“Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.”

Source: Education of a Wandering Man

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Louis L'Amour65

Novelist, short story writer 1908–1988

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“[On his process for writing novels:] I can't imagine what the first sentence is, I can't imagine where I want the reader to enter the story, if I don't know where the reader is going to leave the story. So once I know what the last thing the reader hears is, I can work my way backward, like following a roadmap in reverse.”

John Irving (1942) American novelist and screenwriter

A modern novelist of Dickensian tradition, Spotlight, Russia Today, January 24, 2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ost0Gyl2V1I,

“The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.”

China Miéville (1972) English writer

“Incomplete stories are make history of life. Their incompleteness makes them complete and generates curiosity in the readers, if the story is complete then it is read and kept aside, the incomplete story leaves its mark on the heart and mind of the reader and reader's start waiting for the end.”

Shabdon Ka Jahan

“The construction of short stories calls for a markedly different set of mind than work on a novel, and for me short stories are at once more interesting and more difficult to write than longer work. The comparative brevity of the story dictates more economical and accurate use of words and images, a limited palette of events, fewer characters, tighter dialogue, strong title and punctuation that works to move the story forward. If the writer is trying to illustrate a particular period or place, a collection of short stories is a good way to take the reader inside a house of windows, each opening onto different but related views—a kind of flip book of place, time and manners.”

Annie Proulx (1935) American novelist, short story and non-fiction author

On her short story collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories in “An Interview with Annie Proulx” https://www.missourireview.com/article/an-interview-with-annie-proulx/ in The Missouri Review (1999 Mar 1) <br class="br">Personal life and writing career

“Historically, moves to new ways of moral decision making depend on and occur in pockets of people of good will, who can explore with each other novel ways of relating without threatening or being threatened.”

R. Edward Freeman (1951) American academic

Source: A stakeholder approach to strategic management, 1984, p. 64 as cited in: George Cheney, Steve May, Debashish Munshi (2010) Handbook of Communication Ethics. p. 108

“The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

“My novels offer an extreme hypothesis which future events may disprove — or confirm. They're in the nature of long-range weather forecasts.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

As quoted in "Age of unreason" by Jeannette Baxter in The Guardian (22 June 2004) http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/jun/22/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.jgballard <br class="br">Context: The notions about the benefits of transgression in my last three novels are not ones I want to see fulfilled. Rather, they are extreme possibilities that may be forced into reality by the suffocating pressures of the conformist world we inhabit. Boredom and a deadening sense of total pointlessness seem to drive a lot of meaningless crimes, from the Hungerford and Columbine shootings to the Dando murder, and there have been dozens of similar crimes in the US and elsewhere over the past 30 years.<br>These meaningless crimes are much more difficult to explain than the 9/11 attacks, and say far more about the troubled state of the western psyche. My novels offer an extreme hypothesis which future events may disprove — or confirm. They're in the nature of long-range weather forecasts.

“The world is shaped by two things — stories told and the memories they leave behind.”

Vera Nazarian (1966) American writer

Source: Dreams of the Compass Rose

“I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story; and I have never believed that the novelist who properly performed this first condition of his art, was in danger, on that account, of neglecting the delineation of character — for this plain reason, that the effect produced, by any narrative of events is essentially dependent, not on the events themselves, but on the human interest which is directly connected with them. It may be possible in novel-writing to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters: their existence, as recognizable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told. The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers is a narrative which interests them about men and women — for the perfectly obvious reasons that they are men and women themselves.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: Collins explaining what he calls the literary principal guiding him, in the preface of the second edition of The Woman in White. Also in Reality's Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins by Maria K. Bachman & Don Richard Cox [University of Tennessee Press, 2003, ISBN 1-572-33274-3] ( p. xiv https://books.google.com/books?id=_X8AlmIp0dwC&pg=PR14)

“There is a much more subtle and completely novel threat to man's survival that looms, every year more menacingly, beside that of an atomic holocaust; the cluster of world-wide problems - not only material in nature - growing at an incredible speed when viewed in historical perspective, and called by The Club of Rome the "problématique humaine. In fact, we believe that even without the atomic world war, human existence as we know it is threatened if no way can be found to resolve this crisis syndrome.”

Mihajlo D. Mesarovic (1928) Serbian academic

Source: Mankind at the Turning Point, (1974), p.xi; cited in: Robert C. Tucker (1995) Politics As Leadership. p. 116

“Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.”

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Louis L'Amour65

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