This week, we finally managed to install our new (not new ) item of furniture - a mid-18th Century grandfather clock. It's not bright and shiny like more modern ones, but a dark oak with a warm patina which the beeswax polish is drawing out. In order to set it up, we had to do a certain amount of research - how to hang the pendulum, where the weight went on the endless chain - and it got me thinking... where and when did certain divisions of time come from? The time periods which I have written either had household clocks or didn't, I have not written novels from the time of their invention. Clocks have been around for a long time, and the obsession with measuring time in an ordered fashion dates back to at least the ancient Sumerians. It was they who established a circular reading of time and, I imagine, the sixty seconds/minutes came about as much because it was an easy way to divide a circle as anything else. But it wasn't until much later that the precision of seconds ...
This week's curator on the @WeeklyScribe account is E.L. Lyons (@Lyons_Pen), author of Starlight Jewel. Here is her writing advice on drawing from history to incorporate into fantasy...
When writing fantasy, the magic system always seems to be at the forefront of attention. Wands and dragons and spells are exciting. But when writing epic fantasy, where you’re creating a whole world different from ours, history is essential to grounding that magic and those cultures to make them seem real. If the history doesn’t feel real, or the world seems like it’s just starting, it gives the entire environment an inauthentic feeling.
Contrast this with the terrible E word… Exposition. The one thing that no fantasy author wants to be accused of. You have to craft your world’s history, lace it with magic, and then you can’t even tell your reader about it. But you also have to make sure they know it’s there.
I’ve learned a lot of hard lessons about this delicate balance with Starlight Jewel. One reason it took me near two years to edit it, is because beta readers weren’t grasping my history. It was there, I had crafted it, I’d even woven it in delicately, but readers were confused about who exactly the “Ashites” were. They were the indigenous people of the country of Norge. Historically, they ruled a small portion of the country, then there was a little war, and the Norgans overthrew them, incorporating the Ashite lands as a part of their pre-existing larger nation. Some Ashites are still living in Norge, plotting to take back their country after a couple centuries of recuperating.
There. I explained it. Quick and easy right? But it’s exposition. Even if it’s not a huge chunk of exposition, the main problem with the terrible E, is that it isn’t memorable. Readers will forget the history if you tell them. If not in the next three pages, they’ll forget it three chapters. If I say something once in a 494-page book, it’s just going to get lost in a sea of words.
So how do you weave in history? I ended up doing it in a lot of small ways—characters talking at the gravesite of a king, books from historical peoples, a painting of a general from an old war, references to what certain buildings or rooms had been used for in previous societies, artifacts, and referencing past events in comparison to current ones. But these can’t just be random snippets, they have to be relevant to the plot and characters. They also have to string together a clear and coherent history that’s interesting, which often means condensing the historical events/people/culture into something a little more tightly connected that real history.
If you can manage this, then your world’s history will be more memorable and engaging. I’m certainly no Tolkien, but if the difference in understanding and reaction from my first round of beta readers to my last round of beta readers is to be believed, I did good sneaking the history in.Starlight Jewel
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