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[axver]

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

Comments

[harmonybear]

Totally ignoring the contents of the post to say thank god you updated. Have been worried :-P

[axver]

Yeah, not dead. Been far too consumed by essays/writer's block. Never knew it could take a couple of hours to eke a conclusion out of myself as it did this afternoon ...

I'll sign onto AIM tomorrow, once I've handed in my final coursework essay and stuff. We need to do trainspotting.

[evilmissbecky]

I promise you I'm not feeling argumentative today, but I disagree with the majority of your post.

Writing fiction is not easy. Many's the day where I sit here, staring at my blank screen, begging the words to come. And they don't. My characters refuse to speak to me. The plot I thought I knew has gone by the wayside and I don't know what is going to happen next. Not easy at all.

You certainly have no debt to real people, real events, and real processes to represent them accurately

Having just finished a six-book historical fiction series set in the 1540s-1550s, I strongly disagree with this. 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. Otherwise, why are you bothering? You might as well just write straight-up fiction and be done with it

[axver]

Oh, I didn't find your comment argumentative! I do apologise if this comes across as kind of hasty or defensive ... I need to get to sleep, and I've been proofreading an essay where I've been honing my arguments and how persuasive/vigorous they are, and it probably shows below. Anyhow ...!

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

[evilmissbecky]

Sorry it took me so long to reply.

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

[axver]

As an addendum, a final thought before I disappear for the night - in fiction, there's nobody to tell you you're wrong. You make the story happen; the people and the plot come from within you. In History, this is quite vividly not the case. Everything is external to you and you need to somehow process this, analyse it, systematise it, communicate it, and make sure every word you write is verifiable.

Perhaps the verifiability is the biggest killer. I pride myself on it, as I think any historian should, but making sure you're honest to your sources is so draining.

[augustine]

Not being able to make any valuable contribution to a discussion concerning the relative ease of writing fiction or history (since I can do neither), let me just state that I am glad to see you update, and please do so more often! :-)