Megan Says it Best

Megan Frampton blogged about historical accuracy the other day. Here's an excerpt:

Yes, getting it right is important if you're writing historical fiction, but it's not as important as getting the feeling right.

So while I am occasionally embarrassed about my mistakes, I feel as if I have the tone right, the feeling of the period oozes through every word of my writing. And I might never know the right way to address the daughter of a peer (Lady Megan Frampton, I think, whereas the married-into-it address would be Megan, Lady Frampton), but my characters are inspired by the time, which in my opinion trumps perfect historical accuracy every time.

This is so exactly how I both read and write historicals. Every reader is different, but personally I'm baffled by people who insist they have to "throw the book against a wall" because a dress had a ruffle in the wrong place or a man had the wrong epaulet. In my opinion, if you're thinking about epaulets as you're reading, you're not enjoying the story. That means the author is failing you somehow - it's not working. Move on.

It's a two-way thing, of course - sometimes the book is perfectly good and the reader is being way too hard on it. Sometimes the book's historical details are actually right and it's the reader that's wrong. But readers, as the writer's intended audience, don't have to make allowances and exceptions for authors if they don't want to. Authors have to please readers, not the other way around. You can't argue with every reader about how right you really are. Readers just don't, and shouldn't, care.

As an aspiring writer, I find that terrifying.

Because as a reader, I give writers a lot of leeway. Lots of times I'll read a historical, completely enjoy it, and only later will I read how outraged I should have been by this or that inaccuracy. I recently read Sharpe's Tiger. There's a three-paragraph description in the first chapter about how Sharpe loads his gun. It was interesting. You could tell me it's true, and I'd believe you. You could tell me the writer made the entire thing up out of whole cloth, and I'd believe that too. I don't know what's accurate and I don't care, because I'm not reading a history book. I'm reading a novel and the writer is lying to me for 400 pages anyway. He made me feel like I was a soldier on campaign in India during the Napoleonic wars - he made me feel what that would be like. That's all I care about as a reader.

So I think that one of the negative things about being published is those readers who treat your book like they're marking your history test. "Your heroine wasn't wearing a corset. Every woman would have worn a corset." Really? Did you personally know every woman alive in England during the entire Regency and watch what she put on every morning? These were people, not robots. Maybe someone didn't wear a corset one day. If I can capture your imagination enough to make you forget the corset, I'm the best writer I can be.

So Over Vampires

I picked up Stephanie Meyer's Twilight this week after reading rave reviews. It took me a long time to decide to pick it up - it was supposed to be so good, and yet... vampires. Again.

I like to be proven wrong, but this time I wasn't. Sure, I liked Interview with the Vampire when I was in grade 9, but that book came out twenty years ago. Am I the only one who thinks vampires have been done to death and beyond?

(And those books weren't great either. Remember the one where Lestat was a rock star? No, wait - a huge international rock star with no media attention, PR flacks, groupies, general hangers-on, or musical/vocal talents. Even in grade 9 I knew that was a lame plot.)

Maybe it's different when you're a teenager (and let me say that this is a young adult book), but the older I get, the more thready the vampire plot seems. In this one, the teenage vampire boy falls in love with the teenage human girl. Sure, until he reveals that he is actually 100 years old. What would a hundred-year-old superhuman creature see in a seventeen-year-old girl? Did he find her school lunches and possible dates to the prom that interesting? Was he not bored by her subterfuges to get out of her dad's house? And what was he doing in high school? Doesn't he know all that stuff already? Why doesn't he just go get a job on a night shift?

How are you supposed to be scared of a character who keeps saying how dangerous he is? I think the most dangerous thing he did in the whole book was break a tree branch. Dude, Dracula ate people. He infected their brains with incurable madness. He was no poser.

I guess the fog of adulthood has forever ruined the vampire book for me. I can't buy the rebel-teen fantasy anymore. I'm going back to my romance novels, and their adult fantasies, instead.

Back

Sorry about the absence. Life took over there - suddenly it was like that action-movie cliche where they're on a speeding, out-of-control subway and the villain has blown up the controls. But it's all good now.

In bad news, I got a rejection from one of my query letters. Par for the course, except that I sent the letter out in July 2006. And that they didn't even bother with a form letter - they just took my SASE, scribbled "not for us" on the back in pen, and mailed it to me.

Now, I know agents are busy, but this just made me laugh. Eight months to read a one page letter seems a tad excessive. And I can pay for postage but you can't cough up a penny in toner to tell me I suck? Perhaps you could have used my envelope as toilet paper before mailing it to make your sentiment even more clear. (Hm. Note to self: Disinfect hands after throwing out SASE.)

In good news, this book exists:




Sort of hypnotic, isn't it? Keep looking. He's sort of creepy, yet darned friendly, wouldn't you say? The Fresh Prince of watercolours rocks on.

Abby

Good Childhoods Need Not Apply

There is one romance novel cliche that rarely gets talked about, but, once you notice it, is completely all-pervasive. It drives me nuts.

Every hero, it seems - and most heroines - has to have a bad childhood. It comes out at just over the 100-page mark, when the two have gotten over their initial aversion and are getting to know each other. Like as not, you'll find a five-page conversation in which one draws out the awful details of the other's childhood, and feels the appropriate pity mixed with heroic admiration.

I read a lot of historicals, so the sob story is usually parents who died early (dead parents are legion in romance), parents who abandoned or were cold, insulting parents who undermined their kids, and kids having to raise their siblings. Sometimes the author goes overboard and gives a hero a family that was slaughtered by enemies or something. I read a lot of history, and everyone had a bad childhood - the poor people worked and died of disease, and the rich people were politely miserable and died of disease. I would think the person with the happy childhood would be the exception, so I can't summon too much pity for one lone guy.

It's boring and it's bad writing, and even the best writers do it. Why?

Characters come from somewhere, of course. It's helpful to have background as you get to know someone. But a dumped-on lousy childhood just doesn't work, especially when it's never mentioned again. In The Shadow and the Star, the hero's childhood is so integral to the man he becomes that not to know of it is not to understand him - it's one of the few examples I can think of that makes it work. (The other is the first Stephanie Plum book in which she plays doctor with Joe Morelli. Ha.)

Just once, I'd like to see a hero talk about how great his childhood was, as the heroine looks on in admiration. But I'm not holding my breath.

The Month of Love

In my early twenties, before I even considered publication, I tried writing my first novel. I've always been a big fan of the movies of the 1930's - all that fast, great dialogue - and I thought there should be novels like that. So I tried writing one.

I set it in the '30's and I had my hero and heroine zing all over town, foiling mobsters and solving mysteries and dodging bullets. The plot made no sense - I barely understood it myself - but I was having a good time.

In one scene, the hero ended up at the heroine's apartment one evening and saw her in her ratty old bathrobe. The next day, he wrote her a note that furthered the plot - this book was all plot - and, before I could stop him, he wrote at the end: "Get rid of that old robe, it's awful. P.S. On second thought, don't change a damn thing."

I looked down at that line and realized that he was in love with her. Then I looked back at my other scenes - she kept claiming to hate him, but could never quite stay away - and realized she was in love with him, too.

At that point I had to admit that, despite disdaining them and never having read one in my life, I was in the middle of writing a romance.

It wasn't the easiest way to go about it. I had to go backward and learn my genre properly before I started my next novel. But, once I started reading them - and once I started writing them with an idea of what I was doing - I never looked back.

It's the honest truth when I say that, even if I never see publication, I'll still be doing this. I've learned over the last year that the entire industry is full of shit - but the writing never is. And there is nothing, nothing more fun, or more fulfilling, than writing about love.

Happy early Valentine's Day,
Abby