Stephanie Laurens Quotes

When you have a novel set in a fictional history, you still should get your history right.

Lest men suspect your tale untrue, Keep probability in view.

I don't like something so fantasy-filled that I couldn't imagine it ever happening. I like things that could come true. That's how I conduct the show.

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.

Those who read the fiction assume that, because I'm also a historian, I know what I'm talking about.

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.

Everything in a story should be credible.

I want to make the world real. I have to be able to believe that it could happen. I can't put Pegasus in my stories because horses can't fly. It's just a quirk in my brain.

My action follows my characters. If a character is a cop, you cannot be posing all the time, you cannot fly off the roof because it doesn't make any sense - it's not practical.

I freely admit that I took great license in writing 'The Dark Queen,' more so than my other historical romance novels. This is largely because I viewed the book as a fantasy novel as much as an historical. I do feel that writers should strive for as much accuracy as possible but, in the end, remember that we are writing fiction.

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.

Ellis Peters's historical detail is very accurate and very minute, and therefore is not only interesting to read but good for an actor to acquire a sense of the period. And the other thing I think is that an actor lives in the land of imagination.

The script is very good because the things that happen in it are very believable to me. It doesn't presuppose that the world has changed very much. You don't have to think that you're in a different world.

The novelist's obligation to remake the sensuous texture of a vanished world is also the historian's. The strongest fiction writers often do deep research to make the thought and utterances of lost time credible.

One decision I made in writing 'Henry and Clara' was that I would keep Lincoln's appearances and any dialogue by him to an absolute minimum, because I think readers don't quite believe it when novelists have Lincoln walking around and saying things. They just know they're in the presence of stage machinery.

I've never believed it's a fiction writer's job to create an exact replica of the past, a diorama the reader can step right into. But it is my responsibility to learn everything of the world I'm writing about, to become an expert in the politics and history that formed my characters' identities.

Verisimilitude is something I am constantly seeking in fiction. I am looking for surface detail that makes something seem real.

Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen.

Everything that I can do to ground the story in reality helps make it harder for people to be dismissive of it.

I've been in so many writing workshops where someone hands in a story, and when the other writers in the workshop are giving feedback, they say, 'This is unbelievable.' And the writer says, 'Well, actually, the events are based in real life. This actually happened.'

I like everything to be natural... believable.

VERISIMILITUDE (the appearance or semblance of truth)

Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it.

If it's fiction, then it better be true.

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.