How To Write Alternate History: A Complete Guide For Writers
This complete guide to writing alternate history shows you how to change the past, build believable worlds, and create compelling stories.
How To Write Alternate Histories
Every writer knows how to play the ‘What if?’ game. It’s how we create a plot. That plot is usually set within a framework that is never questioned. The rules that always apply are the morals, cultures, science, and history of mankind (this doesn’t apply to the genres of science fiction and fantasy).
Let’s take the laws of science. Writers can criticise them, ridicule them, but they can’t change them. Or the course of history.
That is, unless writers take the ‘what ifs’ to the extreme. What if these foundations didn’t exist? What if history had taken a completely different turn? That’s when you create an alternate history. Let’s look at how it can be done.
What Exactly Is An Alternate History Story?
As a genre, alternate history is a sub-genre of speculative fiction. It is the twin sister of historical fiction. Many writing tips apply to both genres.
For the moment, think of an alternate history like this: whereas historical fiction is set in a real historical situation, alternate history is set in a fictional historical situation in the guise of real history.
Confused? Let’s look at an example. The Amazon series The Man In The High Castle is about what the world could have been if the Axis powers, Nazi Germany and Japan, had won the Second World War. The series is an alternate history, and it’s told incredibly well.
In the series, the USA is split into a German and a Japanese sector. Within the German sector, we see many Americans wearing Nazi-like uniforms, behaving like Nazis, too. All the mechanisms we know from real Nazi history are there: military presence, uniforms for every organisation, political oppression and the restriction of free speech. Society is forced to conform to a racist ideology, including the eradication of ‘unworthy’ life.
The series is incredibly exciting to watch because it really does show what could have happened. Why is it successful? Because it does what every successful alternate history does: it feels real. It sounds logical. And it uses the following rules.
The 8 Rules Of Alternate History Fiction
These rules will help you write your own alternate history.
1. Find Your Starting Point
Choose a chapter of world history that you’re passionate about. Your passion will ensure your motivation during research. Then, find out what makes this historical period so interesting to you. Zoom in on a pivotal moment where world history took a turn.
This is a good starting point for your deviating (alternate) timeline. As a writer, you need to ask: ‘What if it all had happened differently?’
A good starting point is a pivotal point in world history. Then apply your ‘What if?’. That’s your ‘point of divergence’ (PoD).
For example, have you ever imagined what Britain would have been like if the Normans hadn’t invaded it? Or what modern medicine would have been like if the syringe had never been invented?
2. Know Your History
You will need to do extensive research, not just the timeline of events. You need to dig deep into cultural history and familiarise yourself with details of everyday life.
For example, we’ve all seen pictures of Adolf Hitler. We’ve seen pictures of the Gestapo. Have you ever noticed that these men don’t wear regular pants with the uniform jacket, but breeches with leather boots? They often carry a riding crop, even though they hardly ever sit on a horse.
Why so? These clothes made the Nazis appear as sophisticated as the German nobility at the time. It made them look like legitimate rulers (which, of course, they weren’t). It has nothing to do with the Gestapo riding around on horseback. It’s these details that are used so well in The Man In The High Castle. This is what makes the story so credible.
If alternate histories lose their credibility, they become fantasy. Do your research well.Â
3. Events Must Evolve Logically
Readers of alternate histories are prepared to make only one leap of faith, and that is to follow the writer from the point of divergence. But that’s it. From then on, the story must evolve as naturally and as logically as possible.
Alternate histories are successful if they make more sense than actual history.
4. Do Massive Worldbuilding
This kind of worldbuilding needed here is not like in the genre of fantasy. The rules of history and of science are still in place. It’s only one little historical event that writers may change (the point of divergence). But this has an effect, which needs to be shown in the tiniest details.
Rethink life as you know it from your original history. A good point of divergence creates ripples!Â
Going back to our original example, The Man In The High Castle, the USA are divided into a German and a Japanese sector. Of course, the Americans living under Japanese rule eat Asian food with chopsticks!Â
5. Plot Structure
The plot itself is clear in structure. Your point of divergence happens before your story even starts. You need to start your story by establishing your alternate historical period. What follows is the usual plot structure with an inciting incident and the ensuing three acts leading up to the end.
Your point of divergence is NOT the inciting incident. Don’t discuss where you divert from history; present it as truth.
6. Historical Events/People
Of course, you may weave in real historical events of people. They may lend extra credibility to your story. But there lies a danger in this: historical people, for example, are well documented, and your readers will probably know a lot about them. These historical people cannot be reinvented!
Don’t let your story get too close to real history. Use history as a backdrop, not as a seminal part in your story.
When you write historical fiction, you have the same problem. You may name the historical person, let’s say, Henry VIII. But you shouldn’t make him your main character, and you shouldn’t change his biography. If you do, you’ll enter the genre of fantasy.
You may, however, invent a character that is close to Henry VIII, like a servant. It’s a perfect vehicle for telling an alternate history.
7. Language
Alternate histories pretend to be real. That’s their charm! The overall writing style should be realistic. Your characters’ diction should sound like the original historical period.
Make language as truthful to the original period as you can. Include language in your research.
You may, of course, invent a few new words if these are words specific to your alternate history events.
8. Time Travel
Even though this is a bit sci-fi, it’s a great point of divergence.
The Netflix series, Travellers, used this to send agents back and ‘correct’ history to save the world from the apocalypse.Â
Time travel explains the existence of an alternate timeline. It can easily be used for a series of alternate histories.Â
A History Of Alternate Histories
‘What If?’ has been in the minds of writers from the dawn of time. It’s a creative tool. Applied to history, it points to where a writer is dissatisfied with history. For writers, it’s natural to ask what if things had happened differently. Writers have done that for ages.
- According to Wikipedia, the oldest alternate history was written by the Roman historian Livy (Latin: Livius). In Livy’s The History of Rome (Book IX, Section 17-19), he tells us what Europe would have been like if Alexander the Great had survived and invaded the continent. Historically, Livy is reimagining the 4th century BC!
- The first known complete alternate history in English is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story ‘P.’s Correspondence’ (1845). A man reimagines a different 1845 in which several historical people are still alive, including poets like Robert Burns, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats.
- The first novel-length alternate history in the English language is Castello Holford’s Aristopia (1895). It’s about settlers in Virginia who discover a reef of gold and build a Utopian society in North America.
The Last Word
It’s exciting to write alternate histories! But this genre is not for pantsers. You need to do a lot of planning and research before you even start writing! But it’s worth it. It will help your story pass the ultimate Litmus test for alternate histories: when people believe them to be true. Happy Writing!
Further Reading
- Wikipedia has a very long list of alternate histories – check it out!
- ‘P.’s Correspondence’ by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Aristopia by Castello Holford
- The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman (this series blends alternate history with fantasy)
- Making History by Stephen Fry, (1996)
- The Great When by Alan Moore, (2024)
- Babel, or the Necessity of Violence by Rebecca .F. Kuang (2022)
By Susanne Bennett. Susanne is a German-American writer who is a journalist by trade and a writer by heart. After years of working at German public radio and an online news portal, she has decided to accept challenges by Deadlines for Writers. Currently she is writing her first novel with them. She is known for overweight purses and carrying a novel everywhere. Follow her on Facebook.
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