What elements make great historical picture books and magazine stories?

Writing short historical fiction for children sounds easy: if the Gettysburg Address or the westward pioneers fascinate you, write it up in a picture book, right? Not so fast.

Fiction, especially historical fiction, needs to be grounded in truth. Children learn much of the world’s cultures and histories through well-researched fiction. So even though you’re “making up” a story, center it around what really happened.

Historical topics

Children love quirky, intriguing, and scary things, and something that is “gross” or includes unusual animals is almost a sure hit. Did Edison ever get zapped with electricity? Did a prince keep a mischievous ferret? Look for things like these to build your plot around, instead of yet another generic story on George Washington or the Pilgrims.

For this short fiction, try basing a true story on one life-changing incident, not the person’s entire life. Capture the essence of the person, but focus on the emotion, tension and mystery of that particular incident. (If you find such an unusual incident, this is where a Pilgrim or George Washington story can succeed.)

Historical settings

Historical fiction can be based on a real person, famous or not, or a fictional character set in real time. Either way, you’ll need to write with a strong sense of time and place. Can a stranger pick up the first page or two of your manuscript and tell when and where the story takes place?

Include specific details to set the time and place, but make sure you have a universal theme. People don’t change through history—they still deal with love, loss, fear, friendship, etc.

Don’t plunk a modern person down in an historical setting. Nothing is more irritating than a liberated woman dressed in period costume. If you have a spunky girl, make her spunky within the limits of her era.

Make sure your close-up story also relates to the world around it. If you’re writing about a child stricken by polio during the 1940s epidemic, don’t forget the fact that a father, brother or neighbor is probably away fighting World War II.

Historical research

The way to succeed in your topic and your setting is to do your research as if you were writing non-fiction.

• Use letters, diaries and scrapbooks to create realistic dialogue.
• Check old newspapers to find out what was for sale at what price, what daily events were important to people, and what was happening on the world stage.
• Look for photos, paintings and museum artifacts to see what things really looked like, what was important to families, what the dress was like.

You may research to make your story believable, or you may research a period you love and find your story through the research. Either way, it’s well worth it. You’ll not only have a story that will pass the publisher’s fact-checkers, but one that is a joy to read.

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