I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
Writing 'Native Guard,' I didn't know I was working on a single book. I began writing that book because I was interested in the lesser-known history of these black soldiers stationed off the coast of my hometown.
For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.
Innovation is often the ability to reach into the past and bring back what is good, what is beautiful, what is useful, what is lasting.
My style is not specific to the antebellum South, but it's heavily inspired by the Jim Crow era.
It was Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.
I love to design for women, it's really open and very free. I always think of my friends. I think of both fictitious characters, real people from the past and the present. I am not a woman, but I find women so beautiful and so fascinating.
I see myself as a true modernist. Even when I do a traditional gown, I give it a modern twist. I go to the past for research. I need to know what came before so I can break the rules.
I always like when things are loosely based on real events. That always makes it more interesting because there's a lot of research you can do.
The hiring of Phil Messina, the production designer, was a big decision. He's so gifted, and his ideas were always so smart and rooted in American history and architecture. Nothing feels like it's not us, or couldn't be us, and I think that's very important.
History releases me from my own experience and jogs my fictional imagination.
To be a writer was always my greatest aim. I remember writing a play about Guy Fawkes when I was 10. I suppose it's significant, at least to me, that my first work should be about a historical figure.
For as long as I can remember, I have been inspired by the achievement of our founding fathers. They set forth principles that have endured for than more two centuries. Those principles are as meaningful and relevant in each generation as the generation before. It would be a profound privilege for me to play a role in applying those principles to the questions and controversies we face today.
My only market analysis was to look around and see that, in one way or another, most watches are inspired by watches that were made in the 18th and 19th centuries. If I wanted a watch like that, I'd much rather buy the real thing at auction than a replica.
Inspired by Alex Haley's 'Roots,' at the age of 11 I began a handwritten Middle Passage story called 'Lawdy, Lawdy, Make Us Free.' I was raised by civil rights activists with a very strong sense of racial history and consciousness.
I take references from the past and flip them.
We Virginians do not go to the storied shrines of the past to do worship but rather to gain inspiration.
I've done a number of things in the spirit of employee motivation. I tend to be a storyteller and a student of history. I often tell stories of great battles, like the battle of Thermopylae, to inspire teams who face what appear to be insurmountable odds.
How can even the best novelist or playwright invent someone like Augustus Caesar or Catherine the Great, Galileo or Florence Nightingale? How can screenwriters create better action stories or human dramas than exist, thousand upon thousand, throughout the many centuries of recorded history?
I loved studying the Medieval world; that's why I love 'Game of Thrones.'
In my own creations, the earliest influence came from the ancient civilisations of Egypt, China, Africa and Persia. In fact, one of my earlier creations was a range of tunics, made from silk procured from the islands of Madagascar.
There remains, however, the hope, at least in Russia, that, as sometimes happens in history, the memory of lost alternatives will one day inspire efforts to regain them.
I always feel like the past informs my present musically.
One of the great pleasures in writing 'The Dream Lover' was learning about some of the real people who populated George Sand's life. What a cast of characters! And what a pleasure to recreate them upon the page!
Contemporary fantasists all bow politely to Lord Tennyson and Papa Tolkien, then step around them to go back to the original texts for inspiration--and there are a lot of those texts. We have King Arthur and his gang in English; we've got Siegfried and Brunhild in German; Charlemagne and Roland in French; El Cid in Spanish; Sigurd the Volsung in Icelandic; and assorted 'myghtiest Knights on lyfe' in a half-dozen other cultures. Without shame, we pillage medieval romance for all we're worth.
