Ancient & Medieval Historical Fiction discussion
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Historical Accuracy in Fiction
Margaret wrote: "Terri wrote: "Margaret! I have missed you. I have been thinking lately that I should send you a message to check in. Good to see you are still around. :-)"
Sorry Terri, a difficult couple of mont..."
sorry to hear you were unwell Margaret. Glad to hear you are better.
Paula wrote: "Margaret wrote: "Terri wrote: "Margaret! I have missed you. I have been thinking lately that I should send you a message to check in. Good to see you are still around. :-)"
Sorry Terri, a difficu..."
Thank you all, I'm slowly getting there - finding myself surprisingly weak and wobbly, but definitely getting there.
Kate wrote: "This is why writing fiction further back in the past is fun. The further back you get, the less we know = greater license for your fiction."Exactly the opposite is true. Writing about "prehistory" [whatever that term means] requires extensive research, often using lengthy, dry academic tomes and journal articles to get the details correct. This can require years before the novelist is ready to start writing about the ancient world. The world-building process and getting into the characters' psychology is or should be much more difficult, if one hopes to produce more than farce. Edward Rutherfurd's website contains an excellent essay on this subject.
When the preliminary research stops short and commercial formulae take over to produce work on a schedule, the result is, for example, Auel's later novels which lack the substance and depth of her earlier works.
Guessing at details just to fill in the author's knowledge gaps doesn't work -- like carelessly putting "nail varnish" in a Roman setting.
I tend to very much favour the view point that ultimately a Historical Fiction book is still a story. It if is not fun and engaging it might as well be a text book. I read somewhere that Bernard Conrwell cut 10,000 from the first draft of The Last Kingdom . he had initially put in vast amounts of facts and in the end realised it pretty much made it a text book. So too many facts even if accurate would appear to be a flaw. I think the general feeling is that facts that are just plain wrong should be avoided. That at least seems easy enough to agree with. The harder decision is what you do with periods of history when there is a dispute about what happened. If there are two view points (or more) on what happened I think that providing an author defends their choice and can point to some evidence (or at least a lack of counter evidence) then ultimately it is OK to interpret and come up with your own version of history.
J.S. wrote: "Kate wrote: "This is why writing fiction further back in the past is fun. The further back you get, the less we know = greater license for your fiction."Exactly the opposite is true. Writing abo..."
I think you may be right on this. Part of the need for a lot of research when writing about long ago times is that it is much more difficult to relate and know those times. We have a lot written about the 20th century, and plenty about the 19th and 18th centuries. But how easy is it for someone to imagine life in 11th century southern France (or what we now know as southern France)? That's when we have to find the very dry history books, toiled over by academics who wrestle with every tedious detail before writing it down.
The readers of historical fiction should be so grateful to the authors who have done their research in those dusty tomes and pulled out of them an exciting story.
I find, and I write about the ancient world of Troy and the Hittites, that I need to have done the scholarly research with the primary sources not so much to include it all (disaster to story!) but to know the overall context so that I do not accidentally stray into anachronistic portrayals. It is in some ways less about what I put in as what I manage not to put in. Although there are all those bits and pieces of world detail that come along for the ride when someone reaches for something, eats something, climbs onto something, etc. You also have to have done the research for that material that is organic to the story.
Judith wrote: "I find, and I write about the ancient world of Troy and the Hittites, that I need to have done the scholarly research with the primary sources not so much to include it all (disaster to story!) but..."Yes, the point is not How Much Is Too Much re: detail, but accurate world-building and portrayal of what was important to that remote era, in the first instance.
J.S. wrote: "Judith wrote: "I find, and I write about the ancient world of Troy and the Hittites, that I need to have done the scholarly research with the primary sources not so much to include it all (disaster..."Yup. That's the issue in a nutshell. And it's always a balancing act. The only way to guarantee failure is not to research your period sufficiently. That's at least the first step, then not letting yourself get overwhelmed by all the hard work you've done and keeping it at bay as you write.
And sometimes even when you research carefully, errors creep in. The aforementioned nail varnish - I can't remember what my source was for that, but I had one, a dusty old library tome where (this was before Wikipedia) I'd done some fact-checking. It wasn't till later that I realized the source was wrong, at least when it came to nail varnish!
Richard wrote: "It if is not fun and engaging it might as well be a text book. I read somewhere that Bernard Conrwell cut 10,000 from the first draft of The Last Kingdom . he had initially put in vast amounts of facts and in the end realised it pretty much made it a text book."I agree; sometimes authors do the research and find it hard not to show all the information they've gathered. But then there's another trap: stories with a heavy background of people and events which must be explained or the 'current problem' won't be understood. I have seen very few writers pull that off in a pleasant way. In fact, most turn whole chapters into a rather boring 'school book'.
Sara wrote: "Richard wrote: "It if is not fun and engaging it might as well be a text book. I read somewhere that Bernard Conrwell cut 10,000 from the first draft of The Last Kingdom . he had initially put in v..."Yes,authors need to be able to harness the skill of 'showing' and not 'telling'. this is very difficult when it comes to facts that need to be in the story. Its not an easy thing to do
It is a problem many authors have. I have come across it again and again and again.They do all the research and then they think they have to include it all in their book to show everyone 'look how much research I did. Look how much I know' or the other author that finds the collation of the research as much their baby as the book is and if they seem to feel that if they don't use all that research in their books then it has all been for nothing.
As Judith says. The research is done so you know how to best walk in the world you are writing about. And to get the historical detail right while you are doing it.
Other people are enormously helpful in this regard (I have in mind fellow writers or readers who can be trusted to say what they needed to know to understand a particular plot point or, even more important, what they did NOT need to know).I am struggling with this at present because what I need is a kind of monthly news magazine for 1534–35 Crimea (in English, moreover, or at least Russian), not so that I can put it all in the book but so that I can avoid killing off some bloke before his time or keeping him alive much longer than is appropriate. What I have are historical articles that treat 1532 and 1542 as pretty much interchangeable. Which they are, for the historians, but not for me as I wrestle with what is actually happening in October 1534.
Or to put it another way, all the details need not go into the story. In fact, they should not. But without the details, it can be difficult to figure out what the story is.
C.P. wrote: "Other people are enormously helpful in this regard (I have in mind fellow writers or readers who can be trusted to say what they needed to know to understand a particular plot point or, even more i..."If the information isn't available CP you could go with what is best from the story POV and put in an author's note at the end explaining the lack of accurate detailed data for those years and hence what influenced your choices. What annoys me as a reader is not where a writer has made choices in an unclear situation, but where they haven't bothered to look.
I respect the way you want to put in the effort, CP. This is a prime example of what I have been trying to say in this thread all along.Any author can write a fun story (or think they can), but it takes a lot of hard graft to capture history in the words and put characters in the history.
Writing good and intelligent fiction should not be taken with a grain of salt. It really requires as much work as one might put into writing a thesis.
Terri wrote: "Any author can write a fun story (or think they can), but it takes a lot of hard graft to capture history in the words and put characters in the history.Writing good and intelligent fiction should not be taken with a grain of salt. It really requires as much work as one might put into writing a thesis."
No one could have said it better.
Yes, thanks, Margaret and Terri. In fact, that's exactly what I do. Still, it's wonderful when I can get that specific information. Even if I do not impose it on the reader, it opens up possibilities that I might not have considered.Example: Safa-Girei Khan gets kicked out of Kazan in 1532. He goes back to hang out with his uncle in Crimea. I, being a modern dolt, assume this is like Prince Charles meekly going to tea at Buckingham Palace while waiting most of his life for Mummy to pop off.
Au contraire. Safa-Girei makes such a bloody nuisance of himself that the most powerful group in the khanate goes into revolt merely because he's allowed to hang around the court. So what looked like a nice, stable khanate is one power-mad nephew plus one freaked-out uncle desperate to ship the nephew back to Kazan plus a nobility wildly divided plus the Ottoman Empire whining that the Crimeans can't take Kazan or they will become too mighty for comfort. Sheer chaos, in other words—and we haven't even gotten to the nomads or the Russians or the Lithuanians, all happily exploiting every weakness they see.
That's a very different story from the one I thought I was telling. It also has enough twists and turns to keep even a Hollywood mogul happy. The only question is exactly what was happening when.
But if I can't find out, I will indeed make it up. There are lots of possibilities. ;-)
All this said how do people feel about the use of language.What approach do you take to how your historical characters speak?Obviously you avoid modern slang and anachronistic expressions but your 13th century crusader or 7th century Saxon lord or Roman detective cant actually speak their native tongue can they?
I tend to take the view that to the character's point of view they are in fact speaking in modern (to them) language. So should authors not mainly use modern English (but avoiding slang terms etc)and drop in some appropriate terms and slang from the period?
That's what I do. My characters speak 16th-century Russian or Tatar (except in my first book, where a modern American speaks modern American, most of the time). So English is not their native tongue.I focus on the metaphors. A character who has never seen the sea will not think in nautical terms. A character who has no knowledge of gravity will not use that language. A character who believes that the sun revolves around the earth will describe the day from that perspective, and so on.
It can be difficult (the gravity example comes from an error I made using the phrase "free fall"). But the advantage is that the metaphors are unique to your characters, not clichés.
I write whatever comes into my head on the first draft. But on the second, I look at every image I have created and ask, "Would this character think like this?" If not, I change it.
And no slang, as you say. Even for modern characters, slang is a problem unless you are consciously trying to date a character.
C.P. wrote: "That's what I do. My characters speak 16th-century Russian or Tatar (except in my first book, where a modern American speaks modern American, most of the time). So English is not their native tongu..."I've read a couple of books lately that were in very different milieus than the norm, and there were a couple of instances where they used slang, or a phrase that would be completely appropriate now, but not anytime before 1990. It annoyed me.
Richard wrote: "All this said how do people feel about the use of language.What approach do you take to how your historical characters speak?Obviously you avoid modern slang and anachronistic expressions but you..."
Oh boy. You need to go back many pages in this thread, Richard. That particular debate has been kicked to death over and over again. :-)
The result? Some people don't care how characters sound and some people don't like them to sound modern.
C.P. wrote: "That's what I do. My characters speak 16th-century Russian or Tatar (except in my first book, where a modern American speaks modern American, most of the time). So English is not their native tongu..."Sounds like a good story line, in an interesting time and place.
C.P. wrote: "That's what I do. My characters speak 16th-century Russian or Tatar (except in my first book, where a modern American speaks modern American, most of the time). So English is not their native tongu..."That's the kind of way I work too. Though I have specifically used 16th c grammatical construction of sentences to give a flavour of the period without hopefully making it too difficult for modern readers to follow. I do use Scots vocabulary where it comes naturally, and I provide a glossary, but I do try to ensure that the basic meaning of most dialect term should be made clear by the context.
Richard wrote: "All this said how do people feel about the use of language.What approach do you take to how your historical characters speak?Obviously you avoid modern slang and anachronistic expressions but you..."
Thats what i actually do Richard. I use modern english, leaving out slang or wholly modern terms (someone once complained about my use of the word Pandemonium which apparently didnt appear till the 17thc) but I occasionally drop in an olde English worin italics with an explanation of the word molded into the sentence subtley
OK thanks. Yes sure Terri I am reading around the forums but thought it was fairly relevant to the issue.
WRT language/slang, I recently read a discussion/critique of a modern Indian novel, The White Tiger.The hero supposedly doesn't speak English, but uses terms that could not have been translations from Hindi. Another example is writing "700,000" as opposed to "seven lahk".
My feeling was that the author was writing for an English-speaking audience and it was all OK. Native Indian readers were the most critical.
Now, back to historical fiction...
Richard wrote: "OK thanks. Yes sure Terri I am reading around the forums but thought it was fairly relevant to the issue."While we have discussed it in many threads Richard, Terri was just mentioning that this particular thread has quite a few opinions on the subject if you wanted to read farther back.
As in, Terri herself has mentioned several times that she hates modern language and I've said it makes no difference to me. :)
Kirk wrote: "Another example is writing "700,000" as opposed to "seven lahk"."Since I don't know anything about Hindi, I was a bit confused. Do you mean that 'lahk' means 'hundred thousand'?
I'm particularly interested in how one portrays other languages other than the one the book is written in. For example, if you have a story set in the US and one character is American but the other is, say, Chinese, how would you mark a strongly different accent and grammar mistakes? Or would you ignore it? I feel this is important no matter the epoch you're writing in.
I once wrote a bit of a story set in the US and one character was Portuguese. I had great fun weaving in little mistakes that showed off her true origin and, more importantly, that showcased cultural differences. I feel this is what you, Kirk, are referring to: the hero didn't speak (and there I guess, act) in accordance to his cultural background.
I think culturally identifying words can kill any connection the reader has to a story if it is not well done. For example; one book I read was set in the Scottish borders and all the Scottish male characters called the female protagonist lassie. All.The.Time. Yes, it's a term of endearment, but anyone who thinks that this is the only word that can be used by men when speaking to a woman is dead wrong.
It's not enough to know what certain words mean or when they should be used. If the author is going this route, then they need to understand how the word is used contextually in X culture. Also, culture has different levels - the more localised the author can get the language, the better. By that I mean, (again I'll use Scotland as an example), giving a lowland character highland ethics is also going to alienate a reader familiar with the distinction. I assume most cultures have these localised things. I know Canada, the US, Italy, England and France for sure have distinction. I doubt it stops there.
As for use of cultural language, when done well is truly enjoyable for me. Robert Low does it well in his Kingdom series, It's not necessary though. I would rather an author not try if they're just guessing or attempting to demonstrate some knowledge of the language or dialect. But if they've got someone who can give it a critical once-over, then by all means, include it. If not, then don't.
Darcy wrote: "As for use of cultural language, when done well is truly enjoyable for me. Robert Low does it well in his Kingdom series, It's not necessary though. I would rather an author not try if they're just guessing or attempting to demonstrate some knowledge of the language or dialect. But if they've got someone who can give it a critical once-over, then by all means, include it. If not, then don't.The Lion Wakes (Kingdom Series, #1)
..."
Yes, if there is one author I can think off the top of my head who can capture ethnicity and polyglottic culture in an effortless way, it is Robert Low.
Darcy wrote: "As for use of cultural language, when done well is truly enjoyable for me. Robert Low does it well in his Kingdom series, It's not necessary though. I would rather an author not try if they're just guessing or attempting to demonstrate some knowledge of the language or dialect."I agree. Cultural language should be done only when it's very well understood. However, I think it's worth it to try and do it, even if in a small scale ('small' being the operative word). Like the 'lassie' example you've mentioned: that's taking a supposedly safe cultural aspect and using it in a grand scale. If he had chosen one or two characters to use it once and again, or for talking to a certain character(s), then he wouldn't have blundered, would he?
However, I believe that some stories can't get away from 'cultural language' and that sets a lot of responsibility on the author's shoulders. And, if the author is alien to the culture, he must do a hell of a good research and then tread carefully and, once again, in small scale: one wouldn't want the story to be all about cultural language, after all. Nevertheless, I place greater importance in a correct 'cultural way of seeing the world' than 'cultural language', even if the second can help the first.
Sara wrote: "Darcy wrote: "evertheless, I place greater importance in a correct 'cultural way of seeing the world' than 'cultural language', even if the second can help the first."On this point I heartily agree.
As for the example I had given, that was just one of the issues on the cultural front. The whole work had clearly not been adequately researched. In terms of the language, it was clear that the author lacked understanding of the intricacies. Had they got the other things right, perhaps I may not have noticed as much.
Sara wrote: "Kirk wrote: "Another example is writing "700,000" as opposed to "seven lahk"."Since I don't know anything about Hindi, I was a bit confused. Do you mean that 'lahk' means 'hundred thousand'?"
Yes. And even in English language newspapers in India/Nepal they use the words 'lahk' and 'crore' (10 million) in writing amounts.
Terri wrote: "Darcy wrote: "As for use of cultural language, when done well is truly enjoyable for me. Robert Low does it well in his Kingdom series, It's not necessary though. I would rather an author not try i..."I agree, with the caveat that I think we should be careful we don't confuse dialogue written in modern dialect with the authentic speech and language of the time - which after all would be virtually unreadable. However I don't believe that was Robert Low's intention, though I wouldn't presume to speak for him.
As an example, here are a few lines of genuine 14th Century Scots:
"And quhen Schyr Philip the Mowbra
Saw thaim ische in sa gud aray
Till Schyr Edward the Bruys went he
And said, 'Schyr, it is gud that we
Schap for sum slycht that may availe
To help us into this bataill."
I remember struggling with Chaucer in the original, from High school: that was different enough from modern English, also Beowulf in the original.
Modern dialect can be difficult, too, because it soon becomes stale—even offensive, if not well handled. A better choice, I think, is to catch the rhythm of a given character's speech, add a few words distinct to the time and place, and dodge anachronisms like crazy (unless you have a good, writerly reason for them—i.e., something other than not bothering to check).And that goes beyond language. If your medieval knights are wearing hoodies, you have a problem, whether or not they speak forsoothly, to borrow a phrase from E. Nesbit. ;-)
An interesting perspective on how an historical fiction defined and how important historical accuracy may or may not be.http://www.mark-patton.blogspot.ca/20...
Darcy wrote: "An interesting perspective on how an historical fiction defined and how important historical accuracy may or may not be.http://www.mark-patton.blogspot.ca/20......"
This is a very interesting post. In many ways I think this is similar to the different types of Science Fiction that exist, from the "Hard" SF where all the science has to be correct (maybe like the historical accuracy in HF) to things like Futurama which Matt Groening famously said "the secret is it's not about the future, its actually about today".
I don't know. I read to about halfway and then gave up. Lost interest at the graph. :]
Thank God I read your post, Terri. I lost interest after the graph too, and I was feeling really disgusted at myself - I was already scolding myself that I'm too old and lazy....
Simona wrote: "Thank God I read your post, Terri. I lost interest after the graph too, and I was feeling really disgusted at myself - I was already scolding myself that I'm too old and lazy...."There was only one more paragraph after the graph!
Tim wrote: " There was only one more paragraph after the graph! ..."One big paragraph of poorly analysed blah blah. Besides, by the time my eyes hit the graph my brain had already switched off. :-)
Simona wrote: "Thank God I read your post, Terri. I lost interest after the graph too, and I was feeling really disgusted at myself - I was already scolding myself that I'm too old and lazy...."Nah. Its not just you being old and lazy. Its both of us. ;-)
Wait a minute...I checked...there are THREE poor analysis of blah blah paragraphs after the graph, not one.You lied to me, Tim. ;-)
Terri wrote: "Wait a minute...I checked...there are THREE poor analysis of blah blah paragraphs after the graph, not one. You lied to me, Tim. ;-)"
At least you went back and looked at it again :-)
Yes. You tricked me into doing that. But I nearly fell asleep when I got there. ;)
That article ended up really saying nothing. Historical fiction is as diverse as its authors and readers. There is a blurry line between HF and non-HF. Uh, the whole article done in two simple sentences. :P
Ancient & Medieval Historical Fiction
Books mentioned in this topic
The Lion at Bay (other topics)The Lion Rampant (other topics)
The Lion Wakes (other topics)
The Water Thief (other topics)
Imperial Governor: The Great Novel of Boudicca's Revolt (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Daphne du Maurier (other topics)Robert Low (other topics)
Robert Low (other topics)
C.J. Sansom (other topics)
Anthony Riches (other topics)
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But you can get liquid from juices, milk, or lemonade. I read somewhere for every cup of coffee you drink you should drink 2 glasses of water, to make up the liquid, since coffee dehydrates--tea to a lesser extent. I try to follow that 'rule'.