"I like to create imaginary characters and events around a real historical situation. I want readers to feel: OK, this probably didn't happen, but it might have"
About this Quote
Follett is describing a trick that feels almost like a magic act: he’s not trying to smuggle lies into history, he’s trying to smuggle readers into it. The line hinges on that sly pivot from "didn't happen" to "might have" - a phrase that licenses invention while still paying rent to reality. It’s less about accuracy as courtroom evidence and more about plausibility as emotional truth. If the invented scene fits the pressures, technologies, prejudices, and power dynamics of the era, the reader’s disbelief doesn’t vanish; it gets productively suspended.
The intent is openly pragmatic. By building imaginary characters inside documented events, Follett can dramatize what archives can’t: the texture of ordinary fear, ambition, compromise, and coincidence that history books flatten into summaries. The subtext is a quiet argument about how people learn the past. Most of us don’t retain timelines; we retain stories, faces, and stakes. Follett offers a bridge between scholarship and empathy without pretending the bridge is the river.
Context matters here because Follett’s brand of blockbuster historical fiction thrives on scale: cathedrals, wars, revolutions, systems grinding on individual lives. His promise to the reader is neither strict fidelity nor reckless fantasy, but a contract of informed invention. "It might have" becomes a moral stance: respect the record, then illuminate its shadows - where the human experience lived, and where the novelist can still tell the truth without claiming to be the historian.
The intent is openly pragmatic. By building imaginary characters inside documented events, Follett can dramatize what archives can’t: the texture of ordinary fear, ambition, compromise, and coincidence that history books flatten into summaries. The subtext is a quiet argument about how people learn the past. Most of us don’t retain timelines; we retain stories, faces, and stakes. Follett offers a bridge between scholarship and empathy without pretending the bridge is the river.
Context matters here because Follett’s brand of blockbuster historical fiction thrives on scale: cathedrals, wars, revolutions, systems grinding on individual lives. His promise to the reader is neither strict fidelity nor reckless fantasy, but a contract of informed invention. "It might have" becomes a moral stance: respect the record, then illuminate its shadows - where the human experience lived, and where the novelist can still tell the truth without claiming to be the historian.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|
More Quotes by Ken
Add to List
