Artistic license: thoughts?

[analect]

All righty... in the interests of leaving some discussion open for those who want it, I have a question. How far do you take artistic license when dealing with something in a fictional context, and how much knowledge - either of the thing itself, or in terms of acknowledgement of the license you're taking - do you expect your audience to have?

I'm sure we all have different approaches here, so I'm curious.

As a kick-off point, I recently posted a story of mine that's been kicking around for a while to my journal. The Red Man is a horror short that involves references to Celtic druidism [click to read]. Though I researched a bit for the story, I don't know a lot about either historical or modern practice - however, I do have a few druid friends.

Their religious/philosophical slant is very different to the angle the story explores (notions of Awen and bardic tradition, while awesome, are not terribly horrific). So I guess you could say, here, I've taken the same kind of artistic license that The Wicker Man (the proper film; let's pretend the 2006 remake never happened) took with ideas of preserved pagan practice; i.e., it could have happened that way.

Is this something you do with different ideas? Or are you a stickler for realism and research? Does artistic license always (or ever) mean pandering to stereotypes, or is it a useful tool for playing 'what-if' with?

Comments

[holyschist]

See, for a story like yours, I think modern religious practices and beliefs are irrelevant. That said, current archaeological practice seems to have swung towards thinking most bog bodies were not human sacrifices...but there's still other evidence for human sacrifice among Celtic peoples, and your story didn't trip my ARGH NO RESEARCH meter, personally. And there IS that issue with a lot of historical settings, especially when you go back further--that you run into the wall of We Just Don't Know and have to extrapolate (this is largely true of pre-Christian Celtic religious practices, for example).

[analect]

Thank you! ;)
That's what I was working with - okay, we're shunting away from ideas of human sacrifice in those specific contexts (though those theories are still what seem to sell the most books with shiny embossed titles), but there are other possibilities. It's a fascinating field.