Call Me a Dreamer

Will this be posted in the Bittercon community, or will we be commenting on this post? I actually asked a similar question at a con earlier this year and got a great answer, so I'll have something to share Friday... :)

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jimhines.livejournal.com

But ... but I thought everything we ever needed to know was on Wikipedia!

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The terrible thing is that once you want to get beyond the wikipedia level of specificity, you're plunged into the netherworld of bibliographical references and Jstor articles that you can't even access unless you're attached to a university. Grrr. So then you put in interlibrary loan requests and wait. Just like the old days!

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Excellent, excellent topic.

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As I understand the format (this is my first time, too) we post comments to the panel, here.

I posted a notice of the panel on the Bittercon community page itself.

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lol

Edited Date: 2008-08-06 09:10 pm (UTC)

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Thank you. 8)

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Oh, my, can I relate to that.

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Thanks much.

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marycatelli

Read primary source!

Read lots and lots of primary source, even if you aren't setting a story in that particular era. Get your block knocked off so you start to get a feel for when you ought to ask questions, instead of writing what comes naturally to you.

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Ah, but that's not always easy. We may not speak the language in which the primary source was written, and those primary sources may not exist in translation into our language. Also, getting one's hands on primary sources, or translations of them, requires 1) that we know what they are or how to find them, and 2) that we can obtain access to them.

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marycatelli

Oh, this isn't for research.

There will doubtlessly be writings from various places and times in the library. Settling down to real research, this is frustrating. But at the very beginning, aspiring writers should just get a feel for history's scope and scale.

And really learn how very different people can be.

This helps with the very first step: realizing the need to do research. Like the impossibility of just extrapolating from England to Wales -- which is better than some works I have read, where a writer didn't realize that you can't just assume that 17th century Wales is like 21st century America.

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I've been fortunate enough to have as role models some very fine writers who are also historians, or is that very fine historians who are writers?

So, I know I can't just plunk a character who's just like me or my next door neighbor into a historical setting and expect that to work. Or, if I do, it had better be a time-travel story, or something similar, and the people around them had better think they're really strange and consider burning them at the stake (if it's one of those times and places). :)

But, I'm not a historian. I try to read widely, including both non-fiction history and well-written historical fiction in my reading, which I hope gives me a wide enough background to at least have a glimmering of what I don't know. But, when I'm working on a story or a novel, there's a point at which I've got all the broad strokes I need and what I really need are the day-to-day life details. Those, I find harder to get, in part, because (it seems) historians haven't always seen those things as valuable to record. In a way, I think what I'm looking for falls more into anthropology, than history, per se.

Edited Date: 2008-08-07 03:37 am (UTC)

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And really learn how very different people can be.

I think this is a really important point, especially because so much of popular history is designed to help us identify with people in other periods. E.g. a Japanese women in the Heian period wrote a poem about being sad when she miscarried, therefore miscarrying women in A.D. 900 Japan = miscarrying women in A.D. 2008. Uh-uh. People thought weird and strange things in the past (or so it seems to us), and I like reading about these differences.

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I asked this question at RavenCon this year during a Worldbuilding panel. I am myself both a librarian and onetime history graduate student, and so I know a little bit about research. The answers I got from the panel were fascinating.

1) For quick background research, they all seemed to agree that Wikipedia, Google, etc., are useful. Just looking for a quick fact? Can't necessarily rely on Wikipedia for accuracy, but poke around a few sites and you're (probably) good.

2) The more interesting answer was: know people or get personal experience. Every single author said that the best possible detail came from someone who did something regularly or to do something yourself.

Example: a dozen books on horsemanship won't necessarily give you a feel for the pain of getting off a horse after six days in the saddle.

Example: one author found that wearing a motorcycle helmet while play-fighting with PVC-and-foam weapons and armor got hot. He sweated. Condensation formed on the inside of his helmet, which he noticed and used in a story. This was something, he felt, that he wouldn't have gotten somewhere else.

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telophase.livejournal.com

Librarian here with an MA in Anthropology.* :D *waves* Social history and ethnography are what you're looking for when looking for details. As well as what we call comparative ethnography - looking for records of people with similar lifestyles to what you need. An example of that is when I took an Anthropology of the Old Testament class: there's no good records of what pastoral tribal societies were like in Biblical times, so we had to read ethnographies of current pastoral nomadic tribes and draw similarities between them and the tribes we were studying.

And you find records of daily life in the oddest of places. Emmanual Le Roy Ladurie and Carlo Ginzberg have both written books on medieval France and Italy, respectively, drawn from records of the Inquisition. The Inquisition would descend upon a place that had been reported to have heretical beliefs and would question everyone they could get their hands on, thoroughly, about everything possible, and record it all, not just the religious, so there's a lot of detailed information available about daily life in these areas.

Of course, there's lots of things you still need to be aware of that could cause errors to creep in: the Inquisition was called in because these communities were different than their neighbors, the Inquisition records are in Latin, which isn't the language the people who were questioned spoke, the researchers who translated it may have made errors or been influenced by their own biases, Le Roy Ladurie and Ginzberg have their own biases as well,** and didn't write in English, and then the translators into English add yet another layer to the stack.

But even with all that, there's still enough information to take out and use in a fictional context to build a believable society.

--
* I sit at the Ref desk occasionally, but I really focus on web services and making the ejournals and databases talk to the website, so I'm not as familiar with which databases do what as a reference librarian would be, and I got the MA over a decade ago, so I'm not exactly up to date, but I can still remember bits and pieces.

** I read Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error in a medieval social history class and the professor was quite keen on making sure we thought about these sources of error and distortion. I remember him pointing out that either Le Roy Ladurie or the translator seemed to have a slight aversion to homosexuality, and also insisted on defining people as strictly straight or gay, which the locals at the time probably wouldn't have. One of the villagers, whose name I've forgotten, had relations with both men and women, IIRC, but was termed 'homosexual,' and at one point, when Le Roy Ladurie was emphasizing how literate the average peasant in this village was, he (or his translator) said "Even the homosexual [name] read Ovid," as if there were something innate about homosexuality that prevented the average gay person from reading. So: biases, like my footnotes, abound and you have to be alert.

(edited to correct the spelling of Ladurie's name)

Edited Date: 2008-08-07 03:32 pm (UTC)

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Do you know of good bibliographies of books that cover daily life in different historical periods, for Western Europe? (I'd ask for other places and times, but that's a huge, huge thing to ask).

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I agree with you about the trying-something-out. And sometimes, if you can't try it out yourself, looking at pictures of people doing it. Falconry, for instance: I saw photos of people hunting with falcons, and it gave me a very real sense of, not least, relative size! ... it ended up being a detail I didn't use, but who knows when it might come in handy.

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Love your icon, btw!

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telophase.livejournal.com

Not offhand, but I'll look and see what I can find. :)

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Telophase, it's you!! I didn't realize it until I saw this more familiar icon of yours--just goes to show how much I look at icons instead of names. (I do love that librarian one!)

Thanks, but don't put yourself to too much extra trouble--I know I should make myself do this work!

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mrissa.livejournal.com

In some ways this is easier for obscure places than for the well-known ones. Sure, you can find the information about Chicago easily -- but if you get a tiny thing wrong or choose to make it different in your fabulist Chicago, you'll have hundreds or thousands of Chicagoan readers squawking. Set something in 1950 in Helsinki and Inari (to take a not-random-for-me example!), and you could claim that they all walked on their hands and wore mittens on their feet, and most US readers would not be able to swear otherwise. The vast majority. If you get one or two readers who know the difference, you're lucky.

My main approach has been to get a "friends of the University library" membership for whichever university we're nearest at the time. It puts you below undergrads on the totem pole, but you at least get some chance of finding what you're looking for if it's more complicated than "three fun facts about Finland, with glossy pictures!"

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telophase.livejournal.com

:D It was made for me (credit in keywords) after I used *this* icon on a

little_details post and groused that I ought to get around to making a librarian one. XD

And no worries about the work - I've got Officiamal Permission to do reference searches for friends and internet people when I'm at the ref desk (and count it on our stats!) when I'm not helping our patrons. I think they prefer me doing that to filling out crossword puzzles, since I can't do my other work at that computer.

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Thank you. I don't know that I ever would have thought of using that kind of source material, unless I was using the Inquisition in a story. And the professor made such good points; it sounds like a very interesting class.

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