Snippets of January

pinterest: tempus regina

I don't know that it is time, but it feels like a good time to continue Katie's "Snippets of Stories" meme; it appears I haven't participated since October.  November was so full of hasty scribblings that it seemed silly to post any of them, in the first part of December I took a break, and in the latter part I was getting the feel of Tempus Regina all over again.  (What am I saying?  I'm still getting the feel of it.)  There wasn't a good moment for snippets.

I've done a little more solid writing in January, tucked in around query letters and the like, and feel rather more capable of pulling together some semblance of a post.  Also, at some point Tempus Regina will join the list on the "My Books" page, and in a couple of weeks I plan on introducing this work-in-progress properly with a few questions-and-answers.  The story should be kicking around Scribbles quite a bit.

snippets for january

At the stable she turned, sweeping the hills again with a strange twist of desperation, as if it were the last time she would ever see them. They were beautiful, darkness and light sprawling together in a snapshot of their classic struggle, wild upthrusts and sudden drops of land as riotous as a woman’s emotions against an unchanging sky.

- tempus regina

Drawing herself up and looking around her more narrowly, she found he had set up a precarious structure of birch twigs and a rod that passed over the fire, dangling a small bronze pot above the blaze. Presently the whole construction would give way and the Assassin would have to save it from the flames, but for the moment it was picturesque. “As good as a tea kettle,” she murmured, a witch’s face passing through her memory.

- tempus regina

She looked up at him through her lashes and, parting her lips with an effort, said, “My ring. I want it back.” 

He looked back at her and she thought momentarily he was startled; then his face broke into another smile, quite charming (but a lion’s smile is charming, too, in its own way), and he twisted the blue ring off his own finger to put it on Regina’s left hand. “I see you can keep pace with me.” 

“I intend to." 

- tempus regina

A blast of wind came roaring up the hillside then and smacked them both, taking the air from Regina’s lungs and flipping the Assassin’s cloak up and over his head before racing past. She fought for breath while he fought down the blue folds, and in the midst of it all Regina could not help but think that his predicament was bitterly comic.

- tempus regina

“It seems half the elements came out to mock you tonight.”

- tempus regina

His face was white as the underside of a fish, eyes beginning to glaze; it would not have surprised her if he suddenly went belly-up and left her to kill the Saxons on her own.

- tempus regina

He set his heels into his mare’s flanks and brought her to an uneven trot, striking out first for the glow of the desert-home. Regina ground her teeth and hissed between them, and the Assassin, goading Epona to follow, called the man a name she would have blushed to repeat herself. 

- tempus regina

Excitement or Plausibility?

Back during the blog party in November, Joy asked me to write a post on the balance between fact and fiction in historical novels.  The result was fairly brief, a quick summary of my thoughts on the matter; this post, and probably a couple to come after, is something of an extension of those ideas.

At the same time, though I identify to this most as a writer of historical fiction, the topic applies just as much to other genres.  Whether writing fantasy or mystery, historical fiction or romance, there's a constant tension between what readers will find exciting, and what readers will find plausible.  On the one extreme you have old DC comics - Superman beats up all the bad guys again! - and on the other you have "realism" - everyone dies, loses their minds, is crossed in love, or in some fashion meets a depressing end.

Most of us like to write stories that land in the middle, because while people are drawn to the hopefulness of a happy ending, they are also quite capable of picking out absurdities. The quote about truth being stranger than fiction is quite accurate; truth is certain, no matter how crazy it appears, but fiction is subjected to the grueling test of the reader's credulity and can get a failing grade.  To a certain degree, it doesn't matter whether or not a far-fetched detail in a novel is true, if the reader cannot be convinced that it is so.  This is something that has stood out to me while reading Operation Mincemeat, an account of an Allied effort to convince Germany that British and American troops were invading Europe, not through Sicily, but through Greece.  The deception hinged on truth, half-truth, and lies, but it also hinged on perception and bias; and as the enemy had to be manipulated, so, in a sense, must a writer manipulate his reader.  (It is not at all surprising that many top-ranking intelligence officers were also novelists - Ian Fleming, anyone?)

In this little work of espionage, the key is maintaining a balance between the plausible and the exciting.  If we tell the reader exactly what he wants to hear up front - that Superman defeated the bad guys by bashing their heads together and escaped without a scratch - well, that is all good and exciting, but is it credible?  No.  Is it credible that Odin should conveniently discover a way to send Thor to earth just when S.H.I.E.L.D. needed him most?  No.  Is it credible that Thorin should be able to defend himself from a large enraged orc while wielding only an oak branch?  Uh, well, yes, because he's awesome.  That's pretty self-evident.

These are all exciting scenes, but if we were making them into plausible stories, Superman would be captured, Thor wouldn't be in "The Avengers," and Thorin wouldn't be Oakenshield, he would be dead.  The question then becomes, would it be better to tilt the scale toward the other end, make the story realistic, and wipe out all this melodrama?  Would this be the right formula for convincing our readers of the "truth" (and in a way, as readers we should be brought to accept the reality of both characters and plot) of the tale?

We might convince a few people of the "realism" of the story (whatever that is supposed to mean), but I can bet you nine out of ten will still be severely ticked off.  These all have a common denominator: they're adventures and fantasies, and there are certain expectations attached to them.  The excitement-plausibility scale will tend toward the former, because they are by nature fast-paced and high-stakes stories.  Disbelief is more willingly suspended.

Matters are rather different with historical fiction, where fact and imagination mingle and readers can see the lines.  When the setting is real and limitations are clearer, I know I start to look more closely for elements that stretch credulity too far or snap it altogether.  We can say glibly that fact is stranger than fiction - but when something strange in fiction tries to pass itself off as fact, we still eye it with inveterate suspicion.

Still, even in historical fiction where we expect to see more strictures, I think it is accurate to say that the majority of readers will always tend more toward excitement - because the majority of readers approach books with something of an escapist mentality.  We want to see things through rose-hued glasses for a little while; we want epic battles and happy endings, we want Superman and Thor.  We do not want the boredom of reality.  In my case, this realization gave me the necessity of relieving the monotony of blockade duty in the Sea Fever books; it was, frankly, a humdrum sort of thing, and nobody wants to spend pages reading about it.  But back on the other hand, there are a half-dozen sticky points where a story's critical points must be made credible enough to convince a reader.

The success of espionage is frequently a matter of sticking oneself in the enemy's proverbial boots, seeing things the way the enemy sees, then crafting the deception to pander to it.  That is what writers do: stick themselves in reader's boots.  Perhaps it sounds underhanded; perhaps it is underhanded.  But I think it is also the reason why writers must also be readers, so that we get a feel for such tensions as these.