History is My Plaything
by Maia Chance
I’m in a bind: I respect the notion of History. However, I read and write historical genre fiction.
When readers pick up a cozy mystery, they aren’t looking for a chalk-dry
academic lecture. What exactly is my responsibility, as a writer of
stuff-that’s-utterly-fabricated, to dignified History? Can I make my version of, say, the nineteenth
century, look like the anachronistic faux-land of Disney films? Or should I attempt to replicate, like a
lithograph, the staid language of Nathaniel Hawthorne?
Maybe neither. Literature
scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writes, “Writers present models of reality
rather than a description of it” (Figures
in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self). This means, among other things, that writers
of fiction don’t construct facsimiles, static artifacts, of History. Instead, writers write worlds as they might’ve been.
But there’s a wrinkle: I can’t have my 1867 hero say “Google,”
and my heroine can’t wear Pumas. Suspension
of disbelief depends upon a flavor of
historical authenticity. So, how do we add
historical flavor without the History textbook calories? Here’s my two-pronged method:
—Use Slang. Period slang is saturated with flavor, without
resorting to any exposition. Pure gold.
Read writing from (not about—from)
your time period, and harvest the slang.
—Paint a Backdrop of
Things, not Events. Okay, I watch Downton Abbey. But truthfully, the way every last major historical event smacks that family over the head
does some damage to my suspension of disbelief.
People live their day-to-day lives abutting detailed, tangible things;
putting those things into your writing will make your historical setting seem,
likewise, detailed and tangible.
Period slang (zowie, fiddlesticks, gongoozler, humbug) and period
objects (silverware, castles, Model Ts, and dentures) are my toys. When texts become models of reality, things
thaw out. We’re free to start playing.
Maia Chance is hard at work on her upcoming historical mystery
series, Fairy Tale Fatal, the first book of which, Snow White Red-Handed, will be published by Berkley Prime Crime in Fall
2014. She is a Candidate for the PhD in
English Literature at the University of Washington in Seattle, which means that
she is also hard at work on ... another historical mystery series, set in
Prohibition-era New York.
