Traditions in AH

[Thande]

Then one reaches a point where doing more research becomes an excuse to postpone the actual writing.

Indeed, just the point I was making. Ultimately, someone who writes something imperfect has achieved something; someone who never starts because they always need to do more research is, from the point of view of the universe of readers, functionally indistinguishable from someone who has done no research and no writing.

 

[Artaxerxes]

I dunno. Like the thing is you're never going to know everything, at some point you have to stop researching and start writing.

Like knowledge is fantastic but I think writing historical stories about areas you're not a complete expert on is fine. Writing gets you into the habit of writing. It doesn't have to be perfect to be worth doing. And honestly a lot of published historical fiction isn't particularly vigorously researched.

The problem isn't so much sitting down and writing Fatherland without a complete knowledge of Nazi agriculture but sitting down and writing a faux academic timeline about a surviving Nazi Germany without a complete knowledge of Nazi agriculture. The timeline structure is about showing off facts and thus rather requires facts because there's no narrative or characters, which doesn't mean it's bad, I enjoy just chatting about history but the knowledge requirement is high for it to work.

Saying the answer is more research is I think incomplete, so much as the answer is picking a format that fits the amount of knowledge you do have. AN actual story does not require as much knowledge because it's about characters and narrative.

Forums like AH.com have gotten into a culture where they expect timelines to both cover the entire world and every topic of humanity within in while also being primarily about well researched historical facts and obviously that's impossible.

You don't need to know the entire world before you write something, you just need to either only write that sort of dry chatting about history style essay about stuff you do know or write in a different style where your knowledge isn't front and centre.

"This is my TL about St Augustine sinking off Calais"
*reply #1* AWESOME! How does this affect the rise Christianity in China?

 

[Jared]

I have mixed thoughts about this discussion.

On the one hand, my view of the timeline format is that if done well, it offers a different perspective on a changed world than is available from narrative AH or other such ways of conveying information. I've read quite a few very high-quality timelines which quite simply would not have worked as narrative AH. Sure, a large volume of timelines written are of no interest to me, but then Sturgeon's Law applies to published work (90% of everything is crap) and without the filter of publication, that percentage is going to be even higher. That's fine, and everyone's tastes are going to be different about what that 1-5% of good timelines are. (And the percentage is not that much different in published narrative AH, either).

On the other hand, there's a reason that after writing the world-spanning Decades of Darkness, my next big timeline was very deliberately focused only on part of the world (Australia/NZ), and why aside from occasional snippets, the rest of the world is seen only through the eyes of those living in that region. I still get many of the questions about "so what's happening in region X", but they never get detailed answers, only the broadest of overviews. And that's because trying to track the whole world is time-consuming and prone to making too many errors in research.

 

[FriendlyGhost]

As primarily a reader of AH not a writer*, I have seen quite a few very promising TLs which peter off when they start to broaden their focus from their initial premise. It seems that the authors get either distracted or bogged down by trying to cover something outwith their 'comfort zone' - which probably leads to disillusionment and hence to the TL just dying. There are obviously some works which do manage to successfully cover world-wide events, but they are in the minority.

I sometimes think that AH authors need to be more prepared to give answers such as, "this TL is about events in country M during the #th century so although I appreciate your question about how the development of invention T in country P is affected, I'm not going to cover that." As long as the response is polite, I don't think readers will be offended.

After all, with real history, if I buy a book titled 'Italy during the Renaissance' then I don't expect to find that it includes a discussion of politics in Britain or wars in India. So why should I expect an AH story (regardless of format) to do that?


*I've written more for the vignette challenges on here than for anything else and find that one of the great things about them is that there just isn't time to do in-depth research - you just have to come up with something and write. I hope my writing has improved, at least a little, as a result!

 

[Charles EP M.]

I'm glad this discussion arced this way, because I'm always worried I haven't done enough research (no matter how much research I HAVE done) when writing anything AH or historical

 

[Thande]

I'm glad this discussion arced this way, because I'm always worried I haven't done enough research (no matter how much research I HAVE done) when writing anything AH or historical

The advice I give anyone on writing, regardless of context, is that what you write at first is never going to be good - but it's necessary as a learning experience. The danger of the AH research cycle specifically is it robs you of that needed learning experience. If one actually did do enough research to do justice even to their own inner perfectionist, then what they then write wouldn't be any good because they haven't had the experience needed to refine their writing itself.

 

[Jared]

The advice I give anyone on writing, regardless of context, is that what you write at first is never going to be good - but it's necessary as a learning experience. The danger of the AH research cycle specifically is it robs you of that needed learning experience. If one actually did do enough research to do justice even to their own inner perfectionist, then what they then write wouldn't be any good because they haven't had the experience needed to refine their writing itself.

Or as I regularly hear in another context, for a writer, the first million words are just practice. They probably aren't going to be publishable.

(I was fortunate that the majority of my first million words was written before I really started to touch AH. And no, no-one is seeing those first unpublished works - they're unpublished for a reason.)

 

[Geordie]

This is absolutely also true and I know a few people who've let the perfect be the enemy of the good and never pick up the pen (metaphorically) because they'll never have done enough research.

[Waves]

 

[Hendryk]

The advice I give anyone on writing, regardless of context, is that what you write at first is never going to be good - but it's necessary as a learning experience.

Indeed. My very first attempt at writing a TL was laughably bad, and it took two extensive rewrites to turn WIAF into something fit for publication. I don't know if practice makes perfect, but it does make good enough, and I'll settle for that.