Love Quote by Lynn Abbey

A working writer’s confession hides inside that cozy image of curling up with “some dusty corner of history.” Lynn Abbey frames research as both appetite and obligation: she’s drawn to the obscure, the neglected, the footnoted margins, but she can’t afford to treat that attraction as a private hobby. “Has to support” is the tell. It’s economic, practical, almost parental. The writing must justify the hours spent roaming archives, not just indulge them.

The line also telegraphs a particular kind of craft ethic. Abbey isn’t selling research as a flex or a badge of authenticity; she’s acknowledging the slippery temptation to disappear into source material and call it productivity. Any novelist who loves history recognizes the trap: the deeper you dig, the more the story risks becoming a museum label. Her wording positions research as nourishment, not the meal. The book about history is a comfort object, but the work must metabolize it into narrative drive, character, tension.

Contextually, it sits neatly within late-20th-century genre culture, where fantasy and historical fiction readers increasingly expect immersive worldbuilding. Abbey’s career spans eras when “research” became part of an author’s public persona - a marketing promise as much as a method. She gently resists that fetish. The dusty corners matter because they’re strange, textured, human; they offer the kind of specificity that makes invented worlds feel lived-in. Still, the sentence insists on a boundary: curiosity is the spark, but storytelling is the job.