B3 Day Four – GUEST BLOG #4 – Allison Knight
TRYING TO WRITE A MEDIEVAL ROMANCE – OH YEH!
It always looked so easy. Just start writing, of course, that was after I had a story outline, the names of the characters and each character's personality chart finished consisting of personality, looks and personal history.
HA! I learned very quickly that writing about the medieval time period wasn't as simple as I thought. How could I write a good story without knowing something about how they lived? Or how did they travel? What did they eat? And the clothing. We get an idea of some of their costumes by the drawings and paints that remain – if you can find them. But a lot of information is not available. The different dyes they used are often just a guess on our part. For example, the color green was extremely complex dye. The right chemical to produce a brilliant green didn't make it into the mix until the Dutch chemists did their thing in the 17th century.
I discovered information on the 'net, but that same information gathered from one source is often contradicted by other sites. I've spent hours and hours looking for one tiny bit of information. For example, how did people carry their food staples when they traveled?
We can only guess at some of the food they ate. We don't have any recipe books dating from that time period. In fact there are very few books from that time.
Over the years, I've found some interesting tidbits of information you don't hear about. You certainly don't read about it and the true facts never make it into the movies. If you probably thought people long ago lived in the cold, drafty, drab castles, well, yeh, they did – eventually. But did you know that the middle ages were warm, a lot warmer than now? In fact, the weather was so good their harvests were great, and they had lot of time to build all those castles. The workers could work much longer than in years later. And those castles. Did you know some had glass windows? Tiny little panes of glass which were usually wavy. They didn't have the great machines we have today, so all they could make were small panes and the glass tended to show all the imperfections. They also could make colored glass. Remember the leaded famous Rose window. Inside, the castles they had bright tapestries which have since those days lost their bright colors. The walls were white washed, and they did use carpets in the upper floors. Rushes, often sprinkled with crushed heather or lavender leaves or flowers and covered the floors on the lower level.
Information like this takes a long time to ferret out, but you can do it. You visit a lot of internet sites and double check your information, sometimes, triple check it because as I said, there is a lot of contradiction out there. I have also collected a lot of books and my shelves are full of research books about kings and castles.
It also helps if you have a friend who has an interest in the same time period about which you are writing. I have such a friend and she's quick to help me find the kind of information I need. Recently, as I started my next medieval, I asked her for help with my villain. I needed someone from that time period who really was not a very nice person, but also someone who had no relatives. In other words, his line died either with him or shortly after him. She found a perfectly wonderful "bad" guy for me. Oh, he was extremely loyal to his king, but not to anyone else. I can use him and some of his nefarious actions in the next song book.
And it never hurts to tell people you deal with the kinds of trouble you might be having with your research. You never know when that special bit of help is around the corner. It just so happened that I mentioned some of my research problems to my computer savvy eye doctor. It seems his nephew has a degree in medieval literature, who he volunteered to my surprise and delight. Contact has been made and we'll see if he can answer some of my questions. And yes, I do still have tons of questions. Even with the 'net, the books and my friend, I still have unanswered questions. But then that's part of the fun of writing about the medieval time period. Can you guess, I love to do the research?
