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.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things.
Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth.
Writers begin changing the instant they append 'The End' to a novel. Readers begin changing the moment they encounter that same phrase. And even the novels themselves, through the strange transmutations of time and shifting tastes and mores, exhibit changes as we look backward upon them, acquiring retroactive meanings and tonalities.
In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it into the history books.
A key goal for an author of history is to persuade his or her readers to forget what they know and to relive the world as it unfolded for characters of the time - with outcomes uncertain.
The novelist's obligation to remake the sensuous texture of a vanished world is also the historian's. The strongest fiction writers often do deep research to make the thought and utterances of lost time credible.
As much as I love historical fiction, my problem with historical fiction is that you always know what's going to happen.
I've always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned.
Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.