When James Whitfield submitted the first draft of Echoes of Iron, he included a twenty-page bibliography. For a novel. This is unusual, and it told us something about the kind of historical fiction he was writing. He was not using history as wallpaper. He was engaged in a serious, sometimes obsessive attempt to get the past right, down to what kind of nails were used in foundry construction in 1873.

Working with James on that novel taught me more about the relationship between historical fiction and actual history than anything I had read on the subject. It also forced me to think about where the line is between historical accuracy and narrative truth, and why the best historical fiction sometimes bends one to serve the other.

This is a topic I care about deeply, partly because we publish historical fiction at ScrollWorks and partly because I think most readers do not realize how much research goes into a good historical novel, or how many deliberate choices the author makes about where to follow the record and where to depart from it.

The Research Problem

Good historical fiction requires extraordinary amounts of research. An author writing about, say, the American Civil War needs to understand not just the major events but the texture of daily life. What did people eat? How did they light their homes? What slang did they use? What did a city street smell like? What diseases were common? What did a letter look like, physically? How long did mail take?

These details matter because readers can feel when they are wrong, even if they cannot articulate what is off. A character in the 1860s who uses a word coined in 1920 breaks the spell. A room lit by electric light in a decade before electrification shatters the illusion. Readers may not consciously notice these errors, but they register as a vague sense that something is not quite right, and that sense erodes trust in the narrative.

James Whitfield spent two years researching Echoes of Iron before writing a single page of fiction. He visited historical societies, read primary sources, examined artifacts, and talked to historians who specialized in the industrial era. Our copy editor, also named James, worked with period-specific dictionaries to flag any anachronistic language.

The result is a novel where the historical setting feels lived-in rather than reconstructed. The difference between those two qualities is the difference between a historical novel that works and one that feels like a costume drama. In a costume drama, the characters are modern people wearing old clothes. In genuinely immersive historical fiction, the characters think and feel in ways shaped by their time, even when those ways are alien to modern readers.

Where Fiction Departs From Record

Here is the tension that every historical novelist faces: the historical record is incomplete, contradictory, and biased. Primary sources were written by specific people with specific agendas. Whole populations, particularly those who were poor, illiterate, or marginalized, left few written records. The past as it actually happened is largely unrecoverable. What we have is a partial, fragmentary account filtered through the perspectives of people who had the power and literacy to record things.

Historical fiction lives in the gaps. It imagines what the record does not tell us. It gives voices to people who were silenced or overlooked. It constructs interior lives for people whose external actions we might know but whose thoughts and feelings are lost. This is simultaneously the genre’s greatest strength and its greatest danger.

The strength is that fiction can make the past feel real in ways that history books cannot. A well-written historical novel puts you inside someone else’s experience. You feel the heat of the foundry, the fear of the battlefield, the tedium of domestic labor in an era without modern conveniences. This emotional access is something that even the best academic history cannot fully provide, because academic history, properly done, maintains a scholarly distance from its subjects.

The danger is that fiction can create false impressions of the past that readers mistake for fact. A novel that depicts a historical figure saying things they never said, or a historical event happening in a way it did not happen, can shape public understanding of history as powerfully as any textbook. This is a real responsibility, and not all historical novelists take it seriously enough.

The Deliberate Departure

Every historical novelist makes deliberate departures from the record. The question is whether those departures are thoughtful or lazy.

A thoughtful departure is one where the author knows what the historical record says, understands why it says it, and makes a conscious decision to deviate for narrative reasons. They know the facts and choose to change them, usually in minor ways, to serve the story. The key word is “conscious.” They are not getting it wrong. They are getting it different, and they know the difference.

A lazy departure is one where the author simply did not do enough research to know what the record says. They put electric lights in a pre-electrification setting not because they made a creative choice but because they did not bother to check. This kind of error reveals a lack of respect for the material, and attentive readers will catch it.

James Whitfield told me about a scene in Echoes of Iron where he deliberately moved a historical event by two months to align with his narrative timeline. The event (a labor action at a specific industrial facility) actually happened in March, but James needed it to happen in May to coincide with another plot development. He flagged this in his author’s note at the end of the book, explaining the change and his reasons for it.

I asked him whether he considered just changing his plot to match the historical timeline. He said he tried, but it created a structural problem in the novel’s pacing. The two-month gap between the events, which was irrelevant in historical terms, created dead space in the narrative. Moving the date was a small factual change that solved a large structural problem, and he decided the trade-off was worth it.

This is the kind of decision that good historical novelists make constantly. Which details are sacred and which are flexible? Where does the historical record constrain the narrative, and where does the narrative need room to breathe? There are no universal rules. Each decision depends on the specific book, the specific facts, and the author’s sense of where the line is.

The Author’s Note: An Underrated Tool

I am a strong believer in author’s notes for historical fiction. These are the pages at the back of the book where the author explains what is historically accurate, what was changed, and why. Not every reader reads them, but for those who do, they provide transparency that strengthens trust.

A good author’s note does several things. It signals that the author cares about accuracy. It helps readers separate fact from fiction, which is particularly important when the novel deals with real events or real people. And it gives the author a chance to recommend further reading for anyone who wants to explore the history behind the novel.

James Whitfield’s author’s note for Echoes of Iron is four pages long. He identifies every major historical departure, explains his reasoning, and lists the primary sources he drew from. Several readers have told us that the author’s note was one of their favorite parts of the book, because it gave them insight into the creative process and respect for the research behind it.

I have also seen author’s notes that go wrong. The most common mistake is defensiveness: an author who uses the note to preemptively argue against critics who might accuse them of inaccuracy. This rarely lands well. A better approach is straightforward disclosure. “Here is what I changed and why. Here is where the history is solid.” Let readers draw their own conclusions about whether the departures were justified.

Common Ways Historical Fiction Gets History Wrong

After years of editing and reading historical fiction, I have noticed patterns in how novels misrepresent the past. Some are avoidable research failures. Others are more subtle distortions that stem from unconscious biases.

Modern values in historical characters is the most pervasive issue. A novel set in the eighteenth century where the protagonist holds twenty-first century views on gender, race, or class is not historically honest. People in the past had different moral frameworks, and while fiction can certainly challenge or critique those frameworks, it should not pretend they did not exist. A character who is too enlightened for their time feels false, even if the author’s intent is to create a sympathetic protagonist.

The solution is not to make all historical characters bigoted or retrograde. It is to show the moral complexity of their time. Some people in every era were ahead of their culture. But they existed within that culture, and their progressive views would have had limits and contradictions that a modern character would not share. Depicting those limits honestly is harder than making a character a convenient stand-in for modern values, but it produces better fiction.

Sanitized violence is another common problem. Historical eras were often brutal in ways that modern readers find uncomfortable. War, disease, industrial labor, childbirth, and criminal punishment were far more physically devastating than their modern equivalents, and fiction that softens these realities creates a misleadingly comfortable past. This does not mean every novel needs graphic violence. As we discussed when editing Echoes of Iron, there are ways to convey horror without explicit depiction. But the horror should be present, even if it is shown through implication rather than detail.

Teleological thinking is a subtler distortion. This is the tendency to write about the past as if it were leading inevitably to the present. Characters in a novel about the early industrial revolution should not feel like they are living through “the early industrial revolution.” They are living their lives. They do not know what comes next. A novel that imposes hindsight on its characters, making them aware of historical significance they could not have perceived, distorts the experience of living in a particular time.

The best historical fiction captures the openness of the past: the sense that events could have gone differently, that the future was uncertain, and that the people living through historical moments did not experience them as history. They experienced them as life.

What Historical Fiction Does That History Cannot

For all its risks, historical fiction does something that academic history cannot: it makes the past emotionally accessible. Reading a history of the Industrial Revolution will teach you facts. Reading a novel set in a nineteenth-century foundry will make you feel what those facts meant for actual human beings.

This emotional access is not a weakness. It is the genre’s defining contribution. Empathy across time, the ability to feel something of what it was like to be someone else in a different era, is a form of understanding that facts alone cannot provide. When a reader finishes Echoes of Iron and understands, in their gut rather than their head, what industrial labor cost in human terms, the novel has done something valuable that complements rather than competes with academic history.

Historical fiction also reaches audiences that academic history does not. Most people do not read academic monographs. They do read novels. If a novel sends a reader to the library to learn more about the period it depicts, it has performed a service to historical understanding that no amount of scholarly publishing could match.

I have heard from multiple readers of Echoes of Iron who said they went on to read non-fiction about the era after finishing the novel. One reader emailed to say she had enrolled in a community college history course because James Whitfield’s novel had made her curious about a period she had never thought much about. That is historical fiction working exactly as it should.

The Responsibility of the Publisher

As a publisher, we have a role to play in ensuring that historical fiction is responsible. Our editorial process includes historical fact-checking, which is unusual for fiction but, I think, necessary. When an author claims a historical detail as fact, we verify it. When they depart from the record, we make sure they know they are departing and that the departure is intentional.

We also encourage our authors to be transparent about their process. Author’s notes, bibliographies, and acknowledgments of historical advisors all signal to readers that the book takes its historical responsibilities seriously. These paratextual elements may seem minor, but they shape how readers approach the fiction and how much trust they place in its historical claims.

At ScrollWorks, we think of historical fiction as a form of public history. It shapes how people understand the past, and that comes with obligations. We do not expect our novels to be textbooks. We do expect them to be honest about what they know, what they imagine, and where the boundary between the two falls.

That boundary, I think, is where the best historical fiction lives. Right at the edge of what we know and what we can only imagine. The history provides the skeleton. The fiction provides the flesh. And if both are done well, the past comes to life in a way that feels not just accurate but true.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.