Strategies on Historical Fiction Writing

My Harriman project, which after years of deliberation, field research and study, seems to be taking shape rather nicely. For years i struggled with finding the right entry point into the entire story. The key turned out to be focus on Edward Harriman (1848-1909), since so much is known about him, and this in turn led me to my current strategy of telling the story as a family epic that begins with the earliest known ancestors of his line, which puts the story in the London in the middle of the 18th century.

The recent research that fleshed out many details of this era has been pleasing to undertake. I have developed an idea regarding creativity that when one is following the right path, things seem to "fall into place," as they have in this case, rather startlingly.

Actually this philosophy was suggested to me years ago by my mentor and friend Kim Stafford, who relayed advice given to him on the nature of writing, to the effect that when you're on the right path, "friendly animals" come up to help you. At least I think that was Kim. That was long ago.

This experience of "amazing coincidence," and of things locking into place, has especially been the experience all along with this project, from the days over ten  years ago when Thor and I began it, almost innocently, one afternoon in his house in Fort Collins.

All that innocence seems a long time ago, and yet here I am still working on, and now feeling as if I'm breaking into a sprint after a long stagnation.

But now I've come to point of actually composing the story.  A couple notes: despite all of my strivings to portray history at its most clear, this is a work of historical fiction. There is no escaping this. Although I am endeavoring to make this as factual as possible in historical detail, it is a fact that I will necessarily need to conjecture situations, conversations, and interactions, etc. not only to fill in plot gaps of the story (i.e., to supply conjectures of cause and effect) but moreover to give the story "color" and bring the characters to life.

Since I'm starting in London over two hundred years ago,  I was eager to supply the story with factual details of the time, even if I had to insert them into characters lives by conjecture. I decided the next phase in the research would necessarily involve some reading of materials relating to that time.