Glen David Gold: Both. If working on a book is like untangling a knot, then sometimes you pull on one end, sometimes the other. I come up equally with ideas from the vantage points of "wouldn't it be cool if?" and "why has no one written about?
Tayari Jones: For this book, I started with the historical period and the characters came later.
Margaret George: In my case, since I write biographical novels, I don't have the freedom (or the burden) of developing a storyline per se. I do choose by character, though. I remember once a teacher congratulated me on educating people about Tudor history, and I wanted to say, "No, that wasn't my aim, it's just that my character, Henry VIII, happened to live then!
Megan Chance: It works both ways for me. Sometimes, while doing research for another book, I'll read something that intrigues me and gives me an idea for a story. Other times, it's the story itself that comes to me first, and I look at different aspects of the plot or characterizations to determine where it should be set. Usually, however, when I start researching, I only know the barest bones of a story. The research itself builds the plot and the characters. I rely heavily on research to determine most of the aspects of the story.
Karen Essex: What I did in Kleopatra and Pharaoh was to study the period, the culture, the politics, etc., both academically and in the field; then, I had to disengage myself from the traditional way the story was told. So I had to absorb it and then vehemently reject it. It was an interesting process.
Matthew Kneale: I think of a subject first and then gradually try to think of stories and characters to reveal these. Though I'm concerned to try and avoid characters being too symbolic. I don't want to write history textbooks in fictional form. I want to write novels that work in themselves. So I try to think into the characters' minds until they seem to have their own life.
Kevin Baker: For these two books, I have had general story ideas floating around, but the plots really developed out of specific incidents and facts that I discovered in research. This is particularly true of Paradise Alley, which revolves around the very real story of an Irish woman, married to an African-American man, who goes out into the street to try to save her son from a racist mob. In other words, I have a general impression of a time, and know what themes I want to bring out, but the research is what guides me.
Bernard Cornwell: A bit of both. The Sharpe books mostly come from real history, so that comes first and the story is threaded around the events, but in other books the history is worn more lightly. In the three Arthur books there was no history, only myth, so it's all story.
