Writing Historical Fiction: A History Student's Workbook

Writing historical fiction is an excellent way for History students to develop an understanding of historical narrative, cause and effect, empathy, and perspective. Yet many teachers do not feel comfortable introducing an fiction task to the History classroom, or confident in steering students through it in a manner fundamentally different from English.

This 10-section workbook engages students in a self-guided exercise in forming a historian’s question, locating sources with which to answer it, and performing a thought-experiment with historical imagination. They write the narrative in stages closely tied to historical skills, and so recognize from the outside the contestability of historical explanations and the relative quality of significance and evaluation performed by different historians.

This workbook can be partnered with Diving Bell Education’s Investigating Story and History, a 10-section workbook which guides students through the development of narrative from the earliest human stories to the narratives of the digital era, and shows how History has an innately narrative character.