Rethinking history with the help of K-drama by Gillian Polack

 

I started watching K-drama because I realised that, when I watched US, UK, or Australian television or read most books, I sympathised with the hero. This was not because I had anything in common with the hero, or because the hero had earned my sympathies through their charming personality or sad circumstances. Even when the hero was intensely dislikable, I cheered them on. This is one of the results of the cultural acceptance of the chief protagonist as being someone who requires that level of audience support in our society. Because I live in a culture that looks for a hero to be the core of so many stories, I have been trained to support anyone who is positioned in a story as a hero.

My personal likes and dislikes were less important than where the character stood in the narrative. This centrality of the hero and the audience need to cheer them on, and our tendency to (also culturally) only allow some kinds of people – white and male, often young – to take that hero role are two of the reasons I have, myself, written heroes are are not male and white, and who manage illness or disability. Knowing that, why was I unable to stand back and decide, early on in a story, that this hero was hurting everyone around him or that hero should be replaced by another? Why did I fall into the path of cheering these heroes on, regardless?

I knew the theory: that it was the place in the story path the hero took. That I wasn't cheering that hero on, but accepting the validity of that narrative path. Given that the hero was seldom from any background resembling my own, it meant that I gave a privilege to that hero (normally, as I said, white and male and quite young but in many types of story also someone who would celebrate Christmas and who had a British or US accent) that I never give myself. I wanted to know what I was not seeing when I followed the hero’s path and cheered him along.

The hero path in K-drama is very similar to that in US television of related kinds. The stories use similar beats and plot points. The main difference is that the hero in K-drama is Korean, not from particular English-speaking countries. This is not a vast difference, but I did not need a vast difference to start to grapple with why I simply accepted heroes – I just needed to see that whenever I watched a TV show I automatically sympathised with the hero, regardless of whether this was a good idea or not. I needed to be able to choose when I cheered the hero on, and that small cultural distancing (Korean heroes rather than American or British) opened that choice up to me. 

Right now, I’m working on both fiction and non-fiction that includes Jewish history in ways we are not used to including them. We have structures for putting Jews in novels, and… I’m breaking those structures. When I began my research (as an historian, initially, and about the same time I started watching K-drama) I saw the use of a set of simple structures informing us that, historically, Jews were mainly money lenders, or were only recent part of European history, or were never fully settled in this place or that, or had earned expulsions, or didn’t exist for hundreds of years in places where they had clearly lived for hundreds before. There were set dates and event by which most popular accounts of Jews in Europe swore as accurate… and very little evidence used to back those opinions. I saw many amazingly good historians simply ignoring European Jews, or giving the same descriptions of European Jewish history and that these same descriptions could be traced back to a single author who themselves had not done any significant research. I saw vast amounts of nineteenth century research ignored. I saw, also, that hate rested comfortably on these same ‘facts’ and narratives. I also saw that most novels reflected this and that Jews were seldom in the novels at all, much less acting as protagonists. The big exception to this was Holocaust novels. It was OK for Jews to be protagonists if they suffered more than any human should have to suffer. This, the fiction and the non-fiction alike, informed the way we see Jews discussed in the press, and in cafes. For me, because I’m Jewish, it’s affected my whole life. Right now, it’s a bit scary to be Jewish in Australia. For twenty-five years I worked with other people to help a whole range of folks to emerge from discrimination and to be treated fairly. I had to leave that environment because of Molotov cocktails and related events. I wrote a little of my experience into The Wizardry of Jewish Women – I was living the history at that point. It’s ironic that what I spent twenty-five years working with others to improve is the exact knowledge I need for my own everyday.  This is why I decided to use fraction of my work for the non-fiction book here (with a few modifications, like this sentence) and share it with all of you. 

Fiction writers and historians have useful perspectives at times like this and I count myself very fortunate to be both. When I realised that I needed to know why all this was so and what wood we were missing by looking at three trees out of an entire forest ,I had the tools to work it out. At that point K-drama merged with popular history. I went to Germany and, thanks to Deakin University and Heinrich Heine University, was able to spend five weeks asking all the questions. I began climbing out of a deep and unhappy hole.

What did I find out? Some of it was blindingly obvious. For instance, the patterns others see or fail to see rest on certain historical understandings, for instance, which gave Christian dominance over interpretations of the past, or that did not see how who knew whom and how dominates the evidence we have and whose past it actually reveals. For some aspects of history this Christian dominance lay at the heart of how a given historian might interpret Jewish history. In these cases, often the focus is on what happened to Christians, without any questions about whether this applied only to Christians or whether minority cultures and religions were also considered. Then the explanation talked about “history of the Rhineland” for example, when it really should have said “Christian culture in the Rhineland” or “Christian history in the Rhineland.”

Other historians focus on written sources (which is most certainly the simplest approach to our complex pasts) without considering who had access to the culture in these sources. Close-knit Jewish communities were influenced by the work of the rabbis and Talmud scholars. But what of Jewish farmers? What of those working in trade or craft who traveled to other countries and even hallway across the world? What of those Jews who were not literate or who turned up to synagogue but led an everyday life where they did not connect with the learned who give us most of our sources? What of those Jews who do not appear in records of customs and tariffs, of law and of politics?

What I learned from this was bleedingly obvious: knowledge is not universal and it is fairer to track it from its source and to see how it spread than to assume a universal similarity of all lives. The concept of a ‘universal Jew’ blinds too many people from seeing the uniqueness and interest in the personal lives of historical Jews. Just as there is no single model for a hero in real life, Jews are as diverse as other humans. They are simply not often depicted this way in historical fiction.

Inherent in this ‘universal Jew’ and other constructs that blind us from seeing the bleedingly obvious is how culture and knowledge are shared. Who we know matters to how we share culture and how we live our lives now, but it mattered far more before the intense communication we assume is standard today. Even printing and affordable books were not available prior to the latter part of the fifteenth century. K-drama was not available in Australia until the rise of streaming services. If we look at broadsheets and chapbooks from the early sixteenth century we can begin to see shared culture and know that it cut across more boundaries, but even then, most people lived in small communities and only some of these communities are visible to twenty-first century folks. Sharing of knowledge usually operated more like chatrooms that contain a few friends than like social media.

Christian-based sources are those most commonly used to interpret western European history. They influence how we describe Europe’s past in general. The fact that only a part of society had been explained is missing from so much of what we think we know. Did you know, for instance, that Charlemagne’s confessor converted to Judaism but still remained close to Charlemagne? Jews are usually invisible unless there is a pogrom, persecution, or a particularly notable individual that not even Christian-origin sources can ignore. It’s a bit like histories that are all about the doings of the good and great and forget that without peasants, most of the Medieval good and great do not have the income or even the food to do the things they do.Peasants also have interesting lives and also are difficult to find out about.

In some regions of Germany, where the Christian majority excluded the Jewish minority from everything important, it may be that the overall stories we tell of those places are as we read them. However… we cannot assume that this is the case. We cannot assume that the story of any majority culture or dominant gender in any place or time is the story of that place and time.

To return to my hero metaphor, heroes may follow similar paths in story, but that is the path of that type of story. It does not reflect other kinds of stories. 

What’s more, the hero’s journey has a very curious and strange relationship to both history and to how we see history.Once upon a time, I attended a workshop at an Arthurian conference: it introduced the hero’s journey. All the key elements of Joseph Campbell’s theory of the hero’s journey were explained in detail. The participants were then given a list of the main attributes of the hero, and the core elements of their journey. The presenter walked us through major heroic characters (King Arthur was his favourite example) and ticked off all the places where the hero’s journey matched the story of Arthur as told by Mallory.

Quietly, I kept my own list. I checked the story of the medieval romance of Alexander, and what we know about the life of Queen Elizabeth I, the life of a famous saint, and two other major historical figures. Between the lecturer’s examples and my own, Elizabeth’s most closely followed the hero’s journey.This is, I suspect, one of the reasons she is so treasured in popular memory. We recognise the path her life followed and transcribe it into popular story. 

It’s very difficult to do this for Jewish history, because very few Jewish lives are explained using that standard story. Even when, as with Elizabeth, the way we see a life might match the hero-journey narrative, very few writers or historians choose it for Jewish history or for the lives of historical Jews. We assume that Jewish stories should be told differently, in other words. Our most common stories about Jews are those of Shylock and Fagin and of victims murdered by hate. We carry these stories into our thoughts about the history of Jews. Every time Oliver! is played in Australia, I see an upsurge in antisemitism.

When friends of mine began to explore Jewish everyday life through looking at accounts and charters and many documents that have never been invisible but that were not looked at closely as sources of Jewish history for those places, I began to wonder about whether I needed to challenge my own view of Europe the way I’d challenged my own view of TV heroes. 

And so we come full circle. I’m almost at the stage where I can look for a publisher for this book. I have a bunch more understanding of why we’re in such a mess right now, politically and socially. Thank you, K-drama, historical novels and Charlemagne’s confessor.

Being Curious about the Past, by Gillian Polack

 

I’m not at my desk. This is rare for me. I’ve been unwell for a number of years and one of the results is that I almost live at my desk. Except now. I am travelling. I’m meeting with other History Girls when we’re close enough to each other, and I’m so looking forward to this. It’s not the main reason for my voyages. I have research to do. I may or may not be well enough to do it with any sort of comfort, so this is a vast test. It will basically let me know what kind of life is ahead for me. I want to do extraordinarily well, and I want to be able to dance again when I get home. I’ve not been able to folkdance for over a decade, but I still have many friends who do, and … I miss it and them. This is also not why I’m travelling!

I’m researching a bunch of different things, but they all fit together and create one project. Some of it is fiction and some non-fiction. I’m also giving some workshops and seminars in worldbuilding using Medieval history, in Australian Gothic (the fiction, not the architecture) and even how to write fight scenes using the model of Old French epic legends. This later is an oldie but a goodie. I once was an expert on these battle scenes and soon I teach German translators how to write them. It’s mainly so that we can talk about translation. I will be working with MA students at Heinrich Heine University, and I’m very excited. I am addressing my own past in teaching students about Australian fiction and about Old French epics. My convict ancestry is not actually English. Lemon, my ancestor who was convicted in the Old Bailey (unjustly, I suspect, given what happened later) was born in Leipzig, not London. He married a Londoner, and having German ancestry is something I’ve been wanting to address for years, but never had the courage. Since I’m not a tourist, but a research fellow, I will not be alone, and that matters. It especially matters now, when I can’t take a break from exploring impossible pasts and take refuge in the present. In fact, now is the perfect time to confront Jewish history in Germany, and that’s one of the core things I’m doing while away.

The research side of my travels is all about things past, in fact. I’m trying to learn more about how we see our past and what layers our history with meaning. I will explore Reading (and have afternoon tea with Leslie Wilson while I’m there) to discover how a single town presents the Middle Ages for tourists. I will create a photo-essay for this, and could be persuaded to give it as a slide show (with added bad jokes) for anyone who is curious. I’m also exploring Cambridgeshire, and spending time with Rosemary Hayes. Every moment with a History Girl is a good moment and those few days would be worth travelling to the other side of the world for in and of themselves.

The rest of my research concerns German Jews. Not my ancestors, to be honest. Jews from a quite different part of Germany. I will be comparing the cultures of the German Middle Ages to those of the Early Modern. Jews in the various German states had interesting differences in culture and traditions and… I want to know what has been lost, but also, just as Reading presents its Middle Ages to visitors, some towns in Germany present their Jewish history to visitors. I will explore both sides of the coin: the memories of once-neighbours and how those once-neighbours lived.

Next year is the earliest I can finish my projects. I have other things that need to be done first. At the end of it, there will be a novel: set in our far future, in the same universe as Poison and Light (where, on a distant planet, a society takes refuge in the 18^th century, which for some is salons, for others is politics, and for yet others it’s revolution) though not at all on the same planet. There will also be a non-fiction book, discussing all of these curious pasts.

This is why I’ve been largely quiet. I’ve been trying to finish my current big project so that I can move to the next. Everything went awry and now I’m taking a pause in the current big project so that I can go to Europe and do some of the groundwork for the next. When I’m back and the doctor and I have worked out the effects of this trip, then I shall return to looking at writing techniques used to present culture in novels, especially in fairy tale retellings.

This post got away from me! I just wanted to tell you that I’m an historian again and working on a novel that uses much history. I don’t have time to tell you the fun stuff. I’m posting this twelve hours before I catch my first plane.

If you want my next post to be about some of the history I discovered, let me know! I may even have pictures...

When the Old becomes New Again, by Gillian Polack

 

I have been saved from a post I didn’t want to write by an email on 1 January. Today, you see, is a national holiday in Australia. Australia Day embodies so many dreams and so many conflicts and so much hurt that it would be a very good subject to write about. Not this year. This year too many people hurt and I don’t want to write about people hurting. Or I could talk about the Birthday of Trees, which has just finished. Not this year, either. The Birthday of trees is a wonderful day, but it’s Jewish and it’s not that easy to be publicly Jewish in the world right now. Besides, that email changed everything. It gave me something good to write about, where no-one gets hurt. Except trees… some days I cannot win.

That email concerned a novel (Chocolate Redemption) that had been announced a few years ago. It had been delayed by COVID and by crises and by the world being generally Very Difficult. To start my year (literally, on New Year’s Day), I received the edits from the publisher and the knowledge that it’s finally emerging into daylight. I don’t know yet if the title will remain, but until the release date is announced, then I shall refer to it as Chocolate Redemption, because this is its name in my heart of hearts.

Chocolate Redemption is not just any novel. A long time ago, about the time The Middle Ages Unlocked was on its way, my readers asked me “Why don’t you write more fiction that uses your knowledge of the Middle Ages? You have a PhD in Medieval History and we like to read stories set in the Middle Ages. Write them, please.”

I wrote a time travel novel (Langue[dot]doc 1305) and my readers said, “That was great, but we need more. And it should be different to the time travel novel.”

I answered them, “Maybe one day, when I’m ready to explore the Middle Ages from a different direction.”

I had, to be honest, already started writing this novel. I was on a retreat in the Blue Mountains, at the wonderful writer’s house, Varuna. I finished Ms Cellophane, the novel I went there to write, and I began another. I wrote the first chapter there, and did a ll the research, and wrote an outline. After that, it took me a long time, because life kept getting in the way.

I hesitated to talk about it, too. It wasn’t really a proper fantasy novel. It wasn’t really fully a novel about our world, either. It broke so many genre models. I finished it, and then I put it on hold because I was worried about it. I didn’t think it worked. So I sat on it. And I sat on it. And I sat on it some more. I’m one of those writers who doesn’t always trust their own ability to carry a dream through. With this novel, which (just to be really clear) had amazing support from beta readers, I felt I had failed. So I sat on it some more.

While I sat, I refined it. I was worried about the black dye in one section. I’d included dying because of the place it was set (a town that produced much glorious fabric) but also because I wanted to make the same pun I’d made in Poison and Light. If one has a tenterfield and one is Australian, then the tenterfield needs a saddler. There are bad jokes like this in all my novels, little Easter eggs for readers who enjoy spotting them. Except that in Chocolate Redemption, the tenterfield uses the original definition and is for cloth dying. I wanted the black dye to be accurate, so I asked my textile archaeologist friend, Katrin Kania. I did this throughout the novel. I made sure that there was a basis of historical fact underlying all extrapolation and all whimsy. The invented world for the fantasy side of the novel is mostly Medieval rather than mostly invented, and even the inventions are based on extrapolations: that cloth was my reminder of how I had achieved this. I do that with all my novels. I leave reminders in of the path I travelled to get there.

Then I sat on it some more still. Along the way, I wrote a short story about dancing in a churchyard after the Great Plague, then I wrote another that was a finalist for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, so my patient readers were not left without any of my Middle Ages. They were just missing this one novel I had written and about which I was unaccountably shy.

Really, there’s nothing scary about this novel. I should not have put in on hold for years. It’s what a novel would look like if half of it were a fantasy Middle Ages with the fantastical was grounded in our actual knowledge of the Middle Ages, rather than in the Medieval themes we often read in fantasy literature. And yet it wasn’t an historical novel at all.

I had not quite emerged from The Middle Ages Unlocked (a non-fiction guide to Medieval England I wrote with <drumroll> Katrin Kania), so my approach to the history was precise. Where else did I get my knowledge? It helps, sometimes, to work with other writers and learn from them. I was working, at that moment, with Felicity Pulman, a marvellous Australian writer of Young Adult novels. She asked me for advice on Medieval Winchester for a detective series she was writing (the Janna Mysteries), and it was that advice that led me into my own approach. The town in Chocolate Redemption is loosely based on Winchester, as me doffing my hat to Felicity. If you’ve not read her writing before, Ghost Boy is particularly clever in its emotional force and its use of history.

Eventually I got over myself and Odyssey accepted the novel and then COVID hit and life went awry again. On January 1 this year I read the edits. Odyssey’s editor was ecstatic about the story and the characters and especially one particular love scene and… I felt very stupid about my lack of confidence.

The novel is about women’s lives. Small lives. Lives that the rest of the world fails to see properly. I love the richness of women’s lives. It was a lot of fun to write about an apothecary in a Medieval town and her Jewish best friend and her love and all her professional concerns, and her kitten, and floods and fury and all the stuff a town goes through in a year.

The Medieval section is about the lives of younger women. Old enough to be independent, but young enough to have big decisions in their immediate future. The Katoomba (modern Australian) section is about an older woman, whose daughter is in the middle of the big decisions and whose life has reached a quietly impossible point.

The novel includes chocolate, and it’s about mapping our streets and our lives.  

For me, it’s a bit of an oddity. It falls between genres. Lives of women do this, all the time. The mapping others do of our lives doesn’t actually match with the way we live. That’s the heart of the story.

I’ll put out an announcement on social media when Odyssey settles the release dates. In the meantime, if anyone wants to be included on the review copy list, send me a note and I’ll forward it to my publisher. Because Odyssey (the publisher) is in New Zealand review copies will be ebooks only. New Zealand is a long way from anywhere other than Australia and islands in the very south Pacific. Postage costs and time for the post to reach far-distant places are other aspects of those small lives I so enjoy writing about.

In the meantime, my January gift to myself is finally being able to talk openly about Chocolate Redemption. Bringing it out of hiding was a difficult thing. Watching others read it and form opinions is going to be exciting, but even more difficult. I shall buttress the emotions with chocolate.

Is there history in your fiction? by Gillian Polack

 

So...I’m a fiction writer, but I also wrote a book called History and Fiction. A lot of this blogpost comes from the research I did for that. If you want ‘aha’ moments for when I borrow from myself, History and Fiction is the book to call up. The rest comes from more recent research. My new study of writers and writing is called Story Matrices. 

 

First, my background. I am an ethnohistorian as well as a fiction writer. For History and Fiction I analysed novels using my background in historiography, but I also interviewed writers. Writers are wonderful people to ask probing questions of. I have 80,000 words of answers to prove this.

What was I researching? Different types of novelists hold different types of conversations with history. Also, most novelists hold different types of conversations with history to historians. Today I’ll focus on speculative fiction, with a lot of the Middle Ages, because I was, am, and always will be, a Medieval historian.

When I talk with writers about history, writers reply intimately, personally. Their answers give us amazing insights into how they work and think. The personal is the passion of the history in our fiction. These emotions are important for successful writers: many writers I’ve spoken to who don’t carry that emotion move onto other things or leave historical writing behind. This passion is not a question of ability or of writing skills, because those writers who moved on had short stories published and some have written novels not besotted with history. All the writers who had this passion for history, however, have had successful careers as writers of historical fiction, fantasy, time travel, young adult fiction, period mystery and more. I suspect that the passion for history carries emotion into the novel and helps connect with readers.

Quite simply, any novel where the writer is at a distance from their subject is going to carry a different emotional burden from the same type of novel written by someone who cares.

Before I go any further, I need to define the past and history. I would like us to be on the same page, rather than me on a page of vellum and you on a computer screen. It’s possible to communicate across vellum and a screen but it’s much easier if we use the same words. The past and history, those words, shift in definition so much that I’m going to choose one among many possibilities.

The past, then, here and now, is the temporal opposite to the future. The events in the past are gone. They are out of reach. They cannot be reconstructed in the exact shape they occurred. They cannot be revived. They are not a narrative. History is all narrative. It draws on evidence of the past and it interprets the past. Story is essential to it and fiction writers are some of the creators of this story. When we think about anything historical, we are thinking about the history, not the past. Mediated narrative. Story. The word ‘historia’ in fact, is the Latin word for story, and that’s no coincidence.

History in fiction is part of the world building and it’s essential to the story. I used this satirically in my own novel Poison and Light, where I had my planetary inhabitants re-invent the 18^th century. They weren’t living in the past. They were living in their stories about the past. Not everyone told the same story. One character wants power, for example. Another wants the French Revolution. 

 

One of the most perfect examples of where the history is integral both to the world building and to the story is when Connie Willis pays homage to a work by Jerome K Jerome in To Say Nothing of the Dog. The novel is a delightful frivol in our imagined England and it holds together because of the way Willis depicts that imagined England using stuff many readers already recognise. The Thames of the story is not in a real place or time.

To Say Nothing of the Dog is a near-perfect demonstration of the fact that our invented worlds rest on what we know of history, how we see history, what games we want to play with history. When we write using a known bit of history, for instance, a new tale about Richard and the Princes in the Tower, we validate that. When we invent something that argues against common historical constructs, that’s different. We pull our opinions about history into story.

How novelists do this through using history is by bringing readers into a narrative based on an invented world that rests upon their own interpretation of history. This is partly the role of story, taking readers with it on a journey. A novel that doesn’t bring readers into its journey is very hard to read.

When a novelist chooses something familiar to readers, as Michael Crichton’s Timeline does with its sort-of-heroic Middle Ages, that validates the approach to the story and also expands the cultural validity of the historical constructs. Crichton’s book pushed more people into a particular Middle Ages, where a modern hobbyist could hold his own against professional fighters. Timeline still has so many fans, and to the best of my knowledge, not a single one of those fans are Medieval historians. In fact, because novels validate cultural constructs, unless those constructs are the same as the ones valued by historians, historians are likely to dislike them. Timeline is a wonderful example of this. So, also, is The Doomsday Book. What works for popular fiction can fail historians.

I was saying this, as is my wont, and Van Ikin (an Australian literary critic and academic) challenged me to prove it. I wrote my own Medieval history time travel novel, Langue[dot]doc 1305. When it was released, I watched my Medieval circles closely. I am still welcome in those circles, so my novel validated the way Medieval Studies people see the Middle Ages… but my novel will never sell well, because it doesn’t validate the constructs the wider public normally associates with the Middle Ages.

History in fiction is not about accuracy. It’s about meeting the needs of the novel and the expectations of readers. You can see how this works for yourselves if you read Timeline and compare it with Langue[dot]doc 1305. There are writers who are clever enough in both worlds to cross that divide. For the fantasy Middle Ages, the gold standard for this is Judith Tarr.

Fiction is way more important than we like to admit. It supports culture, it transmits culture and it changes culture. It helps us translate our own experience into words and constructs that help us move through our lives, and to interpret what’s going on. George RR Martin is a useful testing ground for this. Game of Thrones both validates people who want to break down rule of law, and allows others to appreciate the role of law in maintaining a stable society. Why did I bring up Westeros? Because that dual view of a lawful and a broken society that Martin shares is part of US culture. We’ve seen it playing out. Stories matter.

Stories help us interpret the past, and they underpin our own understanding of the world we live in. We use them to discover truth and to place ourselves in a cultural context, and more. And, for the record, religious stories also fill this function. Never dismiss the importance of religion in giving cultural validation. The fact that we live in largely Christian societies means that the ‘neutral’ position for novels is not actually neutral at all. It validates our Christianity-based societies. In Muslim countries, the neutral setting is Islam.

Tolkien’s cauldron of story is handy for understanding this. You can find it in his essay On Fairy Stories. People like me are the chemists who work out what element does which, but most writers and readers are looking for flavour and texture, a good solid meal, or a fine snack.

We don’t talk enough about what goes into that cauldron. History is not just one ingredient in the cauldron, but many. Think of cooking as an interpretative act. Choose ingredients, some fresh, some from the back of the cupboard. Choose how to chop them, how to cook them, how long to cook them, and everything else right to the moment the food is on the table in front of us, the consumers. That’s what writers do.

Let’s look at what a couple of writers interpret what they do with history, from my interviews.

Chaz Brenchley explained “meeting Tolkien had ruined my writing life: I'd always wanted to write fantasy, but I spent my teenage writing bad Tolkien and then swore one of those great adolescent oaths that I would write no more fantasy until I had an original idea. Twenty years later, the postman delivered it, in the form of a brochure advertising a reprint of Stephen Runciman's history of the Crusades. People in exile from their own culture, at war on all their borders, at war between themselves, magic and mysticism and myth all around them”. Brenchley’s Outremer series was triggered by a specific emotional reaction to a particular moment in history.

Australian writer Dave Luckett was more pragmatic. He said, ‘the setting is a marker for a recognisable genre, and that in turn allows me to work with a set of conventions and reader expectations’. Except that Dave already had the emotional links and the knowledge from an undergraduate degree in Medieval Studies.

Most writers who use the Middle Ages in speculative fiction use it for craft reasons, with intellectual background added judiciously. Their work is read by the historians I mix with because mostly, it’s not seen as the Middle Ages. It’s seen as fantasy. Most historical fiction writers use reasons closer to those of historians to explain their writing and the way they research novels is somewhat closer to the way historians research. Kate Forsyth is a good example of this. This makes it harder for historians to read, because we can’t say to ourselves “It’s intended to be fantasy. It can't possibly be real.”

Franco-Australian fantasy author Sophie Masson says ‘I love the Middle Ages because they’re so full of fantastic stories, and peopled with such amazing and individualistic characters. I love the contrasts of the Middle Ages –the frankness, humour, passion, beauty and earthiness combined with spirituality, violence, craziness and chaos.’

Sophie’s statement is the most typical one of professional writers, and reflects what Chaz said. The writer’s relationship with the subject of the novel matters to both writer and reader.

The history of historians is a complex dynamic, a discourse, a set of never-ending conversations. History for historians is an interpretative bridge and history for novelists is whatever we need to make the story work, whether it’s drawn from the history of historians or if it’s invented because sources are hard to find and time is short. 

There are some important things that writers have to take into account when bringing history into their fiction.

First, M. K. Tod’s 2018 Historical Fiction Survey https://awriterofhistory.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/2018-reader-survey-report.pdf made it very clear that readers choose history in their fiction by subject matter and genre. Fantasy and science fiction readers mostly don’t want historical fiction – they want books that confirm to their ideas of subject and are fantasy or science fiction. The historian's Middle Ages is way less important for most readers, then, than what novels tell us about the Middle Ages. This is another of the reasons that Willis is a best seller for The Doomsday Book and I never was for Langue[dot]doc 1305. I don’t meet wider reader expectations, and I can’t because I addressed the expectations of Medievalists in my novel. It’s not the past novelists bring to life, it’s what we tell ourselves ought to be the past.

How we tell the stories is also important.

Every novel has a built world. Where we don’t consciously and carefully construct our world, we draw on things we already know, or think we know. We introduce elements of diaculture, shared cultural knowledge that we think the readers will enjoy or that will help our story along.

Even when we write history into our fiction with great care, the history is often going to be subsumed by the other things we bring into our built world, ranging from tropes, stereotypes, popular assumptions, to stuff from our lived experience. This is one reason why Medieval fantasy novels used to contain so much stew. It’s why some novels set in London contain much rain. Dan Abnett’s Triumff does, and so does the opening of my own The Green Children Help Out. In both cases, it’s a way of showing place that’s part of the way readers expect see the place.

Where a trope, stereotype, popular assumption or lived experience is easy to hand, it can replace what we know historically about a place or time. For example, 17^th century Jewish life is mostly missing from Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver: she uses her own understanding to create the story. 

What we ourselves have lived through, from what we eat and what we learn, to how we walk down the street, what we dream of, what we complain about, what we remember, these create our personal historical experience. Only a tiny, tiny number of people in the world share most of our personal experiences. Unless we research it and question it, however, the world view we carry every day developed through these experiences is the world view we carry into our fiction. This is why so many novels in English have a Christian underpinning to their world view even when they’re written by atheists.

To make it worse, not all Christianity is the same. The current kerfuffle about whether Tolkien created a Christian world or not changes in nature according to whether you’re looking at the built world in his fiction, or his private life. There is overlap. There is always overlap. Our personal experience of history is a deep part of our culture. So many US friends of mine identify major events by what they were doing at the time of that major event. These remembered moments are very handy for fiction writers, because they give moments of shared understanding that help the novel along. This element of US culture reaches into novels written outside the US.

One of the best examples in English literature of a writer demonstrating how experience translates into history is, of course in Octavia Butler’s Kindred. That book is brilliant. A contrasting one is Franz Kafka’s The Castle. They both articulate horrendous everyday experiences and translate them into fiction using history. Readers get entirely different messages from the work of both writers, depending on how they themselves can translate historical knowledge and lived experience into the world of the story. For some readers, the history isn’t visible in Kafka. Others describe it as the Jewish Narnia. For still others, it is fable-like and unreal.

There is no single correct interpretation. Experience translated into fiction is about relationships between the writer and their writing, between the writing and the reader.

What we think we know about the past, what we share with other people, is a big source of emotion in fiction... and of bias. That bias can become the story. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Galileo's Dream paints Galileo as the Great Man in a Great Moment, that is so much part of what most people think history is. It’s the application of a particular cultural interpretation to history. 

 Without Robin Hood and Arthur and Troy as wishes for what history contained, our novels would be much poorer. More historically accurate, but not nearly as much fun. If you want a fun comparison of different cultural interpretations and their effect on the history in a novel, compare the Regency novels of Georgette Heyer with Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series.

What is most important for any approach to history in fiction, however, is credibility: a reader’s capacity to trust the story triumphs. Connie Willis’ ‘facts’ in The Doomsday Book are actually tidbits that enable the reader to trust that the history is credible, because many readers believe that history is full of facts, because, to be honest, school history is full of facts. Verisimilitude is another thing that can convey credibility: this thing is depicted in a way that is real-seeming to the reader. Claire G Coleman creates a science fictional future in Terra Nullius and draws her verisimilitude from Australian history. Both facts and verisimilitude rest very heavily on the reader’s background, rather than on the history of a place or time.

All novelists make decisions relating to their work. We’ve talked about some of them, but let me add two more.

“Do I reinforce the reality of the past, through using writing techniques that help the reader situate themselves in the time of the novel?” The choices in writing techniques usually relate to the genre of the novel, because so much of the marketing is done through genre. The genre signals push the reader just as choosing a genre pushes the writer into how probable their history has to be, how much telling detail they need, and how to make the story credible. Language, clothes, mapping a submarine in Peter Dickinson’s Emma Tupper’s Diary, period illustrations in Jack Finney’s Time and Again – there are many techniques. Harry Turtledove uses telling detail spectacularly in the opening of The Guns of the South and Joan Aiken fills her fiction with grime and doom to bring her readers into her version of the Industrial Revolution.

Credibility is critical. If a reader can’t see the story as possible, then they don’t accept the story. Credibility is, however, a shifty thing. Historical fiction requires a sense of ‘this history is real’ so the writer needs a closer acquaintance with the history of historians. Every single writer in the History Girls (except maybe me) is an excellent example as this.

The more formulaic a genre is – and here I’m thinking of quest adventures, romance, and mystery – the more historical detail shores up the formula rather than working independently of it. The ultimate formulaic sub-genres in this respect are those that are represented by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and much fantasy that claims a Medieval backdrop.

The bottom line is that novels are not one-size-fits-all and that history in novels reflect the nature of a given novel. All novels are interpretive acts, and that the nature of the interpretation rests on the nature of the act. The form of the story, the content, and even the writing style affect how history is depicted.

This is an edited and abbreviated version of a talk I gave at Balticon, in May 2022. If you’d like the complete version, ask here: https://gillianpolack.com/contact-me/