Researching historical fiction is serious work, as Jem Poster, novelist and professor of Creative Writing, says. But to write engaging, inventive novels is a kind of playing, a balancing act between imagination and facts. His new book aims to guide authors towards writing quality fiction through this kind of serious play.
It’s arguable that historical fiction has become, over the past 50 years or so, an increasingly serious literary genre: readers are more likely to notice and care if they spot anachronisms or other errors, and writers tend to work hard at their research, striving towards narratives which, while not of course in the fullest sense true, feel authentic and convincing.
My new book of exercises for writers, The Prompts You Need to Help You Write the Book You Want to Write, written in collaboration with Sarah Burton and published by Cambridge University Press, reflects the genre’s heightened seriousness.
Its section on research is dominated by a guided exercise with a slant reflective of our own particular interests as writers of historical fiction.
Focusing on the Great Fire of London of 1666, it provides three eyewitness accounts of the blaze and encourages our practitioner-readers to immerse themselves in the material they have been given.
It’s essentially a version, artificially contained for ease of shared reference, of the extensive research likely to be carried out by writers quality historical fiction.
That’s serious work, certainly, but research is one aspect of a more complex process: as the fiction-writer’s imagination engages with the knowledge gleaned from research, it must become inventive, experimental, light-footed, negotiating between what it knows to be factually true and what is required for the purposes of its fictional project.
It’s a kind of play, trying out events which could have taken place but (as far as we know) never did, auditioning characters who may never have existed but will come to figure prominently in our narratives, juggling detail to produce a plot at once historically credible and excitingly new.
Without that element of play, our fictions are likely to lack the vitality that hooks our readers and makes them want to continue reading. So our Great Fire of London exercise makes it clear that the writer’s task isn’t simply to replicate or reconfigure the given material, but actively to transform it.
Having familiarised themselves with the eyewitness material, users of our book are invited to identify or imagine a character different from the actual authors of the three passages we provide, making one of these characters the witness and reporter of the terrible event.
How might the fire have been experienced by the little boy who was taken to one of the ‘high places’ of the Tower of London by Samuel Pepys to survey the spectacle? How might the child’s experience be voiced? How might the event have looked to one of the carters or ferrymen recruited, as reported by John Evelyn, to carry householders’ portable goods to safety? – a silver lining for those workers, we might imagine, as the wealthy still in possession of ready money would have paid handsomely for the service.
What must it have been like to be one of those citizens who, as Thomas Vincent records, “on Saturday had houses convenient in the city [but] now have not where to lay their head”? Or, given the information that some Londoners believed as Vincent did – not entirely logically – both that the fire was a punishment visited upon the city by God and that it had been started deliberately as part of a Catholic plot, our readers may find it illuminating and even inspiring to explore the imagined thoughts and voice of a virulently nonconformist preacher moving among the fleeing citizens, or to invent a situation in which a known Catholic is ambushed by a raging mob.
It’s possible to imagine that these and other prompts in the book might lead directly to an entire novel or short story; perhaps that will happen in rare cases, but it isn’t, of course, the object of the exercises.
The dominant idea was, from the outset, that of serious play: we wanted to offer a guided programme that would prepare aspiring writers, through small-scale experiment, for the larger work ahead of them – a form of limbering up for a journey whose ultimate direction might still be unclear.
Are there lessons here for experienced and established writers? Quite possibly. Most of us will recognise the dullness that can creep into our writing when we’re too earnestly focused on the material we’ve painstakingly researched, or have simply found ourselves running out of interesting ideas.
By taking a step back from the important work in hand and releasing ourselves into an act of fiction-writing that has no direct bearing on that work, we can revive the dwindling flame. The resulting piece may eventually be set aside as intrinsically irrelevant to our main project, but the exercise itself may still be valued for its inspirational qualities or the oblique light it has shed on the writing process.
When we suggested to our editor that we might take the idea of playfulness a stage further in a final section that foregrounds word games of a kind that seem, on the face of it, to have only the most tangential bearing on the matters discussed elsewhere in the book, we were quite prepared to have the idea rejected; however, she immediately understood our argument that such play might still have a serious purpose in the light of our fundamental intention – to give our readers whatever might lead them to discover and develop their own individual talents.
Accordingly, readers will find in that section of the book, among other things, suggestions for writing lipograms and making verbal collages, playing around with puns and proverbs and rewriting well-known folk tales as newspaper reports.
At the very least this section should provide a little harmless fun; at its most useful it may help its readers to return to their more serious writing with a rediscovered fluency and freshness and an expanded sense of the creative mind’s powers of invention.
The Prompts You Need to Help You Write the Book You Want to Write: Practical Exercises for Fiction Writers by Jem Poster and Sarah Burton was published on 6 November, 2025.
See more about this book.
Jem has written another feature for Historia, Show, don’t tell, Write what you know: do they work for historical fiction?
For more advice about writing (and researching) historical fiction, look at Emma Darwin’s Dr Darwin column.
Read our features connected to the Great Fire of London:
In search of the animals in the Great Fire of London by Deborah Swift
A review of the Museum of London’s exhibition, Fire! Fire! by Imogen Robertson
And two book reviews:
1666: Plague, War and Hellfire by Rebecca Rideal reviewed by Elizabeth Fremantle
The Fire Court by Andrew Taylor reviewed by Frances Owen
Images:
- The Great Fire of London, 1675: Museum of London via Wikimedia (public domain)
- The Great Fire of London, with Ludgate and Old St. Paul’s, c1670: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection (public domain)
- Samuel Pepys by Godfrey Kneller, 1689: Royal Museums Greenwich via Wikimedia (public domain)
- John Evelyn by Godfrey Kneller, 1689: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Page from God’s Terrible Voice in the City by Thomas Vincent, 1667: Internet Archive (public domain)
