How to Write Historical Fiction | Interview with historian and author Dan Jones on his new novel Essex Dogs

Tides of History

Wondery / Patrick Wyman

Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 16 February 2023

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Every historian I know has a secret dream of writing historical fiction, but few ever do it. Dan Jones, a longtime friend of Tides of History and an outstanding historian, has actually done it: Essex Dogs, his fantastic debut novel about a group of soldiers during the Hundred Years' War, is out now. I talk to Dan about writing historical fiction and what it can do that pure history can't.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime members, you can listen to Tides of History, add free on Amazon Music.
0:04.2	Download the app today.
0:06.0	I'm Patrick Weiman.
0:14.5	Thanks for joining me today.
0:23.8	Now everybody listening to this show presumably likes history.
0:27.1	You like it enough to tune into a show that often gets deep into the weeds of topics
0:30.6	like trade networks and what a bunch of really ugly mass produced pottery bowls tell us about
0:35.0	their world or how we can see marriage practices reflected in ancient DNA or how language
0:39.8	families dispersed across the ancient world.
0:42.0	Now, those are the kinds of things that tend to interest people who really, really dig
0:46.0	history.
0:47.4	But at the root of that interest in history, which I'm guessing stretches back quite
0:51.3	away for you probably lies something more elemental and visceral, the desire to imagine
0:56.9	a different world not necessarily to live in it, but to dip our toes in and see what other
1:00.9	people long ago and far away felt and saw.
1:04.5	And that's certainly true for me.
1:06.5	Historical fiction was in large part my entry to history as a whole and I still love it.
1:10.1	I still read it and I cherish it for the worlds that it introduced me to.
1:14.6	Now to help us understand historical fiction, how to write it and what it means we could
1:18.2	not hope to have a better guest.
1:20.4	And Jones is not only one of my very favorite people in the world.
1:23.2	He is also an exceptionally accomplished historian, the author of a bunch of best selling works
	...

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