Latest / Mythmakers / Historical v. Fantasy Fiction

Transcript

Historical v. Fantasy Fiction · Mythmakers

• 0:00
  Hello and welcome to MythMakers. MythMakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creators
• 0:12
  brought to you by the Oxford Centre for fantasy. My name is Julia Golden. I'm an author but I also
• 0:19
  direct the centre. And the theme of today's podcast is one that faces quite a few of us as we go
• 0:26
  through our writing careers. And that is what exactly is the difference between writing something
• 0:32
  which is a fantasy and something which is in another genre like historical. And as I've had
• 0:39
  experienced a writing both, I thought it would be a good moment to stop pause and have a think
• 0:44
  about this now. When we look to the writers who inspired our centre that's primarily the
• 0:52
  inklings. So J.R.R. Tolkien for example, they were great lovers of historical literature. That's
• 0:59
  what they're dedicating their life to teaching by which I mean literature from the past. And this
• 1:07
  led Tolkien himself at one stage to frame his idea for the Silmarillion and the Lord of the Rings
• 1:16
  as a mythology for England. Though scholars are now saying that he actually moved away from
• 1:22
  that framing to one where he thought about it being held together by the framing devices,
• 1:28
  the red book. But clearly in his thinking at some stage there was this idea of
• 1:35
  it providing material which could be a sort of story, a historical story or a set of legends
• 1:42
  which people in the Northern Europe could relate to. And then looking over at C.S. Lewis,
• 1:51
  he flips this whole idea because what he does in his Narnia series and remember he calls them
• 1:59
  chronicles which is a very, you know, historical term, chronicling the times. He flips that so that
• 2:07
  we get a cradle from grave history of Narnia. So not in order in which they were written but in order
• 2:16
  of the timeline you start with the creation story in the Magician's nephew and you go to the
• 2:22
  end time story in the last battle. So for them the idea of a historical fantasy is definitely part
• 2:32
  of what they are writing. And I'm sure sitting there you can think of your own fantasy epic
• 2:40
  which has the feel of being a history, be it the June stories by Frank Herbert or maybe shooting
• 2:50
  ourselves into the future you could think of the various Star Trek timelines which are very
• 2:55
  careful to put themselves within certain points along an imagined historical set of events.
• 3:05
  But I thought as a writer in both genres I'd have a time here to think about what is going on
• 3:13
  when you do both what are the similarities and what are the differences. And this is part
• 3:18
  inspired by the fact that my book that's out this week is called a book it's called The Persephone
• 3:26
  Code and by me that's Julia Golding and this is a puzzle thriller set in Regency England. So
• 3:35
  that's the same time as the Bridgetons though perhaps it's another podcast to think how fantastical
• 3:42
  the Bridgetons are that would be an interesting subject wouldn't it.
• 3:45
  Anyway so in the Persephone Code which my publishers are calling Dan Brown meets
• 3:52
  Bridgeton in that way publishers do I am drawing on both historical facts but I'm also inventing
• 3:58
  a lot within a certain set of rules. So moving aside from the Persephone Code which is what I've
• 4:06
  been thinking about most recently I wanted to think about the basic level of what we're doing
• 4:12
  when we do fiction so if you're out there thinking of your screenplay or your novel or whatever
• 4:18
  even if you're doing the most gritty kind of kitchen sink drama type thing no flourishes
• 4:26
  stripped back you are still doing that basic job of fiction of making stuff up because if not
• 4:32
  you would be writing nonfiction wouldn't you. So everything in a way is an imagination it is our
• 4:39
  fantasy of what somebody else's life is like so let's agree that fiction is fictional that's not
• 4:47
  so tough is it but we've got to move on now to actually deep to look deeper into what's going on
• 4:55
  in the genres of historical fiction and fantasy. So the first place I want to stop is
• 5:02
  at world building now if you've done any of our fantasy courses or maybe a course elsewhere
• 5:09
  you'll know that world building is thought of as a peculiar peculiarly a skill that goes with
• 5:15
  writing fantasy actually it also goes with writing historical fiction because what you first do
• 5:24
  when you're thinking of writing a historical book of course is you do your research to build up
• 5:29
  the world in your head. Now that is a delight I mean I love research that's really the joy
• 5:40
  for me of writing historical fiction is the research I've been very fortunate to be able to spend
• 5:46
  quite a few years in academia and I did a doctorate at Oxford University in the literature of the
• 5:52
  romantic period which is for those of you who want dates that's thought of as being from about
• 5:59
  1792 about the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign so it includes the Regency period
• 6:07
  and studying a period of literature like that in great depth over years to write a sort of
• 6:15
  academic piece of work means that you kind of get all the it's like becoming native to that period
• 6:23
  you get a general grounding in it so you could almost move in in your mental tardis you can go back
• 6:29
  and step out and feel that you've got a grasp on the events of that world so when I was writing
• 6:34
  the Persephone code which is very specifically set in 1812 I felt I knew the characters who else
• 6:42
  was out there doesn't mean that I can't always discover new facts but I was already invested in
• 6:50
  building that world by the work I done earlier and of course it's to a certain extent a similar job
• 6:59
  to what a fantasy world building exercises like you may of course take you know historical
• 7:08
  examples to help you get grips of something I did this when I wrote a YA book set in another world
• 7:19
  it's a second part of a trilogy and it's called The Glass Swallow I decided that my main male
• 7:27
  character would be a falconer and in order to make that feel believable within the context of that
• 7:34
  world I went and did a falcon flying course because the bird itself is the same even in a falcon
• 7:40
  in in another world so I wanted to know about how you fed them how you looked after them how you
• 7:46
  flew them the molting cycle was those kind of things so it's like doing historical research
• 7:54
  and conversely when I was writing a book set in the First World War so this is a straightforward
• 8:02
  historical novel for a YA audience and this book is called Dawn on the one of my pen names
• 8:09
  Eve Edwards if the world were like a sleep number mattress everything would adapt for your comfort
• 8:16
  because as your life changes and your body changes sleep number mattresses adapt and shift
• 8:21
  to give you personalized comfort night after night and now everything's on sale during our
• 8:26
  Memorial Day event save up to $1,200 on mattresses for a limited time to experience a whole new world
• 8:32
  of comfort visit a sleep number store or go to sleepnumber.com sleep number to a good life sleep
• 8:40
  I was had a character who was a First World War pilot this is in the very early days of flight so
• 8:49
  nothing at all like our experience of flying in a you know a air bus or a Boeing and so I looked
• 8:57
  up and the chance to go on a flight in a tiger moth which is one of the few airworthy planes
• 9:05
  from around that time that I could get a flight in it's an open canopy biplane so you've got
• 9:13
  the sense of the sounds and the the physicality of flying so that really helped my research there so
• 9:22
  be it historical of fantasy research if you can get the real experience then that is gold you know
• 9:31
  that is absolutely gold and then of course the other thing about world building for a historical
• 9:39
  novel is that you get the chance to visit the actual locations very often so if you're writing a
• 9:46
  book about ancient Rome you're going to book a plane ticket and go to Rome and so on in the case of
• 9:51
  the Persephone code it was actually one of the locations that really inspired the book because at the
• 9:57
  heart of the Persephone code is the Health Fire Club which was a sort of secret society that started
• 10:05
  in the 18th century that used to have very risque parties and sort of blasphemous darker undertones
• 10:14
  and whether used to party it's not so very far from where I lived out there's a set of caves near
• 10:20
  high Wycombe that's where James Corden comes from by the way in a place called West Wycombe
• 10:26
  at the village next door and there's a series of caves and in those caves they used to hold parties
• 10:33
  and in fact I'm going to hold the book launch for this book shortly in that cave so you know
• 10:39
  what could be better they hopefully we won't be doing the blasphemous and illegal activities
• 10:44
  that the Health Fire Club used to do at least I'll try and keep my guests under control so visiting
• 10:51
  locations is obviously you know a real godsend for writing historical fiction because you get a
• 10:58
  sense again of the place the layer of the land the history of why things are in a certain place that
• 11:06
  real sense of groundedness in a world but let's not separate fantasy too much from this because in fact
• 11:14
  very often someone who's setting a fantasy in a particular place be it a wood or a desert will have
• 11:21
  their real world experiences behind that the what it feels like to live in a desert for example
• 11:27
  going back to June it's you know you would go to the Sahara or somewhere like that or look at
• 11:34
  the practices of the Bedouin or other people who live in those environments and use those as the
• 11:39
  grounding for your fantasy I can't really think of a completely untethered to real experience
• 11:46
  fantasy world I guess maybe Parallandra, C.S. Lewis is imagining of what Venus is like it is
• 11:54
  quite close to that but on the whole even in sci-fi at the heart of it there is some
• 12:02
  experience that you can point to in our world because otherwise it's incredibly hard to imagine
• 12:09
  maybe some of the versions of this that go into some sort of digital other world
• 12:15
  like the multiverse in the Marvel Universe maybe that's edging that way so something where we don't
• 12:21
  have any groundings I don't know it's quite an interesting one to think through because it's very
• 12:26
  hard for us to really imagine something unique it's usually elements that we've drawn from what we've
• 12:35
  experienced and this goes to remind me of something that Margaret Atwood said she calls her works
• 12:44
  of on the fantasy end of the spectrum speculative fiction and she makes the point that nothing
• 12:53
  that she puts in her work has not happened somewhere in the world at some point into a reversion
• 12:58
  of it and if you think about how much often how often these days the handmade's tale is being
• 13:04
  referenced as part of the political discussion around abortion and birth rights in America you can
• 13:13
  see how there's this sort of play between real world and fantasy in that particular case
• 13:21
  so where historical and fantasy do differ I would say is when it comes to magic because that
• 13:29
  magic is like introducing another Newtonian law so whereas historical world has its function where
• 13:40
  everything is what we experience life to be like adding magic is like inventing yet another law
• 13:48
  where magic is part of the experience so the question you're asking yourself as a right of
• 13:55
  historical fiction is could this plausibly happen in this historical context so there are two sort
• 14:04
  of main camps on this one is where you're writing in the gaps of history and inventing characters
• 14:09
  and events that's kind of what I prefer to do gives me a free hand to have a romp through history
• 14:18
  or there's those who reimagine historical characters like medieval kings and queens or in Hilary
• 14:25
  Mantell's case Cromwell in the Wolf Hall that that series of three books which then were turned into
• 14:32
  successful TV series and within that you won't she will have tried to pin it everybody to something
• 14:41
  that was that she could find in her research that's her particular approach there
• 14:47
  so going back to the question the historical fiction writer is saying is could this plausibly happen
• 14:54
  is there anything here that breaks the rules of this historical moment so you're not going to get a
• 14:57
  car driving through a medieval battlefield that's just not going to happen it then immediately
• 15:04
  becomes fantasy and there are subtler things like trying not to choose language that breaks
• 15:11
  the illusion of it being set in a historical context so you don't want lots of people going
• 15:15
  around saying hey guys hi because it just doesn't feel right and I don't know if you listen to the
• 15:24
  podcast script notes which is a great podcast for people doing screenwriting they were talking
• 15:31
  recently about the Tiffany problem and the Tiffany problem is where there's a historical fact
• 15:37
  that does break the illusion of it being historical so apparently the word the name Tiffany was
• 15:43
  known in the medieval period but if you have a princess Tiffany walk into your serious medieval drama
• 15:50
  it feels as though she sounds like a disney princess or somebody from the 20th or 21st century
• 15:58
  so you would not use that as a result even though your research says it's there and you'll find
• 16:05
  other cases of this they're quite fun to come come across one of the ones which is on the edge here is
• 16:12
  the the sort of exclamation what the dickens sounds as though it must be to do a child's dickens
• 16:18
  but actually it's much older than that and you find it in Shakespeare so when that comes along
• 16:23
  you suddenly feel as though Shakespeare has done a bit of time travelling and brought it back
• 16:27
  but no it was around at the time so looking at fantasy what is the question of fantasy writer
• 16:34
  is asking herself well it's it is also could this plausibly happen but then the next part of that
• 16:44
  sentence is within the rules I've set myself in my fantasy world so again going back to the idea
• 16:52
  of magic being like another Newtonian physics law for your world once you set those laws you can't
• 16:59
  just fiddle around with them and suddenly decide that everybody can speak all languages when they
• 17:09
  haven't previously and they've been using translations you can't just you have to be consistent
• 17:14
  and another thing you can't do is you can't suddenly invent a creature that seems to have no place
• 17:20
  or rationale within the world that you are describing you have to lay the ground and have to have
• 17:28
  made the rule so it can be encompassed it is like you created your own historical context and that's
• 17:36
  probably a quite a good way to think about it talking himself thought about the way he wrote his
• 17:42
  stories as being he always felt like he was adding to a chronicle for his own world and I came across
• 17:54
  a quote for him from him recently about the future of shadow facts where he said oh yes I think shadow
• 18:03
  facts went with Gandalf on that last ship but it wasn't mentioned or it wasn't recorded in any of the
• 18:11
  stories of the time but I feel it should have happened it is almost as if he's kind of teasing us
• 18:17
  to think about the other hidden stories in the gaps so posing within his own fantasy as a historian
• 18:25
  of it who doesn't know the whole thing when of course it is his invention and when it comes to writing
• 18:33
  a historical novel versus a fantasy novel I'm not entirely sure there's a huge difference
• 18:41
  because a lot of the structuring tools that apply to historical fiction also apply to fantasy also
• 18:49
  apply to sort of real life contemporary fiction the idea of pacing and plot beats and all of that
• 18:56
  they do transfer across all of these genres and so though I've got my PhD in the world of 1812
• 19:07
  so that I have walked round in my imagination in that world when I'm writing the Persephone code
• 19:13
  I also have a kind of mindset where the world I invented for the glass swallow and dragonfly
• 19:21
  which were other world fantasies I also have a map and a set of rules and back history for places
• 19:31
  which I discover as I write and so it does feel as though um like talking did I'm becoming a
• 19:40
  historian to my own fiction which is lovely it's why why I write in some ways
• 19:46
  and then of course just talking about doing historical research it's a really valuable tool
• 19:54
  for the fans the aspiring fantasy writer because the more you know about history the more
• 20:01
  weirder and more wonderful it becomes there are things that you won't be able to think up
• 20:07
  that you will discover by a broad historical reading list which of course can become plot ideas for
• 20:14
  your historical novel but they can also give you really fresh material for that fantasy world when
• 20:20
  you convert it into some kind of fantasy plot move of trope you can come up with your equivalent
• 20:26
  of the handmaidens tale by doing your historical research so I would say just to sort of
• 20:33
  wind this up that the top tip for fantasy writers is be historical novelist of your own fantasy
• 20:45
  world go in with that mindset and see what happens now if you would like to have a look at what I've
• 20:53
  been doing in the Persephone code and do pick up a copy it's available in the US as well as in
• 21:00
  around the world it's on Kindle it's going to be an audio version but there's also a nice paperback
• 21:06
  which you know is it's my preferred delivery method when I'm reading a novel and thank you very
• 21:13
  much for listening thanks for listening to MythMakers podcast brought to you by the Oxford Center
• 21:25
  for Fantasy visit Oxford Center for Fantasy.org to join in the fun find out about our online courses
• 21:33
  in person stays in Oxford plus visit our shop for great gifts tell a friend and subscribe
• 21:40
  wherever you find your favorite podcasts worldwide
• 21:44
  if the world were like a sleep number mattress everything would adapt for your comfort
• 21:57
  because as your life changes and your body changes sleep number mattresses adapt and shift
• 22:03
  to give you personalized comfort night after night and now everything's on sale during our
• 22:08
  Memorial Day event save up to $1,200 on mattresses for a limited time to experience a whole new world
• 22:14
  of comfort visit a sleep number store or go to sleepnumber.com sleep number to a good life sleep