Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I just love historical fiction.
I like writing historical fiction.
I've always been drawn to historical fiction.
I'm a huge historical fiction and non-fiction fan.
I'm not a great reader of historical fiction; it's not my favourite genre.
After writing several chapter books, I found my true passion: historical fiction.
Cultural concepts are one of the most fascinating things about historical fiction.
Historical fiction is simply fiction set in the past, and should be judged as such.
My books fall in the wobbly middle between historical fiction and historical romance.
I can't read historical fiction because I find the real thing so much more interesting.
I'm a big fan of historical fiction stuff. Historical battles - 'Gladiators,' 'The Patriot.'
I got nice rejections explaining that historical fiction was a difficult sell. But I kept trying.
The power of historical fiction for bad and for good can be immense in shaping consciousness of the past.
I am not a fan of historical fiction that is sloppy in its research or is dishonest about the real history.
I have always regarded historical fiction and fantasy as sisters under the skin, two genres separated at birth.
I taught English and history, so my education for that really helped prepare me for writing historical fiction.
As much as I love historical fiction, my problem with historical fiction is that you always know what's going to happen.
What's most explosive about historical fiction is to use the fictional elements to pressure the history to new insights.
I like a good fun chick-lit book as much as I like historical fiction, mysteries, or biographies, I like to be well-rounded!
Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.
I like historical fiction. I fell in love with New Orleans the first time I visited it. And I wanted to place a story in New Orleans.
I like to write stories that read like historical fiction about great, world-changing events through the lens of a flawed protagonist.
I never sat down and said, 'I'm going to write historical fiction with strong romantic elements.' It was just the way the stories went.
I am in the interesting position of being sometimes skimmed by the critics and called literature and sometimes called historical fiction.
'Dreams from My Father' was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction.
I've been typed as historical fiction, historical women's fiction, historical mystery, historical chick lit, historical romance - all for the same book.
I love historical fiction because there's a literal truth, and there's an emotional truth, and what the fiction writer tries to create is that emotional truth.
It's still funny for me to think of myself as someone who writes historical fiction because it seems like a really fusty, musty term, and yet it clearly applies.
What 'Floating Worlds' does draw on is Holland's artistry in bringing the past to life in her historical fiction and depicting the people who inhabited that past.
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.
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.
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.
It's really important in any historical fiction, I think, to anchor the story in its time. And you do that by weaving in those details, by, believe it or not, by the plumbing.
One of the joys of writing historical fiction is the chance to read as much as you like on a pet subject - so much that you could easily bore your friends senseless on the topic.
The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.
One thing I like about historical fiction is that I'm not constantly focusing on me, or people like me; you're obliged to concentrate on lives that are completely other than your own.
As a writer of historical fiction, I believe you don't want to fictionalize gratuitously; you want the fictional aspects to prod and pressure the history into new and exciting reactions.
What really disconcerts commentators, I suspect, is that when they read historical fiction, they feel their own lack of education may be exposed; they panic, because they don't know which bits are true.
I can read a newspaper article, and it might trigger something else in my mind. I often like to choose in historical fiction things or subject matter I don't feel have been given a fair shake in history.
Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.
I wanted to be a novelist from a very early age - 11 or 12 - but I don't think I ever thought I would write historical fiction. I never thought I might write academic history because I simply wasn't good enough!
I could write historical fiction, or science fiction, or a mystery but since I find it fascinating to research the clues of some little know period and develop a story based on that, I will probably continue to do it.
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.
One of the great lessons I learned about historical fiction from writing 'Loving Frank' is that you don't try to disguise what people did; my approach was to try to understand the characters and why they did what they did.
Overall, I adhere to the one guiding rule any author writing historical fiction should follow: whatever you describe has to be possible. It may not be common, obvious, or even all that probable, but it absolutely has to be possible.
I do believe that sci-fi or historical fiction finds an easy home in comics because there are no budget constraints in regards to the necessary world-building or visual effects necessary to bring those stories to life in other mediums.
When you're writing historical fiction, you have to think a little farther into the situation: what the average social interactions were, what was acceptable behavior. What did people think was fun, what did they find unhappy, and why?
The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.
Over the years, more than one reviewer has described my fantasy series, 'A Song of Ice and Fire', as historical fiction about history that never happened, flavoured with a dash of sorcery and spiced with dragons. I take that as a compliment.
If you're writing something that's clearly labelled as an alternative history, of course it's perfectly legitimate to play with known historical characters and events, but less so when you're writing an essentially straight historical fiction.