Amanda McCrina

Author of Historical Fiction & Fantasy

Category: Worldbuilding (page 1 of 3)

History, magic, and fantasy

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I always hesitate to call my writing fantasy, because I know that gives people the wrong impression. I’m more often tempted to call it historical fiction, because that seems easier to explain and defend. There is no magic in my imaginary world. There are no fantastical creatures. There’s nothing, in fact, that would be implausible in real-world historical fiction. And I labor to create a sense of “historical” realism. It’s not real history; what I mean is that my characters’ identities derive from their past, the same as do our identities in our world. The way their world works—and the way they understand it to work—is linked inextricably to their history.

My characters are products of their environments. Their stories don’t happen in a vacuum; their societies have long histories, long memories. I want the reader to feel their world is an internally coherent one, and a complex one; I want the reader to have the sense that myriad other stories are happening concurrently with yet independently of my characters’ stories. So I have to give thought to the economic and monetary systems, the climate and crops and markets, the language, the literacy rate, the social issues at work in the background. Perhaps none of this is a pivotal or even visible element in a particular story, but it’s there as an important part of the framework just the same. I want there to be a reason (besides plot convenience) why my main character in Blood Road is bilingual. I want there to be a reason why the royal family are the only ones allowed to wear sapphires. I want there to be a reason why my Empire would wage war over an economically and strategically unimportant rural province in His Own Good Sword. I don’t want anything to feel arbitrary.

Obviously (unsurprisingly) my fantasy world owes a great deal to real-world history, particularly Roman history. With some careful carving-up His Own Good Sword and its prequel, Blood Road, my current WIP, may have worked very well as historical fiction set in the late, crumbling, Christianized Empire. I write very consciously with that setting in mind, because it’s what I know and love. But I choose to write it as “fantasy.” Why? What exactly is fantasy, anyway?

As I said above, “fantasy” has the wrong connotation, if not technically the wrong definition. Technically, any fiction is a sort of fantasy—an imagining of what could be or what might have been. The World English Dictionary defines “fantasy” simply as “imagination unrestricted by reality.” Rather than using “fantasy” as my sandbox for playing with magic and the supernatural, then, I am using it to play with questions of politics and ethics and philosophy. My writing is probably best called “historical fantasy” or “political fantasy”—but even those terms trip people up, because the assumption remains that magic has something to do with it. Mine is neither a real-world setting infused with supernatural elements (as Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, or Katy Moran’s Bloodline), nor a supernatural world with the trappings of real-world history (as Megan Whalen Turner’s Queen’s Thief series, or Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana). The “fantasy” comes instead from exploring real-world issues—slavery, racial and class prejudice, political corruption, theories of government—in a setting informed but unrestricted by reality. It’s magic-less, but it’s no less fantasy.

All the old familiar places

As much as I dislike the old adage “write what you know” for the constrictions it places upon writers’ imaginations, in one sense it’s not bad advice at all. As a writer of historical fiction, it’s vital that I have a solid grasp of the context in which I’m writing. A lot of my research will never make it into the novel, of course—I’m writing fiction, not a doctoral thesis. But it’s research I need to do regardless so that my setting feels fully fleshed out and real, the plot appropriate to the setting. In this sense, writing from what I know is a good thing.

But there’s a danger involved, as I’m finding out with my current work-in-progress. To a certain extent Aquae is a very different animal from His Own Good Sword. It’s a fairy-tale retelling, and it’s more typically “historical fantasy”—that is, it’s set in an actual historical time and place (1st-century Roman Britain, to be exact), but with fantastic elements (the main character has supernatural powers). But because His Own Good Sword was set in a psuedo-Roman world, I’ve found that I can recycle a lot of my old worldbuilding research and apply it to Aquae.

The problem is that it’s all too easy to recycle not only research but also dialogue and character mannerisms and turns of descriptive phrase and even the general pattern the plot follows in each chapter. Some of this is probably just a symptom of Second-Novel Syndrome; if I were writing a post-apocalyptic zombie romance as my second novel I’d still probably experience much the same thing. But there are several similarities between Aquae and His Own Good Sword, and not just stylistic similarities. Broadly speaking, it deals with many of the same things thematically: it’s a coming-of-age story; the main character’s relationship with his father is a major part of it. I find myself expressing those themes in the exact same way I did in His Own Good Sword, virtually cutting and pasting relationship dynamics. On a more technical level, I find myself writing descriptive passages that are nearly identical to descriptive passages from His Own Good Sword. I subconsciously model characters on characters from His Own Good Sword because they fill similar roles in the world of the story. It’s just so much easier to go back to preexisting templates than to come up with fresh new ones, especially for minor characters.

Some of it may perhaps be excused, since the world of His Own Good Sword was in fact intended to feel Romano-British. It’s inevitable that Aquae will bear some resemblance to it, especially in the department of trifling historical details. (The cuisine in Aquae very much resembles that described in His Own Good Sword.) But most of it is probably laziness on my part. Aquae and His Own Good Sword are very different stories, but I’m having to be constantly on my guard to make sure I don’t keep slipping back onto familiar ground.

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