Laura Amy Schlitz, winner of a Newbery Medal, describes her childhood view of history as having two strands. There was the history of textbooks, with dead white men doing heroic and villainous things and whole sweeps of generations wrapped up in a sentence or two. There was the history of novels, following a few people in a certain time and place and their imagined lives of loves and losses. She preferred the latter, as I often do myself.
The two types, the academic and the fiction, feed on each other. I know a few historians, and while they seem to certainly love reading broad strokes of mass movements and key ideas I think of them as in love with the particular of a past moment. I'm not sure if they, like I, use the visions and immediacy of historical fiction as a vehicle for attempting to understand what it was like to live and be and think in a given era. Sometimes it sounds more like symbol manipulation, the tracking of what document is linked to which thinker, and who was reading who rather than people who drink and dream and occasionally write something of their thoughts and observations.
Good historic fiction needs to be based in good history, for the world is too weird for an author's imagination to fill in the details believably. And believability is at the core of historic fiction's ability to take me to another time, for my own imagination, poor substitute though it is for lived experience, to fill in the details of smells and sights, worldviews and interpretations. The past is strange, which is why it fascinates. That otherness can be evoked, by a good author, in a passing phrase or even word choice, but only if it holds together with the world and time being recreated, which I think is easiest to do with accurate detail. Bringing us back to the historian, the archeologist, the folklorist.
Yesterday's run destination: Sadly yesterday I did not run.
Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: eggs
lunch: cheesy mashed potatoes
dinner: tofu fried rice.
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