As the nation approaches the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, the stories that shaped its founding are taking on renewed focus. For New York Times bestselling author Harold Coyle, that focus centers on No Small Thing: A Novel of the American Revolution, a project that proved demanding behind the scenes.

Coyle spoke to these challenges and highlighted how he found success in the following interview:

Q: What is the hardest part of writing historical fiction?
A: This is one time when it is best not to color outside the lines.
What I mean by that is that a writer not only needs to draw upon the accounts of the people who fought the wars covered in these books, they need to follow the social and cultural norms of the period.
The work begins where the record stops: inside the people who had to live through it.

Q: What does “not cheating” actually mean when you’re writing a novel like No Small Thing?
A: It means the facts do not move, even when the story wants them to.
The American Revolution already has its calendar. None of it is negotiable when you are staying true to historical events in your storytelling.

The date of the Battle of Bunker Hill is fixed.

The outcome of Washington’s Christmas crossing is fixed.

The laws defining who could own land, vote, or speak in public are fixed.

What is not fixed is the human reaction inside those moments. The fear before a first shot. The private logic a Loyalist mother uses to keep her family steady while neighbors choose sides. The quiet calculations people make when neutrality stops being an option.

That space, between the rigid skeleton of events and the soft tissue of human response, is where No Small Thing lives. And where the writing gets hard.

Q: Is the hardest part simply “getting the dates right”?
A: No. Dates are the easy part. The hard part is staying inside the era without making the characters feel foreign to modern readers.
My rule is simple and demanding this is one time when it’s best not to color outside the lines.
That means

I use real accounts. Letters, diaries, orders, reports. The voices of people who were there. I also work to respect the social world of the time. Let characters think, speak, and act like 18th-century people, even when it is uncomfortable to modern readers.

Q: How do you keep yourself honest while still writing a novel, not a textbook?
A: I build on breadth, depth, and context, keeping it mostly invisible.
I lean on a framework borrowed from British military historian Sir Michael Howard: any serious engagement with history requires breadth, depth, and context.

  • Breadth: What led up to 1775, including earlier wars, taxes, and political tensions that set the stage for revolt.
  • Depth: Events at every level, from generals making decisions to a single family making impossible choices on a contested street.
  • Context: Resisting the urge to judge 18th-century choices purely by today’s moral codes.

The challenge is that all of this must sit under the surface. If it is done well, the reader does not feel the scaffolding. They feel the world.
Months of research, stacks of primary sources, and careful thinking about power and consequence become the background against which one line of dialogue can ring true.

Q: Why do you reenact Revolutionary War life?
A: Because living as they did, even briefly, goes a long way to appreciating what my characters had to contend with.
That is why I took up reenacting. Reading and trying to understand von Steuben’s Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States (the “Blue Book”) was just the beginning. For me, actually executing the maneuvers the Continental Army performed, being in the ranks, shoulder to shoulder with other members of your regiment while trying to reload and bring a musket to the ready, brings history to life.

The hard part is then translating that brief, physical experience into prose that helps readers feel the strain, not just see the scene. I think about the weight of the musket, the clumsy speed of reloading, and the way a shouted order can be both lifeline and threat.

I cannot drag readers into a reenactment. My sentences have to do that work instead.
In the reenacting community, there is a phenomenon known as the “magic moment,” an instant when you become so caught up in the sights, the sounds, the smells, and the rush of events, you are no longer in the 21st century, but there.

Q: What makes writing historical fiction harder now than it used to be?
A: America is drifting into collective amnesia regarding our history.
I came across an opinion piece that put forth the sad fact that we are drifting into collective amnesia. Ask a middle schooler or young adult, for that matter, why 56 men pledged our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor in 1776, and you’re likely to get a blank stare.

That reality shapes how I write No Small Thing. I cannot assume that every reader arrives knowing why men risked their lives and fortunes to sign the Declaration, or what it meant for a town to be occupied by British troops. So, the novel has to carry more weight. It must be a compelling story in its own right. It must quietly restore context many people were never taught. It must do so without turning into a lecture.

Scenes have to pull double duty. They have to move the plot and also carry the laws, customs, geography, and politics that make the world intelligible.
In other words, the hardest part is not only getting the past right, it is writing the past clearly enough that a modern reader can feel it.

Q: Why do the hard parts matter?
A: Because I wanted to give the reader an opportunity to see history unfold as those who made it experienced it.

For the characters in No Small Thing, the war is more than a rebellion. It is a civil war, a war that pitted rebels and loyalists alike against their neighbors, their friends, and all too often members of their own family. Standing on the sidelines, doing all they could to keep out of the fray was not an option, for the war was fought on their very doorsteps.


Each had to decide not only where their loyalties lay, but what price they were willing to pay for the cause they had attached themselves to.

Historical fact, paired with fictional lives, lets me explore those pressures up close, as long as the story never lies about the world those characters inhabit.
That is the hardest part of writing historical fiction: letting imagination roam freely inside the boundaries that history sets, and trusting that readers will feel the difference between a story that uses the past and one that is accountable to it.

Explore Harold Coyle’s historical fiction: No Small Thing and its prequel, A Savage War of Empire, or learn more about the author.