A Quote by Hilary Mantel
Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.
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I've been typed as historical fiction, historical women's fiction, historical mystery, historical chick lit, historical romance - all for the same book.
As much as I love historical fiction, my problem with historical fiction is that you always know what's going to happen.
Writers of historical fiction are often faced with a problem: if they include real-life people, how do they ensure that their make-believe world isn't dwarfed by truth? The question loomed large as I began reading 'The Black Tower', Louis Bayard's third foray into historical fiction and fifth novel overall.
I can't read historical fiction because I find the real thing so much more interesting.
Historical fiction is not history. You're blending real events and actual historical personages with characters of your own creation.
I've always been drawn to historical fiction.
I remember reading an interview with a writer who said that in nonfiction if you have one lie it sort of messes it up. But in fiction the real details give you so much more credibility, because people do so much research just to write fiction. In fiction you're trying to recreate something lifelike.
This general tendency to eliminate, by means of unverifiable speculations, the limits of the categories nature presents to us is the inheritance of biology from The Origin of Species. To establish the continuity required by theory, historical arguments are invoked, even though historical evidence is lacking. Thus are engendered those fragile towers of hypothesis based on hypothesis, where fact and fiction intermingle in an inextricable confusion.
I considered people who didn't like my work to be in some way defective, deficient, lacking a sense of humor, and not understanding what was really going on.
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.
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.
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.
Cultural concepts are one of the most fascinating things about historical fiction. There's always a temptation, I think, among some historical writers to shade things toward the modern point of view. You know, they won't show someone doing something that would have been perfectly normal for the time but that is considered reprehensible today.
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.
In the past, there hasn't been much reliable information about startups and small businesses available online. It's information that's really valuable, and it's information that people want to share.
Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.
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