2587 - Writing Historical Fiction

Course Description

What is the difference between a historian’s grasp of the events of the past and the imaginative leap the writer must take to recreate it? While the historian must be scrupulously faithful to what is the case, the artist must cultivate a sympathetic imagination for the past. This is all about the sensory details as opposed to the overview—the sights, sounds, smells that make up a lived reality. How do you write convincing dialogue that is neither jarringly contemporary nor self-consciously archaic? How does a writer depart from the historically correct to find a story worth telling? How does a writer create characters that feel like flesh-and-blood, while observing the specificities and constraints of the time in which the story is set? Often what feels most “real” is what has been freely invented, and this course will enable the participants to begin the work of thinking like novelists as they approach history, and to create their own fictional worlds.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the unique process of creating historical fiction.
• Apply these techniques to your own work.

This course may be applied towards the SCS Certificate(s) in

• Creative Writing : Elective Courses