Quotes by : James Alexander Thom

my own definition of bad historical fiction hits these points:It fails to transport the reader to a former....

Before you're ready to tell that story well, you might have to study and learn the equivalent of an entire....

Some writers don't believe they're ready to begin writing the story until they've finished all the research....

you come to understand that history might be, as Thomas Carlyle put it, “a distillation of rumor,”....

Mortmain is an old French word that should be tattooed on the inside of any historical novelist's skull.....

Lucia Robson's facts can be trusted if, say, you're a teacher assigning her novels as supplemental reading....

In my long career in this historical fiction business, though, I've found that the most effective storytelling....

Most historical accounts were written by fallible scholars, using incomplete or biased resource materials;....

If you don't know what those old occupations were, how they were done, and how they interacted with the....

A novel, or so-called “fiction,” if deeply researched and conscientiously written, might well contain....