My challenge in writing The Girl from the Lighthousewas to bring my readers into the closest possible kinship with my main character, Emma Dobbins. It has always been my writing goal to break down as many of the barriers between my readers and my characters as possible. In effect, I like to set the stage, back away, and then let my characters play out their stories directly to the audience, without inserting authorial descriptions and explanations, what some might call “reader feeder.” But here was the challenge of connecting my readers with a character who lived 150 years ago.

To begin with, I wrote The Girl from the Lighthousein the first person. Everything takes place through Emma’s eyes; her thoughts and actions are the reader’s thoughts and actions. Next, I wrote in the present tense, so the reader lives through the action of the novel, she doesn’t have Emma telling her about what happened. Naturally, when Emma is telling her backstory to someone, the tense shifts to past tense to continue the illusion of Emma living the story.

Additionally, to continue my reader’s time travel into the life and times of my main character, in this case, Paris, France, in the 1860s and 1870s, I have much of the story unfold through her relationships with real, historical figures. Since Emma has come to Paris to study art, it’s only natural that she meets, poses for and becomes close friends with the young men and women who will become known as the Impressionist artists: Frederic Bazille, Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and others. Emma also takes an exciting hot air balloon ride with Sarah Bernhardt, the leading actress of the time and models ball gowns for haute bourgeois fashion designer Charles Frederic Worth.

So here, to my mind, is the beauty of writing historical fiction: you can write any story you want: mystery, romance, thriller, adventure, etc. as long as you chose an authentic historical setting for it and sprinkle a few well-known people of the time into your story. Voila!

Some writers say they don’t have the time or the interest in doing the historical research necessary to create an accurate historical setting for their stories. Long, arduous hours in public libraries pouring over old books are a thing of the past. Today the summaries and pictures on the Internet may be the only research necessary to paint a compelling word picture for your readers.