The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

Life ought to be more like a play; the entrances and exits would be a lot cleaner.

This is something my historical fiction author friends and I moan about ALL the time—how history refuses to confine itself tidily to a nice neat three-act structure so a novelist can make a nice neat three-act story out of it! Real life is chaotic, random, full of coincidences and meaningless side-bars and all the other things that bog down a good story, so the task of hammering messy historical facts into coherently-shaped fiction is one of the toughest things about writing histfic.