Writing Historical Fiction, Setting

A while back I wrote a post about historical fiction and using details from your research to craft your plot. But what do you do when you need historical information and you can’t find it?

I faced this question many times for Screwing Up Babylon. For example, I needed information about the palace in Babylon. But I haven’t been able to find much information on the palace except that it was enormous (600 rooms) and extremely impressive. There are some photos on the web of the palace, except those are photos of Saddam Hussein’s rebuilding of the palace. And his attention to historical accuracy is doubtful. After all, he built his own palace in the shape of a ziggurat over Babylonian ruins. And, honestly, though Saddam’s rebuild is big, it’s kind of ugly and plain—just clay bricks that are already crumbling due to poor manufacture. My readers won’t be impressed. And the real Babylonian kings…well, let’s just say you don’t give the rulers of the known world shoddy workmanship.

So I had a few options. I could go with ugly. But I didn’t think that was fair. Particularly since the Ishtar Gate is amazing (no, the gate didn’t make it into the book), and I’ve no doubt that the Babylonian kings would have made their palace more impressive than a city gate.

Another option was to consider real possibilities and let my imagination run within those parameters. For example, Babylonians often used panels for decoration. So the palace I created has those panels. And I decorated them with aurochs and other creatures from Babylonian mythology.

The Babylonians traded all over the known world. So if an item existed within the Babylonians trading sphere at the time the story is set, then I assumed the item was fair game. For example, Tyre, Sidon, and the Egyptians all made beautiful colored glass, which means the Babylonians would have had access to it. So colored glass makes an appearance in the decoration of the palace.

Armed with historical information and imagination, I created a palace that I think my readers will like. And a palace that the king of Babylon would recognize—or at least one, that might make the king say, “We need to hire her to redecorate the palace.”

Sequel Title and Setting

Congratulations to everyone who figured out the title of the new book. The answers to the questions are at the end of the blog post for anyone who missed anything. But if you didn’t get a chance to figure out the puzzle, the title of the sequel to Screwing Up Time is Screwing Up Babylon.

Picking the setting for the new book wasn’t hard. I wanted a culture that was ancient but still accessible. A culture with tremendous power in its time. And a culture with exotic and fascinating attributes. I needed a place where there’d been enough archaeological information that I’d be able to craft a detailed story. And I wanted it to be familiar enough that it wasn’t too obscure.

Babylon was an obvious choice. It was one of the most powerful kingdoms ever. It had one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World—the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. And though there hasn’t been a lot of archaeological research lately, archaeologists have done quite a bit of research at Babylon in the past. And while in many ways Babylon is obscure to modern readers (have you ever read a book set in Babylon?), modern day Iraq encompasses Babylon. So we’ve seen pictures and maps of the area on television for years.

I’d love to know what you think about the setting.

Here are the answers to the acrostic:

1. Where Mark hid from Peter when he was at Bodiam Castle. Stables.

2. The room where the recipe book was hidden. Chapel.

3. An herbal ingredient in the elixir of time. Rosemary.

4. The name of Mark's grandmother. Elfrieda.

5. The real last name of Jeremiah. Wilberforce-Jones.

6.  An epic poem Mark said he read over Christmas break. Illiad.

7. "On the ____ wall, there's a stone." North.

8. A precious metal used in the time elixir. Gold.

9. The name of the animal whose horn is used in the time elixir. Unicorn.

10. The American university that the grad student Mark met at Bodiam Castle attended. Princeton.

11. The color of Miranda's hair. Blond.

12. Peter is known as Peter the _______. Alchemist.

12. The name of the lord who wants to marry Miranda. Bernard.

13. The university where Mark's dad teaches. Yale.

14. The computer wallpaper that Mark uses is from what movie. Lord of the Rings.

15. The name of another epic poem that Mark tries to read over Christmas break. Odyssey.

16. The name of Mark's cousin. Nathaniel.

Setting As Character

If you’re a writer (or a thoughtful reader), you’ve probably heard the phrase “setting as character.” It’s kind of an odd cliche. How can setting be a character? When people use this phrase, they mean that the setting should be so distinct that it’s almost a character in the novel.

I suspect that we’ve all experienced this in reading, a sense of being transported to another place. The Harry Potter series is an excellent example. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure that I know what it feels like to ride a broomstick or play a game of Quidditch. A lot of sci-fi writers are also good at this. If you’ve read Dune, you felt and saw the planet. You knew what it was like to wear a stillsuit. You could taste the recycled water. Ugh.

If you’re writing a novel where the setting is familiar to you like your hometown, it’s not as hard to come up with details that ground your story in the setting. For example, I live in Chattanooga. If I were writing a story set here, I’d include details about the many bridges that cross the Tennessee River and give the city a European feel. I could include details about the humidity that hangs heavy in the air like moss in the trees. I could even compare the Southern cultural niceties that overlay all social interactions to the kudzu that covers the landscape. But what if you’re not writing about your hometown? What if you're writing about a time and place you never lived in? What then?

Obviously, the answer is research. But giving the reader some paragraphs of setting description doesn’t work either. Your setting needs to be integral to the story. It needs to be a supporting character that doesn’t draw attention to itself. Instead, it needs to appear to make the story possible only at this place and in this time. I believe the best way to do this is through details.

If you provide your reader with concrete details—unique sights, smells, tastes, and sounds, their minds will fill in the rest of the exotic place. But what if you can’t find the specific facts you want?

Instead of approaching research as “finding facts to fill in your story,” try to allow the facts to craft your story. For example, in the sequel to Screwing Up Time, one of the settings is a civilization that we don’t have a lot of information about. But I wanted to give the reader a sense of what daily life would be like. So I researched “daily life in civilization X.” I didn't discover what people's daily activities were, but I discovered what a visitor to the civilization might see in the streets. So I set one of the plot sequences in the city streets.

I used the same technique in another novel I wrote called Dark Mercy, which is a lit-fic set in the 1930s and 1940s in the Netherlands. I did a lot of research into the time period and tried to include important socio-cultural issues in the novel. For example, during this time, coffee drinking was a very important social ritual to the Dutch, and there were strict, unspoken rules about how it was to be done. So I made one of the plot turns take place while two women shared coffee. The woman serving the coffee was very concerned to make sure that the handles of the coffee cups pointed to the right side when the coffee was served—this was one of the unspoken rules. And I used her anxiety to influence the progression of the novel, to make this cultural issue affect the way the plot and character developed so that it wasn’t just a setting detail tacked onto the story.

When the novel was finished, I asked my mother to read it (my mom grew up in the Netherlands of the 1940s). Afterwards, she said, “When I read it, I felt like I’d been transported to my childhood. It was as if you took me there again, and I was nine years old. How could you do that?”

The answer, of course, was that I didn’t. I just gave her enough detail that her mind created the reality and grounded the plot. So when the character worried about serving the coffee, my mom experienced the character’s anxiety. My mom remembered serving coffee (hoping and praying that the coffee wouldn’t spill over the rim of the cup) and reminding herself, “Make sure the handle points to the right.” Thus, the character and plot development that happened in this scene felt like they could only happen in the 1940s in the Netherlands.

It’s those kinds of details woven into the plot that ground the story into time and place. Find what is unique in the time and culture you’re writing about and make those details part of your story. They will create the illusion of experiencing another’s life and times.

What about you, readers? Any ideas, suggestions, or examples of how to craft setting? I’d love to hear your thoughts.