Comments on: Accuracy, believability, and the modern reader

By: Paty Jager

Paty Jager — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 22:39:59 +0000

Hi Courtney,

It was fun meeting you last night at the Mid-Willamette Valley meeting. Great information!

Paty

By: Ansel Frazier

Ansel Frazier — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 21:17:56 +0000

So when the author described something about the city that I know isn’t true now, she hadn’t built up enough credit as a depictor of the era for me to accept that she probably knew it was true then. It was something that could easily have gone either way. If I can possibly explain this without giving away enough that somebody could recognize the book: she describes a specific address as being in a certain district, and I know this address would be several blocks south and a couple of blocks east of where this district is today. Once I figured out what year it was, I realized that it was conceivable that this district had moved, but because I hadn’t even been able to figure out when the book was set without reading the cover copy, I still felt the need to look up the bounds of the district in the year that the book was set and make sure. Most historical fiction/mysteries/whatever that I pick up without being given ARCs are much more grounded in their setting, and it has never occurred to me that I should fact-check something in the setting for any of them.
+1

By: Kaetrin

Kaetrin — Mon, 31 May 2010 00:45:55 +0000

FWIW, I don’t think I would have been thrown out of the story by the phrase you originally intended. I have no problem in believing that things in little villages/market towns in England date from medieval times. But, if you’re worried, you could throw in that some older character (his grandfather, the ancient publican, etc) had said the stalls dated that far back. Something like “he remembered his …. telling him… etc”. Or not!

By: Jeannie Lin

Jeannie Lin — Sun, 30 May 2010 01:12:18 +0000

I wouldn’t have batted an eye at such a reference. Market stalls seem like a medieval thing to me — of course this is coming from Ren Faire and Ken Follett. Really cool that they’re as permanent as buildings. I’d hope the audience is hooked enough to suspend disbelief for something like that!

P.S. I had a similar issue with footbinding…in the end there was no way to explain since it just simply wasn’t done yet, so I just moved on.

By: Estelle C.

Estelle C. — Sat, 29 May 2010 14:54:41 +0000

I just fact-checked an ARC of a historical mystery I was reading this morning, and thinking about why gave me a perspective on this.

The author hadn’t built up any credit with me. I had no sense of setting in the book so far. I didn’t reread the cover copy before starting the book, and it has been a couple of months since I picked it up at a convention, and the opening pages had literally given me no idea of the era. A police captain sends a messanger to track a detective down in person saying he’s needed right away, so I assumed we were before cell phones or pagers, but the detective then managed to walk through town without giving me any hint of what year it was. I then reread the cover copy trying to figure out what the heck was going on and determined the year, but even once I resumed reading all there was to suggest the era was mention that certain inventions were “new.”

I’m probably not the best person to comment on how to make people believe market stalls are several hundred years old, because as long as they’re in England I’d have no trouble accepting that. Plus, I have read your blog, your first book, and your novella, and by the time this comes out I’m sure I’ll have read two more of your books, so I trust that you know what you’re talking about. So I guess my question to consider is: if this is in the second scene, will the first scene and any earlier parts of the second scene have grounded the book enough in its historical setting that a reader who had never heard of you before picking up that book will know you know what you’re talking about?

By: Lynz

Lynz — Fri, 28 May 2010 00:44:52 +0000

Ooh, I like Vicky’s suggestions. I grew up in a house furnished almost entirely with antiques, where clothes were always handed to a friend, not thrown out, and where even books were shared among different branches of the family and could sometimes be enjoyed by several generations before being retired, so I don’t think I’d have a problem with the market stalls being that old.

By: Elisa Beatty

Elisa Beatty — Thu, 27 May 2010 03:27:54 +0000

I like Elizabeth’s suggestion above! Your alternative “older than he was” has nothing of the same impact as saying it’s medieval and/or been in use hundreds of years.

Wear on the wood and the overall look of the stone would reasonably let him assume the church and stalls were roughly the same age. Besides, it might be common knowledge in the village, or even a point of pride that the buildings were a few hundred years old (i.e., it’s the sort of the thing the local vicar, or some other self-appointed local historian, might regularly have bragged on, especially if they liked the stasis/continuity/tradition of the village….) SOMEBODY in town surely would be aware of the history. I’ve never known a small town that was otherwise.

By: Aspiringtobesomeone

Aspiringtobesomeone — Tue, 25 May 2010 02:47:21 +0000

I would go back to the character’s background… what is the oldest person who he knows in the town? Did they ever tell him stories of how the stables were there before him/her? Or great-great whoevers…

People relate more to people then years… unless if something happened there…. like the town’s soldiers were invaded there and the people happened to fight them off from the stables… See if there were any battles nearby in the town long ago…

A big thing… is no specifics… 10 year estimation tops.

Good luck, I’m sure you got the answer!

By: Magdalen

Magdalen — Tue, 25 May 2010 00:13:14 +0000

The marketplace in the picture reminds me a bit of Carlisle (without the ubiquitous TopShop or HMV that’s there now, of course). When I saw Carlisle, we’d just come from a 3,000-year-old stone circle (a bit like Stonehenge, only smaller stones & more locals walking their dogs). When the Druids set up stone circles that stick around for 3 millennia, some market stalls could easily be there for 600 years.

But — may I tell you the problem I have with the scene? Your hero can’t be in a village. By definition, he’s in a market town. If it’s a village, it doesn’t (can’t) have a marketplace or the medieval market stalls, and if it has market stalls, it has to be a market town. (Those wacky Brits — it’s a bit like how any place with a cathedral is, by definition, a city. No matter how small it is — and Ely is pretty small, I gather — it’s a city. And don’t get them started on what constitutes a mountain as opposed to a hill.)

By: Elizabeth Essex

Elizabeth Essex — Mon, 24 May 2010 16:29:01 +0000

I might try to equate the market stalls age with something else in the village – like the Church which was built by the Normans – or since the stalls are wood, is there a lynch gate at the church of the same era? Are the slats of wood worn smooth by countless years of use, day in and day out since before the Normans erected the stout stone church? I think your hero, or any hero for that matter, would only think – “That’s medieval” – if he were a scholar. But if we believe he was a scholar, then we will believe he dates his surroundings as part of his natural way of thinking. Just throwing out thoughts here because it’s so much easier to think about your 4th book, 2nd scene than get to my own 4th book 2nd scene.