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Still here. Still wasting my life, sitting in front of my computer as if something's going to happen. Well, actually, that's not entirely true - I've been to Hanging Rock on a photography trip, then I spent last weekend's long weekend in Castlemaine, checking out the steam trains, Bendigo trams, and a cidery with alisaura. I have loads of photographs to
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Speaking as somebody who writes both fiction and History, I find the difficulties of writing fiction are nothing compared to the difficulties of writing History. I have never fought with paragraphs, with sentences, with individual words quite so much. History is fucking stubborn. You have control over the direction, the shape, the content of fiction. You can change what happens. But history? The past dictates all of that to you - you can't change what happened. You do have the control of selectivity, of what to represent and what to not represent, but that is a brutal choice without any of the leeway afforded by fiction.
'If you want your book to ring true, if you want people to read it, then you must be honest about history and repesent it and the people who lived it accurately.'
I think you may be misinterpreting what I'm saying. In my post, I mention you damn well better get your generalities right for anybody to take you seriously. But it's fiction, it's inherently a representation beyond the confines of fact, and having a historical basis is nothing compared to historical analysis.
We've been debating this at university lately, actually. Historical fiction authors don't have to stick precisely to how things happened - and they don't. They may represent the period fairly and honestly, but events are conflated, their geographical location is changed, multiple figures are blurred into one character, etc. A good example is Kate Grenville's The Secret River; I don't think anybody is arguing over its thematic honesty (except those with political motives), but she takes a massacre on one river and places it twenty years earlier on another. Perfectly acceptable within fiction, and it doesn't make her story ring any less true, but any historian who dared to do that would very quickly find themselves out of a job.
'My advice would be to find a couple books that support your current thesis and rely mostly on them for your research/footnotes/etc.'
How nice that would've been ... except I've been writing historiography. Oh yes. For one essay, I was required to read a bare minimum of twenty books on a particular topic. My bibliography references thirty - I didn't have time to read them all, or even any in full, but I certainly digested massive chunks. Another, mercifully shorter, essay was also historiographical, luckily with some slight crossover.
The amount of ideas, content, analysis, connections I've been juggling in my head ... I'm exhausted. And I still have my thesis draft to work on for the rest of the month, which will largely involve sifting through 19th century Kiwi newspapers. Thank god they're digitised and online. Thank god I've done work on this topic before so some research is done and I know what directions to follow.
'Lay them out on the floor in date order.'
You should see my lounge right now ... I've a couple of stacks of books on my desk, some sprawled across one couch, and the remainder on or under the coffee table. They're loosely divided by theme and by when I need them according to the structure of my introduction.
And thanks! :)
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You have control over the direction, the shape, the content of fiction. You can change what happens. But history? The past dictates all of that to you - you can't change what happened.
I agree with this to some extent, but not completely. When a story comes to life, when it takes over, that's when you the writer lose control. It's both scary and exhilarating, but it can turn the actual act of writing into a bitch. I may think I know what's coming up, plot-wise, only to find out that I actually didn't know a damn thing.
Historical fiction authors don't have to stick precisely to how things happened - and they don't. They may represent the period fairly and honestly, but events are conflated, their geographical location is changed, multiple figures are blurred into one character, etc.
There must be more elasticity to the genre than I thought, then. I really haven't read much historical fiction, but this series I just finished was very true to real-life events and people, and there was no blurring or changing around. And that's how I think it ought to be, honestly. So I guess I just lucked out in that I found an author who writes the genre the way I want to read it. :-)
The amount of ideas, content, analysis, connections I've been juggling in my head ... I'm exhausted.
I can imagine! I hope that things are going more smoothly for you!
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