01 June 2026, Writing - part xxxx431 The Novel, Antiquity and Technology, Worldview, Ancient World
Announcement: I
still need a new publisher. However, I’ve taken the step to republish my
previously published novels. I’m starting with Centurion, and
we’ll see from there. Since previously published novels have little
chance of publication in the market (unless they are huge best sellers), I
might as well get those older novels back out. I’m going through Amazon
Publishing, and I’ll pass the information on to you.
Introduction: I wrote the
novel Aksinya: Enchantment and the Daemon. This was my 21st novel
and through this blog, I gave you the entire novel in installments that
included commentary on the writing. In the commentary, in addition to other
general information on writing, I explained, how the novel was constructed, the
metaphors and symbols in it, the writing techniques and tricks I used, and the
way I built the scenes. You can look back through this blog and read the entire
novel beginning with http://www.pilotlion.blogspot.com/2010/10/new-novel-part-3-girl-and-demon.html.
I’m using this novel as
an example of how I produce, market, and eventually (we hope) get a novel
published. I’ll keep you informed along the way.
Today’s Blog: To see the steps in
the publication process, visit my writing websites http://www.sisteroflight.com/.
The four plus two basic
rules I employ when writing:
1. Don’t confuse your readers.
2. Entertain your readers.
3. Ground your readers in the writing.
4. Don’t show (or tell) everything.
4a. Show what can be
seen, heard, felt, smelled, and tasted on the stage of the novel.
5. Immerse yourself in the world of your writing.
6. The initial scene is the most important scene.
These are the steps I use to write a novel
including the five discrete parts of a novel:
1. Design the initial scene
2. Develop a theme statement
(initial setting, protagonist, protagonist’s helper or antagonist, action
statement)
a. Research as required
b. Develop the initial
setting
c. Develop the characters
d. Identify the telic flaw
(internal and external)
3. Write the initial scene
(identify the output: implied setting, implied characters, implied action
movement)
4. Write the next scene(s)
to the climax (rising action)
5. Write the climax scene
6. Write the falling action
scene(s)
7. Write the dénouement
scene
I finished writing my 31st novel,
working title, Cassandra, potential title Cassandra:
Enchantment and the Warriors. The theme statement is: Deirdre and
Sorcha are redirected to French finishing school where they discover difficult
mysteries, people, and events.
I finished writing my 34th novel
(actually my 32nd completed novel), Seoirse,
potential title Seoirse: Enchantment and the Assignment. The
theme statement is: Seoirse is assigned to be Rose’s protector and helper at
Monmouth while Rose deals with five goddesses and schoolwork; unfortunately,
Seoirse has fallen in love with Rose.
Here is the cover
proposal for the third edition of Centurion:
|
Cover Proposal |
The most important scene
in any novel is the initial scene, but eventually, you have to move to the
rising action. I am continuing to write on my 30th novel,
working title Red Sonja. I finished my 29th novel,
working title Detective. I finished writing number 31,
working title Cassandra: Enchantment and the Warrior. I just
finished my 32nd novel and 33rd novel: Rose:
Enchantment and the Flower, and Seoirse: Enchantment and the
Assignment.
How to begin a novel. Number one thought,
we need an entertaining idea. I usually encapsulate such an idea with a
theme statement. Since I’m writing a new novel, we need a new theme
statement. Here is an initial cut.
For novel 30: Red Sonja, a Soviet spy,
infiltrates the X-plane programs at Edwards AFB as a test pilot’s
administrative clerk, learns about freedom, and is redeemed.
For Novel 32: Shiggy Tash finds a lost girl
in the isolated Scottish safe house her organization gives her for her latest
assignment: Rose Craigie has nothing, is alone, and needs someone or something
to rescue and acknowledge her as a human being.
For novel 33, Book girl:
Siobhàn Shaw is Morven McLean’s savior—they are both attending Kilgraston
School in Scotland when Morven loses everything, her wealth, position, and
friends, and Siobhàn Shaw is the only one left to befriend and help her
discover the one thing that might save Morven’s family and existence.
For novel 34: Seoirse is assigned to
be Rose’s protector and helper at Monmouth while Rose deals with five goddesses
and schoolwork; unfortunately, Seoirse has fallen in love with Rose.
For novel 35: Eoghan, a Scottish National
Park Authority Ranger, while handing a supernatural problem in Loch Lomond and
The Trossachs National Park discovers the crypt of Aine and accidentally
releases her into the world; Eoghan wants more from the world and Aine desires
a new life and perhaps love.
Here
is the scene development outline:
1.
Scene input (comes from the previous scene output or is an initial scene)
2.
Write the scene setting (place, time, stuff, and characters)
3.
Imagine the output, creative elements, plot, telic flaw resolution (climax) and
develop the tension and release.
4.
Write the scene using the output and creative elements to build the tension.
5.
Write the release
6.
Write the kicker
Today: Let me tell you a little about writing. Writing
isn’t so much a hobby, a career, or a pastime. Writing is a habit and an
obsession. We who love to write love to write.
I want to start with these definitions as
a premise for writing.
1. Write to entertain
2. Write using the
common outline for a novel
3. Develop a telic flaw,
a protagonist, an antagonist, and plan to resolve the telic flaw.
4. Start with an initial
scene.
5. Develop and define a
modern protagonist: you get a telic flaw, a potential protagonist’s helper, and
a potential initial scene from the development.
6. Write to reveal the
protagonist.
And here is the scene:
1. Scene input (comes from the previous
scene output or is an initial scene)
2. Write the scene setting (place, time,
stuff, and characters)
3. Imagine the output, creative elements,
plot, telic flaw resolution (climax) and develop the tension and release.
4. Write the scene using the output and
creative elements to build the tension.
5. Write the release
6. Write the kicker
I’m going to move into a more technical
subject this time. I’ve addressed this
subject before, but I haven’t in a while, and most of the time, I’ve looked at
it in the context of other writing ideas.
This is the subject of technology.
Why is technology important? The most critical point, in my mind, is
accuracy from the standpoint of the time and place of the novels we write. I’d say, technology is perhaps the most
important compared to history. Why is
that?
The obvious answer for the modern era is
the change of technology. If you write a
novel set in the 1990, and every character has an iPhone, you have done a great
harm to your technology and the historical and technical accuracy of your
novel. The iPhone was first introduced
in 2007. There are a lot of these traps
especially for the young and inexperienced who didn’t live through these
times. In other words, to a person who
spent their entire life with an iPhone (or other, so called, smart phone), the
idea of not having one is almost impossible to imagine. Likewise, the aircraft was invented in
1903. If you have an heavier than air
aircraft in your novel before about 1910, you are breaking an historical
fact. Now, you could be like some of the
creepy and silly movies and novels written in the modern era that have all
kinds of impossible historical technological anomalies. For example, one of the latest Sherlock Holmes
movies in the last ten years has an aircraft in the late 1890s or so. Now, it could be late Sherlock in about 1920,
but it’s hard to tell with the way movies are produced, and who can tell what
time they are really in. In any case,
these types of craziness defy reality and technology, but it gets worse. These are easy examples from the centuries of
knowledge and documentation. What about
the very early times in history and prehistory?
This is something I’d like to explain and
explore. My real expertise is in early
languages, cultures, and societies especially those that are early
Mediterranean and early British. These
are some of the times I’ve written about and that I use in my writing. Plus, I translate Anglo-Saxon and Athenian
Greek. These are both dead languages so
they aren’t going anywhere.
Here's my plan. I’m going to start with early technological
history like the seven basic machines and other major technologies and apply
them to writing about history. We’ll investigate
foods, cooking, warfare, agriculture, horses, husbandry (farming and animals),
crops, furniture, architecture, and so on.
The point is to begin to understand the past and past technology so we
can write historically correct and enlightening novels. In addition, we will eventually move to the
modern eras and then to science fiction.
Science fiction is all about predicting and extrapolating
technology. We’ll make a sweeping study
of technology such that we can write realistic and historically correct
fiction.
That written, let’s go back to antiquity
and see what we can do about historical development and worldview. This is real and reflected, but also could be
created, that’s next.
We are back to the ancient world. I’ve been writing about the real, the reflected,
and the created as worldviews. As I’ve
written, I’m all in on the reflected worldview, mostly because I think it
represents human culture, creativity, and society better than the real or the
created ever can. Still for science
fiction and much of fantasy, you need to move to the created worldview.
Let’s roll back to antiquity and look a
little are technology and information here.
My biggest beefs with historical fiction writers is the following:
1. Incorporation of incorrect
and unhistorical practices and items.
2. Incorporation of inaccurate
and false ideas and concepts.
3. Incorporation of ideas
and concepts that would be impossible for the history, place, and time.
I feel like these are the worst of the
worst and probably require some description.
Let’s look at the first: incorporation
of incorrect and unhistorical practices and items.
Of course, everyone knows the people in
the ancient world had furniture just like today and cooked their food in metal
pots. The reality is that although there
is some furniture, there is very little except among the very wealthy. There is a very strong possibility that
furniture was a very rare commodity. We
do know that no freeman or woman sat in any way, shape, or form in the Greek
and Roman worlds. The Greek and Roman
worlds are about everyplace around the Mediterranean from Britain to Spain to
Turkey and Persian including North Africa.
Among the Greeks and Romans, the all nonslaves lay on their left sides to
eat. No person sat for any meal or
symposium. You can’t have a normal table
when you are laying on your side. Further,
most people would have no type of table at all although a very short type of
table might exist. So, this means that
almost every movie, show, and painting from modern times is absolutely
wrong. This is just one small indication
of the lack of historical practice in most shows, movies, art, and writing. There’s more.
In all the movies, shows, art, and most writing,
the people have their own bowls, knives, forks, spoons, and plates. Many times these are all metal. Metal was not ubiquitous in the ancient
world. Plus, people didn’t have such
things as bowls, utensils, or plates, not specifically or in general. You might find military troops who had bowls for
food and drink mostly wooden or fired clay.
The only utensil potentially used was a knife. That’s about it, and the knife wasn’t common
for the average person, not as an eating device. So, how are you going to cook food if you don’t
have any metal equipment or bowls? In
other words, you might put a chicken, lamb, cow, or something on a wooden spit
to cook, but there is no soup. Whatever
you can bake or cook in an earthenware pot like a pie or roast, but stews and
soups are most likely right out.
If you didn’t notice, without furniture,
utensils, plates, metal bowls, and other common items, the world suddenly has
changed. And there is more, much much
more that you will not find in the ancient world. We’ll get to even more, next.
As I wrote, the people of the ancient world,
at least the part we call civilized did not sit to eat. Only slaves sat, and there is another issue
of the grand ancient world—slavery.
All cultures and people had slaves. The worst slave holders were the stone aged tribes—how
do we know, observations of the North American, African, and Asian indigenous
peoples show us even today how horrific their type of slavery was and is. They enslaved other tribes, their own, and about
anyone they could. The rest they just
slaughtered. If you want to know read
the eyewitness accounts of the American West.
Now, back to slavery in general. The word slave comes from the word Slav
because the Greeks and the Romans agreed Slavs made the best slaves. The American slaves and European slaves were
miniscule in numbers compared to the white slaves kept by the Africans and
Asians. Read about the North African
Coastal wars and the early actions of the American sailors and soldiers against
the black slave trade on the Barbary Coast.
It’s very enlightening. Every
culture and society had slavery until the Europeans, starting with the Brits
ended slavery in 1833. The USA had a
civil war in 1860 to 1865 to end slavery.
That war was fought against the democrat confederates by the republican
unionists. Thank God the republicans
won. After that, slavery in the West was
largely dead, but it still flourished in the rest of the world. Slavery is pretty common in most of the non-Western
world. I’ve been there and seen it. You should research it too, because this
leads us to the point two above: incorporation of inaccurate and false ideas
and concepts.
There is a lot of this in modern
historical writing. From the lack of
basic truth about ancient and even just older cultures. For example, you will find very little about
slavery in Europe before 1833 when it was all over the place. Slavery was and is a cultural institution of
all societies until 1833. Just because
writers missed it or don’t mention it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. Plus, the funny thing is the attention of
historical fiction writers to the slavery in the USA as compared to the slavery
in Europe, the Americas in general, Africa, and Asia. It’s as if whole swathes of history are being
disappeared from the history books. It’s
a good thing we have so many eyewitness accounts.
Part of the problem with slavery is that
it was so common, no one even thought about it, and there is the second part of
my number two issue with historical fiction.
Many ideas that historical fiction writers place in the minds, mouths,
and hearts of their characters are those that no person from the time would or
could ever think about. For example, the
idea that slavery might be wrong—that’s a pretty new idea that basically came
directly out of the Christian church and had very strong ties to the new USA
which got its freedom in 1776. So really,
before 1776, you might have a character who questions slavery, but most likely
not. The other great revolutions of 1776
are individual and corporate freedoms as well as starvation culture and
property ownership.
Before the USA, no one really considered
the idea of property ownership or of freedom from tyranny (a kingdom or
dictatorship). That’s an issue worth
looking at in more depth, next.
One of my greatest pet peeves are all the
characters in historical fiction novels that have ideas that are completely
contrary to human thinking at the time.
I would say that if you can find normative ideas from the period—like papers
or expressions of opinions or thought you might include it in a novel, but if
you can’t find any such real data, please don’t expose us to your created worldview. That’s the whole point of brining worldview
into this discussion about technology.
There is nothing wrong with writing in a
created worldview unless you are telling us you are writing historical fiction. In that case, you must write true historical fiction. Historical fiction can move in a real or a
reflected worldview, but placing it in a created worldview make it fantasy or science
fiction. There is planet of room in the
world for speculative fiction, but identify it as speculative and not
historical fiction. I really get tired
of people overlaying the modern world on history and either accepting or more
often attacking the history of the times because they don’t match the ideas of
the author. Yes, this has become a
popular idea even in the universities, but you can’t learn history from making
it all up. The only way to learn and
express history is by expressing it accurately.
The facts matter and the minds of the people matter. Even the history from the times matter in
terms of fiction and the expression of ideas from the past, but if you can’t
understand the times or the history, you have no place in writing about it.
To make this simple as possible, this is
like writing about iPhones in the 1980s and telling us how horrible a problem that
creates for social media. Did you get
that. In the 1980s, there were no iPhones,
and there was no social media to speak of.
To write about these ideas in that context is not just silly, it is
inane. Writing about certain issues in
history should draw the same distain and complaint. You can’t really write about ideas and
concepts that are entirely outside of human consideration. It’s like writing about building Michelin
tires in a culture than hasn’t invented the wheel. Way outside of that cultures understanding of
the world. How can you handle this if
you really do want to write about modern ideas in a historical setting. Let me explain it to you, because I did this
in two of my novels: The Second Mission and Aegypt. I’ll
write about this, next.
I have a number of historical fiction novels
based on the reflected worldview. One of
my novels, Aegypt caused me to wrote a number of follow-on books as well
as develop an entire real world setting based in history for my
characters. This is a novel based on a
reflected worldview, but I used this to promote historical fiction—how’s that.
Let me state that my novel Centurion is
pure on historical fiction. With it I showed
the world of the first century in the Levant.
This is a great historical fiction novel, but what I wanted to do is to
show the history of the past through the mind and eyes of the modern
world. How to achieve this.
Remember, I wrote that I can’t stand when
authors put the modern world into the minds of their historical
characters. This is a big no no in my
mind. I can’t advise it, but if you can
show the ancient world from the point of view of the modern, you can make
comments and compare the worlds. That is
a totally legitimate means of writing about history in fiction. So, how can we achieve this?
I did it two different ways. In The Second Mission, I took a person
from the modern world into the past. In The
Second Mission, Alan Fisher gets accidentally pulled back into the second
mission into time. In this mission, the time
traveler, Sophia is to record and interact with the Athenian city-state of
Socrates for a single year. She is to
record the final Socratic dialogs that Plato recorded and then return. In an accident of time and place, Alan Fisher
is pulled back with Sophia and must live her mission in the past. Alan gives me the ability to show the past
through the mind and ideas of the present.
This is the use of a science fiction time traveling method to display
history along with the knowledge of the present. The novel is fun although I don’t think some
people get it. Still it answers and
works some great questions about the past and history. It was going to be used by a university for
beginning philosophy students since it includes my translations of the last
five Socratic dialogs in place and in time.
The other novel that I used to compare
modern ideas and the past was Aegypt.
In Aegypt, I brough the past into the present. In 1926, Lieutenant Paul Bolang discovered an
Egyptian tomb in Tunisia. He called for
an archeological expedition and one came.
They discovered the Tombs of the Goddess of Light and the Goddess of
Darkness. When they tried to open the
tombs, the Goddess of Light was resurrected and released. Paul finds the escaped goddess and attempts
to communicate with her in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. She equally wants to communicate with him
because her sister, the Goddess of Darkness is especially dangerous, cruel, and
evil. Do you see how I brought the past
into the present and allowed the novel to show this?
In Aegypt, I bring people back from
the past who lived and knew it. They can
communicate to the present. This is a
fantasy means of communicating the past and brining the past into the
present. This is also the novel that sent
off more than fifteen or more others. I
used the ideas of Aegypt as a stepping stone for other novels that
incorporate the characters and the settings of this reflected worldview. The point from my standpoint, was to show the
minds of beings from the far past, but also to provide a reflected worldview to
frame the world of the Twentieth Century.
My novels in this series cover from 1926 after World War I to the Irish
difficulties in the 1980s. Further
novels move into the Twenty-First century with a slightly different approach
and historical touch. They are all
historical novels, but just with a little different focus on the history.
This is how you can bring the minds and
thoughts of the present into the past.
You either must use some means to pull your character(s) back into the
past, or bring the past up into the present, or a present. I’m sure there are some other mechanisms you
can use, but ultimately, this is how you can do it legitimately.
The next question is the third most
terrible act by those writing historical fiction: incorporation of ideas and
concepts that would be impossible for the history, place, and time. I’ll get to this, next.
There’s more.
I want to write another book based on Rose
and Seoirse, and the topic will be the raising of Ceridwen—at least that’s my
plan. Before I get to that, I want to write another novel about
dependency as a theme. We shall see.
More
tomorrow.
For
more information, you can visit my author site http://www.ldalford.com/, and my individual novel
websites:
http://www.ancientlight.com/
http://www.aegyptnovel.com/
http://www.centurionnovel.com
http://www.thesecondmission.com/
http://www.theendofhonor.com/
http://www.thefoxshonor.com
http://www.aseasonofhonor.com
