With historical fiction, even basing the story on real past events doesn't mean I have a plot. My most recent historical short is about a fairly small, distinct event involving only a handful main players so I knew how it happened from beginning to end, but organizing the sequence for a story that made emotional sense and kept the fictional tension was a brutal process. I not only researched the events and period but read up on preliterate thinking and premodern conceptions of mental illness to get an inkling of how to start the story, and the actual plot, though it followed the recorded events very closely, went through many iterations of planning before it came together on the page. It was and remains a difficult process, but it's so rewarding when things cohere and a workable story is born.