Top 33 Historical Fiction Writing Quotes
#1. 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.
Stephanie Laurens
#2. Why write about the past? Well, there's more of it.
John Cleese
#3. I think I'm too lazy a writer to do something like historical fiction. You have to do so much research. I just write what I know.
Sarah Dessen
#4. The characters tell their story - I am merely the tool used to record it
Marti Melville
#5. 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.
Virginia Henley
#6. 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.
Chang-rae Lee
#7. 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.
Nancy Horan
#8. I taught English and history, so my education for that really helped prepare me for writing historical fiction.
Candace Camp
#9. While what I write is always largely consistent with the records that remain I freely admit that where historical fact proves a barrier to invention, I simply move a detail a little one way or another.
Sara Sheridan
#10. For me, the historical and genealogical library is the one I use. I'm working on, I'll say, it's a time travel novel. I haven't written very much of it. That's the dirty secret of the Cullman center: The writers don't write their fiction there, they just do their research.
Andrew Sean Greer
#11. I had a long writing history behind me before I got into anything in film. It comprehended science fiction, it comprehended historical, it comprehended, you know, just about everything that you can think of.
William Monahan
#12. Historical fiction of course is particularly research-heavy. The details of everyday life are there to trip you up. Things that we take for granted, indeed, hardly think about, can lead to tremendous mistakes.
Sara Sheridan
#13. Every time you go to see Hamlet you don't expect it to have a happy ending ... you're still enthralled.
(Interview BBC Radio 4 Today 17 October 2012.)
Hilary Mantel
#14. 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.
Pamela Sargent
#15. Why do I write historical fiction? Johnny Tremain, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Island of the Blue Dolphins-that's why. I'll never forget how it felt to read those books. I want to write books with the same power to transport readers into another time and place.
Jennifer Armstrong
#16. 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.
Lauren Willig
#17. I enjoy writing historical fiction because it allows me to live more lives than just this one.
Karen A. Chase
#18. History is about the untold story, and writing historical fiction is a wonderful way to present the past in a compelling and entertaining way.
Paul W. Feenstra
#19. I had a few people ask me if I might one day write my own autobiography. I just told them, 'It's already being written; through my books.
T.S. Wieland
#21. 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.
Deanna Raybourn
#22. Archive material is vital to the writer of historical fiction.
Sara Sheridan
#23. The longer I don't write, the more I hurt.
Naomi Wood
#24. For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.
Anthony Doerr
#25. Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there.
Sara Sheridan
#27. Writing historical novels can be dangerous. We need to be as accurate and as fair about the historical record as we can be, at the same time as creating our fictional characters and, hopefully, telling a good story. The challenge is weaving the fiction into the history.
Edward Rutherfurd
#28. Writing is an act of faith. One must believe and see people who are invisible to others and be faithful to tell half formed stories. It's like being on the trail of an apparition who's repeatedly just out of reach.
K. Youngblood
Katherine Imogene Youngblood
#29. Writing historical fiction is a legitimate use of Multiple Personality disorder.
Peggy Ullman Bell
#30. I found out after reading quite a lot of it that it is not rated very high. He has a very descriptive way of writing but also lengthy. May not want to finish!!!!! This was his 1sr and only try ast Historical Fiction!
Wilkie Collins
#31. History tells us what people do; historical fiction helps us imagine how they felt.
Guy Vanderhaeghe
#32. you come to understand that history might be, as Thomas Carlyle put it, "a distillation of rumor," or, as Napoleon said, "a set of lies generally agreed upon
James Alexander Thom
#33. No one ever tells you that: that there's no method. Writing's a lawless place.
Naomi Wood
