Writing Tip: Setting and Truthiness . . .

Suppose you are writing a story set in a locale you've never visited. Is it a failure of imagination that you can't quite visualize the scene?

For writers of historical fiction, creating a sense of time and place are crucial in building story. So, in the quest for 'truthiness', a term coined by Steven Colbert, what writers call verisimilitude (actually 'truthiness' is not quite what writers use in their quest for authenticity or fictional truth), but here's one technique I use when I'm stuck.

A table.

I build a two-column table in Word and jump onto the internet to search for images specifically for a particular place. I copy and paste images that tell me something about this place into column 1 and the URL and my reactions and notes into column 2. Note, I'm not violating any copyright because I'm borrowing these images for research purposes.

Here's an example. When Mac and Deidre's ship, the Brilliant, founders just south of Hobart Town in Van Diemen's Land in 1841, I learned that most wrecks occurred in Bass Strait, north of Tasmania. But one truly spectacular wreck took place just outside Snug Harbour in the 1830's. So I placed my wreck there and wrote my scene. But did they scramble over rocks or sand? Were there sand dunes? How high?

I know from my research that a whaling station was nearby (crucial for rescue), but did a road run inland from Snug Harbour to Hobart Town in the 1840's? I found there was a track, but the whalers were pretty isolated, getting supplies every several weeks. So if the whalers were to help in the rescue, that would occur by small boat. Would they go to Hobart Town or nearby Sandy Bay (because they were transporting prisoners).

Now, what did Sandy Bay look like? What could my characters see once they landed? Since I haven't yet visited Tasmania, the distance being a little over 8,000 miles from my home in the Pacific Northwest, and while maps can tell me something (I use Google or Yahoo maps), image is everything.

What did I find on internet? That the most beautiful, wild cliffs border the ocean along the southeastern coast of Tasmania and that my characters can see Mount Wellington from Sandy Bay on a clear day.

View of Mount Wellington and the Derwent River (Wiki Commons)

I do try to be meticulous about using images on my blog to respect copyright. So, any images that appear here are either photos I've taken myself or photos that are in the public domain, like this one of Mount Wellington from Wiki Commons.

How to save a picture from the internet for research purposes:
1. Open your word file (or word processing).
2. Open your internet browser (two windows open at the same time).
3. Find your image on internet.
4. Right click on the image. A menu will pop up. From here you can copy the image and copy the URL. 5. Move to your Word file. Paste the image and URL. Write notes like mad.

What strategies do you use to bring 'truthiness' to your writing.

B is for Baby . . .

Only since 1962 have American women had access to the birth control pill. This Timeline gives a neat overview of the pill's discovery and the rapidity of its adoption.

But what did 19th Century women do to prevent pregnancy? At that time, married women had an average of 6 children (35% had over 8 children), and working class women were expected to work until they had children (1). Abstinence, delayed marriages, withdrawal, abortion, and infanticide were "birth control" options.

Interestingly, the witch hunts of the middle ages can be linked to the actions of landowners and the Church to prevent population loss following the plagues. Those 'witches' were often midwives with knowledge of herbs that could prevent pregnancy or induce abortions. These women were also accused of infanticide; their deaths led to a loss of knowledge of herbal 'remedies' (2).  But my focus is still the 19th Century. Case histories are few for the women at the Cascades Factory in Van Diemen's Land. But one convict woman was sentenced to 12 months for killing her infant within 10 minutes of birth (3). Infanticide has been called the most common form of birth control (4).

Some scholars talk of a culture of abstinence among the upper classes with delayed marriages and lower frequency of sex after marriage (5). Apparently some upper class marriages, dubbed "companionate marriages," were more for companionship than sex, with little formal recognition of a woman's ability to enjoy sex (5).  It looks like condoms were used by upper class men primarily with prostitutes as protection from STDs. But syphilis (called the pox or 'great pox') was a very real risk, common among sailors and prostitutes. Doctors of this time were just beginning to recognize that syphlitic husbands could transmit the disease to their wives (6). Fabricius, writing in Syphilis in Shakespeare's England, (an interesting book for interlibrary loan), suggests much like AIDS, that the threat of syphilis brought about significant change in people's actions and morals -- and increased chastity before marriage, monogomy, and  faithfulness. The biography of John Bateman, one of the first men to compensate aboriginals for their land, shows the effects of syphilis on both his aspirations and his family. He had nasal syphilis which ate away part of his face and he was unable to walk. Once these lesions appeared, his wife, Eliza, left him (7).

So what does all this information mean for Years of Stone? For now, that 19th Century attitudes about marriage, sex, and having babies vary widely by class. And that we are lucky indeed when a new baby is welcomed by loving parents, then or now.

(1) Spartacus
(2) Wikipedia
(3) Convict Lives: Women at Cascades Female Factory
(4) Cambridge Urban History of Britain
(5) Criminalization of abortion
(6) A Treatise on syphilis
(7) Australian Dictionary of Biography