Bernard Cornwell: Whatever period appeals --- I used to read Hornblower as a child so that period was an early favourite and gave rise to the Sharpe novels. The Arthurian period is another that sprang from childhood, but the American Civil War was an adult enthusiasm, sparked when I moved to the US and began reading American history. But what you cannot do, I think, is write about a period that you instinctively dislike. I'm often asked to tell stories of the Crimean War, but I detest the moral righteousness of the Victorians and will avoid them like the plague.
Megan Chance: The time period is dictated by the story I want to tell. When I start my research, I always know something: it may be a characterization; it may be that I'm interested in a cultural or scientific aspect of some plot; or it may be that it's the historical period itself that I want to write about. For a book about the Salem Witch Trials, for example, the time period is predetermined. If I wanted to do a story that had historical psychiatry as a focus, the development of the science would dictate the time period I chose to explore.
Glen David Gold: First off, I wrote 4 present day novels which were terrible. I put them away. Having had my butt kicked by fiction, I started doing research into Oakland and Bay Area history for the local newspaper. I found out several remarkable things --- that the President of the United States had died in San Francisco in 1923, that a young inventor was living in San Francisco in 1923, and a magician named Charles Carter was performing (and living) in San Francisco in 1923. But I'm thick-headed --- that wasn't quite enough to get me to think about writing something set in 1923. No, I had to go and change a fuse in my apartment, and then I discovered the original inspection certificate that showed my building, which I loved for its hidden passageways and rococo style, had been built in 1923. It was a little bit like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters, seeing the same shape everywhere he went. And so I went off to my alien encounter.
Matthew Kneale: I've written two historical novels now, both set in the nineteenth century. It's a period I know well, having studied it at university, and it still seems a hot topic, as the world is still enduring its legacies, from colonialism to Marxism and racism as a creed. It's also personally important to me, having grown up in Britain, which is a country that remains very much stuck in the shadow of that time today, despite determined efforts by Thatcher and Blair to prod the country into the modern age. It's hard for a lot of people --- myself included --- to work out their feeling about the Victorians. On the one hand they were awesomely driven and energetic, and included some remarkably creative minds, from Dickens to Brunel, Gladstone to Darwin. On the other hand the society was riven with snobbery. The Empire is a very awkward subject for many British, so much so that it's only now that they're beginning to look at it squarely in the face. It's quite a burden to grow up in a country that is striving admirably to be multicultural, and discover that your ancestors arrogantly forced their rule upon a third of the earth's population. In my last novel, English Passengers I decided to write about the island of Tasmania by Australia, and the destruction of its aboriginal people, because that seemed to summarize everything that was most terrible about the Empire. In some way I wanted to bring it all to the surface so that people could know what was done and begin to move on. A kind of fictional therapy.
Karen Essex: As I said, when I discovered that the real Kleopatra had little to do with the seductress of history and myth, I decided to write about her. So there was little choice in what period I would set it.
Kevin Baker: I have an interest in almost all periods of history. Dreamland and Paradise Alley are the first two entries in what we are calling "The City of Fire" trilogy. Both take places at crucial moments in the making of modern New York. Dreamland is set c. 1900-1911, and includes the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the development of the world's first, great amusement parks at Coney Island, and Freud's one and only visit to New York. The theme is how the Jewish immigrant experience transformed the city, and America.
Paradise Alley concerns the Irish immigrant experience, from the potato famine of the 1840s, through the notorious Civil War draft riots of 1863 --- again, a critical time in the development of New York and America. I was very much interested in how these great influxes of people determined what sort of people we are today.
Tayari Jones: I chose to write about Atlanta during the late 1970s and early 1980s because this was a very important moment in my life. I was ten years old when children starting disappearing in Atlanta. I felt that this was a moment in our recent history that had somehow been wiped from the public consciousness. I wrote this book to resurrect that history --- to make a record of what happened. If I ever write another work of historical fiction, I am sure that it will be in order to supplement the history that we already know, to fill in the blanks.
Margaret George: I choose characters rather than time periods. But now that I've invested so much time becoming knowledgeable about Renaissance Britain and the ancient world, I'll stay within those perimeters.
