However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Some critics said, 'Hey, why are you writing historical novels?' I say they're not historical, they're contemporary, because people walking around who lived through this, even a little bit, they carry it inside. The contemporary isn't just what you can see now.
I feel like it's hard to get into historical novels where you know what the story is far too well.
After closely examining my conscience, I venture to state that in my historical novels I intended the content to be just as modern and up-to-date as in the contemporary ones.
Ever since my youth it has disturbed me that of the literary works that survived their own epoch, so many dealt with historical rather than contemporary subjects.
We've all faced the charge that our novels are history lite, and to some extent, that's true. Yet for some, historical fiction is a way into reading history proper.
Obviously, I love to do both contemporary and historical fiction. When a hint of a story grabs me, I try to go with it to see where it will take me whatever the setting.
Historical novels are hard to do for the general public for commercial writers like myself.
A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.
Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything.
My books fall in the wobbly middle between historical fiction and historical romance.
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