How do I write alternate history?
I plan to write an alternate history story that eventually leads to Texas taking up most of the area that otherwise would have been the USA. It starts with the European side of things, in particular the French and the Russians.
I have thought through what I want to happen in my alternate timeline but because I have only heard of alternate history through the videos on Alternate History Hub including his collaboration with EmperorTigerstar on if the South had won the Civil War, I don't know how to write a good alternate history book. This collaboration assumes Texan history stays the same when they ask "What if the South had won the Civil War?". Obviously in my timeline, it doesn't and that would drastically change the outcome of the Civil War.
I have written science fiction before but never alternate history, though I have thought about it lots of times. So would I do something like this:
March 20 1811
Napoleon went to Russia alone. It took a long time to get there.
April 18 1811
Napoleon said "Tsar Alexander I, I want to get to North America but I can't go alone because of the Royal Navy. Now I know you don't have a big navy and never have but could you send about 100,000 troops to France? That should be enough for the British to only see Russians because my army and I will be in the center and sending way fewer troops than 100,000"
and continue the story like that or what because I have never written alternate history before.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/36190. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
Here's an important thing to remember: at the heart of your novel are the characters. Nobody is going to read something that looks and feels like a history schoolbook, only it's "alternative" history. So the first things you have to figure out are who your characters are, and what's their story. The parts that make your story "alternative history" aren't enough: they're worldbuilding. Once you've built a world, someone has to live in it.
Now, of course you want to show off your different world. So you'd want a character who is engaged with the world in a way that shows off its difference from RL. A baker's life would not be particularly different whether Napoleon's troops froze in Russia in 1812, or never went there in the first place. The life of a French diplomat, on the other hand, would be quite different.
The second important thing is, you don't want to surprise your readers with history going into an alternative route halfway through your story, where up until then they might have thought their reading some sort of straight historical fiction. This means that you should introduce straight away either the point of divergence, or something that's significantly different from our world (in which case you make the readers curious as to how the divergence happened).
For example, Susanna Clarke, in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell introduces straight away the point of divergence. Her story is about the Napoleonic wars, with magic.
Autumn 1806-January 1807
Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic.
While Philip K. Dick in his The Man in the High Castle starts with something that's different from our world:
For a week Mr. R. Childan had been anxiously watching the mail. But the valuable shipment from the Rocky Mountain States had not arrived.
The point of divergence in his case is that
The Axis won WW2.
To make a long story short, the "alternative history" is the setting. In this setting, you still need to write an appealing story.
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