I thought I might commence a series of posts about the intersection of history and fiction. I realize that some readers like their historical fiction to read like modern people dressed up in period clothes. Language, attitudes, all serve modern sensibilities—the good guys all have present day values, and oftentimes the bad guys have period prejudices. Modern language and attitudes are sprinkled among the pretty (or entertainingly peculiar) historical bits.
Hey, if that’s what somebody wants to write and somebody else likes to read, writer meet audience.
My target is the reader who wants historical fiction to convey the time machine vibe, though I know that few fictions get it all right.
Some readers accept historical inaccuracies because they don’t know any better. When I look back over my lifetime of reading, I recollect assuming veritas in novels which later turned out to be suspicious at best. But I remember the book fondly because the story pulled me in and extended my interest to the time.
When people ask, “Why are there so many books set in Shakespeare’s era? Why not, say, in Lithuania of the 1350s?” well, first I’d think that some writer could carry off a novel about the spread of the plague but I’m probably not going to read it, second, there might be a truly great novel but it hasn’t been translated into English so I’m unaware of it, which leads to third, popular periods for fictions usually have either a charismatic set of people behind them—or popular fiction. And who has more endurance for English-speaking readers than Shakespeare?
I’m surely not the only person who has been inspired to learn more because I loved some novel or play set in that time and place.
When I travel, I love to visit period houses, and envision life there. I like to look out windows and try to see what people once saw. Writers can’t be truly authentic without a time machine (and there is also the accessibility factor, like, a novel successfully written in Chaucerian English might be hailed as brilliant and daring, but the audience is probably going to be small) but I appreciate something that shifts my imagination to a historical (or fantastical) setting.
The art comes in when writers blend modern accessibility with historical fact. This is dramatically illustrated in the Chaucerian novel example, but it can work not only for historical novels, but for fantasy and science fiction. Writers who most successfully evoke another time and place begin with the deceptively simple things, the fundamentals, such as how people view time.
For example, some readers can’t settle into a novel in a pre-industrial setting that measures time in seconds. “A few seconds later, they ran . . .” “They agreed to meet an hour later . . .” The visual reader is poked out of the story, wondering if these characters in their homespun and leathers all have watches? How does this world keep time? Is urban time-keeping the same as rural, which historically functioned according to season and to sun’s travel?
Farmers didn’t need clocks, because their crops and animals didn’t need clocks. In cities, time keeping used to be a public issue, everyone in earshot of bells. And later, huge clock faces oriented the city dweller.
This program does a lovely job of giving modern people a glimpse into the history of time keeping. And here’s another article that, in exploring the subject of walking, raises a lot of questions not only about how Romans regarded walking, but how difficult it can be to pin down period attitudes even when we specifically go investigating.
Sherwood Smith’s e-books (some of which deal with time) at Book View Cafe
I saw the Roman-walking article the other night, and totally want to steal the “family gait” notion for a fantasy setting now.
I hadn’t seen the Roman walking article, but thank you for pointing us to it, Sherwood. And for your article in general.
Thanks!
I just went and read the article— I love the idea of a family gait! My mother always called the way we walk “The Reilly Stride,” a phrase passed down for at least a few generations.
Through the maternal side or the paternal?
The maternal side. My grandfather’s history on that side and the origins of the Reilly Stride are a bit wreathed in myth, as well… when my mother saw Mad Men for the first time she said that Don Draper with all his secrets reminded her of her father. He never talked about his childhood or his past, and all she and her siblings seem to know is that his father’s name was “Laughing Jack Reilly.”
Wasn’t that cool?
You definitely pointed out why it is so difficult to write historical fiction well. Basically, one has to find a balance between historical “truth” as we know it in our time, and the expectations of readers. Either extreme – like the Chaucer novel you mentioned or modern women living in historical time – doesn’t really work. And now I want to write a tale set in mesolithic Europe. *laughs*
Thanks for an inspiring blog post!
Yeah . . . that’s where the art comes in, I guess. Because it comes down to taste, sensibilities, aesthetics, both for writer and for reader. (And not everyone is going to perceive the choices in the same way.) But I figure it’s worth talking about if it gets people thinking about history.
And of course what it really comes down to is convincing the reader that you got it right. Even if you Made Stuff Up.
It’s a kind of intuition. A sense of the patterns that the history and the culture make. Many times, if a writer achieves that, the made-up stuff turns out to have actually happened–or stuff like it happened. That is so satisfying. Validating, too.
I love historical accuracy, mainly because I love knowing how things work, and they had different ways of making things work, which is cool! It’s why, even though it’s a pain in the neck to read in foreign languages, you really can get so much out of it. Reading Old Irish and Middle Welsh and Classical Japanese, the shocking things are what they just toss off and don’t explain, because it’s obvious. Legal texts are really interesting in the way they codify the social expectations of the time. And there are so many openings for story there!
Yes! I was talking about this in my own blog a week or so ago, and how L.T. Meade tosses off Victorian customs, social rules, and ways of thinking as if the reader is aware of them all. (This is why I have trouble getting into a lot of the steampunky novels set in Victorian times, because the writers don’t really seem to get the complexity of life in Western Europe during the latter 1800s.)
This is my personal beef with poor historical worldbuilding. It really annoys me when a writer assumes that a place and time lacks complexity, simply because it’s in the past. It’s possible to write simplicity into a novel while being aware that life wasn’t like that (some of my favourite books have that apparent simplicity to them), but when a writer thinks that their ancestors were all stupid or that cultures lacked complexities simply because they are not our cultures, then I grumble. A related issue that annoys me (do I really annoy so easily?) as an attitude writers carry (“I don’t have to put the work into this, it’s not real history”). These approaches to the past and to writing show in the finished novel and make it far less convincing than it otherwise could be.
You have just validated the acres of books I accumulated to write the Merlin’s Descendants books. Sure the books are character driven fantasy but the landscape is historical and needs to be accurate. I tend to measure time by heartbeats and church bells.
I once came across a 13th century reference to measuring a recipe (how long to cook it) by singing a hymn. I’ve since taken to measuring some of my own cooking by singing, because it turned out to be terribly convenient as a measure.
I’m going to come out and confess I love history for the same reason I love fantasy. I want other times, other worlds. Reading a “historical” novel that’s contemporary in fancy dress won’t do it for me, and I’m guessing that the amount of time a writer has to invest in understanding the culture and worldview of past times is prohibitive to most.
Yes, and though one can be diligent in research, understanding how people thought and felt is another order of magnitude. I remember reading Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror and getting the impression that though she did her due research, that mirror stayed distant and distorted because she couldn’t seem to see the world the way her subjects did, there was this tone of postmodern superiority passing judgment on them and their worldview.
I’m not sure any of us can claim to be able to truly see through the eyes of other cultures — whether they be distant in time or merely distance. For instance, as much as I’d read about modern Japan, one trip made me realize that I really do *not understand how minds in that culture see hierarchy, duty, or family/business structure, etc.. To understand the true value of things you need to have grown up *in the culture. So how can we say we have an accurate grasp into the mindset of a culture we cannot even visit? History books, anthropology and archeology can only teach us so much.
In my opinion we will always be portraying other cultures through our own modern preconceptions.
True. There are levels and levels, including experience.
And there are attitudes and approaches one can take while researching that make it possible to understand one’s outsider status and to shortcut the research trail a bit. I’m seriously thinking of doing more research on this and writing it up as an aid to writers (a book, I guess). It keeps coming up in class, so I’ve now been teaching techniques for a few years and we need this kind of instruction more and more as readers become more demanding.
A Distant Mirror was fun to read, but Ms. Tuchman tried way too hard to draw the “lessons of history.”
Yup.
I like Brox’s Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light for the bare bones of a history of this major aspect of physical culture, despite some technical errors and a bad case of western-civ-centralism.
Ooh, I want to read this.
I think as soon as _someone_ measures hours – say, by church bells or candles – people will adopt them. ‘An hour’ (and all its derivatives) is approximately an hour – when I used to ride a horse for ‘an hour’ it could be forty minutes, it could be an hour and a half, but it was a _felt_ hour, and an hour measured by the rhythm of the task (warmup, work, cooldown). And while seconds come across as lazy (heartbeats, OTOH, are a natural measure), I think it’s minutes that throw me most, because minutes are *advanced* timekeeping whereas quarter hours are perfectly fine even for the watch-less.
(Between the ages of twenty and the acquisition of an always-present mobile phone about five years ago I’ve lived without a watch.)
Agreed. Heartbeats are definitely a natural measure–one finds them in period writings all the time. But minutes before they were actually measured, and seconds, is that kind of instant jolt of anachronism (like “tuning out” before radios, and “his mind ran along a new track” before railroads) that might not spoil an otherwise good story, but keeps visual readers from settling in deep.
The Roman hour (hora) was a division of the day–which means it lengthened or shortening according to the time of year. But they did measure time. Being great measurers and control freaks in general.
I didn’t know this! It makes so much sense. A couple years ago I walked across Spain and noticed for the first time that each day is not the same as the one before it— between walking west and weeks passing, the light and the length of day and the position of the sun were always (slowly) changing. It’s just harder to notice when you’re moving quickly and plugged into the pace of modern life.
Yes! Once you start measuring time in set units, it’s quite possible to divorce yourself from such natural measures as heartbeats and sunsets.
I have a horse farm, and feed at sunset year-round, though I feed morning and midday meals more in accordance with the artificial clock. There’s a real sense of change from day to day and week to week, and the rest of the day shifts around it. So in winter there’s more evening writing time; in summer we may be finishing the farm’s day not long before we fall into bed–and we’ll wake up very early as the sun comes over the mountain.
Going out at night to check on the horses means I see a lot of moon and star action, and have learned to mark the year by the constellations. It helps me understand how people might perceive the world before we all synchronized our watches.
That is seriously cool.
This makes me want to buy a cabin in the woods and learn to read the stars. I’ll take indoor plumbing and hot water, though. Some inventions are just too marvelous to give up.
This will tell even more about how naval travel and measurement created so much of our capacity to conceptualize time — and created the condition by which the entire globe measure time from the same mean.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/u6Qnc25jQ5OIO-X92mZz6Q
It was late in the (homo sap) game when that took place.
Love, C.
Yes yes yes! I was just thinking about this the other day, trying to get into the head space of someone who tells time by bells, or the tide. My story is set in Co. Antrim in Ireland in 1803, and when I went looking for details about telling time I started thinking about the politics of it… which denominations were allowed to have churches, whether the Catholic Angelus would ever have been rung, and where, and what that meant for those doing the ringing or the listening. Historical details can be a rabbit hole!
My blog about wrestling with the bell problem is here: http://winterfodder.wordpress.com/2012/05/11/the-bells-of-belfast/
Oh, the politics of bells was a hot potato for a lot of reasons–which bells could play when, who had the “right” time, etc. I forget where I read about it, but it was quite interesting. Maybe it was in the entertaining little book on Time by one of the Waughs.
Thank you! I will look that up.
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