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October 20, 2025 · 6:00 am

#Preptober: is it historical fiction or sci-fi? #writing

Today, we’re continuing our Preptober series by designing a conflict and a story arc. I write fantasy, but every story is the same, no matter the set dressing. Protagonist A needs something desperately, and Antagonist B stands in their way.

What does the protagonist want? Everyone wants something. The story is in the way they fulfill that need, or what happens when they don’t. Doubt, uncertainty, people facing the unknown as they struggle to succeed in their quest … these nouns are what makes the story interesting.

This is where we have to sit and think a bit. Are we writing a murder mystery? A space-opera? A thriller? The story of a girl dealing with bulimia?

Let’s do something different and write a historical fiction.

My Uncle Don fought in WWII in the Ardennes and was wounded, coming home with a steel plate in his head. He was an unfailingly kind man who never discussed his wartime experiences. Here in the US, that battle is referred to as the Battle of the Bulge.

Our proposed novel’s genre is historical fiction because it explores a fictional Allied soldier’s experiences. It isn’t a biography.

However, any historical fiction novel is a form of fantasy. This is because we must imagine how our soldier acted and reacted to the events, and the friends he made and lost along the way. Those events now exist only in a few places, such as military archives, old newspaper accounts, and the memories of a generation that is now in their nineties.

We will make a list of things we want to include in our worldbuilding. Filthy living conditions will provide the backdrop to the impending confrontation. Life on the frontline was brutal, and we need to use the environment to emphasize our characters’ experience of combat as it was in 1944-45.

We want to have a complete story arc, so what length should our manuscript top out at? We will plan for a mid-length novel of 75,000 words. We get out the calculator and divide our word count by 4.

The first quarter will be 18,175 words, the two middle quarters will be 37,500 words, and the final run-up to the climactic ending will be 18,175 words.

The first quarter opens our story and introduces the moment of no return, even if our characters still believe they can salvage things.

The following two quarters are the middle of the narrative, exploring the obstacles that our soldier faces. The final quarter winds our soldier’s story up.

HINT: If you are writing a historical novel, your plot will follow the historical calendar of actual events. For our sample, the Battle of the Bulge was fought between 16 December 1944 and 25 January 1946. Reams of documentation still exist detailing that terrible month.
2^nd HINT:our soldier will either be with the US 30th Infantry Division at the Battle for St. Vith (Americans) or the Meuse River bridges (British 29th Armoured Brigade of 11th Armoured Division).

Remember, the historical events are NOT movable or changeable if you want to remain in the historical fiction genre. Once you change the timeline or alter events in any way, you have ventured into alternate history and are writing speculative fiction.

I confess, spec-fic is my kind of book. But accuracy counts for readers of historical fiction.

Readers are smart. Military buffs will know that a soldier can’t be at both St. Vith and the Meuse River, unless he was in the US Army Air Force.

So, our four quarters can be divided this way if our soldier is American:

Attack in the south
Allied counteroffensive
German counterattack
Allies prevail

We will write the scenes that connect those events, and that is where we take a deep dive into history. We can invent characters and use our imagination to flesh out their lives within as accurate a WWII context as possible.

To complete our story arc, we will

Take each incident and write the scenes that our soldier experiences.
We might also write scenes showing the commanders planning the offensives and switch to show the enemy’s plans.

No matter what genre of book you plan to write, all you need is a skeleton of the plot, just a series of events for you to connect. You will write the scenes between these events, connecting them to form a story with an arc to it.

As we write, our soldier’s thoughts and interactions will illuminate and color the scenes. His encounters, how he saw the enemy. Were they people like him or were they faceless? All his emotions will emerge as you write his story.

But maybe you aren’t writing a historical fiction. Some things are universal.

No matter what genre we are writing in, we start with a worthy problem, a test that will propel the protagonist to the middle of the book.

This event is the inciting incident and could be the hook. We discover a problem and set our heroine on the trail of the answer. In finding that answer, she is thrown into the action.

Drop the protagonist into the action as soon as possible, even if the conflict is interpersonal. It could be a minor hiccup that spirals out of control with each attempt to resolve it.

This is the place where the characters are set on the path to their destiny.

Some plots are action and adventure. Other books explore a relationship that changes a character’s life in one direction or another. Others, like our war story, explore surviving extreme hardship.

The inciting incident is the moment when the protagonists first realize they’re utterly blocked from achieving their desired goal. Note this event on your outline early in the first quarter. Then the trouble escalates, so make a note of the moment our protagonist realizes their situation is much worse than they initially thought.

At this point, our people have little information regarding the magnitude of their problem. One thing that I do is make notes that help limit my tendency toward heavy-handed foreshadowing. Most of what I write in the first draft will be severely cut back by the time I’m done with the final revisions.

Subplots will emerge once I begin writing. I note them on the outline as soon as I can, but sometimes I do forget.

The last weeks of Preptober are upon us and this is a good time to visit the brick-and-mortar bookstore and look at the books currently being offered in the genre you are writing in. Then you’ll know what you need to achieve in your work if you want to sell that story.

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Tagged as identifying genre, The Battle of the Bulge, the story arc, writing, writing historical fiction

March 25, 2015 · 6:46 am

World building part 5: history

Sometimes we feel like our plot is in motion but the reasons driving the action feel purely random. It’s a worldbuilding failure, but an easy fix. In writing historical fiction, a sense of randomness can be a factor, despite having accounts of real events to go by. This is where research becomes critical, because those who win the wars write the history, and they write it to show themselves in the best light. Consider Richard III:

Richard’s history was written by the victors. He was the last Plantagenet King of England, and he was defeated at the Battle of Bosworth by the Henry Tudor. The Tudor dynasty lasted for a long time, including Henry VII, Henry VIII, (Bloody) Mary, and Elizabeth I. Consequently, he was mythologized as a tyrant, particularly by Shakespeare, writing during Elizabeth’s reign, two generations later.

Yet with uncovering of his bones in a parking lot, there is a growing evidence that the Richard III Society may not be entirely wrong: his story may have been a bit less damning, and certainly he was no worse than those who followed him. He was a man of his era, as much as Henry Tudor was.

That all-too-human tendency to cover up our failures and atrocities in the light of our righteous victory over a declared evil introduces contradictions and ambiguities into official accounts of events. That makes the work of creating an accurate portrait of large-scale events difficult.

Looking backward from our viewpoint, and with our values, it’s hard to figure out how things really happened in a particular era, without going well beyond the general, official history offered up by the fount of all knowledge, Wikipedia, and doing sincere, dedicated research. It’s easy to say “this happened this way and that’s that.” (It’s repetitious, too.)

But there will be accounts somewhere, and if they exist you will find them on the internet. Wikipedia is the starting point. Search for accounts that disagree with accepted dogma, and keep rephrasing your questions until you hit on the right one. Bookmark or keep a list in a word document of links directing you to the sites you have found, even if they had little to offer–you might need them later.

Remember, if you’re drawing on real-life history you must dig deep–don’t just skim the surface, reading the official recounting of events as written by the victors. The internet is amazing. Historians are continually building our database of information and new discoveries regarding how ordinary people and marginalized groups truly lived. Many resources exist that will give a rounded account of life in the Middle Ages both in Western Europe and in countries around the world.

If you are relying on actual history to provide a framework for your world-building, you should reach beyond the official history of Europe. Asian history is rich and well documented, as is Egyptian. Of course the old adage that history is written by the victors holds true, as I said before, so let’s consider the story of Hatshepsut:

She was described by early Egyptologists as a minor player, only having served as a co-regent from approximately 1479 to 1458 BC, during years seven to twenty-one of the reign previously identified as that of Thutmose III. However, recent evidence shows that in reality, Hatshepsut reigned as pharaoh for more than twenty years.

Her successors, for whatever reason, attempted to rewrite history, erasing her name from monuments. Yet Hatshepsut was one of the most prolific builders in the ancient world, commissioning hundreds of construction projects throughout both Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt. Her buildings were considered far grander than those of any of her Middle Kingdom predecessors’ works, and were certainly more numerous.

Despite the long period of prosperity during her rule and the amazing constructs she built of stone, Hatshepsut’s influence and accomplishments were marginalized and credit for her work was given to others. Early Egyptologists superimposed their own ideas and values on their interpretations of history.

They failed to understand the ritual religious symbolism of statues an art depicting her and didn’t take into account the fact that many women and goddesses portrayed in ancient Egyptian art often lack delineation of breasts, and that the physical aspect of the gender of pharaohs was never stressed in the art. This is in part due to the fact that in ancient Egyptian religious art, subjects were romanticized to fit the ideal of the time, and viewing it from an Edwardian mindset, early scholars believed her merely an overly ambitious “King’s Great Wife” or queen consort. Recent discoveries, however, are righting that wrong, and she is now considered one of the greatest pharaohs of Egyptian history.

Nowadays, it may be easier to find good, unbiased information on ancient Egypt than it is to get an impartial history of post WWII America.

Reality aside, what if your story revolves around a conflict of some sort in your fictional world?

A major worldbuilding trap that is easy to fall into is not clarifying why an event of apocalyptic proportions is taking place at this moment in time, rather than, say thirty years ago.

So in our second draft, one thing we want to strengthen is our sense of history. WHY is Evil Badguy making his move now? What stopped him from putting his nefarious plan into motion two years ago, and conversely, why can’t he wait until next week? Some critical factor must have prevented him from making his move, some obstacle which no longer holds him in check.

What you have to do is identify what it was that kept your villain in check, and make sure it is somehow introduced into the story. This can be done in the same unobtrusive way you slip in other background. In the process you will discover factors that kept other political actors in your society in check as well. It’s all about checks and balances. What are the unwritten rules that everyone knows and which constrain their actions?

The main difference between writing historical fiction and speculative fiction is that the writer of speculative fiction can make the history fit the tale. The writer of historical fiction does not have that latitude.