How to Write an Historical Novel

Some tips from the gifted Stephanie Cowell.

Novels are so not much written as sculpted or molded from thousands of different things: history, a real character, a feeling you had when your mother left you when you were six, something you always longed for, a blue dress, a young man with dark eyes, a war, a dream. Then you combine hair styles, warm ale for breakfast, cobbled streets and so on. Thousands of things somehow finally come together in a plot line and become a novel.