Many of my books are set in the English Civil war, a time of high tempers, and of settling disputes by the sword. Writers of historical fiction find they are often writing against backgrounds of high tension. So with all the fighting, blood, gore, deaths and subsequent tears, how do you avoid sentimentality and melodrama?

To me, melodrama is when the response to an event is out of all proportion to its gravity. But this can be difficult to assess when your characters are living in such turbulent times. Particularly as like most writers, I was attracted to  the period precisely because of its inherent drama.

One clue is when my characters become unrealistically heroic or too obviously villains. They lose their ability to speak normal sentences and become cartoonish and predictable. ‘So you thought I was dead, did you? Mwa,ha ha!’ Make sure their speech is something a real person might conceivably say.

Focus on the detail of the person – ground them in reality by noticing small things – frayed cuffs, the way their eyes are never still, the trace of humour in the lines round their eyes, the way the heel of one boot is ground down by the way they walk. Precision makes the character specific, rather than a mere archetype fulfilling a role.

As for the villain’s behaviour (yes, if you’ve started calling him a villain you have a problem!) – in real life people only use violence as a last resort. So the key is to make sure the provocation, the actual build-up, is bigger than the punch (or gunshot, or whatever.) Good clear motivation, a motivation that is not simply revenge for past wrongs, will help.

My teen books are more prone to melodrama because the action needs to be fast-paced. In one of the drafts of my teen books I could feel the melodrama building and realised I simply had too much action, with no pause for breath. I divided up the action allowing more time for reflection and more time for my protagonist to react in a meaningful way rather than with a knee-jerk reaction. This led to a different more plausible set of actions to move the story forward. Often when I outline, I find that I have relied on big implausible story gestures that need to be re-thought once I am actually writing.

Too many violent episodes, too many over-dramatized deaths, characters that do not develop – these are all death to subtlety. An approach I have found useful is to remind myself of the reality of the world I am writing about. Go back to the research. In other words I need to see the deaths against the context of the 17th century. This was a time when early death was really quite common. In a world where burials were constantly happening, where everyone lost at least one family member before their time, people were more accepting of death, and it probably took more than just the fact of someone’s death to bring on tears. Emotional investment in the characters relationships is brought about by the reader knowing them in small and subtle ways, not always by grand gestures. To me, too much crying indicates either a weak protagonist or a slip into melodrama and sentimentality. It shows I am trying to manipulate the reader to feel something, when the reader’s emotions should be engaged enough not to need any extra push from me!

Subtle fiction is fiction where the between-the-lines dialogue, the thoughts which are unsaid, are as important as the spoken words. Unspoken thoughts can be conveyed through deep point of view narration in a way that is impossible in film or drama, and this is something only a novelist can take full advantage of. When I find myself tempted to melodrama, this is the technique I use to haul myself back.