How to draw on history to build your fantasy world
BY Marisa Linton
7th Oct 2018
Marisa Linton is a professor of history turned prize-winning novelist. She studied on our Edit & Pitch Your Novel course in 2018 and Writing YA & Children’s Fiction – Three Months course in 2019. Her first novel, a YA fantasy, The Binding Spell came out in May 2025 with Chicken House. Circle of Shadows, the first dark academia fantasy in a new series, is out now with Hodderscape.
Here she gives her advice on how to use history to create a historical fantasy.
1. HOW A HISTORIAN WRITES
Writing academic history for me is about uncovering past lives, other lived experiences. As a historian I ask: ‘How did this feel? What was this experience like for the people who lived through it? I’ve written about the leaders of the French Revolution during a time of hope, new possibilities, turmoil, and tragedy. I took that approach into writing fiction. For me, whether history or fiction, it’s always about engaging with other lives.
2. HISTORY IS A DISCIPLINE BASED ON SOURCES
Put simply, as a historian, it’s your responsibility not to make anything up. You have to try to render choices, attitudes and situations as they appeared to the people who experienced them. So your sources are everything. You never put words into people’s mouths or ideas into their minds if you don’t have rigorous evidence that that is what they said, or thought. It’s their story, not yours: they can no longer speak for themselves, or tell you if you get it completely wrong.
3. SWITCHING WRITING PATHS
Circumstances outside my control led me to take up a different writing career when my history department was closed in 2019. I wasn’t happy to sit back on my past achievements. I decided to turn what could have been the end of my writing life into a new beginning. I’d always wanted to write fiction, but had been afraid to try. Crafting fiction uses different writing muscles from history writing. It’s a skill that needs to be learned. One of my first steps was to take courses in writing fiction. That was incredibly helpful, and I met many writing friends through it.
4. CHOOSE A HISTORICAL SETTING THAT FREES YOUR IMAGINATION
If you’re going to pick a particular historical setting and turn it into a fantasy, you need to feel really drawn to that era, because you’re going to spend a lot of time immersed in it. I was never tempted to write a historical fiction set during the French Revolution. It didn’t feel comfortable for me to start making stuff up about real people whose actual lives I had worked on. I chose the late nineteenth/early twentieth century for my historical fantasy because it was a time of growing scientific interest in the supernatural. Many books written then, including Dracula, M.R. James’s ghost stories, some Arthur Conan Doyle stories (not Sherlock Holmes of course) were based on the premise that the supernatural is real, and co-exists just beyond the everyday world.
5. DO YOUR RESEARCH, BUT DON'T FORGET THIS IS YOUR CREATION
To build a convincing historical atmosphere and setting it’s vital to do your research, and immerse yourself in the period you’ve chosen. Reading fiction that was written at that time is also really helpful. It’s the little details that help situate the reader in a particular time and place, so pepper them into your story but don’t get bogged down in the need for historical exactitude. And don’t be afraid to change the historical record if your story demands it, this is a work of fiction. Just be aware that you are doing it. If you include anachronisms in your story, you need to know why they’re there.
6. WRITING A GROUNDED FANTASY
The possibilities of fantasy are limitless. It’s hugely liberating, so enjoy the freedom it gives you as the creator. But for the fantasy to work it’s essential to have rules and to stick to them. For me, the fantasy has to feel real, as though it could happen. One way to do that is to keep everything else feeling very grounded and realistic, with accurate historical detail, while introducing one thing – the what if? In my case, the what if? is – what if the occult was real and there were people in Edwardian England who could secretly work dark magic?
7. HISTORICAL FANTASY FOR TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY READERS
If you’re writing commercial fiction, you have to keep your readers interested and engaged. They could be doing many other things with their time. In most cases that rules out long passages of historical description that may read well, but don’t advance the story or build atmosphere or character. Dialogue is key. Your characters need to speak as though they could be living in a past time, without sounding stilted or self-conscious. As with any story, characters and plot are what keep readers involved. If you can persuade your readers to care about the characters and what happens to them, then they will keep swimming in your sea.
I can found on Instagram as @linton.marisa and on my website.
Circle of Shadows is out now with Hodderscape!