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    Entries in Historical Research (8)

    Tuesday
    Mar222011

    Digging for gold

    There are times, working on this project, when I feel more like an archaeologist than a writer.

    True, I'm working with information, not rock and dirt, and my tools are my laptop and my 4x6" cards, rather than pick and brush. Still, I find myself sifting through layer upon layer of historical detritus, accumulated assumptions and broken chains of evidence, searching for a few kernels of confirmed fact. Or at least, some degree of probable plausibility. There's no question that I will have to hang a great deal of my own guesswork and narrative imagination around the sparse framework of fact and probability that I dig up, but there are times when I feel like a paleontologist trying to imagine an entire dinosaur - bone structure, skin texture, diet, mating behavior, life cycle, and all - from a single knuckle bone.

    I really have no one but myself to blame. After all, it's not as though someone held a gun to my head and forced me to write a book about early 8th century Byzantine and Arab history. Still, it's hard to resist the temptation to whine a bit about the dearth of primary sources. Even secondary sources covering the Siege of 717/8 are few and far between - which surprises me, since there seems to be fairly wide agreement that it was one of the pivotal events of the medieval period, at least as significant in the broad flow of world history as the Battle of Tours, which has received significantly more attention.

    So I dig around the edges of the topic, searching for clues that will help me bring the period to life. And every now and then I come across nuggets of pure gold, veins of it even. One of these came this morning, when I found articles from an entire colloquium on Constantinople that Dumbarton Oaks hosted in 1998. Now, mind you, I've come across quite a number of Dumbarton Oaks publications prior to this, and have made thorough use of some of them - particularly the Economic History of Byzantium, which, while dry as dust at times if you're not utterly in need of the information it contains, is a precious resource full of an incredible wealth of insight on how people related to one another, in trade and taxes and social life, across the whole broad scope of Byzantine history. Still, I had somehow missed this colloquium on Constantinople. The oversight made me dig more deeply, wondering what else I had missed. I wound up spending several hours this morning going through the entire catalog of their past publications back to the 1960s - and there's still more to do, twenty years or so before that. (When you're researching something that happened 1300 years ago, scholarship that is a mere half-century old is considered "recent," folks.)

    The Jewel of Muscat. Photo by AsianYachting.A narrower, but more captivating find came a few weeks ago, when I stumbled upon the Jewel of Muscat Project - an enormous trove of video, photographic, and historical information about medieval Arab shipbuilding techniques, tied to an upcoming National Geographic documentary about the reconstruction of an early medieval Arab treasure ship found off Singapore. (Thanks again to Mitch Williamson for setting my mouse on the path to discover this one.) Sure, it's probably overkill to get this deep into medieval Arab naval architecture, given the relatively small role it plays in my novel - but I'm sure the detail will prove invaluable at making the relevant section feel real.

    I'll get to work on adding a "Resources" section to this site shortly - as well as a set of links to the friends, mentors, and contributors who are actively helping me bring this book to life. Including Matthew Herbst, Director of the Making of the Modern World program at UC San Diego and star of a series of podcasted lectures that I've been enjoying, who spent probably more time than he could spare talking to an aspiring author about Byzantine history and serving as a sounding board for my crackpot ideas about Leo III, Maslama, and the role of fiction in illuminating history.

    Back into the mines, now. I'm hoping to add another segment to the site soon, where I can share some of the more interesting tidbits and stories that I've come across in my archaeological dig - like how I think Justinian II snuck into his own capital city with a few good men and retook it from the successor-usurper to the man who deposed him. Skullduggery worthy of James Bond, surely, especially when you consider the fact that Justinian had a golden nose. (Or perhaps had had plastic surgery at the hands of, most likely, an Indian doctor. Both are entirely plausible.)

    Saturday
    Mar052011

    Tinkering

    I've been thinking of a comment I made in a writing workshop once, trying to describe what my creative process feels like. The image I came up with was of driving a car at 70 miles per hour down a half-built highway while installing the steering wheel, with the chassis more or less solid (you think) but no seats yet - there's a plan for them, and you even have a sketch of the seat covering, but you haven't gotten around to building them - and only a few body panels, several of those borrowed from old cars or new ones that were never quite finished. But there's a damn good radio, and the music is rockin, and you have a road map, kind of, even if you're not sure whether or not some new detours have been added since you last looked at it.

    If I remember right, one of the workshop participants thought about it for a bit and said, "Remind me, if I ever need a ride home from your house, to take a taxi."

    This, I provide to set the context for what my work has been like for the past week or two.

    I honestly think my wife is more or less completely bewildered by what I mean when I say I've been "working on my book." I try to flesh out the details for her and give her a better picture of what I've been doing on any given work day - "I did some updating of my outline and moved around a few scenes," say, or "I did some research to get a better understanding of what the folk traditions of medieval Asia Minor would have been like," or something of that sort. Or, at my best, "I banged out 2,500 words on a new chapter, and got most of it onto the page before I had to go pick up the kids from school." She's come to understand, I think, that that last is code for "I had a very productive day," because quantitative scales are easier to work with and she's been around long enough now to develop a rough understanding of the kind of productivity range that I work within. She knows that if I say I wrote 600 words, I was struggling and tongue-tied and battling my own mind just to get anything done at all; and that if I managed 4,000, or 4,500, or (on one memorable occasion) even 6,000, it was an epic day and I'm flying high, and hated to see my time run out, and probably wound up collapsing onto the couch to take a nap and recover.

    But overall I'd have to say that the behind-the-scenes aspects of this "job" that I've thrown myself into so much lately are pretty much a mystery to her. Probably to just about everyone else around me as well.

    Honestly, it's still a process that feels messy and improvised even to me. But I'll just have to live with it. Lacking the kind of life that would let me sit down at a desk at a regular time every day and plow ahead for six or eight or ten uninterrupted hours, and then pick up where I left off the next day neatly and cleanly, I simply have to manage the best I can. So I write a little, structure a little, research a little, and just keep trying to keep it all hanging together somehow.

    Most recently, I've been working on the technical underpinnings that hold all this information in a form and structure that I can work with. I use a wonderful little program called Scrivener to do most of my writing. It's designed especially for creative people who work with complex documents - poets, journalists, novelists, academics, screenwriters and so on - and provides a wide range of tools to make the creative process simpler, more flexible, and less messy than it would be with traditional word processors. I love it, and it's made my life a great deal less complicated. Above and beyond all the nifty mechanical gadgets that it provides, the best aspect of it is that it makes structuring (and restructuring) a complex document such as a novel far simpler than it would be with a program such as Word or Pages. It also contains tools that make research and notes and source materials easy to capture and access, as well as features that simplify the process of formatting and compiling a manuscript for editing, submission, or even publication on e-readers or the web.

    All in all, a great tool. Of course, my process isn't that clean or simple. I wind up capturing a lot of my images and ideas on 4x6" cards, or sticky notes, or scratch paper. Sometimes I'll be grabbed by a scene concept when my laptop isn't handy, and I'll have to scrawl out whatever I can in whatever notebook is most handy before I lose it, and trust that I'll figure out how to get it into the electronic manuscript eventually. I've got source materials referenced neatly on note cards, others that are bookmarked on my shelves, and others that are no more than a vague scrawl reminding me to go look at page x of book y.

    You see where my image of the half-built car barreling down the highway comes from...

    So, much of my work the past couple weeks has been focused on slowing the actual writing down long enough to solidify the structural and technical underpinnings. This means making sure my references are cleanly noted down in my filing system. Taking my latest outline from 4x6" cards and getting it into Scrivener, and then bringing over the existing drafts and synopses and notes from my manuscript-in-progress to make sure my work to date is put to good use while still reflecting my latest concept of how it will all fit together. Looking through the hurried scribbles I made while listening to 12 Byzantine Rulers or Matthew Herbst's Byzantine history lectures in the car and following up on the basic research to flesh out the ideas they inspired. Finding details on places and architecture and clothing and language to let me bring settings and scenes to life. Making sure I've crossed-referenced dates and source materials to make the underpinnings of each element of the book solid.

    To be honest, it's dull, difficult work - hard to stay inspired while plugging along on this stuff. But it's critical, not only to make sure I'm being faithful to the history (or what's known of it) but also to keep my creative process running smoothly. Here and there I manage to get a little bit of actual writing done, just to keep myself motivated. It reassures me that the book itself is moving forward, even while I spend most of my time tinkering with the chassis and the wiring harness. And I tell myself that once I plow through this grunt work, I'll be cut loose to charge ahead with the more inspiring work, where I can hear the trees swaying in the wind and see the light shining on my characters' hair and feel grit and dirt under my fingernails, across a gulf of thirteen centuries.

    Soon, David. Soon.

    Sunday
    Feb132011

    Site (more or less) complete, research ditto - full steam ahead

    I've taken a couple hours out of my writing time to get the design and structure of this site into a somewhat improved form. It'll continue to be a simple, bare-bones site, but with luck the initial construction will hold for a while now. I'll focus more on updates through the Blog page, and trying to add some links to sites that have proven especially useful in my research.

    I've completed the bulk of the background research on Amaline at this point, a bit ahead of schedule. There will continue to be a significant amount of work to do to cross-check dates and places, as well as to flesh out period details - everything from what kind of drawing materials and media were used in the early 8th century, to dress and diet, to the location and condition of road networks through Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine. I'm sure that kind of targeted fact-finding - or, where facts are hard to find, informed speculation - will continue throughout the writing of the first draft and even well into the editing process. But I feel good about where my research stands at this point.

    This weekend, in the midst of a family ski vacation in Sunriver, I took the time to revisit my outline and bring it up to date with the latest migrations in my mental concept of the book. Again, this is an ongoing iterative process. Research a bit, write a bit, restructure - rinse and repeat. Short of having a novel spring fully formed from my head, I'm not sure how it could be less messy, though I continue to hope for a way to download my imagination via USB cable into a thought transcription program. If anyone knows of such a thing, I'd love to hear about it.

    I'm excited about where the project stands and where it's headed. Now it's largely a matter of begging, borrowing, or stealing the time to push forward on the writing.

    Current word count:  50,000, against a (very loose) target of 200,000 for the first draft. From there the manuscript will go through some surgical reduction to get it to its final, (relatively) svelte form.

    Thanks to Mitch Williamson for helping me track down sources on medieval Islamic shipbuilding and naval forces. Thanks also to Martin at the Museum Ancient Nessebar in Bulgaria for insight into the meeting between Leo III and Justinian II near that site, just before Justinian II's restoration and the beginning of his second reign. And finally, many thanks to Chris Lightfoot, Director of the Amorium Excavations Project (1993-2010), for his guidance in tracking down material about Leo's presence in and around Amorium in 715 and 716 A.D., as well as the nature and status of the city at that time.

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