Using History

If you’ve read many of my posts and book reviews, you’ve probably realized that my writing is often inspired by either science or history, to the extent that I even considered writing an adaptation of Epic of Gilgamesh (maybe I still will, one day).  History provides inspiration, yes, but it also provides grounding.  Many of my worldbuilding decisions are based in some way on something I read about the past, which is especially convenient in short stories, since I don’t want to spend a lot of time pondering the worldbuilding for a two-thousand-word story.  There’s clearly nothing wrong with being inspired by history for your writing – historical fiction is a genre, after all – but Impressions has me pondering how closely a fantasy story can hew to real history without confusing or distracting the reader.

Of my many novel ideas, Impressions is by far the most explicitly historical in nature.  It is a secondary world fantasy, but that secondary world is quite closely aligned with our own.  Although it is not the first novel I’ve written, it is my most serious effort to date, and after my work on the previous two, I learned a few lessons about scope.  Rather like certain government engineering projects (cough, James Webb Space Telescope, cough) that suffer from unrealistic scope, scheduling, and funding so that they instead end up late and overbudget (although, in JWST’s case, the wait seems to have been worth it, so maybe that’s a bad example – let’s use OCX, instead), trying to do too much with a novel can lead to a mediocre, undesirable result.  Despite the relatively positive feedback on it, that’s how I look back on my first novel.  With a complex magic system, a vast, unique world, and almost a dozen major characters, almost none of whom meet each other in the first book, it is still a story that I intend to tell, but my storytelling skills at the time were not up to the challenge.

Going into Impressions, therefore, I was determined to do things differently, and part of why I chose it was because I thought its scope was more approachable for my current writing talents.  It follows one main character throughout the book, and while he travels a lot, from a plotting perspective the world is not as complex.  The magic system is, while not simple, a single core idea instead of several woven together, and because it’s not as fantastic as other magic systems, I think it integrates nicely into a richly historically inspired world.  Plus, that means that I can focus more on the writing for this project, rather than being distracted by pondering whether or not my alternative world would reasonably have oak trees, or if I need to invent original flora.

So yes, if you look, you will doubtless see that many of the worldbuilding elements in Impressions can be tied directly back to a real, historical basis, sometimes even to the names being palindromes of, or directly derived from, historical terms (one guess on which historical peoples provided the name and worldbuilding basis for the “Vigoths”).  This isn’t just a shortcut; I am endlessly fascinated by the history that I read, and I’m always spotting little details (or larger ones) and wondering how I could incorporate them into my writing.  Like, for instance, a game of football/soccer that spanned seven miles, involved hundreds of people, and resulted in several deaths, or the fact that the undergarments that people in the Elizabethan period wore actually helped them stay clean in place of showers or baths, with comparable effectiveness.

Can this, however, be taken too far?  Maybe it’s a little late in the process to be wondering that, since I’m nearly finished (if not already, by the time this post goes live), but I started considering the matter around when I finished writing the second part.  Not in terms of giving too much detail to the reader and thereby affecting the pacing – I know that a slow, richly described book is what I’m looking to achieve – but in terms of confusing a reader’s expectations for the line between fantasy and historical fiction.  Am I keeping those separate by virtue of alternative names and subverting cultural expectations, or will readers expecting a fantasy feel like they accidentally picked up a historical fiction?  Like so much of writing, it’s a matter of managing expectations and finding the right audience for the book, with no definitive answer.  Hopefully, when I finish it, my writing group will have some insight for me on how it works in this particular instance.