Hilary Mantel Quotes

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 am not a fan of historical fiction that is sloppy in its research or is dishonest about the real history.

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.

Whenever I've had to tamper with history for plot purposes, I make sure to mention that in my author's note, and I try to keep such tampering to a bare minimum. I also attempt to keep my characters true to their historical counterparts. This is not always possible, of course.

Entertainment history is now the main source of supposedly historical knowledge for more and more people, but 'histo-tainment' is superficial and lacks all context.

Nobody knows what really happened in any historical period. There are some periods where we know more than others, though.

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.

I like the stories with the historical themes.

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.

I really hate the term 'historical novel' - it reminds me of bodice-rippers. But I'm hooked on research, and I really, really enjoy it.

I feel very strongly that where the facts exist, a historical novelist should use them if they're writing about a person who really lived, because a lot of people come to history through historical novels. I did. And a lot of people want their history that way.

Most historians are engaged in fiction.

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.

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.

For me, writing a historical novel was really hard. I love history as a subject and majored in it in college. I think, in a way, my training made it worse for me because I knew how important it was to focus on document-based analysis, and I really didn't want to get stuff wrong.

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.

When you read a history or biography you are entitled to imagine that it is as accurate as the authors can make it. That research has gone into it and we say "This is a history of the civil war, this is a biography of Lincoln" whatever. But you don't make any such supposition when you say "This is a historical novel."

While writing 'Half of a Yellow Sun,' I enjoyed playing with minor things: inventing a train station in a town that has none, placing towns closer to each other than they are, changing the chronology of conquered cities. Yet I did not play with the central events of that time.

I'm such a history-nerd that, with time for research, I could probably enjoy writing in just about any time period.

Everything in 'The Tudors' is initially based on my historical research, and the fact is that the most unlikely scenes were the ones which were probably most based on reality. I prefer to be as real as possible, and there is so much of that story that you just can't make up.

History is my passion. So I write what I love to read. I find that if I combine history with a strong, sensual romance, it is like a one-two punch. The reader doesn't want the history without the romance, and of course the heavier the history, the more it has to be leavened with a sensual, all-consuming love story.

Accuracy is paramount in every detail of a work of history. Here's my rule: Ask yourself, 'Did this thing happen?' If the answer is yes, then it's historical. Then ask, 'Did this thing happen precisely this way?' If the answer is yes, then it's history; if the answer is no, not precisely this way, then it's historical drama.

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.

You'd have to have one hell of an imagination to completely make up a story, but historians are very anal about what they think should be portrayed on screen. Thankfully they don't make movies; we do.