Another Country
Ξ November 25th, 2008 | → | ∇ Historical Fiction - The Once & Future Past, Independent Authors, New Novels, Peek Behind the Scenes, The World of Fiction, Westerns - Ride into the Wild West, Past, Present, and Future |
So it is said of the past – and most truly said, for it is another country where they do things differently. My esteemed colleague at The Deepening, PDR Lindsay went off on a tear last week, over a badly researched novel of period manners and mystery. The tale in question had been presented as being thoroughly researched, but a close and knowledgeable reading revealed that claim to be embarrassingly far off the mark … and such inaccuracies could have been remedied by research in any number of easily accessed resources. This is not a purely American foible, let me point out – nor is building a whole series of books and a considerable reputation out of writing adventures set in a place one has never visited. The popular German writer Karl May built a fabulously successful career writing best sellers about the American West, although he himself only visited America once, long after his fortune was made, and never went farther west than Buffalo, New York. He did do fairly careful research – aided no doubt that he was writing stories set at least within spitting distance of his own time … but still. May’s books remain terrifically popular in Germany, but any European fan venturing into the very real American west must be in for at least some small disillusion.
The abiding trap for scribblers of historical fiction might be, as PDR pointed out – writing scenes based upon a superficial knowledge of a time and a place that is gleaned from other people’s visualizations of it, especially those on TV or in movies, or even in other novels. This is a trap that lazy writers can fall into, quite easily. A couple of months ago, I reviewed a historical novel about a family of emigrants making their way to California, in the year of the 1849 Gold Rush. It was a serious and literary novel, written by a professor of history and published by a university press – and yet it described a man driving an ox team by sitting in the front of the wagon and using pairs of reins. Mind you, very few living Americans these days have seen someone drive an ox team. Most of us have observed in the flesh or on screen, someone driving teams of horses in the manner described. It seemed the good professor had merely assumed that one way was interchangeable with the other… when a cursory look at contemporary 19th century accounts or artwork should have informed him that ox teams were driven by a person walking next to the lead team, and controlling the animals by voice commands. The past is a foreign country, and they do things differently there. I would have thought a professor of history would have known that, but that author victim to the trap of easy visualization.
Nothing quite equals contemporary documentation of what you are writing about – even if allowances are taken for artistic exaggeration. I like to say that I do ‘historical novels set on the American frontier’, because saying that I write Westerns (unless I am talking to a mad fan of Westerns) leads people to assume that I write about the never-never-western-land, that is always vaguely set somewhere in the upper plains, or west of the Mississippi, in the post-Civil War era, in a place where people ride horses or drive buggies, and the women wear very long skirts, and an exchange of gunfire is about to break out any second, the villain wears a black hat, and now and again there is a raid by a bandit gang or Indians, or whoever is the danger of the moment. There are fans who terrifically enjoy this sort of stuff, and people who with malice aforethought write to appeal to them … but I find the real ‘Old West’ to be just terrifically more interesting. Amazingly, nothing can be more dramatic, tragic, engaging, and interesting that what actually happened in various places and at various times.
For me, everything starts with a year and a place. What is the year that the story is set in, and where? That is key; everything else flows naturally from that. Those two elements dictate everything if I am to do a convincing take on my characters’ experience. As well as being a large place, the American frontier changed radically over the course of the 19th century – everything aspect of the story, from what houses would have been built from, to what the local industry would have been, to what sort of comforts and communications there might have drawn from the larger world, what people would have eaten, how they might have dressed, the books they would have read, how their children might have been taught, to what they talked about to each other — even the knick-knacks they might have had on the mantle-piece of their house. Or even if they had a mantel-piece at all, come right down to it.
I very much prefer to do my research in histories and contemporary documents — diaries, letters and accounts, even memoirs written decades after the fact will do in a pinch. Anything to get a sense of what my characters lives would have been like, how they would have felt about the events and people around them. It helps me enormously that I grew up reading books like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s ‘Little House’ series, where I think I first picked up an affinity for the 19th century — and also a joint affection for Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain, both of whom were unequalled as a model for writing 19th century dialogue. As much as one can judge from a century later, the two of them had a quick ear for the vernacular, on the way people really spoke, way back then.
When I am in the research-and-planning phase, though, I most particularly avoid anyone else’s fictional versions of what I plan to write about. A couple of reasons for this, but the most important is… I go by impulse. Something that I read will say to me — ‘this is fantastic, you have to include this!’ I don’t want to unconsciously copy some other writers’ take on a person or event. Should I have something in my writing, similar to something in another book, I would be clear and be assured in my own mind that it came from something that both of us had discovered independently. For visual inspiration, along with actually visiting the place that I am writing about, or depending upon memories of having visited there once, I depend on a number of books that I have, collections of appropriate-era art – things done by people who were there and did illustrations of what they saw. For instance, George Catlin is invaluable for sketches of native Indian peoples, for authentic pictures of mid-19th century personalities, none better than Matthew Brady… and so it goes. One of my reference bibles is an enormous compilation of costumes of various eras – not that I really spend all that much time describing how characters are dressed, but it helps to get a general idea of how my characters might have looked.
Another method of getting in touch with the past – is through local re-enactors and enthusiasts, many of whom are exacting to the point of mania in reconstructing the past. There is no better way of getting an idea of what people really wore, and the tools they worked with than with the guidance of someone who spends a great deal of time there anyway. The actual heft of a heavy six-shooter, the smell of black powder and the complications of harnessing a horse to a wagon… it all helps to make an excursion into the past so much more convincing.
My current project, “The Adelsverein Trilogy” is set in the realm of the classic ‘Western’ – Texas in the mid-19th century, before, during and after the Civil War. There are appearances by Texas Rangers, Indians and horse thieves, lots of cows and all sorts of other elements beloved by readers of the genre. But there are different elements; the pioneering settlers I write about are German immigrants, newly come and all at once, some of them aristocratic, many of them cultured, all of them bound and determined to make the most of themselves in coming to a bountiful new land. Almost at once they open schools, form singing-societies, and build mills and breweries … all in the middle of the howling wilderness. Can you imagine anything more dramatic and original than that?
4 Responses to ' Another Country '
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on November 27th, 2008 at 1:28 am
I read that book too. I didn’t know enough about oxen/bullocks to query it because I have seen pictures of Australian bullock carts and thought reins were involved there. I do know that ploughing with oxen meant singing and talking to them all day and it would be the same with oxen pulling a cart?
I mind sloppy research so much, not only because people believe what they read, but also because it is a form of cultural vandalism, especially when a writer writes about a country other than their own. And sloppy research covers a range of things, one of which is not going far enough but taking surface things without double checking.
I am still trying to get this through the heads of a group of American romance writers, who call themselves historical writers, and who write about Britain 1800-1815. They insist that people waved pound notes about and used them as they themselves would use their own dollar bills. Despite giving them the Bank of England statement ‘The first fully printed notes were issued in 1855′ they refuse to accept what most British people understand, that notes in the form of paper money, are recent, but the pound is, and always has been, the official currency used as the govt financial standard. However that did not mean there was always an actual pound coin. Indeed in 1800 it was the guinea coin which was the money of the day, along with a plethera of coins ranging from a farthing, ha’penny, tuppence, thrupence, a groat, a tanner, a shilling, to a crown and some weird tokens and overstamped coins.
The paper notes issued by banks in 1800 as one or two pounds were not like today’s dollar bill, but were temporary, used to relieve the gold shortage, and were more like a postal order/money order than the paper money we are used to. They were given in exchange for banker’s drafts and used by the govt.
The sticking point for those romance writers is that they’ve researched old documents and keep finding pound values in statements, newspapers, wills etc of 1800. Because their cultural experience is with simple dollars and cents they cannot or will not make the leap to understanding that whilst the pound value was always used officialy in fact the coinage of 1800 did not include a pound coin but a guinea coin. Nor do they make the leap to seeing how all the little bits of money can be used to make guineas and half guineas, even a pound.
Research, as you rightly say, is more than skimming the internet or reading the online documents at the Old Bailey.
on November 27th, 2008 at 4:27 am
*Applause*
…to both Celia Hayes and PDR Lindsay on saying what needs to be said concerning this subject, and not just about historicals, but anything. I shudder and cringe when I read or listen to folks including animals — pigs, horses, whatever — in their story, even self-supposed “experts” because, really, they ain’t got no clue. They wouldn’t know a lip chain from a twitch, and would confuse the one with the other, never mind that an ergot isn’t a disease, but a part of the anatomy, and that sidesaddles are one of the most secure saddles a person can ride…and one of the most dangerous because they are nearly impossible to escape from in an emergency, especially when riding a panicked, runaway while wearing a full length riding skirt.
on November 27th, 2008 at 6:25 am
Re: oxen - yep, the driver of an ox team, whether hitched to a wagon or a plow, walked next to the lead team animals and controlled them by voice commands. There are illustrations, descriptions and accounts galore of this. My first novel was about an emigrant party on the California trail, so when I read that bit of description I was… startled, to say the least.
Re - pounds, guinea, pence and all… it was my understanding that the guinea coin was actually worth 21 shillings (rather than the pound, which was 20)and when I read near-contemporary writers like Dickens and Thackeray, etc, it is always coins they are throwing around.
In our own dear United States, paper money was also not very much used at that time either - one of the popular coins in circulation was Spanish gold reales (I think) for which there were no small-change equivalent, so they might be cut into eight pieces, or ‘bits’. Hence the slang ‘two bits’ for twenty-five cents.
on November 28th, 2008 at 12:51 am
Fascinating what research reveals isn’t it? I’d always wondered how Americans made 2 bits a quarter.
The thing about British money is that the pound is the standard, the govt measure of value BUT often it did not exist in the actual currencey of the day. Weird huh? Spain also had a govt currencey which often was not available in the coinage either. There is a special name for this money which Donald Platt might remember as he came across it in the reseach for his novel.