“It must be easy writing historical fiction. You already know what’s happened.” That comment always makes me laugh. When you write historical fiction, you wonder what really happened. According to historian Patrick Collinson, “It is possible for competent historians to come to radically different conclusions on the basis of the same evidence. Because, of course, 99 percent of the evidence, above all, unrecorded speech, is not available to us.” That 99 percent leaves a lot of gray areas. Happily, those gray areas are where historical novelists get to play. That’s where our imagination fills in what might’ve happened behind and […]