How to Write A History Book (and Keep Your Sanity) - My Top Ten Tips

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I am very pleased to be at the final stage of completing my book on Christiana Edmunds. It has taken around 2 years to get here and it has been emotional, to say the least! But, now that I'm finally here (hooray!), I thought I'd share a few tips on getting your book done, without having a complete and total mental breakdown.   If you feel overwhelmed by the prospect of writing 60, 000 words, break it down into chapters. For Christiana, I set every chapter a minimum word count of 4000 words and worked on them one at a time. That way, writing the book felt like writing lots of essays, not like one mammoth piece of work.  

  1. Keep a written record of every source you consult – whether you use them in your book or not. It helps to arrange them by theme, too. You will want to murder someone if, ever time you need to check a fact or date, you have to go rifling through your web history or go back to the library. It's SO much easier if you have everything to hand, in an organised manner, ideally. This will make your bibliography far easier to complete, too.   
  2. Speaking of your bibliography, don't leave it to the end! I did and I regretted it immensely! There is nothing less motivating than having to do a bibliography after you've typed up your manuscript when all you really want to do is sit down and not think for AGES.   
  3. Don't make writing your book your entire life. Watch mindless tv, read, play with your kids. Whatever you like doing, do it every day. Otherwise I can guarantee you a complete loss of sanity before you reach chapter four.  
  4. But that doesn’t mean you should be lax about writing. Set a word limit for every day. Mine was 1000 per day which might not seem like much but that means you should have a working draft in three months, without going totally insane and only sleeping *sometimes.*   
  5. Think critically about your book. This probably sounds stupid/obvious but try and get in the minds of the people you're writing about. Take Christiana, for example, it was easy for me to see her a cold-hearted bitch because that was how the press portrayed her.  But, once I started looking deeper, I found a far more complex and complicated. Her poisoning spree, for instance, happened over one summer in 1871. When you consider that Christiana lived well into her 70s, that’s a tiny fraction of her life. Naturally, her crimes dominate her historical reputation but there was a  lot more to her than poison and madness. It's your job to uncover stuff like this, to go beyond the headlines, so to speak.   
  6. Double-check your facts. Just as I was about to complete my first set of proofs, I had a moment of divine inspiration (or coffee-fuelled mania) in which I thought I better check all of the biographical info on Christiana's grandad, Major John Burn. Turned out EVERYTHING I had on Burn was wrong! I had traced the wrong Major Burn (who knew there'd be 2 of them in the same era?!) and my biography was miles out. I also had the wrong cause of death, too. In the end, I admitted defeat on  Burn and hired the wonderful Kith and Kin Research to get me an accurate picture of his life. Saved me hours of research and guaranteed me the right guy!  
  7. When it comes to writer's block, there are two things you can do. You can either A) battle through and stare at the screen for painfully long periods of time, or B) go away and do something else. Personally, B is the better option: go and do something completely unrelated to your book. The words will come back...eventually!   
  8. Practice the rule of 3. If you're not happy with a line or paragraph, you get two chances to rewrite it. Then STOP HITTING DELETE. Leave it alone or you'll never get the first draft done!   
  9. Finally, if you're anything like me, you are your harshest critic. So if you want feedback, give it to someone else to read. If left to me, I would have spent the last two years maniacally hitting the delete button and panicking about my deadline. Instead, I gave it to my lovely mum-in-law who proofed it, spell-checked and gave me her opinion.  
  10. One last thing, I'll leave you with the words of the wonderful, Neil Gaiman: "This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it's done. It's that easy, and that hard."  
  

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