Writing historical fiction can be a bit of a balancing act. It’s a tightrope walk—between being authentic enough to engage readers, and being accurate enough to satisfy historians. Get it wrong, and you can lose your balance, tumbling into a ravine full of disapproval from one side or the other. Or get it spectacularly wrong, and you can crash onto the rocks of anger from both sides.

OK—enough of the tightrope metaphor.

But the point here, is there are real issues in making historical fiction work. As a reader, you might have been curled up with a historical novel, only to be taken out of the story by a jarring anachronism or an awkward info-dump that felt more like a Wikipedia entry. Or as someone with a good knowledge of your historical era, you might have thrown a book down in disgust when the author demonstrates a spectacularly inaccurate piece of poorly researched hogwash.

Most of us know that accuracy matters. But it’s authenticity—the sense of a believable world—where the real magic can happen. That distinction is important for writers who want to create compelling narratives, and who don’t want to get mired in historical minutiae. Or even worse, alienate their readers with over-researched and inflexible exposition.

Here’s my view on this: you don’t need to be a historian to write great historical fiction.

Read that again.

I’m not a historian—but I’ve written seven novels set in the 16th century that have garnered plenty of reviews that suggest my historicity is sufficiently authentic (OK, and a few that say it’s not—but you can’t please everyone, and there are a lot less of those). I recognize that my fiction being considered ‘great’ is open to debate, but I do believe that you need to respect the past. Research your facts, understand its nuances, build a workable picture of the life of the era—then put the research to one side. Now you should know enough to inhabit the world, with a level of authenticity that allows your readers to inhabit it too—even if they don’t know the specifics of that era themselves.

This topic is the subject of one of my three chapters in Crafting Stories from the Past: A How-To Guide for Writing Historical fiction. It’s the chapter on How to Make Authenticity Feel Accurate in Historical Fiction – and in it, I give you five key strategies to build a historical world that feels credible and engaging—while still maintaining a level of historical accuracy that should (one hopes) prevent the historians from throwing their hands up:

• World-building that serves your narrative, not the other way around.
• Dialogue that feels period-appropriate without being indecipherable.
• Avoiding anachronisms that may not be obvious, but can still wreck a reader’s immersion.
• Respecting real historical figures without turning them into cardboard cutouts—or worse, caricatures.
• And maybe most importantly, ways to strike the balance between pleasing historians and captivating general readers.

Whether you’re knee-deep in your third rewrite or still toying with which era to set your new novel, I hope my insights will give you some help. I want you to leave the chapter not only more confident in your direction, but genuinely excited to dive back into your manuscript – and able to keep your balance between accuracy and authenticity.

After all, we wouldn’t want you slipping off the tightrope, now would we?