Why I Write Historical Romance

 When I invite you to step back in time, I mean it. I want you to hear the streets, enter the homes, understand the customs, and feel what it might have been like to fall in love when the world worked differently.

That is what drew me to historical romance in the first place. I grew up loving authors such as Phyllis Whitney, Victoria Holt, Kathleen Woodiwiss, and John Jakes. Their stories made the past feel close enough to touch. They gave me a love of mystery, sweeping family stories, unforgettable characters, and, of course, romance.

When I began writing my own books, I wanted to give readers that same feeling. I research the time and place as carefully as I can, then try to let my characters live within them. They are people of their era. They don’t know what comes next, and they certainly don’t know what we know today. Their choices grow out of the world they understand, even when those choices are difficult for a modern reader—or for me.

That doesn’t mean I expect readers to approve of everything people believed or did in the past. History holds beauty, courage, injustice, and heartbreak, sometimes all in the same story. I don’t want to change it into the past we wish we had. I want to portray it honestly and preserve what I can of how life was lived. I hope I’ve done that well.

The romance is what brings me closest to my characters. Love has always mattered, but the obstacles around it change with the times: family expectations, war, class, duty, distance, and the simple risk of trusting another person. Put two people together in the middle of all that, and there’s a story I want to tell.

I have my favorites among the books I’ve written. If you follow me on Hines StoryWorld on YouTube, I’ll be sharing how some of those ideas began, why I chose certain settings, and why I wrote the characters as I did. I’d love to take you behind the stories.