Or, research in historical fiction, and how much world building do you need?
The subject came up recently, while discussing the rise of indie publishing. It was generally agreed among all parties that indie isn’t going away, and attracts a larger audience and greater market share every year. Then someone remarked that, regarding regency romance, we’d soon start seeing lists separating out books by amount of historical accuracy, to match the ‘spicy vs. clean vs. sweet’ lists that already help categorize that genre.
Ugh.
She’s right, but I don’t have to like it. There’s already a huge amount of No True Scotsman-ing among writers and readers of historical romance, including terminology that not everyone agrees on, lines that are drawn in different places according to the person drawing them, and moral judgments being conflated with judgments on the quality of the writing. The equivalent kerfuffle over historical accuracy would be- is?- quite a headache for everyone involved.
The lines are already being drawn, softly for now. Bridgerton is a costume drama with almost no attempts at historical accuracy, yet it’s incredibly popular, as were the original books. Blurbs on Amazon occasionally include the tagline, ‘a historically accurate adventure,’ or similar wording, though I haven’t seen an equivalent tag for works that are confidently historically inaccurate. They may exist, but I haven’t picked up on them yet.
I bumped into the line between accuracy and drama last week, when I accidentally discovered that burning at the stake, a punishment for women convicted of petty treason, was abolished in Great Britain in 1790. This takes away a major threat to a character in my WIP, which is set 25 years later. Part of the tension is supposed to stem from the mystery of her marriage- was she really married to the man she killed (which would make it petty treason) or was that a ruse, which would make the killing a simple murder? The character has to choose between saying she killed her husband, and saying she was living in sin, which was a Big Deal at the time.
Fortunately for me, the other punishments for petty treason and murder (hanging or transportation, which was often a death sentence due to the horrible conditions in penal colonies) are scary enough that I can use them to hit the same dramatic beats as the defunct idea of burning at the stake. But it was a bit of a wake-up call for me, because I hadn’t done the research, and it would have bitten me in the butt if I hadn’t happened to pick up that one source and reread it for fun.
On the flip side, how many readers of regency romance know that burning at the stake was abolished in 1790? Would that mistake have lost me a bunch of readers? Impossible to say for sure. Probably not too many; it’s pretty obscure.
Obscurity can be the writer’s friend; if no one knows you made a mistake, no one’s going to get upset about it. But there’s always someone more ‘into’ whatever subject you’re dealing with- it doesn’t have to be history- and they’re likely to catch a slip-up.
The medium of work- the fact that a book is written down, unlike a TV show or movie- can also be helpful. Since there’s not enough room on the page to describe everything, the reader has to imagine some things, and they’ll imagine your character’s appearance and the setting according to whatever they think is right, and while a tiny fraction of people are going to complain that they imagined the wrong thing, they are a tiny fraction.
Writers should be careful of circular knowledge- ‘facts’ that are gleaned from other works of fiction. Georgette Heyer’s books are especially enticing, since she was well known as a meticulous researcher. Readers looking to acquire historical knowledge from her fiction may not know that she occasionally inserted deliberate inaccuracies in her books to catch plagiarists and hangers-on. For better or worse, you might get away with using those inaccuracies, because Heyer is so well known that readers will shrug and say, ‘Oh, yeah, I’ve heard that expression/fact/name before; it must be fine.’ But it’s not something you can depend on.
Where to draw the line? How much research is enough? How closely should a writer adhere to that research?
Like with every part of writing, there’s a balancing act between, ‘is this right?’ and, ‘is this helping get the book out the door so it can make money for me?’ Because no matter how little money or acclaim the book brings you, it’s more than a novel in a drawer would bring in.
Beta readers can help draw the lines in reasonable places. If all of your beta readers notice a stray basketball bouncing through George IV’s court, get rid of the basketball. If none of them, including the ones who read your genre- you do have at least one who reads your genre, right?- notice that you sent a character to Sydney, Australia, in 1780 (it wasn’t established until 1788), then you’re probably fine. Keep writing, and get the book out the door. If you notice you’ve made a mistake after publication, you can fix it; that’s the beauty of indie and self-publishing.
Where do you personally draw the lines between accuracy and drama? What subjects are you a real stickler about, and which ones get a pass?
Mad Genius Club 
26 responses to “No True Historian”
I don’t write historicals (Romance or otherwise), but my WIP series is set in a created-world Fantasy version of something sort of like London in something sort of like the later Georgian/early Regency period, and so I’m using the framework of the real deal to keep my faux version in check.
On the one hand I want subliminal social/technological/economic background “accuracy” so that the reader can sink into expectations honed from genuine history without encountering trance-shattering anachronisms. On the other hand, this is my version of that referenced setting, not the real one. It’s especially important to the structure of my series that I get the falling-dominoes sequence of invention and industry accurate, since I’m slotting my hero’s technological work into a version of that, even if all the names, foreign trade, wars, etc., are different.
This has made me read some very interesting books lately. I already knew the period not just through the conventional sources but also through a big pile of “Sporting Literature”, which is something of a specialty of my husband’s. My latest read (City of Beasts – Thomas Almeroth-Williams) is a fascinating study of farming, stabling, mews, markets, domestic animals, etc. within the city of London over the period, something I stumbled over rather than looked for, which will inform a lot of the casual (and sometimes plot-important) world-building as my characters move around.
I could never have spotted all of that accurately, in a badly written Romance book set in the period (though I knew the high points) so I don’t expect my readers would probably have, either. Everyone has a different trigger alarm for “that’s not how that works!” But since triggering that fault is a book-flinging sin, it behooves me to get it plausible, even if more obvious gross problems like inconsistent characters, dropped plot threads, and patent howlers are where more dangers lurk for unsophisticated readers. (The most dangers lurk in anachronisms of social customs and modern slang phrases (e.g., the Peter Jackson “Hobbit” just went by while I was writing this, with an Elven military commander telling someone “I need you to….” in corporation-speak.))
Honestly, the true deal breaker for me in historical fiction is the wholesale plopping of a character that holds woke opinions that are entirely at odds with the time period it is set in. And even that is a little bit of a sliding scale–I finally had to let the “oh, the characters know are gay, but are fine with it/ is also fine with them knowing” annoyance go to a certain extent, or historical fiction to read would have been extremely thin in options, sigh. (Even though I am pretty sure that, if such a thing ever occurred in the past, in certain cultures, it would have been very rare indeed.)
Another one is lecturing the reader on why past things are bad. That isn’t necessary, and it is irritating as heck.
One of the best examples I’ve encountered (in my opinion) of how to write historical fiction that both appeals to modern tastes but also stay true to the time period it is set in is, I think, Lindsey Davis’ Falco mysteries. (I am a bit less fond of the sequel series…but that could be just because the viewpoint character in that one isn’t nearly as entertaining and funny as Falco was.) Modern language/syntax (though, notably, NOT modern slang*), but all the characters have viewpoints that are more or less in tune with their culture and time. So Falco doesn’t bat an eye at slavery and doesn’t think of it as “bad”, it’s just a thing. (In fact, he often grumbles about the ex-slaves who, upon freedom, became fabulously wealthy slumlords–and it’s probably as much fiscal jealousy as anything else, because he is nearly always broke.) The female lead is unusually assertive and independent, but everyone (including her) is well aware that it is out of the norm. (And she’s the apple of her father’s eye, so he lets her get away with a LOT.) It sometimes even lands her in hot water. She takes the 1940s hard-boiled PI tropes and applies them believably to 70AD Rome. And because she is an expert in the Roman Empire’s history, she makes it work *really* well. (Although as with all historical fiction, she has no problems changing up some events to make the story work better, even where real historical figures are concerned.)
*Although I do recall reading somewhere that the author makes up a ridiculous word for something and hides it in every book, possibly for the same reasons as Heyer put in inaccuracies, but also because it was apparently a running joke. To this day–and I have been reading that series since I was in high school–I have no idea what any of them are. They blend in really well.
Ugh. I forgot WordPress doesn’t like brackets. Corrected sentence:
And even that is a little bit of a sliding scale–I finally had to let the “oh, the main characters know (other characters) are gay, but are fine with it/(gay characters) are also fine with them knowing” annoyance go to a certain extent, or historical fiction to read would have been extremely thin in options, sigh.
It’s kinda stupid. People did get away with _some_ of that sort of thing, and it would make vastly more sense to research how X and Y got away with it. (Ridiculously wealthy was one answer.) But people don’t want to raise a pinky to look this stuff up, in an age of information. Sigh.
When I was working on *Daughter of the Pearl* I hit a full stop while researching the roles of women in the Sung/Song and Tang dynasties. Beatings were normal, and murder wasn’t always murder if a husband or father did it. There was no way I could put that into the story. Heck, having the protagonist slap his wife would be a huge problem for modern readers, even though it wasn’t a big deal 40-50 years ago, especially not in that culture. So that’s one place where accuracy goes out the window. No.
In those Chinese dynasties, the punishment depended on the relative social rank of the people involved. So, yes, noble man kills peasant woman was not treated the same as peasant woman kills noble man. Unfortunately, certain groups are trying to impose that kind of “justice” here, just with a different ordering of rank.
I don’t want to see men murdering women, no. But there was a lot of spectrum of how that worked and where; and there were areas in Sung and Tang where that Just Wasn’t Done.
Not many, I’ll grant you.
The big problem was that parents “owned” all their kids, which was why fathers could sell sons into slavery, just like daughters. And “those who harbor rebellious hearts that would harm the… father” could and should be sentenced to death by the dad.
It’ll be interesting to see what everyone else says. Myself, I’m probably no one to comment beyond how it drives me nuts when I see settings that are supposed to be historical Earth but with Beastfolk or other widespread sapient nonhuman races around and living openly, and they have been since prehistory — and all of their history is 100% the same as our own. Save for ‘evil white Christians persecute the noble nonhumans because evil’. It’s so lazy and so obviously done by people who must have learned their history from cable TV.
Can’t anyone think of ways that involve humanity developing alongside nonhumans that are just as smart as they are that don’t involve either mass murder by the humans or silly displays of bigotry that are as poorly-written as an episode of Captain Planet?
How true, how true. And the superhero genre is dominated by two behemoths that put out stories where characters regularly make atom bombs look like squibs, and still history doesn’t change.
First of all, I’m the same Eric Hinkle who posted the earlier comment above Mary Catelli’s. For some reason when I try to enter a comment using my FB account like I always do it won’t let me, saying that my FB entry has timed out. Which is odd given that I can use it with no trouble.
Anyway, on to my response proper:
Agreed. Earlier today I read another awful example of no research done, though in a game book and not fiction. It said flat-out as real history that ‘Christian Europe murdered 10 million women in the Burning Times’. It then added that anyone who argued for real witches using real Satanic magic was ‘excusing and justifying’ all those deaths.
Best part? This was done in a book for a game line (Nightbane from Palladium Books) where the whole sitting is real unholy powers being used by bad people to do bad things.
Oh yes, they also tossed in a line about how American Indians were living in a violence-free utopia before the palefaces showed up. And listed the Commanche and Apaches as examples of welcoming and peaceful Indian tribes.
The Apache would vehemently disagree with the game writer about the Comanche. As would some of the Pueblo peoples.
Paging Stephen LeBlanc, will Stephen LeBlanc please come to the gamer writers’ table to administer a correction?
I find I used to be able to enjoy supposedly ‘historical’ books much more before I began reading more history myself.
The Comanche did not even exist before Columbus, that culture stemmed from the introduction of the horse. They were Shoshone before it.
I know. 🙂 I have five monographs about them within arms’ reach, plus at least thirty pages of notes from smaller works in archives, and oral histories. They were about a third of my dissertation, perhaps a little more.
Just asking, can you recommend a good one-volume book covering the history and culture of the Commanche that can be understood by non-specialists like myself?
For an older, readable book, try “The Comanches: Lords of the South Plains.” S.C. Gwenn’s “Empire of the Summer Moon” is well written, and focuses on the later years of the Comanche. I like Hamalainen’s “Comanche Empire,” but it is thorough, and not as easy a read as the other two.
Thank you very much.
No, no, horses existed in North America since prehistoric times. If they didn’t, that means all the noble lords of the Plains would owe a major part of their culture to the palefaces, and that’s unthinkable!
I know supposedly educated people who ave seriously told me that.
Horses existed in North America in prehistoric times… and they were killed and eaten and went extinct. (It was little eohippus type horses.)
https://equineguelph.ca/learn_objects/evolutiontimeline/eohippus.html
My Yummy Pony…. doo doo doo doo doo
My four-toed pony… doo doo doo doo doo
I did know a little something about that. Mostly from reading American Indian activists who swear up and down that a race of ‘murderous white giants’ came over from Pleistocene Europe to slaughter all the megafauna before the Indians chased them back to Europe.
Good grief, even the Navajo were pretty hated by the other tribes in the area because they were big on raiding and slaving back in the day.
10 million women. ::snorts:: I can’t even.
And of course, the truth was cleverly hidden by that great Patriarchal conspiracy until they (the game book writers, or whatever moonbat writers they grabbed that “factoid” from) uncovered it, right?
With your last comment — Yes, something like that. It’s very, very obvious that a lot of what these authors ‘know’ about history and the like they got from drifty 70’s New Age paperbacks about the noble red man. There’s a lot of ancient astronaut and prehistoric super-science and magic utopias in their books too.
I think I would have blinked at the burning at the stake, not because I knew it had been abolished as a punishment for that particular crime before that particular date, but just kind of “I didn’t think they were still using that in the 18th/early 19th century.”
I read for escapism and am not an expert on any particular period, so I’m okay with making the hero the least chauvinistic guy and the heroine the feistiest gal the setting will support, but not with modern people wandering around in the past. I know that’s a hard balance to strike, but a lot of writers don’t seem to even try to find that balance. I do object to writers who don’t give me the brand of escapism I want from a particular setting: glamor, murder and snark from inter-war England, comedy of manners from the English Regency, swashbuckling adventure from anything earlier than that, proto-Indiana Jones stuff or quasi-Sherlock Holmes stuff from the Victorian era.
Tech developments slightly earlier: the line of thinking from Star Trek IV about “How do we know he didn’t invent it?” usually works for me, if the author does a bit of hand-waving and links the tech developer to the known researchers of the period. I read a YA murder mystery retelling of Sense and Sensibility recentishly, and although the gender roles (and state of the private investigation industry) were absolute nonsense on stilts for the period (still Regency), I appreciated that the author went to some trouble to link in some French chemical research that was done around that time.
One mildly interesting point is that the “treason” for which the last woman (Catherine Murphy) to be burned at the stake would be somewhat more understandable to modern readers. She and her husband (along with several other men) were convicted of counterfeiting. The men were duly hung, and she was duly burned.
Oh, and a fair chance that she was actually strangled before her lifeless body was burned – that was a common practice in the last few years of the practice.