Guest Blog: Marie Brennan
Sep. 2nd, 2011 09:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jpskewedthroneI have a guest today! Please welcome Marie Brennan, a fellow writer who's here today to talk about writing historical fantasy--when to keep your historical novel accurate, when to use real events and people, and perhaps when you should just make it up out of whole cloth. I've never written anything set in the real world, so this was very interesting to read . . . and something for me to file away in case I ever do decide to set a novel in our world. So sit back and enjoy, and then check out Marie Brennan's books!
Marie Brennan speaks: When I set out to write the first book in this series, Midnight Never Come, I didn't think much about the different kinds of historical fiction. I'm not talking about the usual genre boundaries like "fantasy" or "mystery" or "romance;" I'm talking about the way the fiction interacts with historical fact.
You can think of it as a spectrum. On one end, there's historical non-fiction, that sets out to tell you exactly what happened: in a narrative fashion, maybe, giving you the story of those events, but essentially trying to stick to the facts as known. On the other end, there's a story that uses the period only as setting, never as plot: made-up individuals who just happen to be living in the past.
In between, there's a broad range of options. Fictional characters interacting with real events? Real people interacting with fictional events? Over the course of writing the Onyx Court series, I've done both, and lots of other things besides. Speaking from experience, I have to say:
Man, stay away from the real stuff.
I'm almost serious. If you'd asked me last year, when I was tearing my hair out over the timing of the Fenian bombings in nineteenth-century London and the refusal of a certain lunar eclipse to happen further in advance of the opening of the Inner Circle portion of the Underground Railway, I would have said it with absolute sincerity. (And a lot more profanity.) The further real people or real events come into the story, the more writing turns into an obstacle course: jump over this, dodge around that, climb up one person's biography until you're close enough to grab onto the edge of another person's actions. If you've committed to historical accuracy -- as I did -- then all these things become strictures on your freedom of creativity.
Strictures like the rules of formal poetry. Meter and rhyme, a certain number of lines in a certain pattern . . . but sometimes, having to work within those constraints makes you be more creative. You want a relationship between one of your fictional characters and a historical man; it turns out that man was already married. That can shut down your plot idea -- or add a new layer to it, as you decide what would make the relationship happen anyway, and how it affects that man's home life. And sometimes history hands you details that operate as springboards instead of snares, launching you into perfect bits of plot you might never have made up on your own.
But it's true that the closer you get to fact, the less room you have to move, especially when you take the approach I did with this series. The Onyx Court books are secret history, not alternate; events play out as they did in reality, but sometimes have hidden causes or twists. I had to look for the cracks in what we know, the places where I could slip my own story in. The second and fourth books in this series, In Ashes Lie and the most recent, With Fate Conspire, interact more closely with specific historical people and events. The first and third, Midnight Never Come and A Star Shall Fall, are more distant, taking place in historical periods, but using specifics more as context than content.
If you have to pick between the two, go for the latter option. Unless, like me, you're the sort of masochist who enjoys these things -- in which case, good luck! The pleasure of watching it pay off is almost worth the pain. :-)
Author Bio: Marie Brennan is a former academic with a background in archaeology, anthropology, and folklore, which she now puts to rather cockeyed use in writing fantasy. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Marie Brennan speaks: When I set out to write the first book in this series, Midnight Never Come, I didn't think much about the different kinds of historical fiction. I'm not talking about the usual genre boundaries like "fantasy" or "mystery" or "romance;" I'm talking about the way the fiction interacts with historical fact.
You can think of it as a spectrum. On one end, there's historical non-fiction, that sets out to tell you exactly what happened: in a narrative fashion, maybe, giving you the story of those events, but essentially trying to stick to the facts as known. On the other end, there's a story that uses the period only as setting, never as plot: made-up individuals who just happen to be living in the past.
In between, there's a broad range of options. Fictional characters interacting with real events? Real people interacting with fictional events? Over the course of writing the Onyx Court series, I've done both, and lots of other things besides. Speaking from experience, I have to say:
Man, stay away from the real stuff.
I'm almost serious. If you'd asked me last year, when I was tearing my hair out over the timing of the Fenian bombings in nineteenth-century London and the refusal of a certain lunar eclipse to happen further in advance of the opening of the Inner Circle portion of the Underground Railway, I would have said it with absolute sincerity. (And a lot more profanity.) The further real people or real events come into the story, the more writing turns into an obstacle course: jump over this, dodge around that, climb up one person's biography until you're close enough to grab onto the edge of another person's actions. If you've committed to historical accuracy -- as I did -- then all these things become strictures on your freedom of creativity.
Strictures like the rules of formal poetry. Meter and rhyme, a certain number of lines in a certain pattern . . . but sometimes, having to work within those constraints makes you be more creative. You want a relationship between one of your fictional characters and a historical man; it turns out that man was already married. That can shut down your plot idea -- or add a new layer to it, as you decide what would make the relationship happen anyway, and how it affects that man's home life. And sometimes history hands you details that operate as springboards instead of snares, launching you into perfect bits of plot you might never have made up on your own.
But it's true that the closer you get to fact, the less room you have to move, especially when you take the approach I did with this series. The Onyx Court books are secret history, not alternate; events play out as they did in reality, but sometimes have hidden causes or twists. I had to look for the cracks in what we know, the places where I could slip my own story in. The second and fourth books in this series, In Ashes Lie and the most recent, With Fate Conspire, interact more closely with specific historical people and events. The first and third, Midnight Never Come and A Star Shall Fall, are more distant, taking place in historical periods, but using specifics more as context than content.
If you have to pick between the two, go for the latter option. Unless, like me, you're the sort of masochist who enjoys these things -- in which case, good luck! The pleasure of watching it pay off is almost worth the pain. :-)
Author Bio: Marie Brennan is a former academic with a background in archaeology, anthropology, and folklore, which she now puts to rather cockeyed use in writing fantasy. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
