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

[analect]

Helloes, and welcome! Also: icon love. ;)

I think you're right - there does seem to be a level of acceptance, either among readers or among perceptions of 'what people want', that accuracy isn't so much of an issue. For me, it's mental anachronism that gets me; failure not just to accurately describe historical fact, but to get behind the mindset of the time period... much like your point about the Celtic thing. There's a distinct difference between saying 'it could have happened like this' and saying 'it was like this, and they felt like this about it, because that's modern and relatable'... if that makes sense.

Really, I'd agree - it's a matter of, whatever the genre, the fiction working within believable rules. The only change is how far readers are required to - or are willing to - suspend their disbelief, as with historical fiction vs. fantasy. Interesting.

[holyschist]

Well, Philippa Gregory is enormously popular, and I think she falls down on both the mindset and the fact on a regular basis. Mindset is always tricky, since we can't REALLY know and there's also the issue that too much Values Dissonance makes a character unsympathetic for many readers--but some kind of effort is a good idea, and I think that can only really be made by reading all the primary sources you can get your hands on (reading a bunch of Elizabethan wills gave me more insight into actual people than a dozen histories).

I mean, I don't want to act like our ancestors were space aliens--whenever I see people go "No one bonded with animals or children! That kind of emotion is modern!" I want to pummel them with primary sources. But it's the kind of thing where going to the other extreme and going They Were Just Like Us tends to result in the costume-party feel.

Really, I'd agree - it's a matter of, whatever the genre, the fiction working within believable rules.

Yep! And there's a lot of fiction that collapses on examination--it can still be enjoyable (and popular, and best-selling), but I know I personally would like to do better.

[niniane]

I agree so much on the midnset thing. WE really don't know what people were thinking (aside from the hints you can get from primary documents), and it is pretty obvious that they weren't space aliens - men loved their wives, women their husbands, both loved their children, and animals were often treasured companions as well as food. (In fact, the Iliad had some interesting lines on this..."every man loves his husband", etc. You do find a lot of stories of marital devotion in the Iliad and Odyssey and oh, the love Odysseus has for that dog...)

But definitely there were differences in all of those relationships from the modern world.

I think, sometimes, that it helps to extrapolate from autobiographies that are more recent, but still written from worlds that might be more similar to those lived by our ancestors. (i.e. Laura Ingles Wilder wrote some lovely novels that state exactly what she was thinking as she butchered beloved farm animals, smoked deer, etc. Admittedly, she was not a medieval peasant. And her life had a LOT of differences from that of a peasant. But she still lived a lifestyle that was probably closer to that way of thinking than is that of a modern urbanite, like me. So while it's not a perfect comparison, it can be used along with documents from earlier eras to go "oh, I can kind of see how that works..." The same would probably be true for reading the Iliad for an idea as to how a Celtic warrior might behave. There will be differences, but those two worlds are probably a lot more similar than our world is to that of a Celtic (or any tribal) world.)