I’m in the process of reading all (all) the various series/books written by Andrew Wareham. If you’re not familiar with him, I do recommend him highly for his many books. They cover primarily British protagonists in the circa-early industrial ages up to the early 1900s in a category I think of as “career novels”. That is to say, they follow the life stories, often thru generations, of people who have raised themselves from sometimes unlikely hardships of birth or accident. They focus on how people of native acumen can make progress in their lives by figuring out who to ask about how things work: politics, power, industry, crime, institutions like the military, and so forth, and then embracing/making their opportunities with intelligence and perseverance, as well as a certain degree of toughness and realism.
This is a type of historical story I’m very fond of, and Wareham is an incredibly prolific practitioner (I swear he must be an atelier), with several of his series not yet finished (I can only hope for more).
I mention this because I’ve noticed quite a lot about how Wareham approaches his characteristic introduction of new players within his tales, and I’ve learned to be on the lookout when he brings a new person to the reader’s attention, so that the reader wonders (being familiar with and thus on the lookout for this process) “What’s he going to do with this newly-introduced character? Who’s he going to be important to? Like an introduced billiard ball, how will all the other character relationships be changed?”
And then, having noticed this, I can’t help thinking about his techniques when it comes time to bring new players into my own tales, and wondering just how to hint to my own readers, as Wareham does to his, how to place the newcomers in their expectations and initial assumptions.
Do you have technical processes in your own writing that you’ve borrowed from some inspiration of your own? What have you learned, and from what exemplars?
Mad Genius Club 
13 responses to “Learning from others”
At a sentence level, I have picked up expressions or structures that registered as “ooh shiny” and continued to use, but most of the storytelling stuff is more subconscious than that.
My current favorite is emotional tastes and smells. “The rations tasted like cardboard and despair” sort of thing. I don’t think I’ve written any, yet, but I like them.
They can be very entertaining!
One of the things I’ve learned from historical literature is to beware of slipping modern thoughts and terms into historic characters. People had a limited amount of information, often deep on the local level but not broad, and that needs to be reflected in the story, IF I am trying to be accurate. That’s where details come in, and what characters from, oh, say, northern England in the early 1400s would notice and comment on, as compared to even Victorians. Frame of reference matters in a smaller world.
I quite agree, and that’s an area where Wareham shines: how information travels, mores, bribery, corruption, etc.
“OK” is from Olde English, isn’t it? I swear it is in Chaucer. /sarc (just in case).
Not Chaucer. At least it didn’t become common from anything Chaucer wrote.
There’s a lot of speculation about the origin of “OK”, but the definitive version is that it was first used in an 1839 satirical essay as an abbreviation for “oll korrect” a deliberately mangled version of “all correct,” and was popularized in the 1840 presidential campaign of Martin Van Buren who was nicknamed “Old Kinderhook” after his hometown in New York.
And don’t get me started on all the silly things written in sarcasm that became accepted wisdom like the official designation of Presidents’ Day, and especially the absurd, “Who wrote Shakespeare?” stupidity.
Beware of writing stupid characters in your books. What they say may end up being taken way too seriously!
Well, “och aye” is another possibility. If you have Scots in the tale.
I thought we all knew that Christopher Marlowe wrote Shakespeare after he faked his death in that 1593 incident in Deptford to get out of working for Elizabethan spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham? All so he could write occult dramaturgy for the School of Night and its leader Dr. John Dee as he sought to create a magical empire out of Elizabethan England?
PS: I got all of that from a fellow named Ken Hite who writes for tabletop RPGs. So yeah, it’s not meant to be taken seriously. Fun idea though.
Old literature helps you to write in a manner that’s not so timebound. Avoiding modern-sounding prose helps you keep the readers in the field beyond those we know.
But you can get too archaic in language. That being a criticism Lovecraft made about William Hope Hodgson’s ‘The Night Land’. I have to agree, it’s an amazing book but the deliberately archaic English can get to be a bit much.
You generally don’t want archaic. You want the appearance of timelessness.
I’ve mentioned this before, but my north star for character introduction is the pilot episode of the TV series Castle. The economy at which the major characters and their backgrounds are introduced without pausing the story in the slightest is dazzling.