[— Karen Myers —]
No story teller wants to have to describe his fictional world setting molecule by molecule, and no reader wants to slog through that. The way we avoid it is by incorporating worlds we already know as part of our fictional world. Even the most alien speculative world has elements that our readers can recognize where water is wet, fire burns, and characters have opinions for reasons that are not completely obscure.
The more our fictional world resembles a real one, the more heavy lifting that resemblance can do in our story-telling… if you do it right.
Cultural settings and expectations are part of that world. If you change them, you change the suggestiveness of the culture’s specificity, and the shorthand of using that setting fails for the reader.
One of the common faults is projecting a modern cultural perspective into a non-modern period (either historical or fantasy faux-historical). This is typically an offense in real or faux versions of Regency or Medieval or Classical (and elsewhere/when) settings — vs recorded behavior. The worst offenders that cause my walls to be dented by flung works are typically Romance.
Just for starters, you need some plausible anthropology and an understanding that cultures have changed over time and place.
Authors who are stuck in the “always now” manifest the problem when they shove (what they understand about) current cultural fashions into historical (real or imagined) settings: standards of beauty, sexual freedoms, reputational capitol, certainties of legitimacy for children, divisions of labor, cleanliness, health, servants, life expectancy, retirement, religion, seasonal starvation, childhood mortality, seeking security thru marriage or social alliance, lack of privacy, perils of childbirth and disease and infection and accident.
When it’s really badly done, when you are constantly thrown out of a story trance by a lack of understanding about a different time and place, it’s like trying to make out the plot while facing a hail of bullets, one after another. Eventually you stop reading for the story, and start watching for the next blooper, like a game.
I have one particular specimen in mind (a Regency Romance) where the following events occur.
- A young woman from the lower ranks of aristocracy is driven from her home in some generic village to her wedding. She is entirely alone, no family, no attendants. (Is it her coach? a hired coach?) She is jilted at the altar and is driven back home.
- She lives alone in her minor-gentry-class house. Alone, as in no servants, no companions, not even a dog. No kitchen, no cook, no maid, no steward. She may well be underage — it’s unclear.
- There is no contractual aspect to the arranged marriage — no dowry, no financial arrangements, no consequences of the failure to complete, nor any sense of how it was arranged in the first place.
- There’s no economic information — is she wealthy? does she control her own money? is she an heiress? is there a guardian? does she own her house?
- There’s no indication that her local society has any call upon her for civic or charitable responsibilities, potential marriage prospects, or anything else.
- She casually pays public visits to young men (strangers) in their rooms, with closed doors, without any reputational consequences.
You get the idea…
So, how does this sort of world building happen?
I can well understand that Regency Romances aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I can’t help believing that everyone who likes the genre well enough to write in it must surely have read at least the Jane Austen comedies-of-manners corpus. Unfortunately, I have read too many wannabes in this sub-genre to give credence to my thesis any longer — no one could have read the Jane Austen books and made this many mistakes.
The world-building is not serious. Economics are completely absent. There are few constraints recognized that are absent from the present world (travel, lodging, food, cleanliness). That means the world-building can’t bear the weight of standing in for things not immediately visible. Since it’s grossly inaccurate, the world is more like a dream than a setting for a story.
I can only speculate about the causes. For example, a wealthy young woman living alone after her parents’ death in today’s world might have no servants (just modern appliances), would think nothing of answering her own door, and would never think of a chaperone. Her money sits in a bank and she is not troubled with managing it actively. She might even marry without friends or family attending. If underage, she might have to work with an executor briefly.
When you shove that young woman into an historical period, you get fitful and inconsistent results, because the differences are invisible to the present world — servants (and pensioners), social obligations to sponsor local charitable causes, behaviors that are simply inappropriate, devastatingly so in the period. In this “anything goes” modern world, the notion that there are impermissible behaviors is something some authors don’t seem to notice about the past, and if they can’t see them, they can’t internalize how those constraints can make the stories more interesting.
For certain writers, anything set outside of the modern familiar world fails to trigger that sense of falsity that would alert them to a possible error for a story set in their familiar place and time. They’re blind to the mistakes.
Pretend that some Austen movie were a video game. If they wanted to play in that game’s world, they would need to internalize the rules. But a book like the one I just critiqued shows no ability to do even that much. Even mediocre fan-fic should be able to do that.
So if they like something well enough to set a book there (and it wasn’t this author’s first Regency Romance), then how can they be so gobsmackingly dim at discerning the rules, even in a vacuum of historical ignorance?
I would maintain that they don’t discern the rules, because the rules are alien to their limited modern experience. It’s the “can’t see the water they swim in” problem.
If all I ever knew about classical music and opera came out of Warners Bros cartoons, well, I could do a lot worse. My assumptions would be… incomplete but they wouldn’t be altogether wrong.
This author’s assumptions are not just incomplete, but amazingly wrong. Her dim excuse for a setting can’t stand up on its own and is more of a distraction than an aid.
What are some of the excruciating (and unintentionally comic) errors that you have encountered, when an author’s setting burns disastrously down?
Mad Genius Club 
53 responses to “Trashing your created world”
Leaving aside the stories where no one wounded on a medieval battlefield ever gets an infection [facepaw], there was a historical fiction where the oldest son of a ruling duke of an Italian city state (time period Renaissance) saw a lovely young lady in the street, decided on impulse to marry her, and his parents were delighted because she’d bring “new blood and new visions” to the family. [double facepaw]. This was chapter two. I quit in chapter three.
But history also has its unusual moments, such as the early medieval king, Clovis II, who married a slave (Bathilde) in 649 AD. She must have been exceptional, because her first master, Echinoald (mayor of the palace of Neustria), also wanted to marry her after his wife died.
Different time and place that Renaissance Italy.
A Frankish king marrying like that’s no problem, historically or in fiction. The way the novel was written, and when and where it was set? Huuuuuge problem, especially the parents’ response.
The parents’ response is really what gets me from the way you describe it. I could imagine the duke’s son being captivated by a random beauty. I might even see him trying to marry her if he was a sufficiently stupid and impulsive sort. But I cannot see the parents reacting in any way other than having the marriage annulled and, at the very least, strongly suggesting that the priest who had been foolish enough to perform it might find it more rewarding to move to a monastery somewhere in, say, Denmark.
Exactly. Take her as mistress? Sure, and very common. But marry her and have his parents delighted about it? Hard nope!
At least trying to have it annulled.
The question of whether you need your parents’ consent to marry was a hot issue.
Agreed about the parent’s response — it reflects a certain modern mindset.
And while I can guess at the the differences between Merovingian and Renaissance eras, it’s still impressive that a king would marry a slave, instead of taking her as a mistress (or trying to force her to be his mistress if she says no).
One thing to remember about historical slavery is that in some societies a high-ranking slave could be more important than a non-slave commoner.
While a slave, this woman could have been a very important person in the Court.
Didn’t some ancient and not so ancient societies literally have the entire civil government of the empire run by slaves, often eunuchs? I recall reading in Poul Anderson’s ‘Last Viking’ of the hatred people had for enunuchs in Byzantium — ‘If you own a eunuch, kill him. It not, buy one, and then kill him.’ Mostly due to their reputation for corruption. But at the same time they were very powerful at the higher ranks as I recall.
Ming Dynasty China had a bit of a problem with that, toward the end of the dynasty. Eunuchs were supposed to be outside politics because they could not have a family to favor, and thus neutral and safe. It didn’t work out that way.
Tang dynasty, too. One emperor tried to put down the eunuchs and got killed himself.
The Ottoman empire extensively used both eunuchs and slaves, e.g. Janissaries and Mamluks.
This is one of those world-building things: the past was a VERY LONG TIME. Lots of variation. And there are reasons why some things clump together.
I remember Ursula K. LeGuin criticizing Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni series because she felt the main characters had 20th century attitudes. I’d rather read Kurtz over LeGuin, but sometimes her characters did react more like characters in a thriller than people in a quasi-midieval fantasy.
It wasn’t a fictional setting, but someone writing a history of paper seemed to be under the distinct impression that Europeans did not write or calculate until paper was introduced by the Arabs.
*Kindle sample ditched with great speed.*
No poetic license in nonfiction!
Heh, indeed.
It was a comic tale and not exactly medieval. Nevertheless cops doing traffic control smacked of modern.
Also lights. It is not easy to light any fire and light of any kind is not cheap. Natural light is best so you know it is possible to walk by starlight.
Though I remember what a trick it was to see anything by moonlight rather than streetlights. Also there are a lot more stars than you may have noticed
The western romance where the wagon train is met by friendly Indians. The heroine’s sitting on the buckboard(?) of her covered wagon, driving her team, while chatting with a couple of Indians riding along on their “massive horses.” (My mental image from the way the scene unfolded was of them riding these draft-sized animals that put them close-ish to eye level with the wagon driver).
The same book had a scene where the heroine is desperate to rescue her chicken from a dangerous windstorm…because she’s emotionally attached to it, not because she needs the eggs.
Another book had a marriage of convenience between a town-born girl and a farmer somewhere in late 19th c. Colorado. There’s a place in town where you can buy coffee and pastries. And then she has the farmer and his wife dashing over to town for coffee and pastries every time the wife hits a stressful moment. (There was a place in the middle of the book where it seemed like they went out for coffee and pastries two or three days in a row.) NO, JUST NO.
I’m inclined to blame the Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice for a lot of the stupidity in recent Regency novels. It has its good points (very authentic Assembly Ball, interesting and unconventional takes on Collins, Darcy and Mrs Bennet) but it depicts the Bennets as having a very casual lifestyle where they fluff their own cushions and tidy their own parlour, and anyone you’ve seen in anything else is just playing their stock 20th century persona (Donald Sutherland’s a hippie, Knightley’s a generic young girlboss, Dench’s a generic old girlboss). You don’t really get a sense of how their world is different, except that they dress funny and don’t have cars or phones.
A Highlander-style Romance… The heroine (raised poor) knows how to ride, even when the saddle falls off. [I’m not joking — we’re not talking a loose or cut girth here.]
This same author thinks dances from the 1300s are for couples and have a “1-2-3, 1-2-3” count, and that ordinary or poor people have dressers filled with clothes they can share.
The noir detective story set in the 1940s in California where the hard boiled detective calls the female client “Ms,” not Miss or Mrs. Can you tell it was written after 1970? (Actually long after 1970 because through at least 1985 people would remember why that is wrong.)
Or the stories set in the 1950s where no one is smoking cigarettes. Somehow that grates on me a lot more than H. Beam Piper’s characters smoking like chimneys in his SF set in the far future. Smoking could become fashionable again.
I think a lot of that reaction is because we don’t know how people in the future will act, so extrapolating from the present is reasonable if unimaginative.
Whereas we have a pretty good idea of how people in the past acted, so interpolating present customs and mores just doesn’t work.
*Snickers* I deliberately have a few characters who smoke, just to irk the do-gooders, and because why not?
Heh indeed. Besides, gives them something to do with their hands.
My “favorite” has to be the mystery I read ostensibly set in Ancient Egypt where the main character was an obnoxious atheist. The best line was where he was explaining that atheism was obvious, anyone who’d seen what he’d seen would be an atheist, and the only reason the priests could maintain even a semblance of belief was because they’d never seen people who’d been stabbed or had their heads crushed in. Yes, that’s right, he believed that Ancient Egyptian priests, the people who’s job it was to prepare dead bodies for mummification, had never seen anyone who had died violently.
Oh, and just to put the icing on the cake, the author felt the need to make the conceit of the book that it was the detective’s private journal. Because papyrus was so common that anyone, even someone who mentioned he had little money, could afford to buy lots of it. And because obvious everyone knew how to write the Hieratic script, something that was notoriously even more difficult than Hieroglyphics, which themselves weren’t easy. And because the detective was so dumb that he’d put his rants against gods, something that a pharaoh would consider treason, in writing.
Sorry. I could rant about that book for a while.
Then there was the novel set in Ancient Egypt where the story was intended to be the memoir of the Main Character (an Ancient Egyptian).
At one point, the MC defends slavery but nobody in his time-frame would be anti-slavery.
IE Slavery was a fact of life and the only reason a person of that time would be anti-slavery is if he was unjustly enslaved. But even then it would be “against him being enslaved” not about slavery in general.
Mind you, in that case I suspect that it was the Modern Writer explaining the mind-set about slavery in that time-place to his Modern Readers.
Depends on how ancient it was. Some Greek philosophers theorized that it was wrong, but that was very late in Egypt’s time, and of course, the chances of their being a connection were slim.
Oh, please do… 🙂 (rant, that is)
Ah yes, those delightful people who would despise Francisco Franco as a control freak if he ever showed up on their radar, and yet think that God refusing to act like Francisco Franco is proof that God does not exist. I don’t think you’d find them in significant numbers before the early modern era, just because that’s the timeframe where you have enough people with pointless, semi-comfortable lifestyles who recoil from the nasty-brutish-short aspects of life, rather than taking them for granted.
I thought I read that there was some evidence for ancient Egyptian scrolls with sleazy/irreverent treatments of religious topics that had been circulated privately among the scribe/priest classes, but a). that doesn’t mean atheistic priests, it means they thought some particular class of stories about the gods were BS; and b). as you say, a “my-eyes-only” diary isn’t a thing that far back. (Soldier in the Mist, well, you let it slide because the character has severe memory problems and needs written documentation to keep track of what’s going on in his life.) I believe papyrus was more readily available than some other writing materials in the ancient world, but it wasn’t nearly as trivial to acquire as modern paper is.
As a side note, there is a story in the Bible in Daniel, Chapter 14 (I’m Catholic) where Daniel teaches the king that his god Bel is not real. It’s quite the mystery story, involving a secret entrance to the temple and ashes on the floor to trap the priests. But Daniel obviously isn’t an atheist.
Yep, and that’s after he demonstrates correct interrogation techniques in the Curious Incident of Susannah and the Elders. (I forget whether the Case of the Debunked Idol comes before or after the Adventure of the Dragon of the Baskervilles). Dorothy Sayers called the Book of Daniel the first detective story.
Ah yes, those delightful people who would despise Francisco Franco as a control freak if he ever showed up on their radar, and yet think that God refusing to act like Francisco Franco is proof that God does not exist.
I’m going to have to remember that line, thanks!
I believe papyrus was more readily available than some other writing materials in the ancient world, but it wasn’t nearly as trivial to acquire as modern paper is.
Yeah, it was slightly more realistic in Egypt than it would have been in some other societies, as in papyrus actually existed. But it was ridiculously difficult to make, extremely expensive, and it wasn’t like you could just buy the equivalent blank book of the stuff at Ye Goode Olde Marketplace.
There was a children’s book set on the Oregon trail, where the young lady main character sewed a dress while riding in an ox drawn wagon. Wagons on the Trail did not have springs making for a very bumpy ride. Not to mention the fact that the wagon is not actually on a road.
The author was also under the impression that oxen were guided using reins.
There were other issues, but it has been several years since I read that book.
But the biggest problem that I had was that a few weeks into the wagon train people’s belongings begin to be missing and no one did anything about it until an accident happened and the thief’s wagon was overturned and the stolen goods fell out. Everybody felt sorry for the thief and allowed them to continue with the wagon train instead of abandoning them. People whose entire worldly possessions are packed into a 4x 12 ft wagon are likely to notice when things go missing and people who have to survive on the contents of what they pack with them are not going to be kind to people who steal from them.
It was a library book, so I did not throw the book against the wall. I did think about it.
It’s appalling how incurious most people are.
It’s like they take offense when they encounter something they didn’t already know.
And they’re self-centered enough to believe that if something is unimportant to them, it simply must be equally unimportant to everybody else.
And usually such people also believe that if something is very important to them, if it isn’t important to other people then there must be some invidious motive for it.
There was a particular fantasy trilogy that I ended up walling because in the first book the main character–who is mute, illiterate, and has been raised as, essentially, a kitchen slave–is using words like “peripatetic” to describe what she’s seeing.
I was already irked by the endless lists and lists and lists of descriptive words that the author seemed determined to constantly barf all over the page, as well as the fact that it seemed like every few pages the characters all stopped the action so they could tell one another fairy tales (honey, if you wanted to write a book of Celtic fairytales, just do that. Don’t shove it into the plot. Tolkien got away with it–barely–because at least most of the time the song/poem/whatever had a bearing on the immediate action. Even then, it drags the pace down horribly). But that use of “peripatetic” was my absolute breaking point. No. Just…no.
I think the very worst historical set in the late Victorian era was something called “The Whittaker Family Reunion” which I reviewed for another website once upon the day, and part of the plot featured a pair of daring young ladies who traveled (alone) to the big city by train, checked into a hotel and went out drinking. That was merely the worst and most obvious clunker, regarding 19th century standards of conduct for unmarried young ladies…
Amazingly enough, I have read at least one otherwise well-regarded novel (by a historian himself, no less) who also believed that ox-drawn wagons on the California-Oregon trail were controlled with reins by a driver who sat in the wagon…
I’m curious. How were ox-drawn wagons controlled? I seem to recall reading that here in Pennsylvania whips were sometimes used.
The ox pair is attached to the wagon via the shaft and a two-ox yoke. You use teams of yoked pairs (2/4/6/etc.) depending on the weight and the terrain.
The “drover” walks alongside the lead oxen team, typically on the left, and issues verbal commands, using a long whip to lightly guide them to reinforce the verbal commands.
Example:
“The ox next to the drover (the drover stands to the left of the animals) is the neigh [s.b. “nigh”] ox and the other ox is the off ox. Many ox pairs are trained with each animal always taking the same position…
…commands to tell the oxen what we wanted them to do.
get up – move ahead / speed up
gee – turn right
haw – turn left
easy – slow down
whoa – stop
back – back up
A tap with a whip or stick can be used to help reinforce the verbal commands.
For turning right (gee), tapping the neigh [s.b. “nigh”] ox on the hindquarters and the off ox on the head causes the former to speed up and the latter to slow down to accomplish the turn. To turn left (haw), tap the neigh [s.b. “nigh”] ox on the head and the off ox on the rump.
“neigh ox”
I’ve always seen that written as nigh ox.
…pasted from the article and it was late enough at night my eyes passed right over it. Yes, that is a (transferred) typo — s.b. “nigh”.
Bad enough when you have to find your own typos….. 😎
It’s not that you should necessarily know how oxen are driven; it’s that you should think about it and realize that maybe they aren’t just like horses and you ought to look it up. It’s that suspicion of falsity that should stop an author from just carelessly proceeding to an unsupported-by-reality depiction.
The important thing about reading oodles of primary source is not so much to learn facts. It’s to knock your block off so you do not assume that other societies are like modern except where you know to the contrary.
When I put some effort into learning about horses and horse usage as the primary mode of long-distance travel back in the day, I ended up having my characters walking almost everywhere as none of them would have been able to afford or have them given their situations and the general state of their world. This, in turn, led to the story being MUCH LONGER and the distances all had to be re-thought. But at least I no longer had the “horse-used-like-a-car” problem I’ve seen people mention.
I never gave much thought to oxen, but now that I’ve read this I have an idea of what I can do in future stories…
…and then, we all focus on different things.
I’m an etymology buff, so when I think of teams of oxen, my brain skitters off into the coolness of the huge family of Indo-European related words that includes: drover, drive, draft/draught (as in draft horse), draw (as in pull), drag (speculative relationship), etc. With all of that, one loses sight of such things as which side the drover walks on, etc.
And that’s why you know you need to look it up.
Thank you very much.
This will be a bit OT but it does pay to remember how common work animals were with people until just a century or so ago. It helps to explain things like why so many accounts of witchcraft trials and accusations regarded the killing or crippling of work and food animals as so heinous.
Livestock shows typically feature all sorts of cattle specialized by use — meat, milk, draught. In the colonial period, there were some versatile breeds that could do more than one (the Randall Lineback is a still-existing “landrace” breed that was used for all three purposes), just as the Morgan horse was famous for versatility in both carriage and riding use.
When you come from the mid-West, you see a lot of this sort of thing in livestock shows. Tip: always walk around “backstage” — draught oxen are quite fond of longneck bottle beer treats before pulling contests.
The book sample that featured a “barbarian” war-leader circa approx 1000 A.D. in Central Europe, Byzantine Empire borders. He had a tent full of books and didn’t blink when the pre-pubescent servant/slave class girl demanded reading material.
If it weren’t a kindle sample it would have hit the wall. THat was something like three pages in, and I’m glad I didn’t waste more time with it.
I note that if you intend by this sort of thing to inclue your reader to this not being the fields they know — it’s really gotta be done with art. The sort of reader who picks up on the discrepancy is more likely to be annoyed by it.
I remember a story set in Archaic Greece with potatoes and a character named John. Not until the end when we encountered an Oracle that was really obviously a computer and that quoted the Book of Wisdom did I reinterpret them as clues.
Was that book Fred Saberhagen’s The Face Of Apollo?
The “thing” that stuck out to me in The Face Of Apollo was the character of Hades.
While I’m not an expert on Greek mythology, Hades wasn’t considered the considered the Lord of Evil. IE the Greek version of Satan.
Got it in one.
or blatantly by having the POV or descriptive text include more obvious clues. This was marketed as a historical, and other things had already jarred – the assumption that everyone was literate and books were common was just the last straw.