I think all historical fiction is going to be more or less anachronistic, just because the past is weird and we don't live in it. And with romance stories, the structure can't hold up too much drama rama or you tip into something rather maudlin and melodramatic and you're not telling the story you wanted to tell. I certainly made choices here and there in all the fics where I was stretching what people could be doing for the sake of a story, or otherwise the story becomes about some kind of forbidden love thing rather than just about the two people falling in love or whatever.
A good friend of mine writes well-received regency romances for Avon, and yeah, they're pretty watered down.
For me, fiction can never be history, and being a historian I have a pretty clear line there. And that's the funny thing; I think I'm more loose with my expectations for fiction because it simply can't be, and shouldn't be, academic history, so in my head it's always both falling short and not expected to come up to the mark anyway. But you know, there's falling short and there's falling short.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2010-07-09 03:21 am (UTC)A good friend of mine writes well-received regency romances for Avon, and yeah, they're pretty watered down.
For me, fiction can never be history, and being a historian I have a pretty clear line there. And that's the funny thing; I think I'm more loose with my expectations for fiction because it simply can't be, and shouldn't be, academic history, so in my head it's always both falling short and not expected to come up to the mark anyway. But you know, there's falling short and there's falling short.