JACK'S BLOG
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5/19/2012 2 Comments Do you like the tough questions?OpinionHOW MANY ANGELS can dance on the head of a pin? No. Not that one. It's too easy. What will a woman do the first time you kiss her? The fiftieth time? The thousandth time? Again. Too easy. Come on, and let's go for the really hard stuff. How about this: What is historical fiction? Yeah, I hear you. Go ahead and laugh. The funny thing is that I belong to a group on LinkedIn – Historical Fiction – that has been wrestling with that question for more than three months. Seriously, three months. Some believe that it is any fiction set in history. That seems simple enough, doesn't it? Okay, what is history? Here's a sampling of the responses:
During this discussion, others have proffered the opinion that the times must be “historic.” That has led to branches from the original question.
It seems that the English care. Out of curiosity, I searched books in the category of Historical Fiction on Amazon and found that the best selling one is only ranked about 15,000th in the Kindle Store for all paid books. On Amazon UK, it is ranked about 26th. This leaves me with the most important question of all: What the hell am I doing writing Historical Fiction? Maybe I could be a commercial success if in my novel, Rebels on the Mountain, I had made Fidel Castro a vampire and Che Guevara a zombie. (Well, that wouldn't work, would it. Casting Che as a zombie would be an improvement over murderous thug.) What do you think?
2 Comments
5/19/2012 07:34:52 pm
HF - my idea is that it is anything written creatively about a real event that happened yesterday or even further back!
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5/20/2012 12:03:15 am
My thoughts are these. In the movie, any novel set between 1900 and 1975 is a period piece. Any novel set before 1900 is historical fiction. In literary non-fiction, based on that criteria, a book about Fidel and Che is history. In literary fiction, it is a period piece about what the novel really is: a great adventure of love and war and the Cuban revolution. Or, since your lead character is a former CIA operative, I believe you might want to position Rebels on the Mountain as a thriller that just happens to be set in the 1950s - 1960s.
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