Straight from the Source: Victoria Chang on Writing Historical Fiction

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

Typically a historical event or events that took place that I’m very moved by or curious about gets my stories going. These events are usually little known pieces of history, typically affecting Asian Americans throughout history. So for my most recent book, which is a historical verse novel, the burning down of Eureka, California’s Chinatown on February 7, 1885 is what started my writing of this novel. 

There are eerily few Chinese people or other Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) in Eureka, California today. There’s also no Chinatown, just a few Chinese restaurants here and there. Even the local university, Humboldt State, lacks an AAPI or Asian student population. 

In the 1800s, there was even a bustling Chinatown around Fourth and E Streets. 263 Chinese American people were shipped to San Francisco. This was prompted by the killing of a Eureka Councilman, David Kendall, who was shot in crossfire near Chinatown. 

How do you conduct your research? 

In the case of my book, Eureka, I actually re-visited Eureka, a town I had visited once before when I was much younger, but this time, I planned to conduct research while there. I did research before my visit by reading everything I could find on the topic, as well as contacting the Humboldt Asians and Pacific Islanders in Solidarity (HAPI). Various HAPI members gave me a tour of where the Chinatown used to be. I was inspired by their passion and dedication to making this history known. They told me about the new mural located at the site of Eureka’s original Chinatown, painted by artist David Young Kim, as well as interpretive signs, monuments, and other efforts. I recognized this urge to name, to tell this history.

During my visit to Eureka, I also visited the Clarke Historical Museum and went into their photo archives. I also re-visited the massive redwood trees and conducted research online through the Humboldt State University archives. I did more research on the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first major U.S. law to restrict immigration based on nationality, prohibiting Chinese workers from immigrating to America.

What is your favorite thing about research?

This might not seem intuitive, but the thing I love about doing research is that I get to go down these really interesting rabbit holes that end up expanding my imagination. The thing about research is that it’s actually difficult to get every single detail, especially if the book I’m working on isn’t based on any personal experience, so that just means that I have to/get to use my imagination. I get to think about what the streets looked like, I get to imagine the sounds in the streets, the smells, the textures of the clothing, and more. 

To me, the best part of writing anything in any genre is that I get to use my imagination. This sounds like a conscious process, but oftentimes, the imagination just starts moving on its own when I’m doing research. 

What’s your favorite thing about writing historical fiction?

I love writing historical fiction because I feel like I get to shine a light on usually a little known period in history. In terms of writing, in some ways, it feels like there’s some kind of container already there before I start writing. This container might feel restricting to some, but to me, it feels like a wonderful place to start. The historical context and time period, with all of its conventions, allow me to be quite free within some boundaries. This actually feels somewhat like writing poetry with some formal restrictions such as the sonnet or syllabic restrictions.

How does being a poet shape your writing practice for children?

I have the great privilege of being a poet and having written poetry for most of my life. I’ve also read poetry my whole life and teach poetry for a living as a professor at Georgia Tech. All of these experiences help when I’m writing for children, especially because I enjoy writing verse novels. I think my experience (for lack of a better word) with all the craft elements of poetry such as image, diction, line breaks, syntax, and more, help me when I’m writing verse novels for children. These craft elements are a bit baked into my system at this point. 

That said, I think writing for children challenges my craft as a poet who writes for adults. I can’t be as illogical as I can be as when I’m writing for adults, and also poetry can be obscure sometimes or intentionally difficult to understand. You can’t always write that way for children.

Adult poetry also doesn’t usually have a plot (unless it’s a narrative poem, and even then, the plot is sparse), so writing verse novels for children challenges my narrative skills. Poets can be “plot-challenged,” so I have to put a little more effort into working on plot when I’m writing verse novels for children.

Does writing for children affect your adult poetry? If so, how so?

I’m not sure, but I imagine writing verse novels for children helps my rhythmic sensibility and sense of pacing. I sense that after writing several verse novels, my adult poetry might be more fluid in terms of rhythms and less bumpy in terms of syntax. It’s an interesting question to think about. Many poets write adult fiction or memoirs and nonfiction and I always think about how writers travel across the different genres.

In terms of my verse novel, Eureka, it’s not the only time I’ve written about these historical events. I also wrote a long poem that’s in the center of my next book of poems, called Tree of Knowledge. Sometimes I feel like I’m not “done” writing about a certain subject and in this case, I wrote this verse novel about a decade ago and wasn’t sure it was going to be published, so I also wrote a long poem too.

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Victoria Chang’s most recent children’s book is the middle grade verse novel, Eureka, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux Books for Young Readers in 2026. Her other children’s books include a middle grade verse novel, Love, Love and picture book, Is Mommy?, illustrated by Marla Frazee. Her most recent adult book of poems is With My Back to the World, published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the U.S. and Corsair/Little Brown in the U.K. It received the Forward Prize in Poetry for Best Collection. OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. It was also a finalist for the Griffin International Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as longlisted for the National Book Award. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.