J. Clifton Spargo, who, by the way is the Provost’s Fellow in Fiction at the University of Iowa, just down the road from me, wrote this great post on Glimmer Train about writing historical fiction. Sprague is the author of Beautiful Fools: The Last Affair of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald.
Sprague says:
Many conversations about historical fiction get bogged down in the “what,” in debates about specific requirements a novel must fulfill to qualify as historical fiction. From my perspective, however, the real urgency resides in the “why.” Why bother to tell this story of the past at all? Why now? Why again? There must be some way in which the story you tell about the past impinges on our present.
Glimmer Train is a quarterly magazine of short fiction. Glimmer Train has been discovering, publishing, and paying emerging writers since 1990.
Related articles
- What Editors Are Looking For In Historical Fiction, by Jane Johnson (ellaquinnauthor.wordpress.com)
- Yikes! Something New to Fear as a Historical Fiction Writer (ladybladeblog.wordpress.com)
- Historic Fiction (suebe.wordpress.com)
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