◉ Novel Study
One of the challenges of writing historical fiction is that readers may already know the broad contours of your plot. Authors can sidestep that challenge by picking an obscure subject, as we saw Lauren Groff do in Matrix. Or they can embrace the challenge, making it part of the pleasure of the book—like watching Houdini escape from the box (or not!) while bound and blindfolded.
That’s the option Maggie O’Farrell chooses in her novel The Marriage Portrait, which is about Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici. The transfixing portrait of Lucrezia, featured in the novel’s cover design, not to mention her relationship to the notorious Medici family, has made her story fairly well-known, but O’Farrell makes sure all of her readers know it before the novel begins.
The historical note before the first chapter tells us:
In 1560, fifteen-year-old Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici left Florence to begin her married life with Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara.
Less than a year later, she would be dead.
The official cause of her death was given as “putrid fever,” but it was rumoured that she had been murdered by her husband.
We know, then, the end of Lucrezia’s story: dead at sixteen. But notice that O’Farrell positions the information in the middle of the note, ending instead with a mystery: Did her husband murder her?
In chapter one, O’Farrell seems to sweep away that mystery as well, taking us almost immediately to the moment Lucrezia realizes her husband plans to kill her. Here’s the opening paragraph:
Lucrezia is taking her seat at the long dining table, which is polished to a watery gleam and spread with dishes, inverted cups, a woven circlet of fir. Her husband is sitting down, not in his customary place at the opposite end but next to her, close enough that she could rest her head on his shoulder, should she wish; he is unfolding his napkin and straightening a knife and moving the candle towards them both when it comes to her with a peculiar clarity, as if some coloured glass has been put in front of her eyes, or perhaps removed from them, that he intends to kill her.
Notice what O’Farrell is doing with her verb tenses in this passage. Not only is she writing in present tense, she’s using progressive verb forms: “is taking,” “is sitting down,” “is unfolding.” The progressive is used to show an ongoing action, one that is unfinished. O’Farrell puts the reader inside this moment with Lucrezia, with no gap between what she is experiencing and what we are seeing.
Here’s how the passage would read if it were written in the simple past tense instead:
Lucrezia took her seat at the long dining table, which was polished to a watery gleam and spread with dishes, inverted cups, a woven circlet of fir. Her husband sat down, not in his customary place at the opposite end but next to her, close enough that she could rest her head on his shoulder, should she wish; he unfolded his napkin and straightened a knife and moved the candle towards them both when it came to her with a peculiar clarity, as if some coloured glass had been put in front of her eyes, or perhaps removed from them, that he intended to kill her.
See how we feel more distant from her in this version? In particular, notice how that specific moment of her realizing her husband plans to murder her stands out less. In the original, that’s the moment the progressive verb form resolves into the simple present: “he is unfolding . . . he is straightening . . . he intends to kill her.” Like many writing ‘rules,’ the advice to avoid gerunds, those -ing words, is counterproductive when taken to extremes. The progressive form exists for a reason, and you can see it at work here.
After the first paragraph, we get some flashes of backstory as Lucrezia thinks about their journey to this remote hunting lodge:
But this is no hunting lodge, is what Lucrezia had wanted to say when they reached their destination: a high-walled edifice of dark stone, flanked on one side by dense forest and on the other by a twisting meander of the Po river. She would have liked to turn in her saddle and ask, why have you brought me here?
In this passage too O’Farrell marshals torturous verb tenses and moods to make us feel Lucrezia’s constraints. She “had wanted to say”; she “would have liked to turn.” She cannot, does not do either one. Not even the backstory is told in simple past tense.
If we know that Lucrezia dies not very long after this scene, and if we are now convinced, as she is, that her husband murders her, what mystery is left? Lucrezia herself takes us directly to that question at the end of the chapter: “How will he do it?” She imagines a few possibilities, sure that her husband would be capable of any of them. Here are the final words of the chapter:
She sets down her cup; she lifts her chin; she turns her eyes on to her husband, Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, and wonders what will happen next.
After all of those complex verb forms, the verbs in this paragraph ring out with the clarity of church bells: “sets,” “lifts,” “turns.”
That last clause, she “wonders what will happen next,” is a clear challenge—and enticement—to the reader: Here is this self-possessed girl—still a girl at sixteen—calmly contemplating the man she is convinced will murder her and wondering what will happen next. O’Farrell has managed to move the suspense from the basics—will she live or die? who murders her?—to the specifics: How will it happen? And what will Lucrezia’s experience be in the weeks, days, or perhaps mere moments before her murder?
Do you want to keep reading? I do.
Takeaways
If your novel retells a familiar story, you can shift your reader’s curiosity about what happens to questions about how and why it happens, and how your POV character or characters experienced the events, focusing on emotional truths rather than historical facts.
Give us deep access to your POV characters’ interior thoughts and emotions if writing about a familiar historical figure. Take advantage of dramatic irony; the reader might know more about what happens to a historical figure than a character yet knows in the world of the story.
Your verb choices can help you control narrative distance. Use progressive verb forms (“-ing”) to create an immersive, in-the-moment feel. Shift to simple present tense for key realizations to maximize their impact.
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Keep exploring
This is one novel’s breakdown from Novel Study — my series reverse-engineering how bestselling books actually work, opening to ending. The full method, with all the charts, is collected in the books.
This post is collected in Novel Study, Book 1 of the series.
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