March 7, 2026
This is the first post in a six-part series, “The Research Behind the Story,” exploring how the best historical fiction writers use travel and on-location research to create the novels we love — and what that means for writers planning their own research trips.
Anthony Doerr was on a book tour in France when he wandered into Saint-Malo for the first time. He walked the cobblestone streets of the walled port city, admired the granite buildings, and remarked to his editor how beautifully ancient it all felt.
His editor told him the town had been almost entirely destroyed by American bombs in 1944.
That single moment — the collision between what a place looks like and what it’s hiding — became the seed of All the Light We Cannot See. Doerr spent the next ten years researching and writing it. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize.
He never would have written it from his desk in Idaho.
When historical fiction writers are interviewed about their process, one question always comes up: How did you research your book? And the answers almost always involve the same revelation — that something essential happened when they showed up in person at the places they were writing about.
Tracy Chevalier hiked 25 miles and learned needlepoint to inhabit the world of her protagonist in A Single Thread, set at Winchester Cathedral. Philippa Gregory has said she almost always travels to the sites she describes, and that at least half of a historical fiction writer’s time should be devoted to research. Geraldine Brooks stumbled onto the plague village of Eyam while living in England, and that chance encounter became Year of Wonders. Min Jin Lee filled ten banker’s boxes with notes for Pachinko.
These aren’t outliers. They’re the norm among the writers whose work we remember.
And the thing they all describe, in different ways, is the same thing: the moment when being physically present in a place revealed something they never could have found in a book or on a screen.
There’s a word I keep coming back to when I think about this: unmappable. The things that make great historical fiction feel alive — the quality of light at a certain hour, the way sound carries through stone corridors, the smell of a harbor at low tide, the distance between two buildings that seemed close on a map but aren’t — these are sensory and spatial details that don’t exist in archives.
They don’t show up in Google searches. They aren’t in Wikipedia footnotes. You can’t get them from someone else’s travel memoir, because they’ve already been filtered through another person’s attention.
Doerr described the “briny smells and moody seas” of Saint-Malo with such precision because he’d stood on those ramparts. Chevalier understood the physical toll of her character’s world because she’d walked it herself. These details aren’t decoration. They’re the connective tissue that makes fiction feel true.
I learned this myself a few years ago, researching my own novel set in the mill villages of 1930s Knoxville, Tennessee. I’d done months of reading — newspaper archives, census records, oral histories, academic papers about the textile industry. I thought I had a solid understanding of my grandmother’s world.
Then I went there.
The streets were narrower than I’d imagined. The hills were steeper. The creek I’d been writing about wasn’t the gentle stream I’d pictured — it was a ditch running between houses that were closer together than I’d realized, in a landscape that explained, in a way no document could, why the people who lived there felt both trapped and bound to each other.
I rewrote three chapters when I got home.
Over the next five posts, I’m going to take you inside the research processes of some of the most celebrated historical fiction writers working today. Not just what they read, but where they went — and what they found when they got there.
We’ll look at:
Whether you’re a writer planning your first research trip, a book club reader who wants to walk in a character’s footsteps, or someone who’s ever read a novel and thought I want to go there — this series is for you.
Because the best stories don’t just come from research. They come from showing up.
Next in the series: “A Walk Through Saint-Malo Changed Everything” — Anthony Doerr and the decade behind All the Light We Cannot See.
Trip announcements, curated reading lists, and the occasional dispatch — before anyone else.