Historians and writers - a personal reflection

I am in the middle of a project that started smaller than a bumblebee. One day I woke up and saw a call for conference papers. I hate delivering formal conference papers. I am terrified of academic situations. What I like to do at conferences is sit on panels and make supposedly-witty remarks. I like SF conventions, and groups of students - I hate embarrassing myself in front of fellow historians. All very simple.

But the thought of the differences between historians and writers has been plaguing me for a while. And in my in-box was that request for papers. It was for the “Once and Future Medievalism” conference at Melbourne University. My old university – where I was an undergraduate lo, these many years past. And Medieval – my magic word. Say "Middle Ages” and my whole personality lights up.

Without thinking twice (because if I had thought twice, I would not have done it), I sent in a proposal. It was accepted. I was to give a paper. Instant panic stations. I wish publishers would accept my novels as quickly as the conference organisers accepted my paper.

Before I could give it, I had to work out where that paper came from – why I had this sudden imperative to write about a subject that was purely modern, when I am purely Medieval. It had to be an important reason, since I was prepared to face down some big fears to deliver the paper.

The source wasn't hard to find. I work with many fiction writers, some formally, some informally. I write fiction myself. Quite a few of these writers use the Middle Ages in their fiction, as a backdrop or a theme. I do myself. As a professional Medievalist this has caused me many moments of angst, and I ended up (with much encouragement from other writers) starting to teach Medieval Studies to writers.

This took quite a bit of rearranging in my mind. The first reaction of most Medievalists to books set in the Middle Ages is often to play "spot the error". The longer I am in the writing game and the more I thought about my conference paper, the more I realise that fiction writers are actually doing something quite different to historians, and that the "spot the error" response just creates an 'us' and 'them'.

When I had finished thinking through, the obvious struck me. Most people understand this already - I have no excuse for being so slow in working this out. There is no good reason why a novelist should wish to write an historical or fantasy novel that reads like a doctoral thesis. In fact, I can think of 1001 reasons why most should not.

Fiction writers, in other words, have different imperatives to academics, and quite different resources.

Not only are fiction writers doing something entirely different to academics, they mostly don’t have the same research access as historians or the same training. This means that they can face problems even in areas where the historian and the writer of fiction have overlapping aims.

As I write it out, this sounds self-evident. It was not, however, so evident to me when I drafted that proposal for a conference paper. What was evident to me, at that moment, was that I had put in the proposal for a paper because I needed something. I needed to find out what I really meant by the different imperatives and different resources that a Medieval scholar had compared to a fiction writer using the Middle Ages. I had discovered I could not simply assume that the novelist was ignorant or lazy, because I knew many who were not. It became very important to me to find out how writers used the Middle Ages and why writers used the Middle Ages.

The paper has been web-published , if you want to see the interim conclusions. I am only partway through the project though. In sorting through how I would find out what I needed to find out, I discovered I had a large project. Not a conference paper or an article or two, but a whole book. Some of my results are obvious, some are cute, some are quite amazing.

You know the saying that opening one door leads to opening many others? This is the process that is currently unfolding.

I would like to give answers here, and tell you just how writers use the Middle Ages, but right now I am in the middle of more questions. Right now, I am thinking about the answers to my second questionnaire - my first one elicited over twenty-five thousand words of response from twenty-two writers. My first set of questions was designed to help me find out basics. I thought I knew some of the answers already, but I needed to check. It is very easy to assume you know things – and to get them wrong, and it struck me that a lot of the time, scholars assume they know authors, and don’t do the polite thing and ask the questions. I am glad I did the polite thing, because some of the results were surprising.

If you are interested in the sorts of issues that started me off down this track, then look for the discussion between Elizabeth Chadwick, Tamara Mazzei and myself during Women's History Month in 2004. In this discussion you can see some of the reasons for an unintended gulf between fiction writers and scholars, and you can see just how interesting the differences are. Goodwill on all sides doesn’t always lead to happy endings. We found out that writers had needs and academics had needs and only very occasionally did those needs align.

One of the needs fiction writers have is to be seen for what they are and given credit for the work they do. So far twenty-two writers have joined me in helping get the relationship between novelists and the Middle Ages expressed in novelists' own words. Each step I take is more exciting than the last. I am hoping that the whole thing will end up in print, so that other people can share these discoveries and some of the fascinating things writers say about their writing and about their relationship with history. Watch this space, or the Trivium Publishing website , or my weblog , because I have a long way to go on this path and it is sure to be fascinating.

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