How Writers Can Unearth Overlooked Histories for Fiction

Some of history's most compelling stories survive only in footnotes, old newspaper clippings, forgotten yearbooks, or a single sentence on a Wikipedia page. As novelists, those overlooked details aren't obstacles, they're invitations to look a little further, dig deeper.

(Finding the Story Within the Walls of a House.)

Unfortunately, the history books students currently study don’t tell the full American story. How sad a world we would live in if only a certain viewpoint was deemed important enough to learn about. So where historical records are sparse, fiction can restore emotional truths. For this reason, writers must dig into the archives of our history to bring forth untold stories that readers will devour.

I have done this a few times in my career. Most recently, while researching Mary Church Terrell, I stumbled across a brief reference about two other women, Anna Julia Cooper and Ida Gibbs Hunt, who attended Oberlin College with her in the 1880s. That one discovery sent me into archives that completely reshaped the novel I thought I was going to write.

The Ladies Hall explores a forgotten piece of Black educational history that many readers and/or history lovers have never encountered. In fact, this is the first novel written about these historical figures.

In order to bring a work of fiction out of the footnotes of history and turn it into a book that readers will devour, writers can begin by reading any available memoirs or historical writings. Once that is done, the next step should be searching for archives. If the historical figures attended college, as my characters in The Ladies Hall did, contacting the college and asking for an appointment to review everything they can dig up from the archives on your subject will usually provide a great deal of information.

Several items in the archives at Oberlin College confirmed what I already knew from previous reading material, but there was one letter from a classmate of Mary Church Terrell’s that caused me to add another character to the story and detail how she and Mary became lifelong friends. Those archives are true treasure troves.

Once you’ve searched the archives, your next best chance of finding information that might benefit your novel would be to search for old newspapers. When I was researching for The Ladies Hall, I discovered that Oberlin College had their own campus newspaper called the Oberlin Review. I spent an entire month reading through as many of those newspapers from 1880 to 1884 as I could. It was painstaking work but a few of the scenes written in my novel came from the pages of the Oberlin Review.

The funny thing was, the more I scoured through the archives and newspapers, the less interested I was in just writing about famous historical figures. I became fascinated with these ordinary Black students who were trying to build extraordinary futures while claiming their right to be in spaces that tried to deny them the right to be equal.

Many writers search for famous people to write about, but what if you, the writer, believed that ordinary people, doing extraordinary things could make for great fiction? Let’s review a few examples of this:

Once you discover the story only you were meant to tell, remember, historical fiction isn't about inventing facts. It's about imagining believable, emotional lives where records are incomplete. It is our job to respect the known history, inventing only where history is silent. In that way we stay true to the authenticity of the story.

Here are eight ways to uncover overlooked history:

Every archive contains stories waiting for someone to ask another question. Writers have the unique opportunity to create stories that history books sometimes overlook. My journey researching The Ladies Hall reminded me that forgotten doesn't mean unimportant. Sometimes the stories that history neglected become the ones readers remember most.

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