Voices from the Twelfth-Century Steppe

A case study in the craft of historical fiction. My experience, as a novelist, between the primary sources and the historians. This essay is both an interpretation of The Secret History of the Mongols, and a commentary on one creative writer’s interactions with the body of secondary work on this source.

Novelists, inevitably, have a different perspective on the source material (unless a historian moves along the spectrum towards a novelist’s position). We weigh things differently; we seek out things of less concern to historians. Or so I have found in my fifteen years spent with my primary source and the secondary work upon it. I believe in the worth of case studies, and have written out my experience: the three-way conversation between source, novelist and historians.