PUT OUT THE DAMN LIGHT

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Byron, corsets, England, etiquette, genre, history, manners, mystery, pet peeves, regency, Victorian, writing

Judi Lynn/Judith Post recently wrote a blog about ten steps to make your mystery better and started off with “kill somebody.” I can’t think of any opener to top that, so will just start off with the things I look for and try to incorporate in historical fiction to make it believable and immediate. Because that’s the point, isn’t it? To immerse the reader in a world that has been before.

Character/s

How often do we see the same man or woman over and over in a story and nothing changes but their eye and hair color? In reality, people don’t look the same, even when they look sort of the same. People are unique. So should characters be. It’s best if they possess the kind of personality you’re drawn to, but perhaps you prefer the challenge of finding a way to make a somewhat off-putting man or woman sympathetic to the reader. But an initial connection must be made from the get-go and that’s kind of difficult if they have the charisma of yesterday’s pancake.

The Four Es of Character Building

Entice, entrigue, engage, and excite. This doesn’t mean making them attractive. It means making them accessible. They should have traits and personalities similar to the human conditions that haven’t changed over the ages. We all have baggage. Give them reasons for reacting the way they do when “showing” their responses, instead of just “telling” or explaining them on the page. Lets’ just get over it. We’re products of our environments until we do something about it. Give your protags some emotional warts so you can show how they’ve grown (removed) them by the end of the book.

Mary Balogh’s more recent regency works are peopled by the challenged. Her characters have been blind, lame, deaf, suffering from disabling war wounds, including PTSD. The ubiquitous fiesty heroines and sardonic men have become tedious, which is why Balogh is considered the comemporary queen of historical regency. Her people have the problems, joys, and triumphs we understand and seek, or find lacking in our own lives. They have some amazing emotional warts to overcome.

The Three Cs

Complication, conflict, conclusion. You better have all of these nailed. Throw in some juicy subplots while you’re at it to pick up the pacing and tension. If dried up of ideas on how to inflict misery on your beloved protags, there’s always a nasty or annoying family member. We’ve all got one.

Situations

An opening incident that involves one or both of your main characters must suck us into the storyline, establish the time period, or atmosphere, and most importantly, get the reader invested in the primary charatcers.

More and more we’re seeing historical stories striving to tweak genre themes to fit into a niche market or category. In doing so, the story can become secondary to the magic of creating a period piece or just a dang good story. The deliciousness of sinking into the past can get lost from its primary goal by forcing conformity to a parameter. It’s vitally important to keep the time period immediate, to bring the reader into that world, become saturated by the surroundings. In other words, don’t lose sight of the magic of the site, the joy of being there.

Know your history

 OK, so I have a pet peeve about blatant incongruity, like women in corsets doing impossbile physical feats while wearing what should be more accurately called a torso vice made of whalebone or metal slats. It’s impossible to lounge, leap over small buildings, or mount a horse via stirrup without creating a puncture wound. Regency versions (stays) were not quite as viscious as the later, Victorian versions.

Incorporating the etiquette of the time period makes it real, the necessary realities. Calling cards were vital social accourtrement and came with a precise set of rules. A card corner turned down meant the card was delivered personally. It was the most convenient way for both parties to find out whether or not your company was welcomed, or more kindly told to get lost, when there is no reply to the card.

Men went up stairs before women for many reasons but most often to spare them the display of their ankles. Then there’s my always favorite, wait for it…clear vision in rooms where no candle or lamp is ever lit or extinguished.

Even though strict rules were ingrained, behaviors/actions considered not done often were during the regency where gossip had lethal results. A great deal was written about people like Lady Caroline Lamb (flagrant adultery), Brummell (viciously insulted his prince), Lord Byron (too raunchy to list), and Jane Austen (dared to write and evetually use her real name) to list a few. When the Victorian Age descended, the not done stuff still happened, it just got shoved underground.

So many rules, so little time.

If you would like to read Judi Lynn’s excellent advice, here is the link to her blog:

https://writingmusings.com/2018/05/22/10-steps-for-writing-a-mystery/

M.L Rigdon (aka Julia Donner)

Follow on Twitter @RigdonML

Website http://www.MLRigdon.com

https://www.bookbub.com/authors/julia-donner

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Shut up! They Didn’t Do That in Vickie’s Time

Tags

Byron, hysteria, sexual repression, vibrators, Victorian

So it had been a while since I’d read up on the Victorian Era, and I gotta tell ya, I laughed out loud going over some of the stuff I ran across. We all pretty much accept that the word Victorian brings to mind priggishness, but I noticed a decided penchant for extremism. At least, that’s my take on that time in history, roughly 1830 to 1901. The weirdest/sickest part was the whole sexual repression thing.

Certain words were not to be spoken, such as “leg” which got rendered down to one’s “limb.” Far be it from me to suggest we not be antiseptically clinical about such things, but I have a hard time associating my body parts with trees.

And while we’re on the subject of sex, in Victoria’s time, doing it was meant for procreation, not fun. Try another one, Vickie. You and Prince Bertie had a cartload of kids, so we all know who was busy in the bedroom.

I could blame Vickie for the whole repression of sex thing—the love of her life died young and she wasn’t getting any—but all one has to do is read a little more and it’s pretty obvious that men with issues, radically religious or frustrated with secret, naughty urges, needed to make someone pay. Why not women? They had no rights, no reason to think, no laws protecting them, and more importantly, possessed the means to make afflicted males nuttier than they already were.

It was in this era that the diagnosis of hysteria was liberally flung at every female for just about any reason. Hysteria had been around since the Greeks were wrestling naked in the arena. Back then, only the platonic love of one’s best buddy was worth any mention. Women weren’t important unless they were one of the gods. By the time the 19th century rolled around, any disgruntled female was labeled as hysterical, and the usage of hysteria didn’t get taken off the books, medically speaking, until the 1950’s, for pity’s sake!

So what did those gents in Victorian times do to get intractable wives to calm down and act like the prim, obedient queens of their domains? Wait for it, ladies and germs, they sent them to physicians for a restorative massage. And when physicians got bored using their hands, they invented vibrators. Yes, gentle readers, there were all sorts of contraptions and devices, and one guy in 1880 took out a patent on the best version.

Guys, you gotta love’em for putting off on someone else what they didn’t feel like doing themselves. Thank heavens men have changed. Not all of them, but most of them.

So what’s wrong with this picture? The H-word. That self-righteous time period was so hypocritical on every level. Prostitution was at an all-time high, pornography wasn’t hard to find, children were dying in the factories, and the occult was in style. Séances were party favorites. And as much as they put down sex, they talked about all the time. Confessing it in church, tattling vicious accusations, browbeating their form of morality into nonbelievers, screeching about it on street corners as a direct path to perdition.

It strikes me that the era wasn’t as sexually repressed as showing off their prudery, while expending a lot of effort to keep their immoral quirks suppressed and/or hidden, especially within the middle class. For the gentry and aristocracy, this was the heyday of the country house party, swap-outs actually, where the bedtime opening and closing of doors was the embodiment of a French farce.

Give me the Regency. They let it all hang out, especially people like Lord Byron, who wrote naughty ditties. I loved the one about why he loved the waltz—so he could hold a lady in public and look down her décolletage! Byron was a bad boy and proud of it.

And I didn’t even get to the fun stuff written in the uninformed-minds-needing-to-know-rag sheets, like the woman who died from eating her own hair. Those Victorians sure knew how not to have a good time.

Next time: Chicago Can Kill You