- This topic has 433 replies, 23 voices, and was last updated 4 years, 5 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
@northerener In his prefaces/introduction Henty tells you who his sources were. Pretty cool.
"No matter how much it hurts, how dark it gets, or how hard you fall, you are never out of the fight."
I was gone too long again. I feel like I missed so much! First of all, hello @lin! 😀 Welcome! That’s a very interesting selection of time periods/places you like! Have you read the Viking Quest series by Lois Walfrid Johnson? And how old are you? (If you’re willing to say.)
I see the confusion about @valtmy was resolved, but I’m here to back her up anyway, saying that however much I insist on historical accuracy most of the time, I also adore parodies. And parodies need not be historically accurate as long as they are aware they are historically inaccurate. 😉
@selah-chelyah @ashira @northerner I’ve always thought Henty’s books were pretty historically accurate. He was, after all, a correspondent journalist who was on-site at many of the battles he wrote about, and for those he wasn’t, well, I presume that as a journalist he would have held himself to a pretty high research standard. However, if anyone has historical inaccuracies in Henty’s books they’ve noted and would like to point out I’d love to hear about them!Nonsense makes the heart grow fonder ~ Carolyn Wells
HEY! Great to have you back! *tacklehug*
I agree with you about Henty…I consider him innocent of historical innacuracy unless proven otherwise, studying him as I have. 🙂
Assistant Guildmaster of the Phantom Awesome Meraki
~ Created to create ~@rochellaine Thanks! I’ve never read the Viking Quest series but I just looked them up and they look pretty interesting! I might give them a try sometime 🙂
And I became 22 years old in februari… which is pretty old over here I guess haha. What books do you enjoy? And what’s your age? (I’m curious now xD)
“I've loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”
@lin I just turned 20 at the end of March. Yes, you’re on the upper side of the age range, but there are actually quite a few non-teenagers here. 😉
I like his-fic most of all. I enjoy a well-written sci-fi book if I can find one. I especially love to read “contemporary fiction” books written in the 1900s-1950s, since they’d be classed as historical fiction now, but they were written at the time the stories are set in, so the details are all historically accurate. (Details meaning slang and popular phrases, fashion, and cultural norms.) My favorite series of that kind is the Patty Fairfield series by Carolyn Wells. I like Western authors from the early 1900s too, such as Zane Grey, William MacLeod Raine, and B. M. Bower. A couple contemporary authors I like are Lois Walfrid Johnson and Robert Elmer.
I think someone mentioned gutenberg.org to you already, and that’s where I read a lot of the old books, since they’re in public domain and free. (Depending on the country, though, I think.)
What’s your WIP about? Or did you already say?
Nonsense makes the heart grow fonder ~ Carolyn Wells
Oh, I love books from that era, as well. There is just something about books written in the era the author lived in. 🙂 Gutenburg is one of my life’s greatest blessings, for sure.
Assistant Guildmaster of the Phantom Awesome Meraki
~ Created to create ~Hey, you all. I have a question. I am wondering if I should describe a scene in my book that involves child sacrifice (think burning alive to Baal Hammon/Moloch/Tanit), or how much I should say. Would you guys read anything like that, or is it too much?
"No matter how much it hurts, how dark it gets, or how hard you fall, you are never out of the fight."
@rochellaine O I love that era as well! Must be even more fun when the stories take place in the time that the writers lived. That’s a nice way to do research 🙂 And yes! Selah mentioned Gutenburg to me. I’ve already looked around a bit and it doesn’t seem to be a problem in my country. It’s a great resource!
Currently I don’t have a WIP. Terrible, I know. I’ve been going through a writer’s block. It’s just that I like so many time periods that I’m not sure what I should go for. I haven’t had that dash of inspiration for a certain story yet. I am however working on a children’s picture book that I’m writing and illustrating myself. In the meantime I’m figuring out what I want to write a novel about.
How about you? What’s the story you’re working on about? Do you first think of a story idea and put it in the time period you like, or do you research a time period and come up with a story idea from that?
@Ashira That’s a tough subject to write about! I actually read a book about Hizkia, written by Lynn Austin, a few weeks ago. It takes place when Hizkia is still young and it includes scenes in which children are sacrificed to moloch. I think the key to writing about this subject is to not get to graphic. Lynn Austin writes about the act itself, but she never describes how the flames burn the children. Instead she writes how scared the children are, how awfully the fire smells, how blinded the moloch priests were to their terrible deeds. This is enough to make me shiver as a reader.“I've loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”
Currently I don’t have a WIP. Terrible, I know. I’ve been going through a writer’s block. It’s just that I like so many time periods that I’m not sure what I should go for. I haven’t had that dash of inspiration for a certain story yet.
Whenever I have a problem with writers block, I just research. A lot sometimes, but before long I always find something that I want to know more about and then I cant stop how much I want to write about something and crazy story ideas just start flowing. Maybe you do this, but I thought Id mention it. And I dont know about you, but if I want to write about a particular thing, I get stubborn. 😀 Like I decided in one of my book when I hardly knew what the plot was gonna be that I was going to write about the Shoshoni indians. Sure would have been a lot easier to pick a different tribe or switch to a defferent one, but after pushing through all this research and hitting dead ends, I will never regret learning about things like this. Forgotten, crazy things that happened that I am gonna write about so that hopefully a lot more people can know about them. Yeah, you probably know all that, sorry for ranting.
Thanks for your help. I was leaning most in that direction of just giving the idea, not all the details. Besides, its not the major point in the book, so although it helps the plot to have it in there, I dont really need to go into detail for it to help the plot/theme/whatever. It might be giving unneccesary gore while turning away some readers.
"No matter how much it hurts, how dark it gets, or how hard you fall, you are never out of the fight."
I’ve actually just been considering this. My fantasy novel takes place in a culture heavily inspired by Polynesian cultures (particularly Tahitian culture) and human sacrifice was a part of that, though fairly uncommon (unlike in other cultures). Eventually, I just decided to portray it as wrong and make only passing references to it.
Ceud mile failte
I swear I haven’t forgotten you all, just have had a really bad and crazy busy few weeks.
So I’m back again!
The question for this week is:
What is a common historical inaccuracy that really annoys you? (If you need to rant, feel free to include more than one!)
@rochellaine @valtmy @ lin @northerner @Michelle @pursuewisdom(I think that’s everyone)
Ceud mile failte
Ceud mile failte
It’s funny because I’ve been gone for a couple of months now… so I didn’t notice your absence. 😛
Thanks for tagging me!
Common historical inaccuracy (and I’ve seen more hist. fic. films than books) is the language. They use such modern language and grammar sometimes! Belle though, is one film that I found to be very elegant in their historical use of English. 🙂
"In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock." ~Th.Jefferson
@seekjustice Girls or women going bareheaded. Unless it’s set after 1950-something (and even then some women still wore hats for special occasions), ye need to cover yer hair. There have been tiny slivers of time and place with exceptions to this rule. But still. If you’re writing a novel set during the Norman Conquest of England and your hero falls in love with the heroine based on her shining auburn hair or whatever, and he’s not spying on her in her bath (which, ugh) — I’m going to count that an impossibility. Similarly, nineteenth-century grown women with their hair flowing all over the place. Not going to happen. Even poor women had more than two hairpins apiece.
Also medieval women characters: “I’m not allowed to do anything! Men get all the fun!” Whine, whine, whine. Do your research.
Also the choose-your-poison thing where your options are “this was set before the French Revolution, so everyone’s a superstitious (because of religion, natch), super-religious frownyface who simultaneously has ten children and never has any fun” or the only slightly better researched “we know they made bawdy art, so here’s a story where even the superficially religious characters are all irreligious all the time”. (These usually come from an authour with a deep misunderstanding of the dictionary definition of religion.) I’ve gone on rants all up and down the margins of my classmates’ stories that way.
Glad you’re back…for now anyway?! 🙂
UGH! Yes, those are way too common…and SO irritating!
Off the top of my head… the fact that knights (which are somehow all too common and appear at all the right times for no particular reason) wear complete armor + helmet all the time! They would seriously faint from that kind of heat…totally unrealistic. It was something that took time and practice to learn…sitting a horse, in a fight, in full armor. I mean, you are incased in a metal oven!
Also the way different groups of people address one another, or think about other ones, is hugely unrealistic, to say the least.
Assistant Guildmaster of the Phantom Awesome Meraki
~ Created to create ~
- The forum ‘General Writing Discussions’ is closed to new topics and replies.
