A Fondamental truth

That bit about having to get certain things right? It came up during the big chase scene. My character runs down a fondamente along a narrow rio, through a sottoportego into a campo and along a calle to the ponte across another rio. (Over the course of about a page...it's not all in one sentence!)

This isn't there because I'm showing off. Oh, sure, some of it is local color but it isn't the "call a rabbit a smeerp" thing James Blish made fun of. These terms are specific and descriptive in ways that would take longer to say in other ways, other ways that would sound clunky and be potentially misleading (you shouldn't really call it a "canal" because there's only half a dozen of those in Venice; the rest are smaller waterways and are called by a different name). It is more efficient, more accurate, and yes more colorful to use the Venetian terminology.

Plus that's a theme and an aim in the book; the acquisition of local knowledge. In the scene just prior I brought up the term "Acqua Alta" but never let my protagonist figure it out (she doesn't even realize the water she is seeing is basically temporary).

And so I need to make sure that I am using these terms correctly. Because some reader is going to see that and assume that is what they actually call the thing locally.

* * *

I'm still backing way off on researching stuff. It takes time which I don't want to spend any more. I feel a need to get a draft done and see what the whole thing feels like.

It still feels to me like there's too much going on. It is a problem of conservation of detail. There should be extraneous detail, of course. A mystery, a thriller, even a fairy tale is built around the ability of the hero to single out (or to fail to single out!) the one important detail from all the noise around it.

The trick is making it obvious in hindsight.

The problems I am having are three. For one, the real world IS messy. The experience of travel and the experience of history is one of a lot of information and even a lot of disagreement. To say you go to Athens and see monuments of Ancient Greece is to lie. If you go to Athens you see Athens, a modern, living city with a long history and complicated problems, and in Athens are monuments and ruins and reconstructions across a span of time from the Mycenae out to World War II.

You can focus the literary camera in on just what you want to emphasize, but the story I am trying to communicate in this particular novel is that juxtaposition; of what Ancient Greece means to a modern world struggling with current-day problems.

The second problem is you want some words there. The more concrete a detail is, the more weight it carries. Writing "a nine foot high statue in stone" is a lot less interesting to the reader than "A statue of a winged figure in helmet and spear, carved from gleaming white limestone." And it adds more resonance if you can say "A statue of Athena Nike..." (and the rest follows as of above.) It gives the reader a richer experience. It also adds words, because at some cold calculating point a novel is an organized set of words of some length and you've got to get to that length somehow.

And the last is a specific of the first; that I'm trying to be honest not just to the general shape of the world but specific details. If I say there is a bronze of Julia in the garden below "Julia's Balcony" then there really is. I'm trying very hard not to arbitrarily move trattoria and artworks and entire towns around because it allows me to focus the narrative better.

I'm willing to "Bullit" a little with the map, but at some point I have to admit that you can't climb the Acropolis without passing through a lot of stuff that isn't at all Classical Era.