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On Writing Historical Fiction Historical fiction presents its own pitfalls. You don’t want your characters to sound like 21 st century teenagers or housewives, but neither do you want to create authentic period language. Some writers become so entranced with their material, their research, that they have forgotten their readers. You want a flavor of the time – as we emphasized in the chapter on dialog – and you certainly want to avoid anachronisms. Slang dictionaries and the Oxford English Dictionary are your intimate friends in avoiding phrasing that is out of its time. Some slang goes back hundreds of years; some expressions and words will be dated next year. Equally important, that someone wore hoop skirts or silk doublets does not mean that they were any less interested than people in your circle are in their family, their friends, the politics and gossip of their time, getting ahead, getting laid, finding Mr. Right, raising their children, surviving. Make your historical characters real by entering into their heads. Understand that some of their obsessions will be different but many will be yours in a different key. Do not make blanket assumptions that all Victorians were strait laced or that all Puritans were scared of having a good time. Research your period thoroughly. Especially pay attention to the minor and colorful details of daily life. John Adams was considered a very abstemious man because he drank no more than six glasses of hard cider a day. We’d judge that alcoholism. But what could people drink then? The water from their shallow wells was contaminated by human and animal waste. They had no refrigeration to keep milk. They couldn’t hold on to juices. Canning had not been invented. They drank coffee and tea, yes, but they also drank alcohol in quantities we would find alarming – but they were used to it and thought alcohol healthy. After all, it didn’t give them cholera or dysentery like their water did. Put things in their context and make a real effort to understand them. Besides dressing your people in period clothes, feed them what they would eat, give them to drink what was likely and available. Give them the furniture appropriate to their class level and life style and the fashion of the times, if they paid any attention to that. A peasant family in Normandy in 1780 would not furnish with Louis 16 th furniture, while a leather merchant in Paris certainly would want to do so. Discover what jobs people really had in the social class you’re working with. Read about the period but also read as much as you can that actually dates from the period. If you can see the originals, that can be a big help. I knew of the gutter and rabidly political journalism of the French revolution when I was researching City of Darkness, City of Light – but somehow I never imagined that the most obscene and violent street newspaper would look like an academic journal: small type in grayish columns, no graphics, no big screaming headlines. Look at the dishes, the crockery, jewelry, wigs: anything at all you can find from the time. Read about the favored scents and who used them. How did people recognize each other’s station in life? How would you identify a doctor, a bricklayer, a prostitute, a midwife? How did your characters get their water and food and what happened to their waste products? What were the walls, the ceilings, the floor coverings like? Did people keep pets? What kind? Fashions in pets come and go. How many servants would your character have; if they were a servant themselves, what was their life like? Where did they sleep? How did they wash? But all of the time you are making your setting as real and vivid as possible, keep getting deeply into your major characters. If they do not capture the reader and provoke her interest, if they do not convince us they are real and lively, we won’t care how realistic your details of life in 17 h century Amsterdam are. Occasionally, of course, you reach a dead end. I was researching… More great writing tools in: CATEGORY: Writing / Reference / Memoir / The Novel
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| Copyright 2005 Marge Piercy | ||||||
