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.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
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.
What's most explosive about historical fiction is to use the fictional elements to pressure the history to new insights.
Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.
I've never believed it's a fiction writer's job to create an exact replica of the past, a diorama the reader can step right into. But it is my responsibility to learn everything of the world I'm writing about, to become an expert in the politics and history that formed my characters' identities.
Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.
The power of historical fiction for bad and for good can be immense in shaping consciousness of the past.
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 best writers attempt to become alternative historians.
Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.
We want a world with both historians and novelists, don't we? Not with one or the other. Every fiction writer crosses the line that divides artistry and documentation - or erases it.