: Re: Research on an alternate history novel I love alternate history scenarios; however, I just want to start writing. Should I do research or just start writing and go with it with some research

@Mendez196

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I think you need to do light research, unless you already know the answers.

For example, suppose you thwart the assassination of JFK (Stephen King already wrote that book). We know what happened (real history) when Lyndon B. Johnson took over, but you need a plausible theory of what happens if JFK remains President. I don't think you can just do anything, this topic has been speculated upon by experts including people close to JFK. If you impose your own invented personality on JFK, it will not come off as a plausible alternative history.

Of course the further in the past your change, the less people know about it, and the more leeway you have to impose an invented personality.

Likewise, as an alternative history, you can kill MORE people than JFK. What if Lyndon Johnson (riding in the car behind JFK) was assassinated also? That would make John McCormack (the Speaker of the House and next in the line of succession) President.

You would have more leeway then, McCormack is not a well-known political figure, but a little research on his war stance and such might lead to a very different Presidency. The advantage here is you don't have to figure out what JFK would have done, you can write a little more freely about President McCormack. He was a Democrat and publicly supported the New Deal, Great Society, civil rights, public education and health care, and advocated for the Vietnam War to fight communism.

My overall point here is that your story should be mostly fantasy, but an alternate history demands a few anchors in the real world, when you are dealing with real people that other real people remember, or can look up on Wikipedia. Otherwise your alternate history is not believable. If you make obvious mistakes, then well-read people (e.g. agents and publishers and reviewers) that do a little research and find obvious flaws in your real-history claims won't buy it or recommend it.

That does NOT mean you have to do all your research up front, you can still be a discovery writer and start writing, but you will have to stop frequently and resort to Wikipedia and Google when you are writing about real historical personalities. That doesn't have to take long, I read ten minutes about McCormack. He might prosecute Vietnam differently, but he would have tried to win it. And he would still have pushed JFK's civil rights legislation through and the Great Society of LBJ, perhaps better than LBJ.

Fantasy and Scifi I think you can get away with writing while doing no research. I don't believe that is true of this particular niche; alternative history.

I think you can minimize the research you need with the right strategy, namely eliminating the well-known people and resetting the field, so your own imagination takes the reins fairly early in the story. In the example of JFK, kill LBJ also. Then you can write about real people that were not as well known, and introduce your entirely fictional characters early; e.g. make McCormack's VP a fictional character designed by you to be a major player and source of additional conflict going forward; heck the fictional new VP can be one of your main characters.

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