something queer going on

For the December posting meme, lilacsigil asked about research for historical and historical-ish fandoms, and how much research is worthwhile.

My immediate instinct is to say that all research is always worthwhile, of course! I have a Ph.D. in early modern English literature, for which I wrote a heavily history-based dissertation. And part of what drives people to get Ph.D.'s is the urge to know everything and to get every detail right. I have given myself motion sickness from scrolling through microfilms. I have painstakingly transcribed (from photocopies from microfilm) damaged historical documents in difficult handwriting whose transcriptions were already published, because I didn't trust other people's accuracy. I made an entire research trip to England for what ended up being a few pages in my dissertation. As for fic, I can barely remember all the things I've researched. Questions that are nagging at me at the moment include: what penitentials might have been in use in a 12th century English Benedictine monastery, and would a confessor have felt bound to follow them or might he have chosen to give lighter penances? What texts, other than the Bible, might a boy learning Latin have studied? What church fathers were priests reading? What saints' lives were circulating in written form? (I just now googled the most famous collection of saints' lives, the Golden Legend, and discovered it wasn't compiled until the 13th century, so no luck there.) Also, when the hell did monks eat supper? (It varied.) And what homoerotic religious texts were available? (I read an essay about this once. It might have been in Queering the Middle Ages, which I no longer own because I sold all my academic books long ago.)

So, yeah. I love historical detail and I hate getting it wrong. And I tend to get really irritated when I spot incorrect history in other people's fics. Or their professionally published work: in one of Ellis Peters' Cadfael novels, there's a plot point to the effect that ( major plot spoiler )

On the other hand, there is the need for research to lead to writing. Back when I was writing my dissertation, there was a sentence in . . . some book by somebody (it might have been Michel de Certeau, but I am not going to google it) to the effect that there's always the temptation to read just one more book, and one more, and never actually write. This is Very Bad when it's a dissertation, and not great when you just want to write a nice fic, either. I could literally spend months researching this Cadfael fic and still not answer every uncertainty I have. I don't wanna. I don't want to make egregious errors, either, but ultimately I want to finish it and have people read it and hopefully feel a little differently, afterwards, about Brother Jerome.

Right now I'm actively suppressing the urge to do research, because I'm actively worried about writers' block. I have given myself very broad permission to write this first draft badly, and inaccurately, and to have lots of "[RESEARCH THIS]" type notes in the middle of sentences. I'll do more research in the editing stage, but I hope it won't turn into enough to write a second dissertation on 12th century English monasticism and queerness.

The difficult thing is that I do ultimately feel like well-researched fics are better. When a writer really knows what they're talking about, it shows. Not, if they're a good writer, in info-dumps, but in the texture of the fic, in the little throwaway details, in a world that feels solid and lived-in. Of my own fics, the one I think is best is my Discworld fic Midwinter, which is informed by all those years of academic research on early modern England. It's there in the details--rhetoric manuals, changing handwriting styles, novels with very long titles--but more importantly, it's woven into the fabric of the central relationship between Drumknott and Vetinari: the intimacy between master and secretary, the intertwining of status, power, and desire. I could not have written that story if I hadn't gone to graduate school.

And now I'm writing a story about time and a milieu I don't know nearly as well, and trying to reassure myself that that's okay. What I write won't be the fic I would write if I were an actual medievalist, but the fic that it's going to be is not, I hope, unworthy. It can have a different kind of texture, and find its depth and richness through other means. And if I get details about 12th century monastic life wrong, who is actually going to notice?

If I were forced at gunpoint to say how much research is worth it, my answer would be, enough that a reasonably informed, but non-specialist, reader won't point and laugh. Anything beyond that is, at least for someone like me who nods in recognition when Chidi from The Good Place talks about needing to look at just a few more books before making a decision, only a lovely bonus.



I would love more prompts for the posting meme! If you feel so inclined, you can drop them in a comment here.

1) I just finished volume 11 of Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year anthology, which covers stuff published in 2018. These kinds of anthologies are always a bit of a mixed bag, but as usual I found most of Datlow's choices pretty good. Interestingly, the story that most truly horrified me is the one further away from genre horror, Joe Hill's "You Are Released." It's set pretty much now, and is about a bunch of passengers on a plane that's in midair when the world political situation starts to take a very, very bad, and very plausible, turn. It's scary 'cause it's true. (NB the story has a thread of "can't we all be civil to one another across political divides?" that I don't like at all, because no, we can't be civil to homophobes and transphobes and white supremacists. But it's powerful enough that I liked it despite that.)

No idea what I'm going to read next. I keep getting stalled on A Memory Called Empire, but I've got a bunch of other unread books.

What I really want to read is John Le Carré's newest, but even as an ebook it's $14.99. *sigh* And my library probably hasn't even ordered it yet.


2) I've been feeding my new obsession with Julian Firth by watching the episode of Jeeves and Wooster he was in (it's 3x02, and he's charming and pretty) and the 2015 short film Somewhere in Macedonia, which is adapted from letters by two gay soldiers during the First World War. It's not really all that good, but Firth is as good in it as he has time to be, and of course it would have been relevant to my interests even without him.

ETA: And here is the trailer for Devon Gothic, another short film with Julian Firth by the same director, Alice Evans. I find it a bit "everything I don't like about avant-garde short films, condensed," but YMMV.


3) I've also been rewatching Cadfael, by which I mean skipping all the plot stuff and only watch the bits with Brother Jerome and/or Prior Robert on screen. Because reasons.