Stuart Sharp's Blog, page 3

Contests

The other night, Louis Chapman, who is one of the main pros at the MMA gym where I practise grappling, was entered in an eight man tournament with, wait for it, a £15000 prize. I and everyone else in Hull saw how much effort he put into training for it, and I can only guess that all the other fighters did the same. Louis is an exceptional fighter. Then last night... as well as he fought, Louis didn't win, losing to BJJ black belt Stephen Martin in his first match. Martin didn't win either, losing to the eventual winner Andre Winner in the semi-finals. Indeed, because of the format of the tournament, seven of the eight people involved received no pay day for their weeks (and months, and years) of effort. Presumably, the tournament organisers' pay wasn't conditional on anything other than selling tickets.


I'm bringing this up because I'm sure most of the writers out there can see the fundamental problem with this, but a lot of them would still be happy to enter a writing contest. One freelancing site I know of even seems to be using contests as a major component of its approach. Here's the thing though: if you're only paying your "prize" to the winner, that means that the majority of writers there end up doing unpaid work, no matter how good that work is.


The traditional counter to this is that they choose to and that no one is making them. Yet we can only choose from the options that are available. If we live in a world where it is considered normal to run contests to get content, then who is going to pay a writer fairly for his or her time? Eventually, we end up with a world where the only option available to choose is the life of an amateur writer who occasionally wins contests, and who doesn't have the time to devote to it full time. Even an unpaid anthology or token payment is more honest than this, because it doesn't pretend to be anything it's not. So the next time you have an anthology to fill, please, don't run a contest.

A-Z aftermath

So, that's the A-Z over. It was hard work, I'll admit, although at least I made things a bit easier for myself by pre-writing my posts. It was interesting to see how many people said the same things in the comments with this: that they'd always found medieval history interesting, but they could never write a historical novel.


That was the one thing I wasn't sure I was getting across through the month. I firmly believe that about half the time when you're writing fantasy, you are writing history. Half-remembered bits of history, perhaps, but history nonetheless. Basically, if you're writing about knights and nobles and castles you're 'doing' the middle ages in some reflected form. Hopefully, after this month, you've got a few more details to play with.


And I'll try to keep that going. I'm going to try to provide some semi-regular things on fantasy, history, and the relationship between the two.

Z is for Zoroastrianism

This A-Z, I’m looking at aspects of medieval history that might be relevant to writers, and to finish, I wanted to look at a what if scenario, to see how that kind of alternate history might work. Also because it gives me an interesting Z word. Zoroastrianism, for those who don’t know, is an ancient (and still continuing, obviously) Persian religion focused on a division of the universe into positive and evil aspects, each represented by divine beings (which is obviously a massive oversimplification, and apologies to any Zoroastrians out there). Is there a scenario in which it could ever have been the religion of Medieval Europe, instead of Christianity?

It’s not as far-fetched as you might think. Why was medieval Europe Christian? Partly because of the influence of the late Roman Empire, and partly because of missionary efforts at the back end of what people call the Dark Ages. When the Emperor Constantine won the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, he made Christianity the official religion of the Empire. If he had lost the battle, one of the Empire’s other religions might have gotten the gig. And one of the most popular cults in the later Roman Empire was a kind of offshoot of Zoroastrianism that was particularly popular with its military. Even in the Middle Ages, ideas that link to Zoroastrianism were around. The Cathars put down in one of the more brutal crusades against heresy believed in a kind of equal positioning between good and evil, with a figure for evil given almost equal billing as the only real solution to the theological problem of suffering. So it’s easy to see how things could have gone another way while remaining very similar.

Of course, this alternate history game is one that has been played in many forms by many writers. Mary Gentle does it brilliantly in Ash. Jacqueline Carey does it in large parts of her world building. It’s great fun as a writer to take something small but fundamental, twist it, and see where the world you’re working with ends up.

Y is for Youth

This A-Z I’m looking at aspects of medieval history that might be useful to writers. If you’re writing about young people in a medieval type setting, what might they have expected? We can say that there was some concept of children as something separate from adults, but that any childhood didn’t last nearly as long. By twelve or so, many young people would have been working, apprenticed, possibly married.

Childhood, such as it was, seems to have been a weird mixture of child appropriate things such as games and learning, with more adult appropriate things. Even those still deemed children would have been made to work with their parents before they matured enough to work alone. All of them would have drunk beer or wine (because the water was not safe. There was “small beer” specifically for this kind of day to day consumption).

Youth could also be a violent time. Parents generally didn’t hesitate to beat children. Indeed, it was considered a desirable thing by many, so that one key way of getting a young person to remember something was to give them a whack as you told them it, on the basis that pain was an aid to remembering. They were subject to adult courts, with any account for their age based on the personal feelings of the lord or priest judging them. There was only the most basic provision for orphans in many places.

The extent to which you want to reflect that is obviously down to you. Yet it always feels just a little odd when characters in fantasy novels with medieval settings have essentially modern childhoods, so it’s worth at least thinking about the balance there.

X is for signing with one

This A-Z, I’m looking at aspects of medieval history useful for writers (and cheating just a little today). How literate were medieval people? We used to think of them as largely illiterate, yet the answer is probably more complex than that. It seems to have varied by period, with the introduction of schools allowing for a lot of basic literacy by the end of the period.

We also need to think about the evidence for illiteracy. Often it is making a cross for a name, but we know that a number of otherwise literate people did that, sometimes while writing their full name elsewhere. Then there is the evidence of secular writing, such as chansons de geste and other stories. Who do we think was reading them? I’m not saying that the average peasant would have been an Oxford professor (particularly when Oxford hadn’t become a university in the early bit of the period. Bologna beat you to it, people), but I’d suggest that nobles would generally be able to write. Chroniclers tended to mock those who couldn’t.

Or at least, they used to mock those they considered illiterate, but it doesn’t always seem to have meant the same thing. Literacy for much of the Middle Ages meant “literate in Latin”. So I’m semi-literate by those standards, and many of those reading this perfectly easily… Oh, and that’s another thing. There’s a difference between reading and writing. We often find that concept weird today, but in the Middle Ages, it was perfectly possible to be able to read with only the vaguest idea of the skill of writing. Writing well was sufficiently uncommon that it actually makes the identification of documents easier, since there were distinct local and regional variations in handwriting.

So the next time you have a knight walk into a bar, can he read the menu? That’s down to what fits best, but I’d like to suggest that neither having every character able to read nor assuming that they all can’t is entirely the right way to go.

W is for Women

This month, I’m going through aspects of medieval history that are relevant to writers. It feels a bit weird having “women” as one of my categories here, since I don't want to create the impression that all the other categories didn't apply to them. I’ve been envisioning both men and women with almost every other category with the possible exception of knights (and if there were female knights, I’d love to hear about it). All the issues I’ve been talking about affected everyone’s lives.

Yet there are some separate things we need to consider in addition to all the things that applied to everyone. Every medieval society I’ve studied was extremely male dominated, while history was kept by largely male religious orders, writing about battles full of men. That tends to mean that direct evidence for women in the historical record is even rarer than the already limited records for men.

It also meant often quite restrained lives for many women. It is hard for us to underestimate just how oppressed many women of the period would have been. They were often tightly controlled by male relatives, or by their lords in the absence of such. Their opportunities for education and personal freedom were often very limited. Most could not own land in their own right (unless they were widows, for which see below). Marriages among the nobility were often arranged, and a noble daughter was to many noble families essentially an asset to sell off to the highest bidder. Even though the witch trials hadn’t come around yet, ecclesiastical courts tended to round on women who spoke up as heretics, particularly if they ever dared to preach. They also roundly condemned any women found having sex outside of marriage, while doing relatively little about the levels of violence and sexual violence they faced from day to day from men.

Yet having reminded everyone of just how bleak life could be for women in the period, I would also quickly like to remember that there were women who achieved considerable recognition/notoriety in the period. A few I’ve already mentioned include Eleanor of Acquitaine, who married two kings and kept her own court that promoted most of the arts we take for granted. There was the Empress Matilda, who challenged for the English throne for many years. There was St Hilda, who founded Whitby Abbey and taught many respected figures. And there were the countless unnamed widows who found that in that one situation, they suddenly had control of their own lands, and made full use of them. Women could, and did, play a full role in medieval life, and they certainly should in your stories.

V is for Visions

This month, I’m looking at elements of medieval history that might be of use to writers. Now obviously, visions show up in a lot of fantasy literature, but they were also a major thing in the Middle Ages. They showed up in literature (Dante being only the tip of the iceberg), in apparent “histories” such as Bede’s work, and in numerous documents attached to religious houses.

In some ways, visions can be seen as a way that the people of the time claimed control of a religion that still wasn’t quite as centralised as it would come to be, and in which systematic teaching of the “correct” thing to believe wasn’t always very efficiently conducted. Visions represented a way for groups who would otherwise not have had power within the Church, notably women but also lay figures and the poor, to comment on the highly religious society around them. In some ways, they were also a product of that society, where having visions was considered normal.

Well, up to a point. There has been a lot of work done on medieval visions of the afterlife (including mine. I did my initial MA on them), and some of that work shows that even in the Middle Ages, there was a range of reactions to them. Some were seen as genuine visions, while others were treated as heresy. Some were seen as tricks by the devil, some as simple entertainment, and some as symptoms of mental illness. It might be interesting to build in that kind of range of responses the next time one of your characters has the obligatory fantasy prophetic vision.

U is for Unknown Lands

This month, I’m looking at aspects of medieval history that might be useful for writers. The idea of Unknown Lands has been with us for millennia, and while the great ages of exploration weren’t quite on the European world, there was still a fascination with the lands outside Christendom in Europe. There were half remembered memories from Roman conquests, stories brought back by travellers like Marco Polo, and of course, plenty of places that were still wild.

Not everywhere outside a city counted as wild. The Middle Ages were a great period for human transformation of land. The city of Hull, for example, only exists because a bunch of Cistercian monks from Meaux were able to drain the swamp it stood on. Yet there were many wild and untamed places. The claims of many kingdoms over their less hospitable parts were often only theoretical.
It was also in this period that a fascination with great voyages of discovery started to come in, both actually and in literature. We have Marco Polo’s journey, the many Viking voyages of which Lief Erikson’s expedition to Greenland was only the best known, but also the literary journey of St Brendan in his coracle, and the mysterious journeys into strange lands that Arthur’s knights undertook. There was also a sense of Western Europe as one of the unknown lands, occasionally, as Islamic invaders from the south and Mongol ones from the East pushed into this strange, unexplored world.

T is for Travel and Transport

This A-Z, I’m looking at aspects of medieval history that might be useful for writers. Travel in the Middle Ages is an intriguing one, because I think sometimes writers can be a bit inconsistent with it. They treat individual villages as entirely cut off, and journeys to foreign lands as huge adventures to be undertaken only with care, yet at the same time the heroes have no qualms about wandering around the place and messages seem to get through okay whenever the story demands.

Actually though, that’s probably a reasonable enough reflection of the reality. A lot of people wouldn’t have travelled that far (and would have been considered fugitives if they did in the case of serfs). Travel was also quite difficult at times, with walking, horses, and boats the only real options. There were bandits, animals, areas of poor roads, swamps, and more. There was also frequently a lack of convenient little inns along the way, meaning that people had to seek hospitality with nobles, in monasteries, or in villages.

Yet people did travel. Pilgrims, messengers, itinerant nobles… they all wandered around England regularly. The Canterbury tales were about a group of travellers and pilgrims, remember. Ship travel was dangerous, as with the disasters of the White Ship and the Second Crusade, but it could also cover large distances. People did end up in all kinds of places.

S is for Swordplay

This month, I’m looking at elements of medieval history that might be of use to writers. Swordplay shows up in most fantasy novels somewhere, and while obviously the main things about writing it are that it should fit your story and read well, understanding medieval swordplay can help.

For a full look at it, I’d recommend some of the historical texts accessible through http://www.wiktenauer.com/but we can cover some basics here. First is that a wide variety of weapons and tactics were used. It was not all about sword against sword. Secondly, most people would have done something with both hands when they were using a sword, whether it was using a shield, using a second weapon, or holding a long sword with both hands.

Third, some common tactics to try including: attacking and defending in one movement, rather than parrying and riposting. Wrestling at close range, having crashed into the opponent’s sword with yours. Reversing your sword to hit them with the blunt end as a hammer (people really did all of these). Resting your sword against your shoulder baseball bat style in the basic stance, because it’s a waste of energy not to. Try writing in all of these, for that extra bit of authenticity.