Events are not plots
A syllabus is what a student must cover: the war, the reign, the reform act, the voyage of a famous ship. A novel is what one person cannot get without paying. If your outline is a list of things that happened in order, you have a chronology. Chronologies inform. They do not turn pages, unless a want is threading through them.
The pinch is the place where desire and the year refuse each other. She wants a divorce; this court will not give her one without a story she cannot tell. He wants a quiet life; the press gang is on the quay. The public event can stay. It becomes the weather around a private emergency.
One person, named and hindered
Begin with a single body, not a generation. What do they want in the next month, not in the abstract of their life? Who or what in this year is in the way — a law, a father, a debt, a tide, a vow? If you cannot say the obstacle in one sentence, the story is still a theme.
Famous events are useful when they raise the price. The fire, the abdication, the epidemic can be the week in which the private want becomes impossible to delay. They are not a substitute for the want. A reader can look up the fire. They cannot look up what your person did on the morning of it.
Test the pinch against the era
Move the same want into the present. If it is equally difficult, you may still have a good story, but you do not yet have a historical one. The era should be the reason the want is costly, not the wallpaper behind a contemporary dilemma. A secret child costs something different in 1740 than in 2010. Write that difference into the pinch or the century is decoration.
Resistance is allowed. People have always wanted out of the role they were handed. The novel gets historical when the route out is made of period materials: a patron, a loophole, a bribe, a doctrine, a skill the guild recognises, a lie the parish will believe. A speech that belongs to a later century is not a pinch. It is a visitor.
From pinch to first scene
Once you have the sentence — she wants this, the year charges that — you have a place to start writing. The first scene is not the earliest event in the chronology. It is the moment the want meets the price. Everything before that can be recovered later, if the story still needs it.
If you are stuck inventing a plot because you know so much history, you are starting from the syllabus. Put the notes aside and write the sentence of want. The history you actually need will be the history that interferes with it.
Try this
Finish two sentences before you outline anything else: “This person wants ___.” “In this year, getting it costs ___.” If the second sentence would be identical in a contemporary novel, rewrite the cost until the year is doing the work.