Category: writing thoughts

Oh, say, can you see by the dawnzer lee light?

I recently learned a new word: mondegreens. A “mondegreen” is, as defined by Wikipedia, “the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase, typically a standardized phrase such as a line in a poem or a lyric in a song, due to near homophony, in a way that yields a new meaning to the phrase.”

The term was coined by Sylvia Wright, who said, “When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy’s Reliques, and one of my favorite poems began, as I remember:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
And Lady Mondegreen.“

The actual fourth line is “And laid him on the green.” As Wright explained the need for a new term, “The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original.”

So the thing you have to understand about me is that I am absolutely terrible at understanding song lyrics. I have a LOT of trouble picking out words, even though words are often the most important part of a song to me because I’m a writer and not very musical. I frequently have to look up lyrics of a song I love, or it irks me EVERY TIME I hear the song. “STOP MUMBLING!” I shout at the radio. So I frequently have the experience of discovering that I was totally, 100% wrong about what a singer was saying.

I don’t know why it is that what I make up for myself is so often more satisfying to me that the real lyric. Is it just because I’m used to it, having listened to the song that way so many times? Or is it because, making it up myself, I naturally made it up in a way I liked, a way that resonated with me?

The most recent example is from Bob Dylan’s love song, “Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” I love that song. I love it a lot. I love it so much that I love a whole OTHER Bob Dylan love song, “Sarah,” just because it has the line, “Staying up for days in the Chelsea Hotel/Writing ‘Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ for you.” (This despite having no romantic feelings about Bob Dylan AT ALL, as he seems like kind of a jerk.) But I have always, always, ever since I first heard the song when I was 16, thought that the second line was, “And your eyes like smoke and your breasts like rhymes.”

Turns out it’s actually prayers like rhymes. Which, there’s nothing wrong with that as a line. It’s a nice line, even. But I loved my own interpretation. I thought it was the most romantic, sexy simile ever. (For a writer, I guess words are the most erotic thing someone can compare you to.)

And now I’ve heard it the right way and I’ll never be able to unhear it. And I’m kind of disproportionately saddened by that.

When’s the last time you’ve been disappointed by finding out the actual lyrics to a song?

“Maybe they didn’t have black people back then.”

It’s International Blog Against Racism Week, and it FINALLY motivated me to do something I’ve been thinking about doing for a long time: research people of color in my era and setting of choice, Regency England.

I’ve written three manuscripts and I’m starting a fourth, and guess what? I haven’t written a single black character, or Indian character, or Egyptian character, or even a Jewish character (and I’m Jewish myself). I haven’t written a single character who isn’t white and Christian. Not even a minor character or an extra in a crowd scene, unless you count having my heroine bank with Rothschild that one time.

Why is that? Well, the most obvious, easy answer is that the minority populations of England weren’t as large during the early nineteenth century as they are today. Many of the big waves of immigration from different areas of the Empire hadn’t happened yet. And that’s true. But I think there are three factors that are far more important than that one:

1) My default is white. I wish this wasn’t true, but it is. If I have to describe a random housemaid or the heroine’s friend from finishing school or a sailor on the docks or a doctor or a land agent or a waitress or any of the huge cast of supporting characters that are inevitably created for any novel, it doesn’t occur to me unless I consciously think about it that THEY COULD BE A PERSON OF COLOR.

Even Victorian Thackeray did better than that in his historical novels–just off the top of my head, there was an African page boy in History of Henry Esmond and a mixed-race student at Miss Pinkerton’s in Vanity Fair. (Of course, both of those portrayals were racist, but that’s hardly an excuse for my own whitewashing.) English society in 1815 was a lot more homogenous than it is now, but it was also a lot less homogenous than I’ve depicted it in my books.

Why do I say “supporting characters” up there? Because there’s no way I know enough about nineteenth-century non-white-British cultures to write a story from the point of view of someone from one of those cultures. No way at all. Which leads me to:

2) I don’t write characters of color because I don’t have the knowledge base to write historical characters of color well, to give them the detail and the verisimilitude and the voice and life that every character needs.

Research for writing historical novels is an on-going process; no matter how many books I’ve read or how much I think I know about the Regency, every time I sit down to write I realize there’s another gaping hole in my information. When is a cavalry officer allowed to wear his uniform off-duty? I asked myself a few days ago, and I had no idea. I know quite a lot about historical accounting and poaching and new farming methods in Norfolk thanks to In for a Penny, and right now I’m busy researching bluestockings and the internal workings of the Whig party for my next book, but when the time comes to write the next book I’ll have to do a whole new set of research.

Since ALL of my information about the time period is acquired from books and fellow research geeks, and I don’t have general knowledge based in life experience the way I do about the modern world, I know nothing about Regency communities of color because…

I’ve never researched Regency communities of color. Because I never really thought about it, and I can get away with never thinking about it.

3) Writing characters of color is scary, because if you do it wrong people might get upset. If you just don’t write them, it is hard for people to get upset at you, because you blend in with all the other books that give the impression that the entire world is white.

I’m not happy writing books set in the All-White World anymore. So:

Here are some awesome Regency-set books written by white people that include major characters of color, as inspiration and example:

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. The character in question is the wonderful Stephen Black, an extremely competent butler who, to his great dismay, becomes the favorite friend of a cruel and capricious fairy ruler. Stephen is awesomely realized, and oh yeah, he saves England in the end.

Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series includes a variety of characters from different parts of the world (in particular, China and Africa).

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson. This one is actually set in the US in the period leading up to the Revolutionary War, but it’s so great I included it anyway. It’s about a little boy who gradually realizes that he is a slave and that his entire upbringing is an experiment by Enlightenment philosophers and scientists to determine whether Africans are inferior to Europeans. It’s brilliant and inventive and the historical voice is amazing.

Here are the research books I just ordered:

Black London: Life Before Emancipation, by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina. “Alongside migrants from all over Europe, Georgian London supported a community of more than 10,000 blacks. Theirs is the story that Ms. Gerzina, who teaches at Vassar College, tells with great clarity.” – New York Times Book Review

Immigration, ethnicity, and racism in Britain: 1815-1945, by Panikos Panayi.

And here are the ones I put on my wishlist:

Black Experience and the Empire.
Black Writers in Britain: 1760-1890.
Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830. Yes, I’m a geek, I can’t help it! Too bad textbooks like this are so expensive.
Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History.

If anyone can recommend good Regency romances with characters of color and/or good research reading on the subject, please do!

And here are some blog posts that brought home to me the importance of creating a multicultural world in my stories. They’re about science fiction and fantasy because I read a lot of geeky blogs, but I think the principle is the same.

This one is about Uhura in the new Star Trek movie. I’ve always found it really, really difficult to describe or articulate how this invisibility feels, how it affects you and the way that you view and experience media. I remember someone posted a one page article or somesuch wherein all of the actors in STXI had just one little soundbyte type quotation about their character and their feelings about the original version. John Cho’s was him noting that his reaction to Sulu was essentially: “OMG AN ASIAN GUY IS ON TV.”

This one is a moving essay about the Earthsea trilogy and how it felt to the author to finally read a fantasy story with characters of color in it. Seriously, read this. I cried. But I remember Dad saying, how come you never see anybody like that in the stories you like? And I remember answering, maybe they didn’t have black people back then. He said there’s always been black people. I said but black people can’t be wizards and space people and they can’t fight evil, so they can’t be in the story.

Musings on Race in Fantasy or: Why Ron Weasley isn’t Black. This poster rambles a bit, but he makes some points that resonated with me, as a white author. No writer would dream of suggesting that a black person couldn’t be beautiful, but our “generic” idea of beauty is pale and blonde, just like our “generic” idea of boyish charm is a freckly redhead and our “generic” idea of a wise man is a white guy with a long beard and a pointed nose.

I want to change, and I’m going to try. I know I’ll probably make a lot of mistakes, but I think that’s better than staying where I am, and hopefully, when I do mess up, I’ll be able to apologize, think about it, and do better next time.

Plus ça change…

I’ve been doing research for my next book, and stumbled across something that reminded me of an important point about writing historical fiction.

A few years ago I came across the following quote by William Hazlitt (from a series of lectures he gave in 1818): “I am a great admirer of the female writers of the present day; they appear to me like so many modern Muses.”

What a patronizing jerk! I thought. Those women aren’t there to inspire YOU, they’re artists who do their own creating!

Then, while reading the essay “Representing Culture: ‘The Nine Living Muses'” by Elizabeth Eger in Women, Writing, and the Public Sphere, 1700-1830, which discusses this 1779 painting by Richard Samuel, I came across this passage:

“As Marina Warner has argued in her study of the allegory of female form, [the muses’] symbolic power is so universal that it seems that we are not meant to associate them with real women, let alone women artists. She is correct to make this point in a contemporary sense–we have for the large part lost a sense of the individual characters and functions of the muses, let alone the possibility that they might refer to real women. The muses form an allegory of ideas, in which the personification of abstract aesthetic categories is the primary device[…]Samuel, however, has painted his peers–living women who practiced the arts they represent[…]

Images of the muses or muse in the twentieth century have tended to be voiceless sources of male creativity rather than vivid practitioners of the arts. […C]ertain male poets, such as Robert Graves, have been responsible for perpetrating the myth of the muse as an eternally feminine and passive figure of inspiration. The Romantic and modernist concentration on the individual act of literary creation has tended to focus on the poet’s communication with the muse as an intimate and often highly sexualised relationship, obscuring the classical tradition of representing the muses as a group of independent, active, wilful and manipulative practitioners of the arts.”

There are things I know are different about the Regency gentry: they talked differently and dressed differently, duels were a reasonable way to resolve an argument, a woman who had sex before marriage was “ruined,” and not paying a gambling debt was worse than stiffing your grocer. I know those things because they’re big things and I can’t get away with not knowing them. (Although I still remember how shocked I was the first time I realized that “democracy” was a dirty word in mainstream society during the Regency! If I’d thought about it, I would have figured it out–but because positive associations with democracy are such a basic thing to me, I didn’t think about it.)

But it’s not just the big things that shift over time. Little things were different too, even things that seem “instinctive” or “obvious” to me. The muses represent X to me, so they must have represented X to a Regency person, because that is just what the muses are! But no, the human mind is a wonderful and fascinating thing, and many ways of thinking about things that seem self-evident are really just a product of culture.

Culture changes, even the little things. And if I want to write historical romance that really pulls the reader into another time and another world, if I want to really do justice to my time period, then I need to be as aware of that as possible.

(Of course, in searching for the quote for this post, I discovered that William Hazlitt goes on to say, “I could be in love with Mrs. Inchbald, romantic with Mrs. Radcliffe, and sarcastic with Madame D’Arblay”…so, I guess the women writers are just there to inspire him. He then mocks a series of women poets with such zingers as:

“Miss Baillie[‘s] tragedies and comedies, one of each to illustrate each of the passions, separately from the rest, are heresies in the dramatic art. She is a Unitarian in poetry. With her the passions are, like the French republic, one and indivisible: they are not so in nature, or in Shakespeare.”

Oh, snap! I’m now picturing his lecture as a stand-up comedy routine that bombed horribly. Probably that’s another anachronism, but hey, the more things change, the more they stay the same, right? Clearly I should have trusted my instincts about Hazlitt.)

The letters of the alphabet frighten me terribly

I was looking through my notebooks and came across a great quote about writing from Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel about St. Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis. (I can’t vouch for the translation in the linked edition–I read a much earlier one–but as far as I can tell it’s the only one in print.) The book is narrated by Francis’s best friend and follower, Brother Leo, who says (and I apologize in advance for the association of blackness with the devil):

“Yes, may God forgive me, but the letters of the alphabet frighten me terribly. They are sly, shameless demons–and dangerous! You open the inkwell, release them; they run off and how will you ever get control of them again? They come to life, join, separate, ignore your commands, arrange themselves as they like on the paper–black, with tails and horns. You scream at them and ignore them in vain: they do as they please. Prancing, pairing up shamelessly before you, they deceitfully expose what you did not wish to reveal, and they refuse to give voice to what is struggling, deep within your bowels, to come forth and speak to mankind.”

He’s got it right on the nose, doesn’t he?

Here is another bit from the book that I love:

“When an almond tree because covered with blossoms in the heart of winter, all the trees around it began to jeer. ‘What vanity,’ they screamed, ‘what insolence! Just think, it believes it can bring spring in this way!’ The flowers of the almond tree blushed for shame. ‘Forgive me, my sisters,’ said the tree. ‘I swear I did not want to blossom, but suddenly I felt a warm springtime breeze in my heart.'”

Five Titles In Search Of A Novel

I’ve been writing historical romance since I was 17, and since then I’ve never wanted to write any other kind of novel. I don’t get plot bunnies for them, either.

What I do get are titles.

Seriously, I have a whole list of titles for never-to-be-written novels in such genres as:

The Great American Novel: Meet Me in Sumner J. Calish Square.
The Great American Expatriate Novel: The Bushes in Paris Have Thorns.
The Great Jewish-American Novel: Envious Kishke (and its sequel, Kaddish Cheese).
The Great American Novel with a Southern Setting: A Jar Big Enough to Hold the Sky.

I have no desire to actually WRITE any of these books. I don’t know anything about their plots or characters, and anyway my talent is for writing an entirely different kind of book. But what I love about them is that you can tell from the title exactly what KIND of book they would be.

Obviously romance titles are often instantly recognizable too, and a lot of the time you can even guess subgenre: historical, paranormal, romantic suspense, comedy, &c. Which is something I love. I think it’s amazing how genres and subgenres develop their own style and culture and conventions that a community of writers and readers can play with and follow and subvert and love and laugh at and share and make their own.

I love fake books and book titles within novels, too, so long as it’s done with affection–for example, The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death in Ellen Kushner’s Riverside novels.

I also love when real period titles get a mention. In In for a Penny, my hero reads Chronicles of an Illustrious House; or the Peer, the Lawyer, and the Hunchback. That’s an actual book published by the Minerva Press in 1816, and it’s much funnier than anything I could have come up with on my own!

Of course, it’s not foolproof. For example, when I first saw the movie poster for “Immortal Beloved,” I was CONVINCED it was going to be a vampire movie. You’ve got the intense 19th century guy in a red cravat, the beautiful women with chokers, and of course, the name–“Immortal Beloved.” (Obviously, I knew nothing about the life of Beethoven.) I was completely stunned at being wrong. All the signs were there!

Does anyone else make up titles for books you’ll never write? And if so, what are your titles?

And was there ever a time you were fooled by a title?