Cleopatra's Heir
by Gillian Bradshaw
Read: 1/12/09-1/25/09
LibraryThing tags: Historical Fiction, Alternate History, Roman Empire, Greek World, Egypt, Story Research, Sonderbook (click here for Sondy's review)
This isn't precisely "alternate history" as one normally thinks of it. Or at least, not as I normally think of it. It isn't like Harry Turtledove, or like the only other books I currently have tagged that way on LibraryThing, the Sorcery and Cecelia books. Although it is very, very, very unlikely that the premise of this book actually occurred, it conceivably, theoretically, could have, and our history books would have remained the same.
Cleopatra and Julius Caesar had a son, normally called Ceasarion (all the important figures back then had so many names...). His paternity is debated, but there is good reason to believe Julius Caesar was his father. Among other things, Caesar himself seemed to believe it. Anyway, when Antony and Cleopatra were defeated, Ceasarion was killed by order of Octavian (Caesar Augustus) in 30 B.C. Cleopatra's Heir asks, what if he escaped? Then it proceeds to answer that question quite satisfactorily. The extremely dissimilar viewpoints of a fugitive king and a common peasant are wonderfully done. The character growth is very good, too, without making Caesarion obnoxious and unlikable in the beginning (at least to the reader -- the peasants might have a different opinion). Oh, and the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman cultures are portrayed very well -- accurately, to the best of my knowledge, which one would expect from an author who also happens to be a classics scholar. But she doesn't bog you down in her knowledge, either. If it's a part of the story, she includes it. Otherwise, she doesn't.
I did feel a little detached from this book for some reason -- possibly because of one of those other tags I put on it -- "story research." Still, that didn't come into it much. The issue I want to research more, that of royal hostages, barely was referenced in the book at all. I knew it would be a slender connection. It was still useful, even as a reminder of all the things one has to research to write good historical fiction (and historical fantasy), but that shouldn't have kept me from immersing myself in the story. It normally wouldn't. Maybe I just needed to read it faster. Real life and other books got in the way.
The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature
by C.S. Lewis
Read: 9/28/08-1/5/09
LibraryThing tags: Literary Criticism, Medieval, History, Philosophy, SLOBS
This should be required reading for everyone. Okay, it might be a bit academic for that. Still. His focus is very much on interpreting literature, so if a historical tangent would be important but has no bearing on the literature, he says so and moves on. Nonetheless, for such a focused little book, he covers a decent amount of history, especially the history of philosophy. He corrects several very common historical misconceptions, like the idea that the medievals thought the world was flat, or that they would consider a sphere problematic because everything would fall off the other side (something he himself uses in Narnia, oddly enough). I've seen this corrected in other books, but Lewis' analysis is such a great read.
Obviously they did differ with us on some aspects of astronomy, but that affected life and imagination in different ways than one might think. For example (not the best of all possible examples, but I like this quote),
“The Earth is really the centre, really the lowest place; movement to it from whatever direction is downward movement. As a modern, you located the stars at a great distance. For distance you must now substitute that very special, and far less abstract, sort of distance which we call height; height, which speaks immediately to our muscles and nerves. The Medieval Model is vertiginous. And the fact that the height of the stars in the medieval astronomy is very small compared with their distance in the modern, will turn out not to have the kind of importance you anticipated. For thought and imagination, ten million miles and a thousand million are much the same. Both can be conceived (that is, we can do sums with both) and neither can be imagined; and the more imagination we have the better we shall know this. The really important difference is that the medieval universe, while unimaginably large, was also unambiguously finite. And one unexpected result of this is to make the smallness of Earth more vividly felt. In our universe she is small, no doubt; but so are the galaxies, so is everything--and so what? But in theirs there was an absolute standard of comparison."
I love his preface. He explains of his book, "I cannot boast that it contains much which a reader could not have found out for himself if, at every hard place in the old books, he had turned to commentators, histories, encyclopaedias, and other such helps. I thought the lectures worth giving and the book worth writing because that method of discovery seemed to me and seems to some others rather unsatisfactory. For one thing, we turn to the helps only when the hard passages are manifestly hard. But there are treacherous passages which will not send us to the notes. They look easy and aren't. Again, frequent researches ad hoc sadly impair receptive reading, so that sensitive people may even come to regard scholarship as a baleful thing which is always taking you out of the literature itself."
And from much later in the book, one of the things that "look easy" and isn't: “The importance of all this for our own purpose is that nearly every reference to Reason in the old poets will be in some measure misread if we have in mind only ‘the power by which man deduces one proposition from another’. One of the most moving passages in Guillaume de Lorris’ part of the Romance of the Rose (5813 sq.) is that where Reason, Reason the beautiful, a gracious lady, a humbled goddess, deigns to plead with the lover as a celestial mistress, a rival to his earthly love. This is frigid if Reason were only what Johnson made her. You cannot turn a calculating machine into a goddess. But Raison la bele is ‘no such cold thing’.”
I wonder if, later in the Enlightenment and modernity when you have the exaltation of the more specific type of reason, the deductive part, if they ever took as support the old statements glorifying Reason, when in fact those old statements referred to something larger, something that could not be justified by the smaller meaning alone. Seems quite possible.
And later in the preface, "There are, I know, those who prefer not to go beyond the impression, however accidental, which an old work makes on a mind that brings to it a purely modern sensibility and modern conceptions; just as there are travellers who carry their resolute Englishry with them all over the Continent, mix only with other English tourists, enjoy all they see for its 'quaintness', and have no wish to realise what those ways of life, those churches, those vineyards, mean to the natives. They have their reward. I have no quarrel with people who approach the past in that spirit. I hope they will pick none with me. But I was writing for the other sort."
If there's any time it's okay to indulge yourself and bake and eat a bit of warm crumbly sweetness, it must be on a day when you went running for an hour, right? Especially when it was uphill both ways, not to mention barefoot in the snow. Um. Okay, scratch that last part. At any rate, Scottish Shortbread, here I come!
Writing is weird. In many ways. Let me tell you about one of them.
Part of me feels like I'm not changing The Miller's Granddaughter nearly enough. I feel afraid that all the praise has gone to my head and spoiled my judgment. After all, writers seem to agree that first drafts are crap, that one needs to do at least seven or eight revisions before publishing, that few words will remain the same from first to finished draft, that it is imperative to polish and perfect as much as possible before seeking a publisher because publishing is so freaking hard and they see so many manuscripts, you've got to blow them away. So I look at my manuscript, at how neat and clean it still is compared to published author Kristin Cashore's, how minuscule some of my changes are, how much I'm leaving exactly as is for now, and I worry that I already like the story too much.
Another part of me feels like I'm changing The Miller's Granddaughter far too much. People liked it! They even loved it! I feel afraid that my judgment is suspect and I must trust these very intelligent readers. And yet here I go manhandling the poor story, cutting things, adding things, probably turning it quite boring. Why would I take something that worked, and try to fix it? Why am I messing with pacing? So I look at my manuscript, at the things I've crossed out, and the arrows, and the handwritten notes, and I worry that I'm making it worse.
I worry that my decisions, each tiny little one, are not perfect. They are, in fact, suspect. I must ask other people what they think. And then I see. Even if they are not perfect, taken as a group, they're probably good decisions. One or two or three or four of them might make the story worse, at least for some readers, but all of them together probably will make it better. And eventually, it will be a novel that I genuinely love. And that's best of all. Not that I don't care about everyone else. If that were the case, why bother trying to share it, to publish it? (Aside from money, and let's face it, my chances of making oodles of cash via my writing are only slightly better than winning the lottery. And I've never bought a lottery ticket in my life.) But even as far as others are concerned, it'll probably be more effective if I love it. a) Books written to formula tend to be boring, and one has to tap deep into oneself in order to come up with something truly fresh and unique. b) I'm not all that unique -- chances are, if I like it, there are other people out there very similar to myself who will also like it.
Huh. Who would have thought?
I read an article on pacing by Steve Almond in Writer's Digest earlier today. He mentions a famous piece of literary advice by Anton Chekhov, that you should cut the first three pages of any initial draft. Almond adds that if you're not sure whether or not you should really do that, consider questions like, "Is your protagonist alone for these pages?" or "Is he in bed or in a bathtub?"
Now, the scene I'd especially been thinking about cutting is not actually in the first three pages. The prologue comes first. I had some strong ideas behind the prologue and had to get a lot of information out very quickly in order for my story to make sense, and to get on with said story. So the scene I'd been wanting to cut? First chapter I originally wrote after the prologue. Three pages of it. Of the protagonist alone, starting out in bed, in fact. There are a couple things in those pages I'll save, add somewhere else. But as a whole, they're getting the axe.
Oh, but don't worry. There are other scenes I'm adding. The article ends with exercises. Part of the last one reads, "First: Cut every single word that isn't absolutely necessary until you've cut at least half the story. Second: Using this shorter draft, identify the most dramatic moments and rewrite them, intentionally slowing the pace." Because of the rest of the article, I think what he means by "slowing the pace" is to slow the actual amount of time covered, the chronological pacing, not to slow the "rate of revelations."
I will not be following this advice, at least not just yet, not consciously. (Well hey, Almond isn't Chekhov.) Not only is it brutal, but my novel's pretty short to begin with, and there aren't all that many unnecessary scenes like those first three pages. I under-write. I'm closer to the problem of pacing he mentions earlier, "Covering too much ground. Otherwise known as: That's not a story, it's an outline." Every minute I write I consciously fight that. That whole stupid "show, don't tell" thing. "Okay, that's the scene, now describe the scene, what happens, what do they say?" Nonetheless, consciously doing the exercise or not, I'm sure as I revise there is much I will cut, and even before I had read the article I'd started adding scenes, knowing that such and such also happens to her when she's young, consciously making myself write about it instead of just summarizing it for the reader. That's not quite the same thing as picking dramatic moments and rewriting them, but it's a good first step for an under-writer (I don't know if it's actually spelled with a hyphen, but I am NOT an underwriter) -- picking dramatic moments in what had been backstory and bringing it into the actual story. Yep. Slow the pace. Only without changing certain people's opinions that it's a page-turner. Add depth without actually, well, slowing the pace. Sounds like a good thing to do in a first revision.
Daughter of the Forest (The Sevenwaters Trilogy #1) by Juliet Marillier
Read: 7/1/08-7/3/08
LibraryThing tags: Fantasy, Fairy Tale, Romance, Historical Fiction, Ireland, Medieval
Doesn't this list of tags just make your mouth water? No? Hmph. You're weird.
I can't tell you one of my favorite things about this book, because premise or not, it's not something you find out for sure until over a hundred pages in. So you'll just have to take my word for it, I guess. It's good, read it. One of my favorites, now. The prose is wonderful. Despite its length (544 pages), it feels very polished, crafted and magical.
