You are definitely not alone!
As far back as I can remember, I've listened to or read fairy tales.
I remember listening to The Sleeping Beauty on a record, circling around my mother's spinning wheel, the only piece of antique furniture she had. I wondered how Sleeping Beauty could prick her hand on that. There was no needle anywhere.
And while it was "only" a fairy tale, it still made me think a lot about this.
Historical Fiction readers are demanding. Many of them WILL research your world to see if you got it right or not if they don't already know. This is common. Heck, I do it myself.
I was completely surprised by some of the ugly reviews some of these books had gotten. One reader even said:
"There is one HF (historical fiction, red.) writer whose work I will never again read after she had a woman in 13th century England using a spinning wheel. Anyone with any DEPTH of knowledge of the middle ages would know better."
When you add a historical element to fiction, you attract a lot of new readers. People are fascinated with different time periods in history.
And that reader awareness brings some problems for new historical fiction writers:
It can be intimidating. It's the main thing that keeps good writers with good story ideas from writing historical fiction.
But those readers weren't born with the information. People born in 1980 don't come into the world understanding the plight of a princess living in a renaissance castle.
There's no reason why you can't learn about that time, too. And you don't have to be an expert on every single thing during that time period.
You only have to know enough to tell your story
That's hugely important, so I'm going to say that again...
You only have to know enough to tell your story.
Even if you write a time traveler story, where someone from the present time visits some other era, they will only be exposed to so much during the course of your book. They won't experience everything from that era.
Even if you DID know every trivial fact about that time period, if you put everything you know into your book, it would be remarkably boring (and really long).
That's if you ever even finished writing it. You probably wouldn't.
So, I decided to learn the things that I (and any writer) would need to know to tell a good number of stories in just one period: the Renaissance Era.
Why that time? Because it's an interesting period in history, it's romantic, and it's the era of most fairy tales.
Historical fiction sells!
If you didn't already know this, now you do. It really really sells!
So, I set out to learn just enough about that period to write a competent and interesting story. I didn't need to know enough to write a history textbook covering every last detail of every year throughout the entire period.
After doing this research, it dawned on me that I could share it with others interested in writing fairy tale retellings or Renaissance fiction, saving them all the time and effort I'd already spent.
And that's exactly why you're here!
