A Quote by Antony Beevor
The blurring of fact and fiction has great commercial potential, which is bound to be corrupting in historical terms.
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I have a lot of blurring between fiction and non-fiction in so many of my works. For example, my first novel, 'When Nietzsche Wept,' has a great deal of non-fiction in it. I didn't create many characters at all. Almost all of them are historical characters that actually existed.
I've been typed as historical fiction, historical women's fiction, historical mystery, historical chick lit, historical romance - all for the same book.
I read a ton of fiction - historical, contemporary, literary, commercial, I love it all.
Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.
As much as I love historical fiction, my problem with historical fiction is that you always know what's going to happen.
Historical fiction is actually good preparation for reading SF. Both the historical novelist and the science fiction writer are writing about worlds unlike our own.
History buffs expect historical background in historical fiction. Mystery readers expect forensics and police procedure in crime fiction. Westerns - gasp - describe the West. Techno-thriller readers expect to learn something about technology from their fiction.
Historical novels are about costumery. I think that's the magic and mystery of fiction. I don't want to write historical fiction but I do want the story to have the feel of history. There's a difference.
Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency, and historical tasks is an actual or potential assassin.
I think the 'New York Times' reviews overall tend to overlook popular fiction, whether you're a man, woman, white, black, purple or pink. I think there are a lot of readers who would like to see reviews that belong in the range of commercial fiction rather than making the blanket assumption that all commercial fiction is unworthy.
Being serious is serious business in fiction. It's commercial or hoi polloi in fiction to be funny. It's too accessible to the great unwashed.
Collins masterfully blends fact and fiction...transcends the historical thriller.
No, this customary aim of research by excavators is completely foreign to the historical work with which I am occupied... my sole and only aim is to be able to establish a historical fact, on which I disagree with some eminent historians and geographers.
As you see, I bear some resentment and some scars from the years of anti-genre bigotry. My own fiction, which moves freely around among realism, magical realism, science fiction, fantasy of various kinds, historical fiction, young adult fiction, parable, and other subgenres, to the point where much of it is ungenrifiable, all got shoved into the Sci Fi wastebasket or labeled as kiddilit - subliterature.
I first started writing historical fiction in the late '70s and kept pictures of Kathleen Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers on my refrigerator until my first book was published by Avon in 1982. The biggest advantage of this genre for me is that it allows me to blend fact and fiction.
I went to grad school with the grand plan of getting my Ph.D. and writing weighty, Tudor-Stuart-set historical fiction - from which I emerged with a law degree and a series of light-hearted historical romances about flower-named spies during the Napoleonic wars.
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