I’m getting critiques back about the first 50 pages of my second draft. Responses are mostly positive: definitely still needs work but it’s evidently it’s a compelling read.
Most of my critique partners aren’t historical fiction enthusiasts so I find their input valuable re: possible cross-genre appeal. One even said that though she’s not a history buff she’d read my book for the alchemy and magic alone.
I never thought I read historical fiction as a child, at least in the “pure” Dorothy Dunnett/Philippa Gregory/Margaret George mold. I preferred “real history” (I cringe at my childhood snobbiness). But after this discussion it occurred to me: I was reading histfic all along. I just found it in other genres.
Take Anne Rice. I was a teenage goth so of course I read and reread her Vampire Chronicles and Mayfair Witches series. Rice typically falls on the horror/fantasy but Lestat and co. survive through pre-revolutionary France and antebellum New Orleans; the Mayfair family moves from England through to the Caribbean and thence to the New World over five centuries.
My carefully preserved Anne Rice novels from yonks ago. Many hours spent in line to get them signed.
Octavia Butler’s Kindred also stuck with me. Time travel puts this sobering read squarely in the sci-fi box but Butler’s nuanced depiction of slavery in the American south suggests painstaking research of the type associated with the best historical fiction.
Kage Baker’s Company series goes everywhen: Tudor England (Baker taught Elizabethan English as a second language and it shows) to 17th century Spanish California to the 19th century old west and elsewhere…with time-traveling, historical-artifact-saving cyborgs.
M. J. Rose’s Seduction is a fictional account of Victor Hugo’s seances in search of his daughter’s ghost. Witch of Painted Sorrows involves fin de siècle Parisian occultism and possession.
Deborah Harkness’ All Souls Trilogy has it all: witches, vampires, werewolves, and time travel
The sci fi and fantasy genres jumped on serialized fiction awhile back, but with Julian Fellowes’s Belgravia and SerialBox’s Whitehall it seems historical fiction is finally getting in on the act. Looking forward to both and seeing if this presentation format proves popular.
Hadn’t heard of Carlo Gesualdo until news about a one-man play about his life popped up in my Google alerts. Pity it’s not local – Gesualdo’s messy story of musical genius, vicious murder, and alleged sorcery is fantastic storytelling fuel!
The Historical Novel Project(TM) is creating a number of writing challenges that are above my pay grade, but it’s not the believable characterization, compression/abbreviation of real historical events or the need for creating an accurate world that intimidates me.
I think the hardest thing I’m going to have to describe is the mental state of a character who is slowly developing visual/auditory hallucinations through a combination of stress and overwork. I need to sell his slow decline to a modern reading audience while:
limiting myself to 16th century vernacular, as they didn’t have a vocabulary for mental illness the way we do
convincing the reader that the character does not realize he’s going mad – he thinks these visions are real
making it clear that there is no “voice of sanity” – everyone around him believes his visions are real too, and some actively encourage them
that in the context of the time/place this assumption makes sense.
This requires a huge amount of research. Not that I mind, but it’s hard to find sources for exactly the situation I’m trying to convey.
At the suggestion of my new historian acquaintance, I got a copy of highlights from The Anatomy of Melancholy, to get some idea of what language 16th/17th century people used to describe mental/emotional distress. I’ve also picked up Carl Jung’s Red Book, because though he does use modern psychiatric language it’s the only documentation I can find by someone who realized he was having a psychotic break but chose to interact with his hallucinations.
It’s also revealing the need for a lot of context about the mindset of the late Renaissance, when the scientific method was just being developed and a lot of superstition (such as the belief that it was possible and expected to talk to spirits) was still accepted as fact.
