Hello, writers. Thanks to doughty WO!er dconrad for hosting last week, and delving deeper into the question of writing what you know. Next week’s Write On! will be hosted by the equally doughty strawbale.
There was quite a long and interesting discussion about historical fiction in the comments last week. It made me think of some of the challenges I run into when writing historical fiction:
What Everybody Knows is wrong.
We’ve talked about this on here before, I think. An example might be that “everybody knows slavery was a southern thing.” (In reality, New York freed its last enslaved person in 1827 and New Jersey in 1865.)
The Continuous Progress fallacy.
Readers tend to imagine that the distant past was bad, the less distant past was less bad, and the recent past was only slightly bad. Literacy, women’s rights, tolerance, sanitation, etc, have all had their ups and downs at different points in history. It’s hard to convince a reader that a medieval noblewoman might have been more likely to be literate than a 19th century English factory worker.
They Didn’t Talk Like That!
I run into this with ever book. With Storm Before Atlanta, the characters tended to reduce phrases to acronyms because that was a popular slang habit at the time of the Civil War. It was also a popular slang habit at the time I was writing the book, so I had a heck of a time making it seem Period.
Usually I end up using the OED, which I bought at an auction for $2.75. It gives the dates when words first appeared in print, but it’s wrong sometimes, perhaps because of a British bias.
The trick in all of these cases is to make the reader feel okay with what you’ve written.
The phrase “Odds bodkins!” sounds medieval but is in fact a later creation.
Write a scene in which someone says “Odds bodkins!” You can set it in any time or place as long as you make the use of the phrase believable.
Try to limit yourself to 150 words.
Write On! will be a regular Thursday feature (8 pm ET, 5 pm PT) until it isn’t.