We’ve all seen it in movies. The Roman legionnaire raises a fist to hail Caesar and there’s a wristwatch on his arm. The sheriff’s posse rides after cattle rustlers, under a hard blue sky streaked with jet trails. As a history buff and novelist, this sort of thing makes me cringe more than bad acting. When Mary, Queen of Scots slipped off her shawl to reveal a zippered bodice, I stopped watching Reign.

In writing, anachronisms lurk like predators, ready to sabotage your setting unless you practice relentless vigilance.

Oh, all right. I’m overdramatizing because actually I don’t believe in slavishly following historical events. While historical novels don’t re-write history, they do take advantage of the unlit corners, colour around the softer edges, and propose interesting possibilities. It’s fiction, after all. In my mind, it’s more important that a historical novel should be so immersive that the act of closing the book is akin to wrenching the reader out of another time and place. The events may be fictional, but you must be true to the era. Verisimilitude is what matters.

Verisimilitude. Don’t you love that word?

Here are a few things that contribute to or detract from “a sense of place”.

Clothing, medical knowledge, rights of women: this bit of wisdom comes from Anne Perry, not me. During a workshop on writing historical novels, Perry said that these three, more than any other, help readers imagine the world of your novel. I’ve thought about this statement a lot, and here’s why these three aspects help you establish some baselines for your era.

· Clothing – it’s not just accurate descriptions of a historical costume that helps with visualization. Type of fabric, cut, and state of clothing testify to a character’s status, profession, wealth, class and personality. Once you establish what the average person of a certain class wears, then details such as an over-lavish neck cloth or shoulder-baring dress offer clues to a character’s personality. In the modern world, almost anything goes. Back whenever – we need help understanding.

· Medical knowledge – provides a criteria we can all relate to, which helps readers contrast the science and technology of that era against our own. There’s nothing quite like leeches, laudanum, or primitive hygiene to help you understand how people lived. Not to mention the precariousness of life back then.

· Rights of women – what kind of society was this? How enlightened in social and legal terms? The way women were treated is important to understanding the mindset of the average person of that culture and era.

Appropriate figurative language: I’m not even getting into dialogue, which is a can of worms all on its own. Use appropriate figurative language. When writing Three Souls, I had a small epiphany that left me paralyzed for a few hours. Figuratively speaking. My literary education has been very, very Western. My novel is set in pre-WWII China. One day it dawned on me that I couldn’t use a single Western literary allusion. Not in dialogue, not in narrative. Because it would wrench the reader out of the world of the novel. Think of how often we use metaphors of Judeo-Christian origin, not to mention Shakespeare, Greek and Roman mythology, Dickens. These are second nature to us, but totally out of place in China. Suddenly, I felt I’d lost a whole rack of literary tools. The only solution was to read some Chinese classics (in translation, alas) to get a feel for the sort of figurative language well-educated Chinese would understand.

Behaviour consistent with cultural norms: This is about the bigger picture of the novel’s world, beyond the rights of women. It’s all about establishing context. In Three Souls, a young woman wants to be a schoolteacher. For us, this is a modest ambition. But her father refuses to let her go to college and she runs away from home to pursue her dream. In 1920’s China, a daughter who rebelled against her father’s wishes could find herself cast out of her family. Women had no resources; they were entirely dependent on family. The novelist must establish cultural context because readers should be able to gauge the magnitude of a character’s decisions.

· What are the consequences, risks, or rewards of behaving against the norm? When characters do this, what are the motivations, quirks, or personal histories that make their actions credible?

· Congruent with this, how characters in the book respond to another character’s behaviour must be consistent with the cultural norm as well -- and if not, why not? Again, the novelist must supply background and motivations to make this credible.

There’s tons of other ways for authors to avoid anachronisms and convey a sense of place. What I’ve described are just a few of the learning experiences that smacked me across the head while writing a first novel.

Janie Chang is a Canadian novelist who draws upon family history for her writing. She grew up listening to stories about ancestors who encountered dragons, ghosts, and immortals and about family life in a small Chinese town in the years before the Second World War. She is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University. Three Souls is her first novel.

Born in Taiwan, Janie has lived in the Philippines, Iran, Thailand, and New Zealand. She now lives in beautiful Vancouver, Canada with her husband and Mischa, a rescue cat who thinks the staff could be doing a better job.

Author photo: Ayelet Tsabari.