Historical fantasy - a sort of informal not-quite-poll/discussion

[jessicasteiner]

I've been having some really interesting discussion with a fellow writer who stumbled upon a post I had made about a future project - the steampunk AU set in Sengoku era Japan that I've been poking at for a while. It's made me think - and rethink - a lot of what I'm doing.

I have to admit that historical fantasy is a subgenre that I've only lightly explored. For a long time, I wasn't interested, but over the last 5 years I've become a fan of several writers in the genre. I'm not up on all that the subgenre has to offer, though I've thoroughly enjoyed what I have read, enough that I want to try my hand at it.

So I have a question or two to toss out there, and I'm going to start with this one:

When making changes to create the alternate universe, how far do you need to go in following the changes you make? How far back do you go? How many countries should you trace the changes back? How permissible is it to handwave, fudge, and pick an arbitrary point at which "everything is the same" and then follow it forward?

The world is pretty interconnected, not just now in the internet age. Changes in one country, specially big changes, will affect the history of any country they traded with, bordered on, or conquered. As a writer, do you need to follow the changes through all the linkages, even if those countries aren't going to appear in your series?

Comments

[layla]

I really enjoy historical fantasy and alternate history, and I'd say my answer is (unhelpfully) "as much as you need to and want to". :D That is, if you love following all the different bunny trails backwards and forwards, inventing conlangs and figuring out what happened to minor historical figures in the alt reality, then go for it; the story will be richer for it. But if you're not really into that, then I'd say it's perfectly fine to do the minimum that you need to do for the parts of the world/historical eras that will be dealt with in what you're writing, and invent details on the fly if you have to touch on other ramifications of the altered events. As long as you don't directly contradict yourself, I don't think readers can tell the difference between the two approaches in any case.

It's sort of like starting out with your character's entire backstory and every exhaustive detail of what they like to read/eat/wear, versus starting with some basic character traits and letting them unfold as you write them. Some writers prefer one way, some like the other way, but there's not a one-size-fits-all solution for every author; it's just a matter of what works best for the individual.

/my 2 cents

[jessicasteiner]

To be honest, that IS helpful, because it confirms what my feeling was to begin with.

I know Naomi Novik probably figured out every freakin' country in the world, for the Temeraire series, because she actually GOES there. But also she has a Masters degree in the Napoleonic era.

I've also read Scott Westerfeld, and it seems to me that he knows pretty much everything about first world war era Europe and Middle East, but I'm not sure he worried about other parts of the world outside of that. And it seems to me like he did the handwavey "everything in history was pretty much the same until this point, but with meat airships and giant robots"

[layla]

See, I'd put Novik in the same seat-of-the-pants category, because I don't really get the impression that she worked backward much at all from the Napoleonic Wars, or thought much about the world outside Europe as of the first book. I get the impression that she started with "Napoleonic Wars with dragons" and then has worked outward from there as she's written the books. I'm not saying her worldbuilding isn't impressive (actually, it's maybe MORE impressive to do it on the fly and keep it internally consistent); it's just that I'd put her pretty solidly in the category of authors who seem to be figuring it out as they go along. One of the main things that makes me think she's doing it seat of the pants style is that history is already diverging pretty significantly from what we know, given the events of the books, but doesn't seem to have diverged all that much beforehand due to the presence of dragons.

As an example of the opposite approach, though, I suspect Kate Elliot HAD to have worked out a tremendous amount of historical and cultural detail for her Cold Magic series before ever touching pen to paper, because her modern Africa/Britain fusion is really really different from history as we know it -- it's not modern Britain with a few twists, but an almost unrecognizable country located where Britain is in our world, yet it's plausibly derived from early Britain with a very different historic trajectory. It's so radically different that I don't know how she could have written it without having a great deal of detail planned out beforehand, not just about Britain but about cultural, social and political details of countries elsewhere as well.

These are just guesses, though; I really do think that you can't accurately work out the details of the writing process just from reading the finished book! I read an interview recently with a mystery writer -- unfortunately I can't remember who it was off the top of my head, but she mentioned that she never plots her books beforehand, just starts writing ... and my reaction was a stunned "REALLY?!", because her books seem so meticulously plotted that I never would have guessed she doesn't have all the twists planned beforehand.

[jessicasteiner]

Ahh, well I didn't mean to exclude Novik from that category when I was talking about Westerfeld. I wasn't very clear about that. I remember reading somewhere that she had planned it as 7 books, but I don't know at which point that plan actually formed, or how much detail the plan has been. It's quite possible that she's pantsing it XD

I'm not familiar with Kate Elliot, but that sounds pretty interesting :|a

I've heard of quite a few people who have no idea what they're going to do before they start writing, and who just are pretty good at grabbing at some thread they left danging 3 books ago and using it as fodder to get themselves out of a plot jam. I just listened to an interview by Glen Cook where he talked about that, and apparently his books are really complex, but he just writes without much of an idea in mind at all.