When researching a historical novel, how do you capture the details of everyday life? Utsudo found that historical records alone rarely reveal how people talked, what they ate or what they cared about. The most effective method is reading realist literature by writers of that era, which naturally records language, food, working conditions and social attitudes. It made her truly understand what it means that literature is a cultural asset: it’s a time machine that never wears out.

Translated from Utsudo’s original Chinese column.

Phrases like “a treasure of the humanities” and “a cultural asset” are often used to describe literature’s contribution to society. I’d heard them since I was young, but never really understood what they meant.

Obstacles in researching a historical novel

Until recently, when I started gathering material and reading historical sources for a story.

The sources were about modern history, so there was plenty of material, and it seemed rich. But I soon hit a big obstacle: once I knew the history and tried to connect it through my own fictional characters, everything related to daily life was a blank.

All kinds of questions came flooding in.

How did people talk back then? What language did they use? What were their habits? What did the streets look like? How did people interact, what did they eat, what did they care about, what TV shows or radio did they listen to?

Questions like these swarmed in and made it hard to write.

Of course, I could check each one before writing, but that would take a huge amount of time for details that might only appear in a single passing sentence. And stringing all these “background settings” together could feel unnatural. So how could I solve all of this at once?

Reading realist literature from the era is the best method

The best method is to read works by writers of that time—ideally realist ones—that record people’s hopes, backgrounds, words and deeds, and all kinds of scenery, letting us travel through time back to a simpler era.

What can instantly give you a sense of, and feeling for, a particular time and place? Besides film and television, I think it’s literature. Literature carefully shapes characters’ feelings and backgrounds, so you can savor them again and again.

Unless someone invents a time machine or spends a fortune building a virtual reality of the past, the cheapest and most effective resource available to us is still reading lots of literature from that era to understand those distant times.

Realist writers may even describe the background of daily life quite naturally in memoir form—how people spoke, what they ate, their working conditions, social attitudes and so on—presenting everything I wanted to know clearly and naturally.

My favorite pastoral literature: 《田園之秋》

Speaking of which, as a child I loved Chen Guan-xue’s 《田園之秋》 (Autumn in the Countryside). Pastoral literature is mainly essays recording life in the countryside—say, building a tin-roofed house in the fields and, living among them, often interacting with plants and animals.

Like finding a baby bird under a tree, an animal wandering into the house while he’s reading, or fruit trees bursting into bloom in season. For me—living in town but loving nature and living things—it was something to long for. Every time I read it, I drifted along into those pastoral daydreams.

But farming while writing like he did is impossible for someone as physically frail as me, not to mention the wild boars, snakes and fruit thieves in his essays—I couldn’t handle them. Still, through his essays I could feel as if I were living a leisurely, fulfilling rural life, and that was enough for me.

Literature is a time machine

Literary works are far more than cultural treasures. They’re also a time machine that never wears out.

Do you like reading literature too?

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Further reading

• Previous: Hey! I Heard You’re a Writer on Ghost Island #105: The Art of Visiting Other Writers
• Start from the beginning: Hey! I Heard You’re a Writer on Ghost Island #01: Utsudo’s Debut — A Road to the Dream Covered in Frost
• Utsudo’s books

About the author

Utsudo is a Taiwanese light novelist and novelist VTuber with more than ten years in the industry and 40 commercially published print books. Her novel 《遺失的情書》 received a 2022 Ministry of Culture youth creative award. The 《嘿！聽說妳在鬼島當作家》 series records her experiences as a novelist in Taiwan.