Transcript
[0:05] Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.
My name is Julia Golding. I'm an author but I also direct the centre.
And the theme of today's podcast is one that faces quite a few of us as we go through our writing careers and that is what exactly is the difference between between writing something which is a fantasy and something which is in another genre like historical.
And as I've had experience of writing both, I thought it would be a good moment to pause and have a think about this now.
[0:47] When we look to the writers who inspired our centre, that's primarily the Inklings, so J.R.R.
Tolkien, for example, they were great great lovers of historical literature.
That's what they dedicated their life to teaching, by which I mean literature from the past.
And this led Tolkien himself at one stage to frame his idea for The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings as a mythology for England, though scholars are now saying that he actually moved away from that framing to one where he thought about it being held together by the framing device of the Red Book.
But clearly, in his thinking, at some stage, there was this idea of it providing material which could be a sort of story, a historical story, or a set of legends which people in Northern Europe could relate to.
And then looking over at C.S. Lewis he flips this whole idea because what he does in his Narnia series and remember he calls them chronicles which is a very you know historical term.
[2:04] Chronicling the times he flips that so that we get a cradle from grave history of Narnia so So not in order in which they were written, but in order of the timeline, you start with the creation story in The Magician's Nephew, and you go to the end time story in The Last Battle.
So for them, the idea of a historical fantasy is definitely part of what they are writing.
And I'm sure sitting there, you can think of your own fantasy epic, which has the feel of being a history, be it the Dune stories by Frank Herbert, or maybe shooting ourselves into the future.
You could think of the various Star Trek timelines, which are very careful to put themselves within certain points along an imagined historical set of events.
[3:06] But I thought as a writer in both genres, I'd have a time here to think about what is going on when you do both. What are the similarities and what are the differences?
And this is part inspired by the fact that my book that's out this week is called The Persephone Code by me.
That's Julia Golding. And this is a puzzle thriller set in Regency, England.
So that's the same time as the Bridgertons, though perhaps it's another podcast to think how fantastical the Bridgertons are.
That would be an interesting subject, wouldn't it?
Anyway, so in the Persephone Code, which my publishers are calling Dan Brown meets Bridgerton in that way publishers do, I am drawing on both historical facts, but I'm also inventing a lot.
Within a certain set of rules so moving aside from the Persephone Code which is what I’ve been thinking about most recently wanted to think about the basic level of what we're doing when we do fiction so if you're out there thinking of your screenplay or your novel or whatever, even if you're doing the most gritty kind of kitchen sink drama type thing.
[4:25] No flourishes stripped back you are still doing that basic job of fiction of making stuff up because if not you would be writing non-fiction wouldn't you so everything in a way is an imagination it is our fantasy of what somebody else's life is like so let's agree that fiction is fictional that's not so tough is it but we've got to move on now to actually deep to look deeper into what's going on in the genres of historical fiction and fantasy.
[5:00] So the first place I want to stop is at world building.
Now, if you've done any of our fantasy courses or maybe a course elsewhere, you will know that world building is thought of as a peculiarly a skill that goes with writing fantasy.
Actually, it also goes with writing historical fiction because what you first do when you're thinking of writing a historical book, of course, is you do your research to build up the world in your head.
[5:33] Now that is a delight. I mean, I love research.
That's really the joy for me of writing historical fiction is the research.
I've been very fortunate to be able to spend quite a few years in academia and I did a doctorate at Oxford University in the literature of the Romantic period, which is, for those of you who want dates, that's thought of as being from about 1790 to about the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign.
So it includes the Regency period.
[6:09] Studying a period of literature like that in great depth over years to write a sort of academic piece of work means that you kind of get all the… it's like becoming native to that period.
You get a general grounding in it, so you could almost move in.
In your mental TARDIS, you can go back and step out and feel that you've got a grasp on the events of that world.
So when I was writing The Persephone Code, which is very specifically set in 1812, I felt I knew the characters, who else was out there.
It doesn't mean that I can't always discover new facts, but I was already invested in building that world by the work I'd done earlier.
And of course, it's to a certain extent a similar job to what a fantasy world-building exercise is like. You may, of course, take...
[7:07] You know historical examples to help you get to grips of something um i did this when i wrote a ya book set in another world um it's a it's the second part of a trilogy and it's called the glass swallow i decided that my main male character would be a falconer and in order to make that that feel believable within the context of that world, I went and did a falcon flying course because the bird itself is the same even in another world.
So I wanted to know about how you fed them, how you looked after them, how you flew them, what the molting cycle was, those kinds of things.
So it's like doing historical research.
[7:55] And conversely, when I was was writing a book set in the First World War.
So this is a straightforward historical novel for a YA audience.
And this book is called Dawn under one of my pen names, Eve Edwards.
I had a character who was a First World War pilot.
This is in the very early days of flight. So So nothing at all like our experience of flying in a, you know, an Airbus or a Boeing.
And so I looked up and the chance to go on a flight in a Tiger Moth, which is one of the few airworthy planes from around that time that I could get a flight in.
It's an open canopy biplane.
So you've got the sense of the sounds and the physicality of flying.
[8:50] So that really helped my research there. So be it historical or fantasy research, if you can get the real experience, then that is gold.
You know, that is absolutely gold.
[9:04] And then, of course, the other thing about world building for a historical novel is that you get the chance to visit the actual locations very often.
So if you're writing a book about ancient Rome, you're going to book a plane ticket and go to Rome and so on.
In the case of the Persephone Code, it was actually one of the locations that really inspired the book because at the heart of the Persephone Code is the Hellfire Club, which was a sort of secret society that started in the 18th century that used to have very risque parties and sort of blasphemous darker undertones and where they used to party is not so very far from where i live now there's a set of caves near high wickham that's where james cordon comes from by the way uh in a place called west wickham a little village next door and there's a series of of caves.
And in those caves, they used to hold parties.
[10:04] And in fact, I'm going to hold the book launch for this book shortly in that cave. So, you know, what could be better?
Though hopefully we won't be doing the blasphemous and illegal activities that the Hellfire Club used to do.
At least I'll try and keep my guests under control.
So visiting locations is obviously, obviously, you know, a real godsend for writing historical fiction because you get a sense, again, of the place, the lay of the land, the history of why things are in a certain place, that real sense of groundedness in a world.
[10:40] But let's not separate fantasy too much from this, because in fact, very often someone who's setting a fantasy in a particular place, be it a wood or a desert, will have their real world experiences behind that.
What it feels like to live in a desert, for example, going back to June.
Cartoon, you would go to the Sahara or somewhere like that, or look at the practices of the Bedouin or other people who live in those environments and use those as the grounding for your fantasy.
I can't really think of a completely untethered to real experience fantasy world.
I guess maybe Perilandra, C.S.
Lewis's imagining of what Venus is like is is quite close to that but on the whole even in sci-fi at the heart of it there is some.
[11:32] Experience that you can point to in our world because otherwise it's incredibly hard to imagine maybe some of the versions of this that go into some sort of digital other world.
[11:45] Like the multiverse in the marvel universe maybe that's edging that way so something where we don't have any groundings i don't know it's quite an interesting one to think through because it's very hard for us to really imagine something unique it's it's it's usually elements that we've drawn from what we've experienced and this goes to remind me of something that margaret atwood said she calls her works of on the fantasy end of the spectrum speculative fiction and she She makes the point that nothing that she puts in her work has not happened somewhere in the world at some point or a version of it.
If you think about how often these days The Handmaid's Tale is being referenced as part of the political discussion around abortion and birthrights in America,
[12:43] you can see how there's this play between real world and fantasy in that particular case.
So where historical and fantasy do differ, I would say, is when it comes to magic.
Magic is like introducing another Newtonian law.
Whereas historical world has its function where everything is.
[13:12] What we experience life to be like. Adding magic is like inventing yet another law where magic is part of the experience.
[13:22] So the question you're asking yourself as a writer of historical fiction is, could this plausibly happen in this historical context?
So there are two sort of main camps on this. One is where you're writing in the gaps of history and inventing characters and events. That's kind of what I prefer to do.
It gives me a freer hand to have a romp through history.
Or there's those who reimagine historical characters like medieval kings and queens, or in Hilary Mantel's case, Cromwell in The Wolf Hall, that series of three books, which then were turned into a successful TV series.
Is and within that you won't she will have tried to pin it everybody to something that was that she could find in her research that's that's her particular approach there.
[14:17] So going back to the question the historical fiction writer is saying is could this plausibly happen is there anything here that breaks the rules of this historical moment so you're not going to get a car driving through a medieval battlefield that's just not going to happen It then immediately becomes fantasy.
And there are subtler things like trying not to choose language that breaks the illusion of it being set in a historical context.
So you don't want lots of people going around saying, hey, guys, hi, because it just doesn't feel right.
[14:52] And I don't know if you have listened to the podcast Script Notes, which is a great podcast for people doing screenwriting. They were talking recently about the Tiffany problem.
And the Tiffany problem is where there's a historical fact that does break the illusion of it being historical.
So apparently the word, the name Tiffany was known in the medieval period.
But if you have a Princess Tiffany walk into your serious medieval drama, it feels as though she sounds like a Disney princess or somebody from the 20th or 21st century.
So you would not use that as a result even though your research says it's there and you'll find other cases of this they're quite fun to come come across one of the ones which is on the edge here is um the the the sort of exclamation what the dickens sounds as though it must be to do with charles dickens but actually it's much older than that and you find it in shakespeare so when that comes along you suddenly feel as though shakespeare's done a bit of time traveling and brought brought it back. But no, it was around at the time.
[16:01] So looking at fantasy, what is the question a fantasy writer is asking herself?
Well, it is also, could this plausibly happen?
But then the next part of that sentence is, within the rules I've set myself in my fantasy world.
So again, going back to the idea of magic being like another Newtonian physics law for your world.
Once you've set those laws, you can't just fiddle around with them and suddenly decide that everybody can speak all languages when they haven't previously, and they've been using translations. You can't just, you have to be consistent.
And another thing you can't do is you can't suddenly invent a creature that seems to have no place or rationale within the world that you are describing.
You have to lay the ground and have to have made the rule so it can be encompassed.
It is like you created your own historical context.
And that's probably quite a good way to think about it.
Tolkien himself thought about the way he wrote his stories as being.
[17:17] He almost felt like he was adding to a chronicle for his own world.
And i came across a quote for him from him recently about the future of shadow facts where he said oh yes i think shadow facts went with gandalf on that last ship but it wasn't mentioned or it wasn't recorded in any of the stories of the time but i feel it should have happened it's almost as if he's kind of teasing us to think about the other hidden stories in the gaps perhaps so posing within his own fantasy as a historian of it who doesn't know the whole thing when of course it is his invention and when it comes to writing a historical novel versus a fantasy novel i'm not entirely sure there's a huge difference because a lot of the structuring tools that apply to historical fiction, also apply to fantasy, also apply to real-life contemporary fiction.
The idea of pacing and plot beats and all of that, they do transfer across all of these genres.
[18:31] And so though I've got my PhD in the world of 1812, so that I have walked around in my imagination in that world when I'm writing the Persephone Code, I also have a kind of mindset, where the world I invented for the glass swallow and dragonfly, which were other world fantasies, I also have a map and a set of rules and back history for places, which I discover as I write.
And so it does feel as though, like Tolkien did, I'm becoming a historian to my own fiction, which is lovely.
It's why I write in some ways.
[19:17] And then of course just talking about doing historical research it's a really valuable tool for the fantasy aspiring fantasy writer because the more you know about history the more weirder and more wonderful it becomes there are things that you won't be able to think up that you will discover by a broad historical reading list which of course can become plot ideas for your historical novel but they can also give you really fresh material for that fantasy world when you convert it into some kind of fantasy plot move or trope you can come up with your equivalent of the handmaiden's tale by doing your historical research so i would say just to to sort of wind this up, that the top tip for fantasy writers is be historical novelists, of your own fantasy world.
Go in with that mindset and see what happens.
[20:20] Now, if you would like to have a look at what I've been doing in the Persephone Code, do pick up a copy.
It's available in the US as well as around the world.
It's on kindle there's going to be an audio version but there's also a nice paperback which you know is my preferred delivery method when I'm reading a novel and thank you very much for listening.
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