Book description
Once Upon a Time, it was NOW...
While a historian stands firmly planted in the present and looks
back into the past, a historical novelist has a more immediate task:
to set readers in the midst of bygone events and lead them forward,
allowing them to live and feel the wonderment, fear, hope,
triumph, and pain as if they were there.
In The Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction,
best-selling author James Alexander Thom (Follow the River,
From Sea to Shining Sea, Sign-Talker) gives you the
tools you need to research and create stories born from the past that
will move and inspire modern readers. His comprehensive approach
includes lessons on how to:
- Find and use historical archives
and conduct physical field research
- Re-construct the
world of your novel, including people and voices, physical
environments, and cultural context
- Achieve verisimilitude
in speech, action, setting, and description
- Seamlessly
weave historical fact with your own compelling plot
ideas
With wit and candor, Thom's detailed instruction,
illuminating personal experience, and invaluable insights culled from
discussions with other trusted historical writers will guide you to
craft a novel that is true to what was then, when
then was
now.
James Alexander Thom was formerly a U. S. Marine, a newspaper
and magazine editor, and a member of the faculty at the Indiana
University Journalism School. He is the author of Follow the
River, Long Knife, From Sea to Shining Sea,
Panther in the Sky (for which he won the prestigious Western
Writers of America Spur Award for best historical novel),
Sign-Talker, The Children of First Man, and The Red
Heart. He lives in the Indiana hill country near Bloomington with
his wife, Dark Rain of the Shawnee Nation, United Remnant Band. Dark
Rain is a director of the National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial
Planning Council. The author's Website is: www. jamesalexanderthom. com.
