Blind Spots Revisited
Last
week, I blithely blathered on about historical blind spots and the odd anomaly
of my writing a book set in 1920s Kenya when my interest has always tended
towards earlier time periods. (The Ashford Affair! Coming to a bookstore near you on April 2, 2013!) But as I
was reading through the comments on that post, something struck me. My 1920s book wasn’t an anomaly after
all. Every single major project I’ve
undertaken has been a blind spot.
I
spent years declaring loudly that I was a court intrigue kind of girl and the
one part of the Tudor/Stuart continuum that didn’t interest me was the Civil
War and Interregnum—and then I went and spent years working on a dissertation
about Royalist conspiracies in the latter half of the English Civil War. I declared my allegiance to the eighteenth
century and turned up my nose at the eighteenth—and then went and wrote a
series of books set in 1803/1804. The
book of which I’m proudest, The Betrayal of the Blood Lily
, is set in another
of those blind spots: Hyderabad, in 1804.
I
could argue that these were all flukes, but I think there’s something else
going on here. Blind spots provide a
challenge. There’s a numbing feeling of
familiarity to those areas we already know well, or believe we know well. I may adore the intricacies of Scottish
politics in the mid-sixteenth century, but I’ve never been able to successfully
set a story there. Trust me, I tried.
My
theory—and you can contest this—is that it has to do with the joy of
discovery. When we learn about a period
specifically for a story, it’s all new and fresh and exciting. The details stand out to us in a way the
details of more familiar areas don’t.
That very freshness enables us to convey the scene with more clarity to
readers. I believe that sense of
excitement that comes with discovery comes through, too, a key ingredient for a
successful story.
I
don’t just do this as a writer; I wallow in my blind spots as a reader,
too. Some of my favorite novels are set
in places about which I knew relatively little until I read them. One of the prime examples of this is M.M.
Kaye’s Trade Wind
. I knew nothing of
Zanzibar until I opened those pages and read of Hero Hollis’s fascination with
Zanzibar… “fair is this land”…. Alexander
McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
holds that same kind of
fascination, as does Michelle Moran's The Heretic Queen
and Gillian Bradshaw’s Horses of Heaven
, which is set in Afghanistan in the 2nd century BC, an era and a place that was a complete blank to me before opening that book. The pleasure in reading those books was heightened by the excitement of discovering new worlds, represented in vivid, sensory detail.
So
I say, revel in your blind spots! Today’s
blind spot may be tomorrow’s great discovery.
Which
are your favorite blind spot books?
1 Comments:
I too, loved Trade Wind. I just read a historical romance, "A Secret in Her Kiss" by a new author, Anna Randol, that takes place in Constantinopole, which I know nothing about, so that was a fascinating setting.
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