Guest Post with author M.J. Rose and Giveaway!

 Ever wonder how historical fiction authors decide at which point to gravitate away from the mountains of non-fiction sources they have accumulated to craft their next novel and towards the writing desk to get cracking on it?  How do they decide they have enough to write convincingly of the past?  M.J. Rose picked the brains of her fellow historical fiction writers to find out:

M.J. Rose:

I started writing books that went back in time to other eras after having written 8 totally contemporary novels. 

I knew I needed to do research – but how much? When do you stop researching and start writing. How much information is enough?

And the more research I did the more overwhelmed I was by the job I’d given myself.

One of the things I did was ask other writers of historical fiction about how they wrote so realistically about the past without turning their novels into history lessons.

How do you delve into a historical past you cannot yourself remember?

Here some of the answers that helped me find my own way.

C.W. Gortner: For me, it's part instinct and part research. I write novels based on people who actually lived, so it's always a challenge because my imagination is constrained by fact. For example, I can't change the ending, even if it ends badly. I'm obsessive about research; I have to find out everything I can, and that means getting in contact with libraries and archives, finding out-of-print books, setting up meetings with experts in certain areas, etc. After the research is done, and the writing begins, something stronger takes over and perhaps that is, in fact, a collective unconscious of the past.

Arthur Phillips: Memory has a huge role in writing historical fiction, but just not the memory of that particular history. I use my own memories from time to time in my books, of course: something I said or did or wished I said or did, or felt, or wished I felt, or whatever. And then I give that memory to a character who is otherwise unlike me, and in the cases of historical fiction, someone who lived at a time and in a place that I did not, and hey presto: a reader might have the illusion of a particular moment of history recreated convincingly, but maybe that is a trick because living memory was transplanted into a historical shell...

David Hewson: While I try to be "accurate" as much as possible (mainly because it would be lazy to be inaccurate when the sources are out there), I don't see veracity as important in itself. What matters is the subjective truth of the historical world to the reader. An unreal world that feels right is much better than a technically accurate one that feels made up.

Steve Berry: Research, research, research. I suppose that means I rely on the recollections of others. How else would we ever know about the past except through the memories of those who experienced it? In my case, that comes from hundreds of primary and secondary sources, which I pore through one by one, searching for those precious few facts that will fit together to make a story. Without those recollections, properly memorialized and preserved, the past would truly be lost.

David Liss: My background is in literary studies, not in history, and so by training I am inclined to pay as much attention to researching historical subjectivity as material historical fact. What people ate and wore and how they got around and the material conditions of their day-to-day lives are all very interesting, but they are also meaningless if we try to impose a contemporary sense of self into a historical setting. When I work on historical characters, I always try to imagine how this person, living at this time, would respond to this problem or obstacle or success or whatever it is they are dealing with.

Sandra Gulland: One realization that was important for me in delving into history — an epiphany, really — came while I was feeding my horse. I realized that what I was doing was timeless. But for his height, my horse was not much different from a horse in the 17th century — or the third century, for that matter. As for myself, I might be taller than a woman in the past, and clothed differently, and my constellation of beliefs and customs somewhat different, but my body and soul were basically the same, and what I was doing — feeding a horse — had been done for centuries before. That was the key that opened the door for me, helped me to make myself at home in a world of the past.

  

Thank you M.J! You can learn more about M.J. Rose and her other works at http://www.mjrose.com/content/index.asp

 And now the giveaway!  Up for grabs is: 1 copy of The Hypnotist by M.J Rose

SYNOPSIS: Haunted by his inability to stop the murder of a beautiful young painter twenty years ago, Lucian Glass keeps his demons at bay through his fascinating work with the FBI's Art Crime Team. Investigating a crazed collector who's begun destroying prized masterworks, Glass is thrust into a bizarre hostage negotiation that takes him undercover at the Phoenix Foundation—dedicated to the science of past-life study. There, to maintain his cover, he submits to the treatment of a hypnotist.

 

Under hypnosis, Glass travels from ancient Greece to nineteenth-century Persia, while the case takes him from New York to Paris and the movie while the case takes him from New York to Paris and the movie capital of the world. These journeys will change his very understanding of reality, lead him to question his own sanity and land him at the center of perhaps the most audacious art heist in history: a fifteen-hundred-year-old sculpture the nation of Iran will do anything to recover.

 Giveaway is open to: US and Canada

To enter: Leave your name and email in the comments.  1 additional entry each for posting about this giveaway on Twitter, Facebook, or on your blog. 

Giveaway ends on: Midnight December 11th.  Winner will be announced on the 12th.  

Good Luck!

 For more tour stops featuring reviews, giveaways, guest posts and interviews with M.J Rose visit:

http://hfvirtualbooktours.blogspot.com/2011/10/mj-rose-on-tour-for-hypnotist-november.html

or follow along with the tour on Twitter: #TheHypnotistVirtualBookTour

Stop back by on the 8th for my review of The Hypnotist :)