Charlie Cochrane - Mysteries with a dash of slash, romances with just a pinch of spice

How to make your historical references subtle

Sprinkling (and I do mean sprinkling, no ramming it down the readers’ throats) some references to customs/etiquette throughout your tale is a great way to make an understated historical background to the story. Having your hero rise from his chair when a lady enters the room, ensuring the ladies withdraw after dinner, men wearing hats who then raise them to ladies in the street – these are the sort of things which immediately set your story in that strange world we call the past. And these touches are not as painfully obvious as getting your hero to discuss the sinking of the Titanic with his friend.

Don’t settle for the obvious. Setting the scene can be a great place to showcase your skills and really draw a reader into the story if you’ve done it well; it’s particularly a boon in short stories where each word has to count. But it's also good in longer works too, where it sets the tone for good writing.

I’m using an example from one of my own short stories (Blitz) here, but only because the review at Speak Its Name said “The book has an excellent start - a great first line, first paragraph, which pulls you into the story immediately - tells you where you are, when you are, who’s thinking/talking with a bare minimum of fuss.”

The beer tasted bloody good. Plenty of people were saying that ale now didn’t taste like it had pre-war, that everything had gone downhill, but Adam Jackson couldn’t agree. As far as he was concerned, there was too much looking back with rose tinted spectacles going on. He couldn’t deny the fact that stuff was in short supply, that the things people had taken so much for granted were now luxuries (if they were obtainable at all), but these were all small sacrifices compared to those that some people were making.

I’m really proud of that paragraph and it came about from me seeing my hero, Adam Jackson, as if he was in one of those lovely black and white WWII films and trying to put his thoughts into words as subtly as possible.

I must mention a pet hate of mine, the ‘clunking historical reference’. You know the sort of thing – you’re watching a film, the camera sweeps past a newspaper seller and you see the headline ‘Man lands on the moon’, so we all know it’s 1969. No more references to Neil Armstrong all the rest of the film. Worse than that there’s the stilted conversation between two men at their club about the ‘bally beastly things the Boers are up to’ whose only purpose is to set the time frame as 1901.

Handy Tip number 3: If you really find it impossible to be subtle, then the easiest thing to do is to preface your writing with the words Edinburgh, 1905 which says it all and gets rid of the need for references to men in kilts and Edward VII.