Some novelists want to give people in history a voice because they have been denied it in the past.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.
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.
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.
Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.
You can't believe anything that's written in an historical novel, and yet the author's job is always to create a believable world that readers can enter. It's especially so, I think, for writers of historical fiction.
You can write a great book and be ignored. Literary history is full of classics that were under-appreciated in their own time.
The power of historical fiction for bad and for good can be immense in shaping consciousness of the past.
I feel very strongly that where the facts exist, a historical novelist should use them if they're writing about a person who really lived, because a lot of people come to history through historical novels. I did. And a lot of people want their history that way.
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.