Guest Post: Kit Forbes!

 Today Kit Forbes is joining us to tell us about writing actual historic events into your fictional work!  Here's her post:

Incorporating real historic events into fictional works

Anyone who uses historical settings and events in their fiction will agree when I say the hardest thing about researching is trying not to get lost in the history. At this point in time when so many books and library and museums are offering digitized version of things in their collections “getting lost” is easier than it ever was.

A good example related to Shadows Fall Away is in the second half of the book when I wanted to do a bit from Genie Trambley’s viewpoint. I was looking up things on London hospitals and nursing of the time and that lead me to a memoir of a young nurse who described working a night shift. I was able to use some of the treatment details of what we’d consider an emergency room case to have Genie participate.

Another thing that was hard not to get swept up in was imagining the type of clothing the
characters would wear. I’ve always loved the look of later Victorian fashions and spent more
time scouring books and Google that I care to admit to.

With all the resources and information freely available on most every aspect of life in the
past few centuries it’s very hard knowing what to include and when so as not to bog down
the pacing of the story or come off sounding like my Mark’s Aunt Agatha teaching one of
her history classes.

For many of the scenes I got the basics down of the action and dialogue. In revising I went
back through and decided where it needed more fleshing out in terms of setting the characters
(and reader) more firmly in Jack the Ripper’s London.