Historical fiction writers are often told to do their research. That advice is right—but incomplete.

Research matters. It gives us context, credibility, and depth. But research alone does not create story. A novelist can gather books, archival documents, dates, names, and quotations and still end up with a draft that feels more like a lecture than a living narrative.

That is the challenge at the heart of my workshop, From History to Story: Transforming Research into Compelling Fiction. In it, I show how I move from broad historical research, to primary documents, to immersive fictional scenes—using examples from my novel Resisting Removal: The Sandy Lake Tragedy of 1850.

What I want participants to see is this: the work of historical fiction is not simply collecting facts. It is learning how to transform those facts into drama, movement, tension, and human experience.

Start with Secondary Sources

When I begin researching a historical novel, I do not usually start with scene. I start with understanding.

That means reading secondary sources—books, essays, regional histories, memoirs, and scholarship that help me understand the broader political, cultural, and human landscape. Secondary sources help me answer foundational questions: What happened? Why did it matter? Who was affected? Where are the tensions, contradictions, and gaps?

In the case of Resisting Removal, one of the most useful guides was James M. McClurken’s Fish in the Lakes, Wild Rice, and Game in Abundance. A book like that does more than summarize history. It helps a writer see patterns, power struggles, and pressure points. Just as importantly, it points toward the sources beneath the interpretation.

That is one of the key lessons I explore in the workshop: endnotes are not the end of the process. They are often the beginning. A footnote can lead you to letters, petitions, testimony, government records, and firsthand accounts that carry far more dramatic energy than a summary paragraph ever could.

Follow the Citation Trail to the Primary Source

Once I understand the historical landscape, I begin looking for primary documents that can anchor a scene.

A primary source does not automatically give you a novel. But it often gives you something just as important: voice, agenda, bias, omission, pressure, and stakes.

One example I use in the workshop is a document related to the October 11, 1849 resolution of the Minnesota Territorial Legislature. In formal language, the resolution called for the removal of the Ojibwe from ceded lands in Minnesota Territory. On the page, it reads like a legislative record. But for the novelist, it contains much more than policy.

It reveals fear. It reveals power. It reveals whose interests were being protected and whose humanity was being ignored.

Consider one line from the document: it argues removal was necessary to ensure “the security and tranquility of the white settlements.” For a historian, that phrasing is evidence. For a novelist, it is also a doorway. Who spoke those words? Who believed them? Who benefited from them? Who suffered because of them? What did the room feel like when such language passed without objection?

Those are story questions.

The Document Gives the Bones. Story Gives It Life.

From there, the writer’s task changes. We are no longer asking only, What happened? We are also asking:

• Who is physically present in this moment?
• What does the room look like?
• What is at stake for the people involved?
• What remains unsaid in the official record?
• What can be responsibly imagined without violating the history?

That is how a historical record becomes a scene.

In Resisting Removal, I used the resolution to build a fictionalized moment inside the Minnesota Territorial Legislature: a small room, a formal reading, an unquestioned vote, the casual momentum of power. The facts remained rooted in the record, but fiction allowed me to dramatize the human atmosphere surrounding those facts.

This is one of the central ideas of my workshop: you are not inventing against history; you are dramatizing within it.

When Research Overwhelms the Story

There is another challenge historical fiction writers face, and I know it well because I have faced it myself. Sometimes our earliest drafts are accurate, serious, and full of information—but they are not yet alive.

That happened to me while writing Resisting Removal.

In one early passage, I explained the history of La Pointe at length. The draft contained important context, but it delivered that context in large blocks of exposition. The result was informative, but dramatically flat. Readers were being asked to absorb the history before they had a chance to fully experience it.

In revision, I kept the meaning but changed the delivery. Instead of summarizing everything from a distance, I filtered the history through character, dialogue, memory, and emotional stakes. The revision still conveyed the larger historical reality, but now it moved. It breathed. It gave readers a reason to care.

That shift—from explanation to dramatization—is one of the most important craft moves a historical novelist can make.

What the Workshop Will Teach

In From History to Story: Transforming Research into Compelling Fiction, I walk participants through that full progression:

1. how to use secondary sources to understand the larger historical world,
2. how to use those sources to identify stronger primary documents,
3. how to turn a primary source into the basis for a fictional scene,
4. how to recognize when a draft is carrying too much exposition, and
5. how to use fiction craft—point of view, sensory detail, tension, and voice—to make history immersive.

This is not a workshop about abandoning history for entertainment. It is about honoring history by telling it in a way readers can enter, feel, and remember.

If you are a writer who has done the research but still struggles to turn that research into compelling narrative, this workshop was designed for you.

Sign up for the workshop here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1900767158739?aff=oddtdtcreator

I would love to help you move from facts on the page to story on the page—from history to story.

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