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.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
When you have a novel set in a fictional history, you still should get your history right.
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.
I write novels, mostly historical ones, and I try hard to keep them accurate as to historical facts, milieu and flavor.
Although this is a fictitious story the history is real. You don't want to re-write history but you certainly want to portray events and characters as realistically as you can.
What I had to do was keep the story within certain limits of what was, of course, plausible.
As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.
What's most explosive about historical fiction is to use the fictional elements to pressure the history to new insights.
History releases me from my own experience and jogs my fictional imagination.
The work itself has a complete circle of meaning and counterpoint. And without your involvement as a viewer, there is no story.
The illusion is that most of my work is simply about past events: a point in history and nothing else.