On Writing History Part 1: Weekly Writing Prompt

Writing History for Fact and Fiction: Part 1

Historic Downtown Austin! Some of these buildings are over 80 years old.
"No! Surely not! No one was alive then!"

Yesterday I met up with a friend of mine in Austin, Texas for a writing day.

I like one-on-one time with writing friends because we get to re-explore the passion we have for our works. We mostly used the time we had to throw ideas and obstacles at each other and see what all we came up with. My biggest problem I was facing was getting hung up on details in my Western, resolving side-plots in my Fantasy, and making sure my exposition and setting have a point in my Urban Fantasy.

My friend's major problem was not knowing how much history to include in her work as she was writing it. More specifically, she asked me for my opinion on focusing on the history at all as she was writing the first draft.

For most writers, engineering a fictional history, knowing about factual history, or altering the course of history are a huge part of world-building. At some point, all writers will have to deal with history. That's why today's post and writing prompt are all about how we deal with history as writers of fiction and non-fiction.

The Realities of History

Another dear friend of mine is currently undergoing the life-altering and mind-numbing procedure of the PhD track at Yale. She specializes in Early Modern England (what we usually refer to as much of the Eighteenth Century in a vastly oversimplified explanation). 

Last week she and I discussed the importance of the general public's acceptance that historians' work is still relevant and important because of how much we just don't know about the past. In our opinion, a swath of pop culture, mass culture, and the general public view history as a moot point, and thanks to networks like National Geographic and Discovery (no real slight intended) the 20% of what is actually known about history is often taken by the pop, mass, and general population as 100% of what is actually known, leading many to question the necessity and relevance of things like studying textiles and dyes--and their manufacture--in the Eighteenth Century. 

Because of how little is actually known about these things (and many others), it is vitally important to understand the history of certain things in order to perhaps enlighten our current understanding.  

Case Study: The History of Ancient Egypt

3,500 years ago, there were five major dynasties that characterized the historical (not religious) rule of what we call Ancient Egypt. Each of those dynasties were punctuated by Intermediate Periods in which dynastic rule by indigenous Egyptians was disrupted. This has contributed to a near-complete lack of understanding and standardized method of Egyptian mummification. Despite what many network television documentaries would lead us to believe, we still do not fully understand the Ancient Egyptian civilization. In the last ten years, we have seen major upheavals to what was accepted as common knowledge about that civilization--from the way we have been interpreting their language to their mortuary cults (to all the knights errant reading this, I actually didn't pull this one out of thin air--I researched Egyptian dynastic rulers while I was doing my "Oh My Ra!" Series on Dark Corners. I apologize for the lost pictures). 

Despite the Egyptian iconography, this mummy was in fact interred during the Greco-Roman
occupation of Egypt, as can be seen from the geometric design of the wrappings on the face.
A little history goes a long way.

There are a number of reasons and theories behind the sheer drought of knowledge we have on the Egyptian mortuary cults: 1) though written language was a thing in Ancient Egypt, it is possible that because of the industry of mortuary practices (see my blog post) it is likely that embalming techniques were passed down from master to apprentice, meaning much of it was never written out; 2) politics and economic class had a great deal to do with how embalming was being performed overall and how much the deceased family could afford to pay for your comfort in the afterlife; 3) because Intermediate Periods lasted upwards of several centuries, it's possible that many practices fell by the way side, and short lifespans meant that some masters of the mortuary practices took their skills with them to the grave.

In presenting what information we do have down pat to the general public, network documentaries often utilize the 80/20 rule: they use the 20% of our actual knowledge of the Egyptian Civilization to represent 80% of the story they are trying to tell--and all documentaries are telling a story, whether it's the story of the Battle of Gettysburg or the story of King Amenhotep. The difference between telling a fictional story for television and telling a historical story for television is one group of writers makes up the entire plot while the other set of writers condenses broad facts about a topic into interesting and engaging content that is easily digested in about an hour to answer an equally broad-spectrum question.

What we as writers want to know is how to use the 80/20 rule of history to our advantage.

The 80/20 Rule in World-Building

The 80/20 rule is perhaps the most time-saving and useful tool in any business, development, and writing work flow. In many cases, the most efficient use of time is making sure that you are using 20% of what you have (be it knowledge of history or Photoshop) to do 80% of your work. 

Building the history your world is as important as building economic structures, magic, science, and religion. However, as you wrote your outline, got your characters together, and named your cities, things like history might have been after thoughts. Writing fantasy, urban fantasy, and historical fiction, your world is based around magic, religion, science, politics, economics, etc. You might think history can be glossed over as a matter of un-importance.

However, in the known universe of mankind, religion, history, art, and science often go hand-in-hand, inseparable from each other, each being informed by the politics of the age and place, and each being acted upon by those in power or those owning wealth, each of those individuals a possible character in a larger world. Without knowing at least as much history as you need to begin writing, it will be impossible to write out events in an order that makes sense as you tell yourself the story in your first draft. Yet getting hung up on the details of that history could ruin your motivation to keep going, as your need to do research outweighs your need to put words down on paper.

Obviously there has to be some idea of how history is going to be played out, or how it has already played out, as you are writing. But how do we keep ourselves from being distracted when we should be, say, focusing on a truly epic shoot-out in Fort Stockton? How do we write the best first draft possible without stressing over whether or not your story is set in 1897 but you forgot about the railroad?

(No, no, I'm fine--really)

This is where the 80/20 rule comes into play. I'm writing a Western. I know that in 1897, people used horses as a mode of transportation in rural Texas. I know that the Colt revolver was a common weapon. I know that people rode railroad trains between far-flung towns. 

I know just enough about the Colt revolver to know that you pull back on the hammer to cock it, squeeze the trigger to fire it, and it does a lot of damage. I also know what that sounds like (I've done it). What I don't need is to constantly get hung up on who has what gun and which caliber. I can handle that in edits. What I need to focus on is who is firing at who and why.

I know just enough about the railroad in 1897 to describe a train and how it operated to write a train robbery scene. I do not need to get hung up on the description of the interior cabin, the way a steam engine works, and how to stop one; I can do that in edits. What I need to do now is focus on who is robbing the train and why that's important to my story.

You can take the 20% you've come up with, or the 20% that we have collectively in our archaeological record, and use that 20% to at least get through the first draft without derailing yourself on a historical spiral that could ultimately force you to give up entirely on the story or bore you off the subject.

The 80/20 Rule in Predetermined History

The 80/20 rule also works in world-building in edits if you find yourself wading through a lifetime of historical back story that you spent a lot of time on. Though Tolkien wrote an incredible amount of history for The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson didn't even come close to using all of it in the films. In many ways, Jackson's TLotR trilogy condensed a lot of Tolkien's best history and writing into digestible pieces that were relevant to the story, but didn't bore the viewer. Though not entirely true to the books, Jackson's films utilize the 80/20 rule by using 20% of Tolkien's written and documented history and timeline for Middle Earth to do 80% of the work of building the world in which Tolkien's characters fought and died. 

This works for known historical facts and factual places as well. Writers of historical fiction may gloss over contentious points of setting and history in order to advance plot simply because they know that most readers will too if presented with that much information. Writers of historical fiction may rely on a predetermined 20% of fact in their fiction to tell a compelling story without worrying about small details that would completely derail their story and bog it down. This is what makes bridging the gap between economic classes and upward mobility vastly more interesting in Pride and Prejudice than in North and South. 

With only 42 years of difference between their respective publication dates, P&P and N&S were both anti-romance stories involving dispassionate men of dubious character and the ladies of low-rank who married them. Where Jane Austen used wealth as a means to move plot and establish class to create conflict, Elizabeth Gaskill set her story in the heart of the Industrial Revolution, taking on the rise of cotton in Northern England and the prejudices people from the North and people from the South of England expressed for each other. The plot goes everywhere as Gaskill tries to balance her goals for the novel and present the cotton industry in it's true light. Both authors had different goals, but the reason Austen endures and Gaskill does not is that Gaskill had many slow spots that went off on tangents and distracted readers of the Twentieth Century. Austen's narrative was tight and to the point--as much as Regency fiction could be said to be.

Case Study: Vlad Dracula

Vlad the III or "Drakyula", which literally means "Son of the Dragon" after his father's epithet. Vlad II adopted "Drakul" during his war with Mehmed the II when he started the Order of the Dragon. That is why Bram Stoker chose Vlad's epithet, "Dracula", as the name of the character that would go on to be the most legendary vampire in the world.

When Vlad III (called Vlad the Impaler in our history books) took the throne of Wallachia in 1448, he was surrounded by enemies, aides, and allies. His closest ally was the weak-willed and weakly-connected lord of the Holy Roman Empire, Matthias Corvinus. His chief enemy was Mehmed III, ruler of the Ottoman Empire and the son of the ruler who had killed his father and older brother, and who now imprisoned his younger half-brother, Radu. And when Fred Saberhagen wrote A Sharpness on the Neck, he recalled everything he had read about Vlad and Radu's strained relationship as he described the two legendary vampires duking it out in a blood-fueled battle for vampiric supremacy during the French Revolution. 

Yet as he wrote the story, he also had to take into account how difficult it would be for a vampire, even in 1704, to traverse the social and political turmoil of revolutionary France. At the forefront of this undertaking is a character whose past life informs his decisions also informs his feelings towards his brother.   

When Bram Stoker wrote Dracula's monologue to Jonathan Harker at the beginning of Dracula, he laid the groundwork for Saberhagen's character--though even then, Stoker could only use the history available to him at the time, and this was limited both by distance and the fact that the Eastern Bloc had only been ceded to Europe from the Ottoman Empire a century-and-a-half before. That monologue is perhaps part of Stoker's best work, and it is the first and last time we hear the story of Vlad III from the vampire's own lips, as even Dracula admitted the rest is ancient history. 

Despite having a wealth of knowledge at his disposal, Saberhagen's real genius lay in making sure his characters came first, that history merely informed his story, making the reader desperate to learn more about this incredible character (even if he was sort of dubious in real life). The reader wants to keep reading! Despite having little information, Stoker managed to create one of fiction and history's most enduring and beloved characters.

That's the important thing: using history to build a rich world while not drowning your reader in it--or accomplishing 80% of your world-building with only the most relevant and useful 20% of the information at your disposal. 

Weekly Writing Prompt

Okay, seriously, is anyone else overwhelmingly comforted by this room?

This week we're talking about using a small amount of information to make as much of an impact as possible during drafting so that we can focus on getting words down on paper. Since this week's discussion is on history, I challenge everyone to a writing prompt on a piece of history or information that you have beginner or cursory knowledge of and use it to write a 2,000 word scene. It can be any historical event, (or fictional historical event), or involve any historical (or fictional historical) person, and your job is simply to write a scene. 

This is also one of the many ways Fan Fiction is a viable tool for exploring other built worlds and having to make sure all the essentials of that world are included to prove authenticity. However, this must also be balanced with plot and character to keep new readers interested without bogging the piece down in details of the world. Remember, 2,000 words is the challenge, and every word counts!

Do not bother doing more research on your topic. Simply write what you know. In this case, writing what you know is absolutely acceptable because in many cases too much detail will be glossed over or cut, and copious research will result in no or few words being written during the most crucial phase: first drafting. 

Try not to pick something off the top of your head that you might know about. Choose a history, subject, or person, or fictional historical past of a world that you are reasonably familiar with, enough to write to the subject without worrying about further research, or making sure every single detail is absolutely perfect.

We would love to see what everyone came up with this week! Since this is just an exercise, we very much encourage you to share your piece with all of us! We think it would be fun to see how far each of us got on just a smattering of knowledge. 

Features

As always, mention that you are interested in having your piece featured in the comments section below or on this week's Writing Prompt Facebook post. An admin will respond to you within one day, and we'll send you a message via DM or email so you can submit your piece for feature. 

Next 

Next week we'll look at part 2 of writing history: delivery of historical information in your writing.

Writers Away!