Storytellersunplugged

As I burrow ever deeper into the current opus-in-progress — approaching 85,000 words and no end in sight — there are days when the characters and I seem to be playing an increasingly complex game of hide-and-seek. And I’m always It, while they’re snickering behind the trees.

The novel, which I’m approaching as the first of a series, doesn’t fit atop the piles of anything I’ve done before. A historical is probably the most apt label, although that’s not quite total terra incognita. Into otherwise contemporary novels I’ve injected interludes that stretch back as far as ancient Sumer, aped the style and limb-hewing substance of Snorri Sturluson’s Icelandic Sagas, prowled the hedonistic streets of Weimar Berlin.

Still, those were hit-and-run jobs. I got in, got out, and didn’t let the time machine door hit me on the ass as I scurried back to the safer familiarity of modern day.

On this go-around, a different era isn’t just a functional detour. It’s the full-time destination. Which comes with a set of challenges that, by comparison, starts to feel as if the Labors of Hercules were an afternoon of easy knock-offs. It means rounding up everything we take for granted about the world and daily life and the technologies that undergird them, along with all the metaphors and points of reference that rely on them, then sending all of that up in a big pluming fireball. It means reinventing the millwheel.

The bad news: That’s the easy part.

Read enough books and articles, pore over enough period maps, watch enough demos of archaic technologies on YouTube, or live if you can find them, and you’ll eventually be able to render a reasonable simulacrum of the world you’re resuscitating back to life. It’s all just details. With enough determination, anybody can master a set of facts, although there’s an art to their judicious application. You do have to recognize the point at which the only reason you’re troweling on more detail is because you’ve ended up with a really big trowel.

During the process, I‘ve learned oodles of stuff that has zero relevance to the lives of all but a tiny fraction of people in today’s English-speaking world. Say, how to clean and shape a freshly cut ox horn, and to weave with a warp-weighted loom. I find it fascinating enough to write convincingly of the maggots, the boiling, the scouring with vinegar and sand. Of the interplay between the shuttle and the heddle stick. But if these seem to be there only for their own sakes, who’s going to care, really? It’s just local color, injected to sell a little authenticity.

The thing a reader is more likely to care about is why the character needs to fashion the horn in the first place. Or the conversation going on while the weave is coming together. The overt conflicts and the emotional undercurrents into which small details of daily live are embedded like walnuts in pumpkin bread.

Because it’s not the time or the trappings that captivate as much as it’s the people.

Just one problem.

“They were not like us,” says the author of one of the books I’ve found most fertile for everyday details of my chosen time and place. And in those five words lies the primary challenge to the writer of historical fiction, one that applies just as well to the writer of a contemporary story set in a culture very different from the creator’s own. There were not like us.

But when it comes to historical characters, we have to have it both ways.

On the one hand, there’s the habitual need to wrangle a stableful of human beings who are engaging, recognizable, that readers can see themselves in, and can get to know and understand, to love and hate. Often, fiction that tromps around in other times and/or places is just another way of getting at something about the here and now.

On the other hand, we still need to convey that sense of not-like-us-ness.

So the hands are forced to cooperate, even while contesting with each other in an arm wrestling battle royale. And if one of the hands goes smashing to the table, it’s as obvious as a fistful of busted knuckles.

Either: historical characters who seem a little too recognizable, a little too anachronistically modern, possibly the result of wrapping friends, neighbors, and that hot barista down at Starbucks in bearskins and powdered wigs, then calling it a day.

Or: historical characters who remain as opaque as a soaped window. They stand on the other side of a barrier of time or culture that the author seems unable to breech. They feel flat instead of three-dimensional. Wooden rather than fleshy. Or maybe stilted and melodramatic. Instead of having conversations, they’re prone to expository monologues as windy as a Chicago winter day.

I can readily forgive the former if the story pulls me in. As for the latter, I suspect — based on nothing more than the myopia of my own reading — this usually happens when the writer feels so beholden to the details of this other time and place, and whatever actual events that may serve as the work’s backdrop, that they become a straitjacket that prevents the characters from becoming real.

Say it again: They were not like us. All right … start with that as a given.

Now: How were they not like us? And never mind the trivia of average lifespan, wardrobe, and hygiene habits.

In the most general terms, I think the key is the characters’ worldviews. How they see what they know of the world, and their place in it; what they believe about the next world and how to earn admittance there; their defined role in community and family, and the expectations of both, and the penalties for transgressing against those strictures.

Get a handle on that, and you have the foundations for characters who may not be like us, but can still be understood on their own terms.

Yet for all that, they’re not as unfathomable as it may sound, these women and men of long ago. I’d like to introduce you to a couple…

O, we are apart.
How I have grieved for my Wulf’s wide wanderings.
When rain slapped the earth and I sat apart weeping,
when the bold warrior wrapped his arms about me,
I seethed with desire and yet with such hatred.
Wulf, my Wulf, my yearning for you
and your seldom coming have caused my sickness,
my mourning heart, not mere starvation.

Cover copy from a Harlequin bodice-ripper? Nope … this is not quite half of a Dark Age treasure that’s been called “perhaps the most heart-rending cry in all of Old English poetry,” and only one of two known poems from the pre-Conquest Anglo-Saxons — the folks who gave us “Beowulf” — with a female narrator. There’s room for ambiguity in the whole, so interpretations vary, but she’s evidently married to one man, yet has a child by Wulf, and may never see him and the child again.

In a complete change of mood, here’s a bit of ancient book defacement. An unknown ninth century Irish monk was unable to resist the temptation to jot — into a copy of St. Paul’s epistles, no less — this tribute to his cat, noting the parallels in their lives. Translations differ, but I find this one the most charming. Again, I’ve cut a couple quatrains for space, but you get the idea:

I and Pangur Ban, my cat,
‘Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

So in peace our tasks we ply,
Pangur Ban, my cat and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine, and he has his.

From just a few lines, across more than 1000 years, I feel that in some small but significant way I know these people. The trapped longings of a woman caught up in a love-hate relationship … the scribe’s affection for his cat, and the impish, irreverent way he went about paying the mouser tribute … these sentiments are able to leapfrog the millennium between and touch people even today because what drove their authors to put pen to paper doesn’t belong to any era. It’s just human. Achingly, touchingly human.

We’ll never know the names of these two, but they’ve revealed something so much deeper.

And in many ways, no, they wouldn’t have been like us.

Except for their hearts.

I can work with that.