The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I don't write historical novels but novels that wonder, 'And what if it happened in this way and not in this other one?'
As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
The novelist wants to know how things will turn out; the historian already knows how things turned out, but wants to know why they turned out the way they did.
Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.
In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.
People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.
In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.
There I was limited to what happened the same way I am with Riel. It doesn't feel like a great burden to have your story, to some degree, set. I am enjoying figuring out what I think is the most dramatic way of telling this set of historical facts.
The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.
All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened.