In an interview with Lit Hub, writer Amor Towles discusses his process for creating realistic historical settings in his novels.
Towles approaches his settings as though setting a stage for a play. A painted backdrop gives the audience a sense of place, but generally isn’t too detailed. “If you look at the style of painting on that canvas, it’s not hyper-realism because that would look very weird to the eye if you were sitting in the theater,” Towles says. “For me, history is the painted backdrop. I really don’t care that it be very precise. It should not be very precise. It’s not hyper-realism. It should be impressionist.”
