Of course, many more details of setting are revealed throughout the novel in costume, food, furniture, housing, toiletries, entertainment, landscape, architecture, conveyances, sounds, smells, tastes, and a hundred other aspects.
#Seven elements of fiction windows
It rattled the signs to the air-raid shelters in Trinity New Court and battered on the boarded up windows of King’s College Chapel.” Robert Harris Enigma A ceaseless Siberian wind with nothing to blunt its edge whipped off the North Sea and swept low across the Fens. “Cambridge in the fourth winter of the war. The tall candle that had been left to burn all night was almost a stub, and even through the closed shutters she could hear the cockerels on roosts, walls and dung heaps, crowing the city of Poitiers awake.” Elizabeth Chadwick The Summer Queen But I could see nothing but the lacing on the bodice of the lady standing in front of me, blocking my view of the scaffold.” Philippa Gregory The Other Boleyn Girl Even more critically, you need to transport your readers into the past in the first few paragraphs. More than 75% of participants in a 2013 reader survey selected ‘to bring the past to life’ as the primary reason for reading historical fiction.
Many words have changed their meanings over time and could be misinterpreted. Don’t weigh the manuscript down or slow the reader’s pace with too many such instances. Dip occasionally into the vocabulary and grammatical structures of the past by inserting select words and phrases so that a reader knows s/he is in another time period. Your mission as writer is to reveal the people of the past.ĭialogue – dialogue that is cumbersome and difficult to understand detracts from readers’ enjoyment of historical fiction. A Roman slave differs from a Roman centurion, as does an innkeeper from an aristocrat in the 18 th century. And that means discovering the norms, attitudes, beliefs and expectations of their time and station in life. Since I work best by example, I’m developing an explanation of the seven elements in the context of historical fiction.Ĭharacter – whether real or imagined, characters behave in keeping with the era they inhabit, even if they push the boundaries. While every story succeeds or disappoints on the basis of these elements, historical fiction has the added challenge of bringing the past to life.
All writers of fiction have to consider seven critical elements: character, dialogue, setting, theme, plot, conflict, and world building.
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