Thought I'd paste my reply to SM's question from RRR here...
Originally posted by Secret Master
You know, Chris, it is amazing the sheer volume of research you have put into this. You know, rather than write the AAR, you could just take your research and do a graduate thesis in 15th century German history...
I do have a question for you. Actually, this might be a question for the SolAARium, but since you have been doing so much research for this one single project, I thought I would start here. In your experience with writing this saga, how often has your historical research forced you to rewrite something you would have wanted to write a certain way for literary reasons. Perhaps to put it another way, how often have you had to sacrifice a good story idea due to it being grossly out of whack with the facts?
I’ve now made a couple different attempts to “generalise” my response to your question so it addresses the issue in broader terms rather than focussing on this AAR in particular. The more I try to do so, though, the more I find that I have to keep qualifying what I’m saying – which leads to some pretty long and unwieldy paragraphs. What follows, then, are my thoughts as they relate to this work and probably wouldn’t be as applicable to anyone else’s work…or even to the next AAR I write.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, this AAR is a departure from my previous ones – and in many respects from the “normal fare” on the forum – in that its principal goal is to explore a series of themes using a character-driven story set against the framework of a portion of an EU2 game I played. This establishes the overriding pair of “priorities” for all aspects relating to its writing:
- Does it further one of the themes? (“Friedrich’s Ambition”, “A Coming of Age”, “Sacrifice”, “A Study of War”, etc. being the primary ones).
- Does it further the story? (This being in terms of character development, mood, entertainment value, etc…i.e. does it make for a book that someone would want to read as opposed to being a thinly-disguised essay on each of the themes?)
More or less everything else is secondary to those. Since this is the AAR forum I’m operating on the premise that the underlying sequence of events should be based on the play of the game, as opposed to presenting it elsewhere where I could treat it as historical fiction. Nevertheless, I am very leery of making too great a departure from history since the further I do so, the harder a time the audience will have with their suspension of disbelief.
This has, most definitely, presented some challenges along the way. I’ve often found myself trying to balance game history and real history and in most cases I’ve elected to place slightly more weight on the game than on history. I have, however, made adjustments to both of these in order to better support the overall literary intent.
There have also been cases in more recent months that I wish I’d known something – some small tidbit of historical note -
before I’d already written it (or begun to set it up) based on what happened in the game. There have also been moments where I decided to stick closely to history and am now kicking myself for it (and example being the whole “name thing” where there are far too many character names held in common). I also find myself thinking on occasion, that I could have made my life easier if I’d made some “tweaks” to ranks and titles here and there.
In general, though, I’ve followed a rule of thumb where “events” and “action” should be governed mostly by what happened in the game; whereas “people”, “places”, and “history” should be more closely aligned to real life. Before I’m finished, I suspect that I will introduce a few accidental (and glaring) inconsistencies somewhere. I’m also hoping that historians will forgive me for taking liberties with reality since I’m doing so in the interests of the themes and am not trying to present an accurate account of the history of the era. I don’t have the same problem when I “corrupt” game events since I’m the only one who has read this particular game’s history log or watched things unfold on my computer screen.
Luckily for me, I did the vast majority of my major research
before I began writing and most of the research I’m doing now is geared towards enhancing the flavour of the story and maintaining the aforementioned suspension of disbelief of the reader. I’ve found, reading other AARs or reading historical fiction, that the one thing that an author can do to jar me out of their narrative is to introduce something blatantly ahistorical without justifying it somehow. If I have Charles VII suddenly deploy ICBMs against the Pfalz, for instance, then I
know I’ll get a flurry of comments asking me what the f*** I’m doing. A less extreme example would be having his soldiers set up their muskets (which, of course, they are just as likely to have had as ICBMs in this era).
The more detailed the research I do, then, the more historically accurate and consistent the story will be. I tend to think of it in cinematographic and continuity terms, really, so I my goal is to make sure that none of the background or peripheral things look fake to the eye. I may be throwing a very large spanner into the gears of the real historical timeline, but the audience here
expects this because that is the nature of writing an after action report about an alternate history game. In effect, they grant me artistic licence to manufacture a plot that isn’t historically accurate…but that license only extends so far.
The more real (and accurate) the history I include, the more willing a reader may be to accept the instances where I must depart from it – with the proviso that it’s rationalised somehow. The greater the care I take to present my almost-historical world, and the deeper I can immerse you in it, the less likely I am to accidentally shatter the effect.
As I write, then, I try to maintain this balance of conflicting histories while using them to further my greater goals of thematic development and literary interest. If real history conflicts with my needs then I try to make a compromise if possible, but if that isn’t possible then real history will be sacrificed unless a minor change can be made to the plotline that won’t introduce problems later.
This is not to say that I haven’t adjusted my storyline to bring it more into line with history. I’ve also made some very significant changes to the exact dates and order that some things occurred during game play…adding a little bit here and subtracting a bit there. I cut all sorts of game stuff out, in fact, since I’m sure that trying to detail (or even mention in passing)
all of the log would drive me insane and bore you all to tears. There was one period, for instance, when I fought a large number of mini-battles in succession (the ol’ AI sending 1k recruits against a large besieging force) that I’ll pretty much nix altogether. I also moved Christoph’s crowning from it’s historical (and game) date…for reasons that will become apparent in a while.
But there is one extremely important point I should emphasise: any major changes like that were done
before I’d written a single word of this AAR. I have had a complete and detailed outline of the entire AAR since mid June, and even a post-by-post “here’s what the reader needs to know by the end of this post” summary that stretches approximately a full chapter ahead of the point where I am now. It isn’t carved in stone, but it’s not too far from it. All of those decisions were based on doing the research and looking at the log before I decided on the plotline. All three were then put into a “soup” to try to make it “taste” as good as I could possibly get it to taste. I’m just tweaking the seasoning now.
So there you have it…in my usual verbose and rambling way. RL history is largely subservient to my established framework, but as I’m doing my ongoing “flavour” research I may tweak it a bit here and there to improve the AAR’s presentation. It sometimes suggests slight changes in my approach to telling the story, but it hasn’t made any changes to my plotline since the original planning phase.
Err….what was the question again?