Three major amateur historical fiction mistakes to avoid

I’ve written before about general anachronisms to avoid in historical fiction, but didn’t delve so deeply into most of them. Let’s look at three major mistakes that make one look like an amateur.

1. If you’ve lived through the end of one decade and start of another, you know very well society doesn’t Magickally transmogrify into entirely new fashions, attitudes, slang, music, etc., the moment the clock strikes midnight. For the first year or two, there are many carryovers. Brand-new things don’t immediately emerge.

The first such transition I have memories of was the change from the Eighties to the Nineties. The early Nineties were very much like the late Eighties. There were subtle changes, yes, but nothing radical.

Hence, if you’re writing about, say, 1940 or 1941, you’re going to want to focus most of your fashion research on the late Thirties. Styles were virtually unchangeable. Same goes for the popular music of the very early Fifties being quite similar to that of the late Forties. However, it can be argued that many trademark aspects (fashion, social attitudes, culture, etc.) of the Fifties started in 1946–47.

One of many facepalm-worthy things wrong with my now permanently shelved We the Children of Atlantic City series is how I depicted the culture and fashions of 1949–1950 as closer to about 1957. Overnight, suddenly all the girls are wearing poodle skirts, bobby socks, and saddle shoes, and everyone is jamming to early rock and dancing at sock hops.

Poodle skirts first appeared in 1947, but they didn’t immediately catch on and become super-popular. Bobby socks, saddle shoes, and sock hops got popular during the Forties, but putting them all together in the way I did would’ve been super-anachronistic in 1950. Also, precisely no one would’ve been rocking out to Bill Haley & His Comets before they’d released any records under that name, and when everyone was still wild about big bands and swing!

Which leads me to…

2. Almost no one begins using a new invention the moment it’s invented! Being that kid who read too much and understood too little, I took dates of invention and introduction to mean those things were immediately in common use, and also frequently pictured them as they are in their familiar modern forms. E.g., answering machines existed in 1949, but almost no one used them. Full-room computers were NOT something even millionaires would’ve had, and no high school would’ve taught classes on them!

Other things didn’t exist at all, even in earlier prototypes, yet because I couldn’t think outside my early Nineties frame of reference and didn’t do enough detailed research, I had my 1940s characters using stuff like shopping carts, Walkmans (called portable headsets and cassette players), boomboxes, tape players, cassettes, pregnancy tests, and birth control pills. I also mentally pictured their cars as Nineties cars, despite being familiar with how old cars looked.

It takes awhile for most new technology to first catch on, and then to become realistically affordable for the common person. There was a reason barely anyone had cellphones before about 2000, and even after they significantly slimmed down and become somewhat more affordable, many people still didn’t see the need or couldn’t afford them. A hundred years earlier, the first telephones were luxuries reserved for the well-off in cities. Most people had to use common phones in hotels and stores, and rural areas weren’t wired for them.

Which in turn leads me to…

3. Writing in before they were famous references to your pet passions is seriously stupid, and could even get you hauled into court if you name a real, living person who didn’t agree to be used fictitiously! If this is a family or town saga that’ll extend to that point in history, just hold your horses till you can write about that band, actor, artist, or whomever or whatever in a normal, historically accurate way. You can also write a new story set then.

I was so obsessed with The Four Seasons at age thirteen, I wrote in Frankie Valli as a musical wunderkind cousin of Kit’s newly-created ex Robert. Yes, because it’s such a brilliant idea to not only use a living person as a character without permission, but also to give him a fictional family! Principal Mr. Robinson was right to deny Robert the right to use his school as a concert venue for a little kid.

Later that year, I changed Frankie into Freddie, who has zero musical talents.

It’s one thing to buy a popular début album by a band that’s gotten little to no airplay in one’s native country when travelling abroad and then introduce it to friends, as Mary Julia Seward (Elaine’s daughter) does with Please Please Me in 1963. Entirely another for her to somehow get ahold of a bootleg from a no-name band she’d have no reason to hear or care about!

If you never heard of big names well before they got famous, or paid them no attention when mentioned in passing, why would you think your characters are the magical, special exceptions? Forcing in allusions isn’t clever, it’s goofy and implausible.

WeWriWa—Arrival at the depot

Welcome back to Weekend Writing Warriors and Snippet Sunday, weekly Sunday hops where writers share 8–10 sentences from a book or WIP. The rules have now been relaxed to allow a few more sentences if merited, so long as they’re clearly indicated, to avoid the creative punctuation many of us have used to stay within the limit.

For the new year, I’ve switched to excerpts from the fourth and final book in my Atlantic City prequel series, with the working title Almost As an Afterthought: The First Six Months of 1941.

It’s very early in the morning on New Year’s Day 1941, and Cinnimin and Sparky have just arrived at the depot to join their friend Kit and her family for a skiing holiday in Vermont (initially written as the Berkshires).

“Over here,” Kit called.

Cinni stumbled towards the Greens and the other people they were taking on vacation. Besides herself and Sparky, Kit had also invited Julieanna and Gayle, and Kit’s two older sisters were also taking four friends each.

“This trip will be even better than I thought,” Kit said with glee in her voice. “My mother and Sammy ain’t coming. They woulda ruined everything.”

Cinni looked through the gathered crowd and noticed through her heavy-lidded, groggy vision that Mrs. Green and Sammy indeed were missing. “Mr. Green, can I ask why your wife and Sammy ain’t coming? I won’t miss either, but I thought your entire family would be here.”

“To make a very long story short, I wasn’t interested in spending my entire winter vacation with a constant headache and shattered nerves,” Mr. Green said.

The ten lines end there. A few more follow to finish the scene.

“Already I feel so much calmer and happier. If divorce weren’t so scandalous, I would’ve gone to Reno or Mexico years ago. The only reason I married Bernie was because my parents insisted on it from the time we were small children, and superstitious fears prevented me from backing out of the betrothal agreement after they passed away.”

Mr. Green became to say something else, but he was quickly drowned out by the train roaring and whistling into the station. After everyone unboarded, a plethora of porters came forward to carry all the luggage and skiing equipment into the baggage car, and Cinni walked towards the train. As soon as she reached the private cabin Mr. Green had reserved for her and her friends, she climbed into the nearest Pullman bed. She was fast asleep by the time the train started wending its way towards snowy Vermont.

Writing about castrati in historical fiction

Farinelli (né Carlo Maria Michelangelo Nicola Broschi), 1705–1782, painted ca. 1752 by Jacopo Amigoni

The mention of castrati in my most recent post gave me the idea to write a whole separate post about the topic (particularly since I edited that paragraph down in the interests of a lower wordcount). Let’s explore the subject of castrati in historical fiction, and some important things to keep in mind when writing about them.

1. First things first, I can only speak for myself, but I don’t think I’d be comfortable writing about the actual castration procedure in detail, given that it was child SA by any other name, and that would make me feel all kinds of creepy, gross, and wrong. If I were writing a story with a castrato, I’d have him maybe mention the method of his mutilation after the fact, or have his parents and doctor discussing how to do it beforehand.

Senesino (né Francesco Bernardi), 1686–1758, drawn 1735 by Alexander van Haecken after Thomas Hudson

2. This was an almost exclusively Italian phenomenon. There were some French and German castrati, but it was never common there. No other place had this brutal tradition of unnaturally preserving angelic male voices into adulthood.

3. Most boys were castrated between the ages of about eight to ten. Their parents, talent scouts, and singing teachers couldn’t risk (so to speak) the arrival of puberty and with it a changed voice.

4. Some castrati were castrated for what were believed to be legit medical reasons at the time, and then pushed towards a musical career when their talent became apparent. E.g., an inguinal hernia, testes crushed in an accident, severely underdeveloped testes that never grew, tumours, testicular torsion, high fever.

Domenico Annibali (ca. 1705–1779), painted 1750 by Anton Raphael Mengs

5. In an era before anesthesia or even chloroform, opium and other narcotics were used for pain relief. Tragically, many boys died when these drugs were given in lethally high doses.

6. To try to make boys pass out so they wouldn’t feel any pain, the even more dangerous technique of pressing on the neck’s carotid artery was used. This also often lead to death, both from doing it too long or doing it in the first place.

7. Recovery from castration took about two weeks. Even if the boy survived the shock of the procedure, he could still die of infection or bleeding.

Giusto Fernando Tenducci, ca. 1735–1790

8. Complete removal of the testes wasn’t the most common technique. Instead, they would be twisted in an ice or milk bath till they atrophied.

9. Even if the boy survived all this, there was no automatic guarantee he’d become a rich and famous opera singer like Farinelli. Of all the castrati who went on to long, successful careers, there were countless more whose names have been lost to history, or who only sang in choirs and at private salons.

10. Many parents who did this to their boys were motivated by the desperation of poverty and the lack of opportunities for upward mobility in the 18th century.

Venanzio Rauzzini (1746–1810) and his dog Turk, painted ca. 1795 by J. Hutchinson

11. Some castrati, like the above-pictured Rauzzini, are believed by some scholars to not have been castrated at all, but had endocrinological conditions and hormonal anomalies preventing the voice from breaking. Some intact modern male singers have castrato-like voices for this reason.

12. Though it might seen counter-intuitive, castrati were in great demand as lovers. The resulting very low testosterone level after castration greatly diminishes sex drive, but it doesn’t always preclude erections. In an era before effective, widely-available birth control, castrati were seen as safe lovers on account of their inability to impregnate women.

Giovanni Battista (Giambattista) Velluti, 1780–1861

13. Lowering sex drive wasn’t the only natural consequence of shutting off the main source of testosterone. Many castrati, like the above-pictured Velluti, had a reputation of being divas, childish, and difficult to work with (chalked up to artistic temperaments). So many people even today don’t understand puberty isn’t just about primary and secondary sex characteristics, but brain development. Blocking the natural progression of puberty mentally stunts people.

14. Another frequent result of low testosterone was growing unusually tall, due to bone joints not hardening as usual. Not only their arms and legs grew longer, but their ribs as well, giving them increased lung and breath capacity. This gave them a great vocal advantage.

Luigi Marchesi (1754–1829), drawn 1790 by Luigi Schiavonetti

15. Castrati first appeared in the mid-16th century and reached their popular height during the 18th century. Changes in musical taste and social attitudes towards castrating young boys brought this chapter of history to a close in the first third of the 19th century, coupled with the practice being made illegal after Italy’s 1861 unification and Pope Leo XIII outlawing the hiring of new castrati by the Church in 1878.

16. Despite this shift in tastes and these new laws, some castrati continued to perform by the Sistine Chapel and other Papal basilicas in Rome. There were almost none left by the end of the 19th century. Pope Leo prohibited the hiring of new castrati in 1902, and his successor, Pope Pius X, issued a 1903 ruling stating all soprano and contralto roles must be sung by boys. (If women hadn’t been banned as singers, all this might’ve been prevented!)

Alessandro Moreschi (1858–1922), last known surviving castrato, ca. 1900

17. If you want to describe castrato vocals, the 1902 and 1904 recordings by Alessandro Moreschi aren’t the most accurate model. He was in his forties and well past his vocal prime; he was a choir singer, not an opera singer or soloist (though he did sing a difficult coloratura role in an oratorio once); the recording technology of that era didn’t provide the most accurate reflection of one’s true voice; he was trained for the acoustics of the Sistine Chapel, not opera. Additionally for modern audiences, his style of singing, castrato or not, was radically different from current popular tastes.

18. Castrati had rigourous musical training, with little time allowed for anything unrelated to singing and music.

19. This intense, hyper-focused training from a young age prepared castrati to make a début by their mid-teens.

20. Despite many castrati coming from poor families, some, like Caffarelli (né Gaetano Majorano), were well-off, and asked for castration to preserve their voices.

Top 10 events from history on my fantasy time machine trip

The prospect of time travel seems as far away as ever, and even if it were invented today, there’s still the whole complicated issue of whether the entire course of the future might be changed by something a time traveller does, even to the extent of that person not needing to go back in time to, e.g., kill Hitler if the resulting events never happened.

But in the meantime, it’s fun to think about the things we could witness in the past. Since my lucky number is eleven, this list has eleven items.

1. The 1939–40 World’s Fair! I’m so enraptured and fascinated by this grand pageant of humanity and the exciting promise of the future, I’ve written about it in detail in two books now. The 1939 season sounds like the most fun, since there were more pavilions in the Hall of Nations before the war, but the 1940 season still had plenty of things to see and do. Rides, exhibits, international restaurants, a nightly fireworks show, broadcasting oneself on TV, visits from the Yankees, projected houses of the future (including one real families lived in for two weeks each), and just the feeling of being connected to the world.

2. A performance by Farinelli. I’m mad with curiosity to listen to an opera sung by Farinelli or one of the other renowned castrati. For many reasons, the 1902 and 1904 recordings by Alessandro Moreschi are very unrepresentative of what a skilled castrato in his prime and in the prime era of castrati would’ve sounded like.

3. The 1895 première of the Lumière’s films, or any other first-ever film screening in the 1890s. What must it have been like to see true moving images for the first time ever?

4. On the same note, the 1927 première of The Jazz Singer. While sound-on-film experiments began in 1895, this was the first truly successful, mainstream one. Contrary to popular belief, the film is about 75% silent, but the first time I saw it, those songs and dialogues felt electric and awe-inspiring. How much more so must they have felt to 1927 audiences?

5. After my own morbid and macabre fascinations, plus my near-lifelong interest in the Lincoln family, I’d like to be a witness to Pres. Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre. The last living survivor, who was only five years old, reported he still had nightmares in his nineties, but this was one of the biggest events in U.S. history.

6. Continuing with the presidential history theme, I’d love to see Pres. Washington’s first inauguration. That must’ve been such an awe-inspiring moment, the first time ever an American president took the Oath of Office. Unlike all other inaugurations, which took place first in March and later changed to January, this was on 30 April.

7. A whirlwind tour of prehistory, to see our pre-Homo sapiens ancestors and cousins. I have particular love for the Neanderthals, but I also want to see Homo habilis (who lived at the most dangerous time in history to be a human, when larger animals were constantly hunting us and cats’ ancestors hadn’t yet figured out it’s better to manipulate us for food than to eat us), Homo erectus, any of the Australopithecines, Ardipithecus, Sivapithecus, Oreopithecus, and Toumaï of Sahelanthropus tchadensis. I’ve never seen them as distant fossils, but my family from long agos and worlds apart.

8. A trip to Coney Island from about 1910–1940. I’m so jealous when I watch old films where people spend the day at the amusement parks and beach, with all those fun vintage rides and attractions. Rockaways’ Playland in Queens, pre-Robert Moses, would be awesome too.

9. Again being very morbid and macabre, but it would be fascinating to witness an outbreak of the Black Death. What must that unknowing terror and sense of impending Apocalypse have been like? The firsthand descriptions I’ve read are so intense, but that’s no substitute for experiencing it in person.

10. On a much happier note, a Who concert when my boys were at their peak, about 1968–1976. The intensity must’ve been electric, far more powerful than any live recordings I’ve heard.

11. The miraculous, against all odds rebirth of Israel on 15 May 1948. I’ve heard the recording in Tel Aviv’s Independence Hall thrice, and it’s so powerful and emotional.

WeWriWa—Leaving for winter vacation

Welcome back to Weekend Writing Warriors and Snippet Sunday, weekly Sunday hops where writers share 8–10 sentences from a book or WIP. The rules have now been relaxed to allow a few more sentences if merited, so long as they’re clearly indicated, to avoid the creative punctuation many of us have used to stay within the limit.

For the new year, I’m switching to excerpts from the fourth and final book in my Atlantic City prequel series, with the working title Almost As an Afterthought: The First Six Months of 1941. Its radical rewrite, almost entirely from scratch, is currently on hiatus, but I’m very eager to finally get back to it.

The book opens as Cinnimin and Sparky head out to the depot to join their friend Kit and her family for a skiing holiday in Vermont (initially written as the Berkshires).

A thick canopy of indanthrone blue blanketed the late twilight sky as Cinni and Sparky sleepily trudged out to the waiting car on the first day of 1941. Their older brothers carried the large, heavy suitcases they’d spent the last few days carefully packing. Cinni and Sparky only had to carry their beautiful new skis and skiing poles, which they’d soon be breaking in on the snow slopes of Vermont.

“Remember to be on your best behavior while you’re away from home,” Widow Filliard warned Cinni as M.J. opened the doors of the seven-seater Renault Vivastella. “You want everyone to have a good first impression of you.”

“I know the drill,” Cinni said. “You ain’t got nothing to worry about.”

“Be good for the Greens,” Mrs. Small told Sparky. “It’s such a privilege to be invited on their vacation, and to have the opportunity to stay by a kosher resort when your hosts aren’t Jewish.”

“I won’t give the Greens any reason to regret taking me,” Sparky promised.

The ten lines end there. A few more follow to finish the scene.

After all the luggage was loaded, the girls got into the car, and Widow Filliard drove to the depot. Cinni fought off the sweet song of Hypnos the entire way, longing for the moment when she could climb into a soft Pullman bed and go back to sleep. As far as she was concerned, any hours before nine in the morning ought to be illegal, and even nine was a questionable hour.

When they arrived at their destination, Widow Filliard called for a porter to help with transporting the luggage, and Cinni was unhappily obliged to once more stand up and start walking. Cinni tried to remind herself that every step brought her one step closer to that Pullman bed and ultimately to the lovely skiing holiday awaiting her.