Rosalyn Eves grew up in the Rocky Mountains, dividing her time between reading books and bossing her siblings into performing her dramatic scripts. As an adult, the telling and reading of stories is still one of her favorite things to do. When she’s not reading or writing, she enjoys spending time with her chemistry professor husband and three children, watching British period pieces, or hiking through the splendid landscape of southern Utah, where she lives. She dislikes housework on principle.

She has a PhD in English from Penn State, which means she also endeavors to inspire college students with a love for the English language. Sometimes it even works.

What typically comes first for you: a character? An era? A story idea? How do you proceed from there?

It depends a little bit on the story—I’ve had some of each. For my historical fantasy trilogy, I started with an idea: what would an anti-Chosen One look like? What would it be like to be the only one without magic in a society that valued it? I knew I wanted to write about Hungary, where I had lived for nearly a year and a half, and I chose the Austria-Hungary war in 1848 as one of the most tumultuous times in the nineteenth-century. As a bonus, Franz Joseph, who would go on to rule as emperor for decades, was still a teenage boy at the time. 

For my forthcoming book, Beyond the Mapped Stars, I was inspired by an NPR interview with David Baron, who wrote The American Eclipse about the 1878 solar eclipse that went through the American West. Starting with the time and place, I worked backward to find the character and storyline. For one of my works-in-progress, I started with a trio—two sisters and a cousin—and their story flowed from there. The great thing about writing is that it’s not a one-size-fits all, even for a single writer. 

How do you conduct your research? 

I went to graduate school before I started writing seriously, so historical research is where that academic training tends to come through. I typically start general, with history books published for a wide audience (like The American Eclipse). Once I have a general sense of the time period, I’ll drill into specific details. I’ll sometimes use university library databases to find academic articles on aspects of the topic, like the role dancing played in the 1848 Hungarian Revolution (really). I look at the sources my sources use, to see if there’s something obvious I’m missing.

To add specific details to the stories, I often turn to primary sources. Some of the most useful sources for my historical fantasy trilogy were travel narratives written by British travelers to Hungary in the mid nineteenth-century. They were full of specific details for readers back home (where they had gone dancing, what kind of food had been served, what it was like to cross the border between Austria and Hungary) and they helped me get a sense for what a girl raised in London might notice on her first visit to Hungary. I also read contemporary novels by Jokai Mór (the Hungarian equivalent of Charles Dickens) who included so many rich details about daily life that I wouldn’t have easily found elsewhere. For my forthcoming book, I went into archives of Colorado newspapers to find details about the eclipse, and I used Interlibrary Loan to request a copy of Cleveland Abbe’s 1880 government report of the eclipse, which included multiple accounts of the experience. 

Researching any book is always a new adventure—it’s one of my favorite parts of writing. 

You do have a specific system for collecting data? 

I tend to keep all of my research for a given book in a single word document. I include the source and details I find helpful, as well as links. I use the Heading function to group research by general topic, so I can use the navigation feature to easily find what I need when I’m writing (pictured below). I’ll highlight or star things I don’t want to forget. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s worked for several books now. 

At what point do you feel comfortable beginning to draft? How does your research continue once you begin writing?

For me, research is a cyclical thing, and something that’s never truly done. I will usually research until I have a feel for the era—until I can start imagining my characters moving through the world. That can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. Once I can start envisioning scenes, that’s usually my cue to start writing. 

Of course, no matter how much I plot out my stories, there are always details that crop up that I don’t know yet. When that happens, if it’s a detail that I can look up later, like a description of someone’s clothing, I make a note to myself to flesh it out and keep going. But if that knowledge gap is big enough that I can’t finish the scene without it, I have to stop writing and do some research. For example, with my forthcoming historical, I started to write a dance scene, and realized that while I knew a lot about dancing in Victorian and Regency England and Europe, I didn’t know how much of that translated to dancing in the American West. So I stopped writing for a few days until I had enough research to write the scene. This start-and-stop research and writing continues all through the writing process—even as I do edits, I might stumble across something new that needs more research, or something I read might inspire me to make an addition to the story. 

I don’t think research is ever really done—even about time periods I know a lot about, I don’t know everything—but I have to balance the time tradeoff between research and writing. One of the dangers of research is that it’s too easy to procrastinate writing in favor of endless research. At some point, I have to stop researching and write.

What’s your favorite thing about writing historical fiction?

I love learning new things about the past—it’s impossible to write historical fiction and not learn something new. And I love exploring historical worlds with my characters, thinking about the ways that past times are both like and unlike our present moment. I’m particularly interested in the nineteenth-century: the paradox of high-society manners mixed with periods of intense social turmoil. 

What are some challenges of writing historical fiction?

The most obvious challenge of writing historical fiction is the research—what do you do when you can’t find the information you need? How much are you allowed to fudge? This was less of an issue when writing historical fantasy, as the addition of magic gave me some leeway to make things up (though I did try as much as possible to reflect actual history). There have been scenes and details I ultimately had to cut because I couldn’t find the information I needed, after hours of research. 

Another challenge is balancing historical detail and accuracy with the story. With my historical fantasy novel, I initially stuck to the historical timeline, spanning my character’s arrival in the London Season in spring of 1847 to the Hungarian revolution in March of 1848. But readers kept saying the story dragged—it took too long to reach the March revolution. So I moved the timeline forward a few months (easier to do in alternate history than actual history). Sometimes—most times—I can’t include all the details I find fascinating, because they don’t serve the story. Ultimately, when writing historical fiction, I think it’s important to remember the fiction aspect—telling a good story is the most important part. (Though I also think it’s a good idea to note any major departures from actual history in an author’s note, so readers know it was intentional and not just careless research).

The biggest challenge for me is creating characters who are enmeshed in their time period and are sympathetic to today’s readers. I dislike reading historical novels whose characters act like modern people dropped into the past, with thoroughly modern attitudes and beliefs. At the same time, given widespread attitudes of racism, sexism, homophobia and more that have characterized most historical time periods, I think most of us would find strictly authentic portrayals of the past to be off-putting. Finding that balance of believable historical characters who are still relatable can be tricky. 

What’s one of the most interesting things you’ve learned while researching?

There were two things I found while researching Beyond the Mapped Stars that were both entertaining and horrifying. The first was a pioneer account of dying a new dress to a beautiful emerald green. The writer’s mother accomplished this by first dying the clothing in indigo—and then soaking it overnight in urine. Effective, but not what I would have thought of! The second involved a nineteenth-century dancing tradition in Utah communities. To raise money, people often held dances. One ingenious (and disturbing) method for raising money was to hold a “weigh dance,” where the couples arrived at the dance, the woman was weighed, and her partner had to pay an entrance fee equivalent to her weight. I don’t imagine most modern women would want to participate in a dance like that.

Karen McCombie is a British children’s author whose 90+ books have been translated into many languages around the world. Originally from Scotland, Karen lives in London and began her writing career as a magazine journalist on teenage girls’ titles. Her novels and book series range in style and age and have mostly been contemporary, but she has moved towards writing historical fiction in the last few years. Her most recent novels – conceived as a pair – are ‘Little Bird Flies‘ (2019) and ‘Little Bird Lands’ (2020). They’re set in the 1860s in the Highlands of Scotland and America respectively, following the emigrant story of Bridie, a young Scottish girl, and her crofter family.

How did the ‘Little Bird’ duology come about? Was it the Scottish setting or a specific historical event that inspired you?  

I’d had an urge for years to write something about my homeland of Scotland. I grew up in the city of Aberdeen – known as Britain’s ‘oil capital’ – which was home to many Americans and Europeans due to the oil industry. But as a child I always loved our family’s regular weekend trips to the countryside, to walk in forest trails, climb hills, visit castles and get lost in nature and history. Over the years, I’ve always held onto a jumble of Polaroid images in my head of the rugged rural landscapes: grey granite stone, green mosses and pine, mauve heather and bright yellow gorse. 

My husband Tom always encouraged me to write my love letter to Scotland, but nothing seemed to crystallize as a story for me. He also knew about my life-long love of the ‘Little House’ series by Laura Ingalls Wilder and suggested that I consider writing my own pioneering tale. But I knew I couldn’t do that, not when so many American writers could tell that story much more authentically than me!

I can’t pin-point when the lightbulb moment happened, but suddenly my two beloved, back-burner book notions came into sharp focus, and I realized I could write a pair of books, set in the 1860s, focusing on a Scottish emigrant story. Many people are familiar with the history of emigration from Ireland to America in the 19^th century, but the Scottish experience is less well-known. Even in Britain! 

What kinds of sources did you use for both the Scottish setting in ‘Little Bird Flies’ and the various American locations in ‘Little Bird Lands’?

The backdrop for ‘Little Bird Flies’ was the Highland Clearances, a very dark time in Scottish history when poor tenant farmers (crofters) and their communities were forced off the land in their hundreds of thousands and became economic migrants. So I read plenty history books about that, but for the day-to-day life experience of ordinary working families, I found the open air Highland Folk Museum fascinating, as it’s filled with historic buildings gathered from across the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. The founder of the museum also wrote the most fantastic resource book, ‘Highland Folk Ways’. For helpful pictorial images, I used this UK reference website. 

‘Little Bird’ lands opens in New York, then follows the family as they move to a copper mining town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, then onto Minnesota. Barnum’s American Museum features in the NY section, and The Lost Museum website helped me visualize the interior. I stumbled upon a Michigan Government geological report about copper mining, which surprisingly gave the most wonderful social history of the Upper Peninsula. Books I found incredibly helpful for context were Louise Erdrich’s ‘Birchbark House’ series, ‘The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers’ by Anna-Lisa Cox and ‘They Chose Minnesota’, a historical reference book about the state’s different ethnic groups.  

What did you stumble upon while researching that really grabbed your attention?

Like most people, I knew Ellis Island as the famous arrival point for emigrants from Europe. But as I researched the epilogue for ‘Little Bird Flies’, I realized Bridie and her family would be landing at the pre-Ellis Island immigration landing depot of Castle Garden. The changing fortunes of Castle Garden is so intriguing, from the circular building’s initial use as a military fort in the early 1800s, to its transformation into a fashionable theatre – where the legendary Jenny Lind performed sell-out shows! – to its final incarnation as an immigrant depot in the 1850s. I felt as if I could’ve set a whole novel there, rather than just a brief chapter!

What’s your least favorite thing about research?

Having to stop! If you were lucky enough to have lots of money and no pressing deadline, you could spend blissful and endless hours, days, weeks and months finding the next little bit of historical treasure to drool over. Sadly, I don’t have that luxury, so at some point I have to get practical and stop, while knowing that there could have been yet another tantalizing, unfound gem just around an internet corner!

Any drawbacks to writing historical fiction?

Yes; frustration and financial! Firstly, no matter how much research you do, some of the everyday detail of working-class people’s experience just eludes you. It leaves me aching to be able to step back in time so I could witness, ask and understand every seemingly ordinary aspect, every little nuance of their lives for myself.

Secondly, a publisher will pay me the same (not very big) advance, whether I write a contemporary or historic novel, but of course the latter takes three times as long to write, because of the extensive research. So in writing terms, I’m passionate about my historical novels, but in economic terms, they’re not the best bet! 

Ultimately, what’s your favorite thing about writing historical fiction?

Giving a voice to the voiceless. Even during my childhood visits to Scottish castles, I’d be more interested in knowing about the ‘long-ago’ servants rather than their grand and spoiled masters. For me, it’s about the beauty and importance of ‘ordinary’ lives, and especially those of girls and women, so very often in the background of history. 

Anything you’d like to leave us with?

I used a little Scots’ Gaelic language in ‘Little Bird Flies’, and have Mairi Kidd, a native Gaelic-speaking friend, to thank for that. She suggested a saying to me that I’d never heard but thought was beautiful, and I went on to use it in a pivotal scene. So I’ll end with it… 

‘A h-uile latha sona dhut, ’s gun latha idir dona dhut’ 
(‘May every day be happy for you, and no day ever bad’).