By definition, historical fiction is a lie. It’s made up; not true. Otherwise it would be history. Writers deal with that fact in a variety of ways. Some will simply pick a historical backdrop and write a completely fictional story set in their approximation of that time and place. Others will look for real events and people, and fit their fictional characters within the real story of those events and people, and still others will write their imagining of how a real story with real people took place, staying true to the historical record as best they can. And the last category – one I find personally perplexing – is to take real historical characters and make them the protagonist in stories in which they do things they never did or even would have done in their real lives.
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Historical mystery novelist DE Johnson at http://writinghistoricalnovels.com/2013/01/17/the-balance-of-real-and-unreal-in-historical-novels-by-de-johnson
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