06 June 2026, Writing - part xxxx436 The Novel, Antiquity and Technology, Worldview, Ancient World Ideas
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.
Perhaps the worst offences in historical
fiction is the lack or the ignorance of the importance and reality of religion
in the minds of the people and cultures.
This piggybacks on the greatest misunderstanding of the modern world
about the past, which is the idea that any human had any idea about how the
universe or anything else really worked.
Even the basic ideas of the modern world had to be invented in the past,
and most modern people are completely ignorant of all they discovered because
we live in the world of empiricism and not the world of the rational. We think we live in a rational and empirical
age, but the empiricists won and the logisticians lost, and we don’t understand
the world very well at all.
As I noted, the problem goes back to
religion. When you have no idea about
the natural world or natural laws, you have zero basis for understanding that,
for example, fire requires fuel, oxidizer, and heat. Some things burn and others do not. Why? If
you don’t understand the basis for substances, you can’t begin to understand
why one thing will burn and another will not, plus even with an education, most
people today don’t really understand why or how anything burns. They just rely on the judgement and education
of others who tell them all about the empirical and to have faith in the facts
of burning. You can have much more trust
in this basic science than most people understand, but that’s why hundreds die
of exposure in the wilderness every year.
In any case, without an understanding of fuel, oxidizer, and heat, you
end up with animism—spirits in everything.
The religion of the world without any revelation or literacy is
naturally animism. How else do you
explain fire except that a spirit causes it to occur. There is a spell requiring the proper
ingredients and environment, then the spark of life, and we have a fire. This is the thinking of humanity until a few
other inventions. In the past, you can
only expect all humans to believe in animism.
The reason things grow, move, and show other specific characteristics in
the world is due to the spirits within them.
Likewise, humans have a spirit within.
We move naturally from animism to Pantheonic paganism with
literacy. The reason is as I’ve written
before. Until literacy, there are
certain ideas that can’t exist in the world.
Love is one of those ideas. Love
can’t exist in any form until you invent a word for it. If written words don’t exist, there is no way
to express ideas that are not solid nouns or verbs. When I write solid nouns or verbs, I mean
those you can draw a picture of. Love is
not unique, but you can’t draw a picture of love. There are all kinds of things you can’t draw
a picture of. These words and ideas
require a written word. A protoword or
protowriting won’t do—it must be a word.
The reason we get Pantheonic paganism with literacy is that the literate
invent all kinds of words to describe those things that can’t be pictured and
suddenly you need some physical form, other than the word itself for the
idea. You make gods to fill in the
intellectual voids. Thus, I get a god or
goddess of love. I can also get a god or
goddess of marriage and the home. The
goddess or god of dreams. The god or
goddess of knowledge. You can go on and
on, and the gods suddenly get the jobs some spirit used to do. For example, Zeus becoming the god of lightning
and fire, but not replaced but subsumed as the head god and giving over his
role as the fire maker to other gods. So
is the way with human literacy and understanding of the world.
My main point is this. We think the people of the past were just
ignorant. They were not ignorant as much
as they could not understand how the world worked because they had no basis for
that understanding. The world was not
governed by nature or natural laws in their minds, but rather by the gods and
spirits within everything. This was not some
selective idea but rather a human reality for a long time. Any historical work that doesn’t recognize
this human reliance and full on trust in the spirits of the world is a futile
and false understanding of the past and of humanity. People did not pick and choose what to believe—they
believed because for them it was truth.
One great example from the past based on
this. Fire came from the gods and was
sacred. This is why all cultures either
worshiped fire or kept it as a sacred piece of the gods. For example, in Greece, the goddess of the hearth,
Hestia kept the sacred flame. The flame
itself came fist from Zeus as lightening, and then from Appallo as
sunlight. This reflected the Greek understanding
of fire and the ability to make fire using a polished concave shield. In Greece once a year, all the hearth fires
were extinguished and the sacred fire rekindled from sunlight on mount Olympus at
Hestia’s hearth. This fire was then brought
to ever temple in Greece by runners and the hearth fire for Hestia rekindled in
the temples. From the temples, the people
brought the sacred flames to their own hearths.
Every year, the flame was renewed.
In Greek culture, you were not allowed to rekindle the flame on your
hearth with just any flame—it had to come from the temple hearth. This was an idea so ingrained in the Greeks
it even lives today in some regards—further, the flame was protected through
the night with the alpha and the omega, which are symbols for Hestia. Hestia was the alpha and the omega. She was the beginning and the end, the hearth
fire of the Greeks could not be put out and symbolized the entire spirit of the
Greek people and culture. I’ll go on,
every first libation of every drink was dedicated first to Hestia. Hestia was literally the alpha and the omega
of their culture. Why is this important? These ideas represent all human culture. No one could believe anything else because
there was nothing else. No one come even
contemplate that some other ideas or existence could be except the gods and
spirits until we hit the next level of religion, mysteriums. These came about because of the invention of
reasoning or philosophy. I’ll get to
that, next.
All civilizations start with animism. When they develop literacy, they become Pantheonic
pagan. That’s due to the fact that new
words create new ideas or vis versa, it’s hard to tell, but most likely they
come together. Then you get mysteriums. Mysteriums come with philosophy. This begins the realization among
civilizations that spirts don’t cause everything in the world. For example, spirits can’t explain pi or the Pythagorean
theorem. The idea that secrets (the
mysteriums) exist that are not explained by the gods, but are somehow provable
changes the world of religion and begins a movement toward monotheism. Now, I do need to mention that there are two
religions that don’t follow this trend in the world, Judaism and
Christianity. They are cut from the same
cloth, and both look like a mysteriums, but they were not created via
philosophy or specifically through reason.
The next stage of religion is Gnosticism. Gnosticism in the West was caused by Christianity,
but developed because of Aristotle, and Gnosticism is the main religion in the
modern Western world. What is Gnosticism? It is created by the invention of the
scientific method, by modern science, and it’s tenants are that knowledge leads
to physical as well as spiritual salvation.
Sure smells like the modern world.
We have many religions that represent
these four main ideas and two that are oddballs: Judaism and Christianity. As I noted, they look like mysteriums, but
they aren’t. All the others fit into the
containers of animism, Pantheonic paganism, mysteriums, or Gnosticism.
I guess I should explain why they look
like mysteriums, but aren’t. The key quality
of any mysterium is that it has a secret and a secret initiation ceremony. During the initiation ceremony, the first
level of the secret is revealed. All mysteriums
have a secret initiation and a revelation of the whole or part of the
secret. In addition, mysteriums have all
kinds of pretty standard religions traits like baptisms, meals with the deity,
ceremonies (mostly in secret), robing, renaming, prayers, invocations of the
deity, sacred signs, and a few others.
You see all of these in Judaism and Christianity except in both, there
is no secrets and no secret initiations.
I should mention that religions that hide their ceremonies to protect
from persecution are not mysteriums.
Mysteriums are mysteriums because their initiations and their secrets
are their revelations are secrets.
Neither Christianity or Judaism are intentionally secretive. In fact, this is what endeared and brought
great acceptance of Christianity in the world of the Greeks and Romans. A mysterium that let you into the secret
right away. By the way, the secret of
Christ: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.
So, what is my point about religion and
history? In all of history, until
Gnosticism became a thing and really popular about he Age of Enlightenment (1750
to 1800), people practiced religion, whatever it was with a fervor because it
was not just an idea, but the basis for their understanding of the world and
the universe. They and it could not
exist outside of religion. Most modern
historical fiction authors threat religion as we do in the modern era as an
option. In the past, it was never an
option—it was existence. The people did
not pick and choose, they simply believed and existed. In fact, until Christianity basically told
the world they had a choice and could choose, there was never a way out of the religion
of the place or culture. This perhaps is
the greatest fault of most historical fiction.
They almost all treat religion as a choice and an idea rather than a
feature and quality of the entire people.
There were never bad or false believers—there were just believers.
A further problem I see in modern writing
is that it almost entirely ignores religion in all cultures. Except when it wants to belittle or create an
antagonist or an evil person, religion is usually no part of any novel. So, riddle me this, when a large portion of
the American population believe in their religion and at least 50% practice
some religion, you would be hard pressed to find any novel that even has any
religion or touch of religion in it—especially positively. This is like ignoring the fact that the USA
has grocery stores or even malls or places to buy things. They are ubiquitous, but not religion in
fiction. It’s almost funny.
So, I have a very special beak for those
writers who do not get or provide any understanding of religion from history,
and I have distain for authors who don’t touch any religion in modern writing. The least we can do as authors is normalize
the normal and not ignore it, but that’s my own peeve.
There is more to this about stuff that
historical fiction gets completely wrong about the world. I’ll explore that, next.
I’ve written about furniture and food, but
almost every aspect of life in the past is much different than life in the
present. The problem is that many of not
most authors don’t get the history right at all. For example, one of the main problems of
historical fiction and general historical understanding in modern society is
the problem of the scarcity of almost everything. For example, when you see a historical show,
almost everyone is well dressed and properly clothed. Clothing seems ubiquitous and everyone has
plenty of everything. The reality of the
past is that many had very little and some had almost nothing. Clothing, in the past, was almost always hand-me-downs,
and used. Usually, it was used and purchased
used. Only the wealthy could afford new
clothing and all clothing was handmade. The
middle class and the poor could hand make some of their own clothing, but the
average person might only own two sets of clothing. They wore these clothes every day and without
much washing. We can only imagine the
smell and dirtiness of the people. They
didn’t take many bathes either. Their
faces and hands were generally clean, but everything else, yuck.
Further, until around 1750, no one, and I
mean, no one, wore underclothing of any kind.
Underclothing developed as a result of the cotton trade and
industrialization of cotton fabric production.
The outer clothing was expensive, but underclothing was less expensive
and made the outer clothing last longer and smell better. You could wash cotton underwear while most
wool or other fabric outer clothing could not be washed easily. In spite of the lower cost of cotton
underwear, most of the poor wore used underclothing sold by the wealthy and
middle class. Historical fiction and
history shows rarely depict this scarcity of clothing and reality of the past,
but there is more.
I mentioned the problem of metals and
money before, let me repeat myself. We
think that money was ubiquitous because it is today. Money and metal were scarce commodities in
the past. In general, metal equals money
and money equals metal. The word for
coin in the ancient Greek means cut or punched from a pot. The point is that money and metal was almost
the same. You also might know that in
the past governments could not inflate commodity based money—that means the
value of the Greek denarius remained very constant through time. Over time metal reduced in value because of availability
and production, but the value of money remained relatively constant (unlike
today). Still, until about 1750, most
people could not afford a pot or if they could, they only had a single
pot. Pots were metal and therefore very
expensive. Only until modern
industrialization could metal prices become affordable for the average
person. Today, metal is completely ubiquitous
and money flows like water. That’s all
due to capitalism, but even then most history and historical fiction is confused. There is more.
It’s not just money and metal that is
scarce in the past, food, money, books, paper, tools, weapons, domesticated animals,
land, wood, houses, and about everything else was all scarce. In the historical fiction and history shows,
we see houses filled with happy campers ready to face the world. The reality is obvious from the fiction of
the times and the writing of the times, but no one including historians seems
to read any of that. Is everyone living
in an historical echo chamber of complete fiction. Or is the past just made up to suit shows and
fiction? I don’t know, but I write real historical
fiction, and I’d like to encourage every writer to follow that lead.
There is more, and I’ll go there, next.
The absolute reality of the ancient and
not so ancient world is that most people were completely emersed in just trying
to get enough calories to survive. That’s
why all cultures in the world until America in about 1750 was a starvation
culture. Actually, the USA which wasn’t
the USA at the time, was the first nation to begin to break out of a starvation
culture. The means, as I’ve written
before, was through property ownership and free market capitalism. These two go together, and these two could
not exist in the world in any place except the USA. The reason is the same today: in Europe
people do not really own any land, however, their rights became less curtailed
because of the USA. In the USA today,
people don’t really own land either, but I won’t go through that story
again. I caused it, and let’s hope in
the future it is overturned in the courts back to what it was. In any case, you all, including most of
Europe have the illusion and the value of land ownership. What that allows you to do is to use your
land to produce products, like food, manufacturing, and so on. The value of this production mostly, or at
least in part, goes to you. It’s true in
most nations you pay the socialist ideal of more than 50% of your profits for
the privilege of poor and insufficient services. In the USA, we still pay on average much less
than that. Too bad we aren’t living with
the ideals that removed all of these Western societies from starvation cultures
to the current affluent cultures they are today. I can assure you more people with more money and
government with much less money results in much more wealth and prosperity. If you want examples just look at North Korea
and South Korea or Taiwan compared to Communist China, or the exSoviet Union
compared to Europe or the USA. Heck,
just look at the USA with it’s extreme wealth and value as a nation. Even the poor are fat.
So, what do historical fiction writers
(and many historians) get wrong? The
main problem is how people think. We are
used to people reading to themselves or praying quietly or even thinking by
themselves. If you every looked at older
literature and wondered why people rarely or that writers from older periods
made a point that their protagonists or characters were thinking, reading, or
writing alone—you should realize that the idea of such things was new. Not that people did not think and read and
potentially write alone especially as we moved into the 1750s or so, but that
the entire ideas were odd to general society.
Just as in antiquity, the idea that natural forces could cause
something. Everything was the result of
gods or spirits in the minds of the people of antiquity. There were no other ideas or thoughts until
really the mysteriums and Aristotal, and even Aristotal was not fully certain
that the natural laws he was discovering with the scientific method were actions
of the gods or spirits or laws natural to the universe. This is very important. Every Greek, Roman, and other person until
the Age of Reason assumed everything was the actions of the gods or spirits. One of the discerning points of the Age of
Reason was that Christianity discovered the difference between God and the
creation. The Christian God did not make
the world play it’s forever tune. The
Christian God created the universe and in fact, the Creation to be and act on
its own. It was a function of the universe
and the Creation and not just the Creator making things happen. This all came from the idea of freewill. Just as man had freewill, so did the
Creation.
The most important idea from this is that
many less educated and non-Christian cultures today attribute the actions of
the world to gods and spirits. Only with
the concept of freewill and the Christian ideas of freewill and the universe,
can any culture understand the idea of the laws of nature. This is even true for the Gnostics. Remember those pesky semi-atheists? Gnostics come out of Christianity and really
no other religion because of freewill and the idea that knowledge leads to
salvation. The Gnostic’s idea of
salvation is a bit different than the Christian’s idea of salvation. Gnostics believe that knowledge of the world
and universe (Creation) will lead to godhood.
They mean that they will become like gods. As you can note, this is a very Christian
idea with the perversion of knowledge. Christians
believe that if you are persuaded of the logical argument of Christ—that Christ
Jesus is God and has the ability to act as God, then that’s the reasoning and
knowledge required for salvation. The Gnostics
reason that if they can acquire the knowledge of the Creation, they can be like
God and see Jesus as their predecessor—a man who became like God.
What does this have to do with historical
fiction? If you think like the person in
antiquity, even the early Christians were fighting in their minds about the
actions of the God in nature as compared to what was natural in terms of the
so-called laws of nature. How do you
handle this in historical fiction and other historical writing? You might ignore it, but I recommend you
somehow integrate the ideas of those antiquity to provide some basis for their understanding
of the world. This can provide a whole
host of information and plot ideas. The
point is that it won’t be much difference from modern ideas. People in modern society generally have no
idea how the world works at all, but they think they are really knowledgeable. They flip a switch and have great faith that
the lights will come on. When they don’t
most people in the modern world might have no idea what to do. The ancients would actually do a better job
solving the problem—they might just not be willing to do some things we would
consider normal. For example, I suspect
most every person in the ancient world knew how to make a fire, but because of
the religious nature of the fire on the hearth, they would not relight a hearth
fire—they would go to the temple for the official fire and not make one. Making a fire would be considered a great sacrilege
in this case.
How far did these ideas and these taboos
go in the Greek society? Well, in the
Hebrew society, the two leaders who offered nonapproved fire to God were burned
to a crisp. Not a good end.
I tell my classes all the time, we need to
put on the mind of the ancients we are studying to be able to understand how
they thought and why they did what they did.
I’m sure there is more to write about
this. We’ll look at that, next.
Really, I realized that I should be
writing not just about antiquity but also about the modern world. The reason is that much of the world thinks
like the mind of the ancients. There was
hope for the third world and second world with the Jesuits and Western
education, but both have fallen by the wayside and education in the West isn’t
anything to call home about except with a private or parochial education. The wealthy get a great education while the
poor are wallowing in ignorance and stupidity.
That’s sad because the potential for greatness in knowledge is there and
historical fiction and history is supposed to build understanding not mask
reality.
What’s the problem? Here’s the message of the modern world: all
humans are the same and all think the same.
This is completely false. If you
have travelled around the world, like I have, you quickly realize that people
are not the same and people do not think the same. Perhaps the best example is from languages.
I love the word love because it is a miniature
microcosm into the thinking of the human world.
If you remember, I wrote that the illiterate can’t even imagine
love. Without the ability to see and
define a word, you can’t understand it.
Therefore, whatever portion of the modern world that is illiterate can’t
even begin to fathom love. How much of
the modern world is illiterate. If you
go by modern America, we know that about 50% of the population is functionally
illiterate. This probably does include the
partially literate. The partially
literate might have some comprehension of the idea of love—this is why they
venerate celebrities. The celebrities
have become their modern gods. This is
the way of the ancients. People can live
in your culture and society who are functionally illiterate, but who give the
impression of some degree of understanding by actually being Pantheonic pagans—and
you had no idea. If 50% of the population
of the USA is functionally illiterate, what does that mean for the rest of the world? I suspect that at least 50% of the entire
world’s population is functionally illiterate.
They make due and they imitate some degree of understanding because of
TV and other media, but underneath, they don’t have the slightest idea about
many things and many ideas.
In fact, the way you can tell are the fun arguments
that we see in the media. Ideas and
concepts that have been known or studied or examined for thousands of years are
brought up by the celebrity crowd as if they are entirely new. This is where history and historical fiction
as well as modern writing has failed.
The people should at least know what humanity has already explored and
not act as if these ideas are new or even unique—they are not.
I think we should explore education a
little to understand what education means and what a good education is all
about. I think that’s worth
exploring. Let’s define and look at a
good education, 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
