Tag: research

More Thought for (Fictional) Food

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Even in the midst of fantastic (or historical, or science-fictional) adventures, your characters are going to have to stop sometimes for a bite to eat.

The late Diana Wynne Jones, in her Tough Guide to Fantasyland, speaks eloquently of the Stew that appears to be the only menu item available in so many of the realm’s inns and taverns.  There’s a certain logic to the idea — if you’re going to be serving hot food at all hours of the day in pre-industrial conditions, a pot of something that can be kept at a low simmer over a slow fire makes a certain amount of sense.  So does going in the opposite direction, with things that can be deep-fried or stir-fried in a hurry when they’re ordered, but it’s not often that you get a party of hungry treasure-seekers settling down at the local tavern for a plate of assorted fried stuff.

(Not chicken, though.  Time was, when any chicken that made it to the dining table was likely to be a stewing hen, retired from the egg-producing game because of age and likely to be tough as an old boot unless given the slow-simmer Stew treatment.  Fried chicken was a luxury, since it required the sacrifice of a young hen still in her egg-producing years.  It’s only in the decades since the middle of the twentieth century that chicken has become cheap and mass-produced.)

But if your characters are going to sit down to a good bowl of Stew, take at least a minute or two to consider exactly what makes that particular stew different from another stew in another place and season.

If it’s a meat stew, what kind of meat is it?  Beef, from a superannuated dairy cow?  Beef, from cattle raised for meat?  Was it purchased from a butcher shop — are they in a town that has a butcher shop, then? — or was the animal raised by the innkeeper and then slaughtered?  Or are your characters travelling through wool-producing country, where the common meat is likely to be mutton or lamb?  Or are they on the edge of the wilderness, where wild game is the commonest meat?

Are your characters traveling through a dairying region, where butter is the common cooking fat?  Or are they in olive oil country?  Or do the local cooks use chicken fat, or lard?

And what time of year is it?  Is it winter?  Before canning (a 19th-century innovation) and before reliable refrigeration (the 20th century), there were no out-of-season vegetables to put into those stews.  Wintertime meals would feature the kind of root vegetables that could be kept in cool dark places until spring — turnips, hard squashes, yellow onions, potatoes — or vegetables that could be dried or salted or pickled (sauerkraut, kim chee, parched corn, dried beans.)  Fresh greens wouldn’t show up again until the coming of spring.

Research — here I am, beating that drum again! — can help you keep your travelers’ tavern meals from becoming bland and generic.

It All Counts for Research, Right?

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Today’s entry in the “everything is grist for the writer’s mill” department:  a decidedly NSFW illustrated article on a 1680 sex manual that even shocked Samuel Pepys.  (But he read it anyway, the horndog.)

For the prurient or dedicated researcher — not that the two are necessarily mutually exclusive — the article includes a link to the full version of the text as digitized on Google Books.  Because you never can tell what you might need to know someday.

On Writing Forsoothly

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“Writing forsoothly” is the term we like to use around the house for all the different varieties of bad pseudo-archaic diction that infest modern fantasy — historical and created-world fantasy in particular.  J. R. R. Tolkien is undoubtedly to blame for a lot of it, because his characters do like their elevated language; what unobservant readers miss is the way that Tolkien modulates his characters’ dialogue, moving effortlessly from plain vernacular to almost-archaic high formal speech and back again, depending upon the situation and the company.  Strider the Ranger has a much commoner way of talking than Aragorn the Heir to the Throne of Gondor, but at the same time they’re both recognizably the same guy.

It’s probably unwise to play with writing in extreme forsoothly unless you can at least approach Tolkien’s level of skill and language-awareness.  It’s a lot harder to do than it looks, and the failure mode is dire.  But if you’re determined to give it a try — and nobody ever makes any progress in this game unless they regularly try things that they aren’t certain will work — there are a few things it will help to do first.

One:  Ask yourself, “Is this really the direction my writing talent lies in?” and answer it honestly.  If your interior Magic 8-Ball refuses to yield up anything more specific than “reply hazy; ask again later,” find a kind but honest friend and ask them.  Kind, because you don’t want your self-image pulled down and stomped upon with hobnailed boots; and honest, because you’re not asking them for sympathy, you’re asking them for the truth.

Two:  Prepare yourself.  Read genuine period or formal writing until it dribbles out of your ears.  If you start talking in Shakespearean or Regency English at the breakfast table, you’re probably ready.  And a good thing, too, because at that point your friends and family are either bored stiff with your project, or convinced that you’re going nuts.

Three: Stop researching and write.  Don’t worry about getting all the nuances down perfectly; you can always polish the heck out of the language in your second — or third or fourth or fifth — draft.

Four:  Go find that kind but honest friend again.  This time, ask them if the archaic or formal language in fact worked; and ask them, also, whether they think you got it right but took it too far.  As with so many other things in writing, a light hand is best.

(For an interesting example of archaic diction done well in an unexpected venue, check out the historical romance For My Lady’s Heart, by Laura Kinsale, now available again in e-book format after a long while out of print.)

Tech Notes

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I’ve written before about the issue of buried or implied technology in language.

But there’s another technology-related question that writers–especially writers of created-world fantasy– need to be aware of:  What is the general tech level of your story?

A lot of created-world fantasy takes place in a pre-industrial setting.  (Steampunk is perhaps the most obvious exception, but only if you consider steampunk to be a species of fantasy rather than a species of science fiction — a question upon which opinion is divided.)  “Pre-industrial”, though, covers a lot of ground.  Do you mean pre-gunpowder?  Pre-clockwork?  Pre-mass production and interchangeable parts?  Does your society have steam engines or water wheels?  Spinning wheels or drop spindles?  Is your hero’s sword steel or bronze?  Is his armor plate or chain or boiled leather?  Does he pay the swordsmith in barter or with coin?  Does his banker know about letters of credit and double-entry book-keeping?  Has banking even been invented yet?

You need to think about all of these things if you’re not going to have your story taking place in an ersatz-medieval RennFaire fantasyland — and you need to make certain that your tech levels match across the board.

(Yes.  This means that you have to do research if you’re going to write fantasy.  Books like The Timelines of History and television programs like the old BBC Connections series are a good place to start.)

Getting There

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Fantastic and historical fiction is full of journeys, quests, hot pursuits, and other assorted road trips — sometimes with magical assistance, and sometimes not.

It’s with the “not” that things can get difficult, because a lot of modern-day writers don’t have anything like a working knowledge of any kind of travel that doesn’t involve an internal combustion engine and a four-lane divided highway.  Doing research can be tricky, too, because while modern-day horse people (and trail hikers and dogsled racers and people who raise and train yokes of oxen for fun) are almost always delighted to share their specialized knowledge, a lot of the time it can be like asking a NASCAR driver or a rally enthusiast, “How many days would it take me to drive from Podunk to Ashtabula?”

You’ll get an answer, all right, but it may well be so full of qualifying details that you can’t sort out the single thing you really need to know, or so far out there on the extreme performance end that an ordinary mortal wouldn’t have a chance of coming near it.  These people are all highly-qualified experts driving perfectly-maintained, high-end machines, and all you really want to know is roughly how long it would take an ordinary Joe or Jane driving a plain vanilla sedan with an automatic transmission and 50,000 miles on the odometer.

(I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that once horses stopped being a means of transportation and became a hobby, the equine equivalent of the midrange family car with automatic transmission and cruise control started fading out of the picture.)

Nevertheless, you have to try.  Criticism of fantasy, both from within and from without the genre, has already said a lot of true and cutting things about fantasy horses that are functionally indistinguishable from motorcycles; you don’t want to provide the critics with yet more ammunition.

For some help on that, you could do worse than to read this LiveJournal post, here — also the comments, which contain much additional useful information.

Another Neat Thing They’re Doing

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Scholars are using computers “to help reassemble more than 100,000 document fragments collected across 1,000 years that reveal details of Jewish life along the Mediterranean” — a task that previously had to be done by eye and hand.

A lot of the documents retrieved so far deal with the minutiae of daily life:  contracts and sales records and legal documents and even recipes.  For a historian, and even more for writers who are trying to recreate history for their readers, such details are golden, worth far more, sometimes, than the word about who defeated whom on the battlefield, and where.

(I’d be particularly interested to know the ingredients and techniques involved in what the article describes as a “particularly vile” recipe for honey-wine.  Purely as a matter of academic curiosity, you understand.)

 

Too Much of a Good Thing

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As I said in my previous post, there’s another big way in which description and scene-setting can go wrong, and that’s through a superabundance of detail.

You don’t want to describe too much of the scene, forcing your readers to tally up detail upon detail.  With no way to sort out the important details from the unimportant ones, the readers get swamped, unable to build a convincing mental picture out of the material supplied.  A handful of judiciously-chosen details, on the other hand, will give your reader the seed crystals from which they can grow their own settings and scenery.

A version of the handful-of-details technique is useful for historical or alternate-historical fiction as well.  You don’t have to have to give your readers all the information you could possibly gather about everything in the period you’re writing about.  Give them enough interesting and world-illuminating details, and let them do the rest of the work.  And nobody but you needs to know that you’ve structured the description around the interesting details you were able to collect, rather than researching every possible detail that the description might possibly include.

But because you’re relying upon your readers to do their share of the work in the matter of world-building and scene-setting, you don’t want to give them more of a burden than they can carry.  Every time they have to stop and recompile the scene in their heads to incorporate yet more details, you run the risk of losing them for good.

More from the Department of Nifty Stuff

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Because writers, as I’ve observed before, are intellectual packrats who gather up odd bits of information just in case they may need one of them someday:  The scholarly hairdresser who figured out how to do the Vestal Virgins’ seven-braid hairdo also takes on 18th-19th century papillote curls — the “curling-papers” we read about in period fiction.

When I googled on “papillote curls” to retrieve the link, I also found links to blogs where other recreationists have gone on to try the process themselves, which is how I learned that the process works best on hair that hasn’t been washed for a day or so — “every day” hair-washing being a mostly 20th-century innovation.  And in the “everything is connected to everything else” department, I liked the hairdresser’s comment that this particular style and curling method didn’t become popular until technology had advanced enough for paper to become relatively cheap.

More Neat Stuff

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Regency and Napoleonic-era fans and writers take note:  Google Books now has La Belle Assemblée, Volume 2 (January through June, 1807) available on-line and as a PDF download.

Also neat, though not Napoleonic:  Boston viewed from the air, in 1860.

The Return of the Intellectual Packrat

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By way of apologia for having been Away From Keyboard for a couple of days, have a couple of nifty research sites.

The Memoirs of Pascal Bonenfant.  The site name notwithstanding, this isn’t actually anybody’s memoirs; rather, it’s a collection of research sources and links for 18th-century social history.  There’s a database of thieves’ cant, and a page with recipes from a period pharmacopoeia (I really want to know what the “Powder of Millepedes” — Take Millepedes prepared 12 grains; Saffron 3 grains; Flower of Benjamin, Salt of Amber, each 2 grains; Ginger 1 grain; Oil of Aniseed 1 drop; Bring all to a Powder — was supposed to be prescribed for), a “List of the Flying Coaches, Stage Coaches, Waggons, and Carriers” going in and out of London in 1721, and a plethora of other fascinating things.

And then there’s the Food Timeline page.  If you want to find out the wholesale price of wheat in Philadelphia in July of 1762 (5.5 shillings the bushel), or the cost of a  Thanksgiving turkey in New Jersey in 1931 (39¢ a pound), this is the place to look.

Because if you really want to write about the past and make it real for your readers, you don’t just want the wars and the politics.  You want the food and the drink and the furniture of everyday life as well.