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//"Oskar Schindler would have been an easier man to understand if he'd been a conventional hero, fighting for his beliefs. The fact that he was flawed - a drinker, a gambler, a womanizer, driven by greed and a lust for high living - makes his life an enigma.//

//Here is a man who saw his chance at the beginning of World War II and moved to Nazi-occupied Poland to open a factory and employ Jews at starvation wages. His goal was __to become a millionaire__. By the end of the war, he had risked his life and spent his fortune to save those Jews and had defrauded the Nazis for months with a munitions factory that never produced a single usable shell."//

-Rodger Ebert

A historian tells us, sometimes in vivid detail, about U.S. Marines fighting their way across Iwo Jima, what they did, what their living conditions were like, perhaps even something about their backgrounds. He or she analyzes why they were there, using words like "unprovoked aggression" or "expansionism" or "imperialism" or "oil embargo" to explain why so many young men had to die for a small island in the Pacific Ocean. He or she may even give us vignettes, descriptions of heroic acts on both sides. A good historian helps us imagine the roar of battle, the spectacle of ruined earth littered with dead, giving us a __safe__ vantage point between and above the lines of battle. The historical fiction writer puts us in the battle. We do not watch the young Marine slog his way up Mount Suribachi; we feel his heavy pack digging into our shoulders, curse as our feet slip in sand and mud, hear the snap of passing rounds and feel his fear as we hit the dirt with him and scramble for whatever cover we can find. We pray with him in the moments before he raises his head from the sand and __looks__ around. We care about the things he cares about: not expansionism or oil embargoes or national strategy, but his brother who lost a leg at Pearl Harbor, his girl back home, the buddy who was right next to him, but now lies in the dirt not moving. We're not just watching the fight; that's our buddy, our girl back home, our brother. The writer of historical fiction is first a writer not of history, but of fiction, and fiction is about characters, not events. So historical fiction is a close relative of history, but not simply a retelling of the lectures we learned to dread in high school. We write historical fiction, and read it, not to learn about history so much as to live it. It is the closest we can get to experiencing the past without having been there. We finish a history and think "So that's what happened!" We finish a __work__ of historical fiction, catch our breath, and think "So that's what it was like!"

-H. Scott Dalton