Stories Across the Tides of Time: Why I Write Historical Fiction

There’s a hush I feel when standing at the edge of history,
not the loud parts, the dates and declarations,
but the quiet places.
A half-faded letter. A photograph creased at the corners.
A name etched into the back of a drawer.

These are the entry points.
This is where the story begins.

I write historical fiction not because I’m drawn to the past,
but because I’m compelled by the people who lived within it,
those who dared to hope, to love, to lose,
to light a candle against the dark
and believe it might be enough.

When I first began writing The Hand That Sows the Stars,
I didn’t know where it would lead.
Only that I was haunted by a man on a ship,
a war-wounded fisherman with Keats in his pocket
and too many ghosts in his chest.
His name was Henry,
and he was searching for something,
someone he had once lost
beneath a sky streaked with fire.

His story became the vessel through which I asked my own questions:
How do we carry grief that was never spoken aloud?
What becomes of love when the world breaks open?
Where do we find home, when everything familiar is gone?

Historical fiction, for me, is an act of resurrection.
It’s not nostalgia.
It’s not about tidying the past into something pretty.
It’s about listening.
It’s about standing in the ruins
and choosing to touch what others turned away from.
It’s about asking, again and again,
Who were you?
What did you long for?
And how does your longing echo mine?

The people I write are not perfect.
They are flawed, tangled, often afraid.
But they are reaching—
toward healing,
toward wholeness,
toward something real.

In that way, they are not so different from us.

So, I write.
Across the tides of time.
In the hope that someone, somewhere,
might find their own reflection
in the pages of a story once lost
and now remembered.

Welcome to my corner of the shore.