There is a particular silence that settles over a desk when the sources simply stop. I have sat with it more times than I can count, staring at a sentence in a chronicle that ends exactly where I most wanted it to continue: a battle described in exhaustive detail, down to the weather and the order of the banners, and then nothing at all about the negotiations that led to it. A ruler’s victories recorded with obvious relish, his failures passed over in total silence, as though the chronicler had simply decided not to notice them. Decades of a person’s actual life compressed into a single surviving sentence, the rest lost somewhere between one archive and the next, never to be recovered. One of the biggest misconceptions about historical fiction, I think, is that history hands a novelist all the answers and simply asks them to dress them up. In my experience, it is almost the opposite. History hands you fragments, and then it hands you silence, and the real work begins in deciding what to do with the second thing.

The Trouble With Certainty

Researching the Related to Dracula series taught me quickly just how often the historical record disagrees with itself. This is especially true of Vlad III of Wallachia, whose story survives to us through German pamphlets that despised him, Slavic chronicles that judged him by entirely different standards, and Romanian oral tradition that remembers him, more often than not, as something closer to a hero. Three traditions, three different men, all supposedly the same person. Who do you believe? The honest answer, more often than a novelist would like, is that you cannot always know with certainty at all. History is rarely the courtroom we imagine it to be, delivering a tidy final verdict once all the evidence is in. Far more often, it is a puzzle missing most of its pieces, and the box has long since lost its picture.

What I learned, slowly, is that this uncertainty is not simply an obstacle standing between a novelist and the truth. It is data in its own right. A chronicler’s silence about a ruler’s failures tells you something about who that chronicler was writing for. A legend that persists for centuries despite having no documentary support tells you something about what people needed to believe, whether or not it ever actually happened. Reading history for fiction means reading for the gaps almost as carefully as you read for the facts, because the gaps are where a chronicler’s loyalties, fears, and blind spots quietly reveal themselves.

The Curse That History Could Never Confirm

One of my favourite examples of this lives in a small, half-forgotten legend from the Wars of the Roses, one I first came across as background reading and could not quite let go of afterwards. According to the story, Elizabeth Woodville, the widowed queen whose two young sons vanished during the chaos following Edward IV’s death, is said to have cursed whoever was responsible for their murder, decreeing that their line would end in a barren girl. Many at the time suspected Lady Margaret Beaufort herself, Henry VII’s own formidable mother, of a hand in that same disappearance. Elizabeth Woodville was rumoured, in some tellings, to be a sorceress in her own right, and plenty of people believed the curse was real.

There is no way to verify any of it. No document proves Elizabeth Woodville ever spoke such words, no source can confirm Margaret Beaufort’s guilt, and the curse itself belongs entirely to legend rather than to anything a historian could responsibly call fact. But I could not stop thinking about what it would mean if someone inside my own story, someone who already carried the strange gift of glimpsing threads of the future, turned that old rumour over in his mind and realised how closely it seemed to match what was actually coming: a king who would never father a legitimate adult son, and a throne that would, in the end, pass to a barren girl after all, the very daughter of the woman he had just tried to help. I did not invent the curse. History handed it to me, half-formed and entirely unprovable, and all I did was let one of my characters notice how strangely well it fit the shape of what was still to come.

Where Creative Licence Actually Begins

I have never believed that historical fiction grants a writer permission to invent anything at all, and I try to hold myself to that discipline carefully. For me, creative licence only begins once the historical framework is already firmly in place. The dates stay accurate. The places are real, and where I can visit them myself, I do. The political conflicts follow the documented record as closely as the record allows. The major historical figures behave in ways that remain genuinely consistent with what we actually know about them, their documented choices, their recorded temperaments, the patterns of their own lives. Only once that framework is standing do I let myself ask the questions no chronicler ever answered. What might this person have actually been thinking, alone, in the quiet after the public event the record so carefully preserved? What private conversation might have taken place behind a door no historian was ever invited through? What fear did they carry that never once made it into writing? The fiction grows outward from those questions. It does not replace the history that made them possible in the first place.

Respecting the Reader Enough to Show the Seams

I never want a reader to close one of my books uncertain about where the documented history ends and my own imagination begins, which is exactly why I write the companion articles alongside the novels themselves. Many scenes throughout the Related to Dracula series are built directly from real events, real places, and legends that have survived for centuries in their own right. Others are entirely my own invention, built to connect those documented moments into a story a reader can actually follow from one page to the next. I believe a reader deserves both things at once: a novel that genuinely moves, and a novelist honest enough to show her working afterwards, so that anyone curious enough to ask “did that really happen?” can actually find out.

The Question That Starts Almost Everything

If I am honest, the favourite part of my own process is still the simplest one. What if. What if a single forgotten line in an old chronicle was hinting at something considerably larger than the chronicler himself understood? What if a legend that never made it into any official record had preserved some genuine fragment of truth underneath all its embellishment? What if two historical figures, separated by an entire continent and everything that should have kept their stories apart, were connected in some way no surviving document ever thought to record? None of those questions replace the history I have spent years researching. They grow directly out of it, the way a tree grows out of ground that was already there long before anyone planted anything in it. Some of the moments I am proudest of in either book began exactly this way, with a small, half-buried historical detail that simply would not leave me alone until I had imagined the story surrounding it.

Silence as Invitation

Every historical novelist eventually reaches the place where the documents simply end. No diary survives. No witness left an account. No letter escaped the centuries in between. There is only silence, and every writer has to decide, sooner or later, what that silence actually means. Some see it as a limitation, the point where the story has to stop because the evidence has. I have always seen it differently. I see it as an invitation, not to rewrite what history actually tells us, but to step, carefully and with real humility, into the one place history was never able to follow. The record provides the foundation. Research builds the framework around it. The surviving evidence marks out the boundaries I try never to cross. And somewhere inside those boundaries, in the quiet history left behind rather than the noise it recorded, fiction gets to give a few of the forgotten voices a chance to speak again.

People sometimes ask whether I love the history more, or the fiction. I have never been able to answer that honestly, because I do not think I could separate the two even if I tried. History gave me the people, the places, and the centuries that have fascinated me since I was a child. Fiction is how I have learned to walk through them. When history leaves a gap, I no longer see an empty space waiting to be filled with whatever I like. I see an opening, narrow and precise, shaped exactly like the question I still need to ask. And more often than not, it turns out that the most compelling part of the story was never sitting in what history told us at all. It was waiting quietly in everything history chose to leave unsaid.