On the other hand, by that definition the Sixties are historical fiction for you but not your granny, which complicates things. Perhaps, as a good Marxist, he felt that only big historical processes count as history, and so only stories of events that historians agree changed the lives of big groups of people count as historical fiction. I think what happened is that the Second World War has now passed beyond adult living memory, as the First did many years ago.
Everyone now buying books has only stories, or the childhood memories that become stories, of the war: self-contained, widely-recognised packages of events, emotions, tastes, technology, clothes and objects.
Your boss, on the other hand, was mis taking a different angle on the question: historical fiction as a genre. To us, today, the novel is obviously set in our historical past. I will mention that my journal, the Historical Novels Review , has a working definition, which we use for consistency purposes in deciding which books to review.
Most autobiographical novels would not fit these criteria. Not all people agree on this definition, however, and even we occasionally break the rules. A number of authors best known for their work in other fiction genres are turning to the historical past for inspiration.
Historical novels have also won some of the major literary awards of the past several years. Among the prizewinners are the following.
In Canada, Richard B. Also, a growing number of historical novels have become publishing phenomena over the past few years, and these works have given the field an ever-increasing audience. In some sense, then, historical fiction is getting the respect and attention it deserves.
This is the good news. On the other hand, there is, unfortunately, a snobbery of sorts that surrounds the genre, one that has persisted over many years.
Listen to these examples from the recent press, both from members of the print media and from authors themselves. His are not cardboard chatterers, like those in most historical novels. There are many other examples, but you get the idea. At least if you believe what you read in the papers. There seems to be a perception on the part of some members of the media myself excluded, of course that historical fiction is a genre that is very rarely done well. The novels that seem to escape the scorn of these reviewers are works of literary fiction that are set in the past.
Publishers and authors are equally guilty. What events will you choose? Tod writes historical fiction. She can be contacted on Facebook , Twitter and Goodreads or on her website www. Beyond writing historical fiction, Jennifer Robson and I share Toronto as our home town and I was delighted to meet her in person two months ago.
Clearly Jennifer enjoys wartime settings! Today, she discusses the factors that make historical fiction tick. Until scientists succeed in inventing a working time machine, historical fiction is the best means we have of sinking into vanished worlds and gaining a sense of what it must have been like to live in another time. Are historical novels inherently different from contemporary novels, and if so, in what ways?
But as soon as you go back a hundred, five hundred, or a thousand years, you are on your own. I know I make mistakes in my books, and I know they present an incomplete picture, at best, of the past. But the point is that I try. We all try, and when we get it right the results can be magical.
What aspects about the past do you specifically try to highlight in your novels? I really want to discover what life was like a hundred years ago, the good and the bad, and I want my readers to learn along with me. In writing historical fiction, what research and techniques do you use to ensure that conflict, plot, setting, dialogue, and characters are true to the time period?
My books have all been set in the first half of the twentieth century, which makes world-building considerably easier for me than for, say, someone writing about Imperial Rome. I rely on the same sources that any other historian would use, beginning with secondary sources and digging down to the primary source stage. What aspects do you feel need to be included when you are building a past world for your readers?
This is where a lot of writers, myself included, often have difficulties. I write commercial fiction, and my readers have a certain expectation that my heroines will be people they find engaging and interesting, if not always likeable. To that end I often err on the side of caution — my heroines are more independent than is typical of their female contemporaries, for instance, or are more liberal in their world view than would be typical of the average person.
But it does make her rather more of an outlier, as it were, and I have to be careful not to turn the entire book into a fairy tale in which the past has been prettied and sanitized beyond recognition.
Ruby ends up staying in Britain for the duration, and her experiences — of enduring the horrors of the Blitz, of traveling to France after D-Day — are based on those of other journalists of the time. I was inspired to write Goodnight From London by the experiences of my late grandmother, Nikki Moir, who was a newspaperwoman in Vancouver from the s onwards, and who worked throughout the war.
I was always so proud of her, and after she died I decided I wanted to use her example as an inspiration. Characters usually change as a result of the problem and must to be able to resolve it. Setting Place is a particular historical geographical location. Time is a particular historical period. Plot Must be plausible and believable. Usually problem or puzzling event is a result of the time or place in history for characters to resolve. Theme Themes usually fit with a historical context or can have conflicting contexts between historically different views.
Some events include historical events, dialogue, period thoughts, historical accurate, but not all information is authentic.
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