Research: down in the weeds

Since I’ve just finished a historical fantasy novel (the one I’ve been calling Book of Secrets, but now it’s Shadow of the Crescent) set in Italy and Constantinople in 1480-81, I enjoyed the recent column here on historical fiction and had so many thoughts that I decided to save them for a separate post instead of flooding the comment section.

If you don’t like doing research, or can’t at least tolerate research, historical fiction and its offshoots are probably not for you.

And if you love doing research, it’s all too easy to fall down the rabbit hole. I’ve got enough background information for two more books set in Renaissance Italy; all I have to do is come up with a couple more plots. And my family is very grateful that, at least for the time being, I’ve stopped looking up from my research materials to share some intriguing details about ganching, or the use of a hanged man’s skull, or the reason some alchemical recipes require that you bury a bottle in a heap of manure for a specified time.

if you want to do something set in a popular time and place—Tudor England, Regency England, the US West, WWI Western Front—you need to do enough digging to get it right.

And the less popular the time and place, the harder it can be to get those details. For this book, I had a plethora of information on Renaissance Italy, but you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to get descriptions of Constantinople between the conquest in 1453 and the period of Suleiman the Magnificent. I did a lot of extrapolating from 16^th century sources, deleting buildings known to have been built after my target year and borrowing details that probably didn’t change much. If I read Turkish I would have had access to a few more sources, but I wasn’t willing to delay the writing of the book for a couple of years while I learned Turkish. Creative vagueness can be helpful here.

One of my rules of thumb is that the harder it is to find certain details, the more likely you’re going to be able to fudge things. By collating several sources I was able to put together a detailed chronology of Turkish attacks on Italian states during the 1470’s and 1480’s, but I gambled that my readers wouldn’t notice that I changed that chronology slightly to suit the plot. Granted, if I were writing military history I probably wouldn’t have been able to get away with that.

…getting into the mental world of a different time and place can be very hard.

I found that letters, diaries, travelers’ notes and other first-person accounts were helpful here… although, as Alma says, the farther back you go, the trickier it becomes. Fortunately all I had to do was meet readers’ probable expectations of characters from this period, while accepting that actual condottieri, necromancers, or Janissaries would probably fall over themselves laughing at all the stuff one inevitably gets wrong.

And if you guys want to point and giggle, I’ll let you know when the book is available on Amazon.