I've finished two books, several articles, and about four hours of podcast on the Bronze Age Collapse. Which is just barely enough to give me confidence the story can go forward. But not enough, alas, to move into actual plotting.
The goal is draft in a year. Three months for general research and planning, the next six to nine moving from setting to setting more-or-less as the cast does. One of the things I learned from the fanfic is I do like more of a travel literature style (more extensive descriptions and histories) but I need to back off. I need, in short, to decompress my text. More of the words should be the grit; walking and talking, eating and fighting. More "They sailed for another three days" and less "They boarded a dromon with sails of cinnabar-dyed linen."
Which boils the required research down to something like six to ten 5,000 word essays. Not impossible to complete in a year. This doesn't, of course, account for the investment of visiting Crete, acquiring sandals and a bronze Naue-II replica, eating historical foods, etc., etc.
I am less confident about back-filling, about the idea of skipping over chunks of text or putting in place-holders. Sure, I want to learn more about how Scrivener handles meta-data, but I tend to write in whole paragraphs. This is definitely going to be an experiment in not just outlining, but actual iterative writing. For instance, all the description of Memphis might be in a single chapter, but the Scribe character will be in almost every chapter.
(There's an amusing side thought in this. The Homeric epics are characterized by epitaphs for recurring characters and even natural phenomena; "The wine-dark sea" is a typical phrase. This made it easier to fill out a line to the right length and meter. It also made it easier to remember what was an oral, bardic tradition -- and is theorized also could serve as a sort of standard set of parts to construct new lays. There's something here not entirely unlike the idea of using a place-holder to be replaced after the research is done.)
I originally picked the Bronze Age Collapse for three reasons; because I'd been reading/exposed to a lot of bronze age stuff already, because the period is lesser-known, and because I thought I had a plot.
Well, the latter two fell down almost immediately. Lesser-known is not the same as saying we know nothing about the period. There is a lot of research to do. And more; although I could easily stick to, say, the Anatolian coast and have characters who haven't studied history, it seems a shame not to explore some of the really big players here. Particularly the Mycenae, and the Egyptian New Kingdom. The former is the time of Tutankhamen, possibly the most popular and popularized era of Egypt's long history. The latter is the Heroic Age, the time of Troy and Theseus and the rest of the Homeric and legendary heroes.
And more. There is actually archaeology here. Ancient peoples were as fascinated by the past as we are. And even the idea of ancient writings, particular hieroglyphs, as being magical writing is not something invented with the Theosophists of the 19th century. It was already an idea in ancient Egypt. There's at least one tale of a wandering scribe looking for a book of magic who has to break into a tomb and fight off the monsters within.....
Yup. My Egyptian Scribe character would probably feel at home in fedora and bullwhip.
So between him, and a "Greek" mercenary wrestling with questions of honor against the mythologies he was brought up on, I'm going to have a lot of character time dealing with history and literature and language and religion. As easy as it would be to have Conan-types striding bronze sword in hand through a land they barely understand, it works better for me to have more of a, well, Lord of the Rings flavor with everywhere history and crumbling monuments and ancient ballads and Elvish songs (well, not really the latter).
At the moment I'm at a plateau. I'm continuing to do general research on the period and peoples, but I don't have a good idea now for the plot. The only things I'm sure of is I want to move around, and I want to move mostly along the paths the Sea Peoples took (or may have took; it is entirely unclear if the Sea Peoples, quote unquote, had anything to do with the collapse of the Hittite Empire and the sacking of their cities). And I'd like to end in 1175 at the Battle of the Delta, when Ramses III defeats an assembled fleet of these mysterious invaders.
I am tempted to start with the sack of Hattusa with a Mycenaean mercenary band doing an Anabasis from there (well, march to the Aegean). Willusa/Illios/Troy is probably two hundred years back, meaning it is part of the legends and stories already. Another starting point might be Knossos, when the exiled Scribe and the Cretan seer he has discovered realize they need to get word to Ramses III -- and presumably fall to pirates within the first day of their journey.
And Eastern Europe is not off the table yet. The history and archaeology available in the West is heir to the bias towards the foundational Greco-Roman cultures, but this is changing. And there is some fascinating stuff happening in this period in the Intra-Carpathian region.
The other big unknown is the fantasy element. After thinking it over for a while I've realized I don't want an "out of context" problem. No crashed spaceships, no people (or visions, sigh) of the future. What happens should be presented in, discussed in, understood by the characters in terms they understand.
I want to treat magic and gods the way they are treated in the various literatures. There's a very matter-of-fact way auguries are described in Xenophon -- in one particular incident, it was divined that the freezing wind was a result of having angered Poseidon. One sacrifice later, and "The winds diminished noticeably, much to the Greek's relief." Of course Xenophon is writing in the late Classical age, but then Homer didn't pick up his pen until some two to four hundred years after the period when my story is getting set (and some of the most literary of the Egyptian tales didn't get recorded until the Ptolemy's.)
There's a pitfall, however. The Xenophon above exemplifies something I'd call "deniable magic." And that feels wrong to me as well. I don't want to play the game of having things happen that could be interpreted as the action of gods or merely the blind action of natural forces. It feels dishonest to the cultures being depicted.
It isn't as if it is hard to find excuses to send characters out on an adventure. The Bronze Age Collapse is pretty much the definition of a time of disorder, of rapidly shifting events that sweep up people in their path. I'd like my characters to have a purpose that isn't just a transparent McGuffin. And yet, it would be unfair to the real history to have a single cause for the collapse that they can discover and attempt to thwart. It doesn't even make sense to the real history for our misfit group of heroes to know the "secrets" of the Sea People. The historical evidence is that neither they nor really anyone in the period thought of this as a unified force with specific goals. It was, as I said, a time of chaos.
The best I can come up with is the heroes have some other goal, tangential to but not completely unrelated to the events unfolding around them. A Saving Private Ryan mission, perhaps. Or, something I've been toying with but need a lot more research on the various local mythologies to see if it can be made appropriate, a sort of personification of Chaos or War. Something that was one of the engines behind the current path of destruction and could make things worse if left unstopped. But throughout all of this I keep remembering that this is the end of an era. Even Egypt essentially collapses (well, is reduced severely in power and never fully recovers.) This is the last golden age of many empires, and the best the heroes can achieve is small victories, a candle of hope to light the dark ages to come.
(And here, if nowhere else, it is terribly tempting to have a seer gain a vision of the Classical Age. Which, when you think about it, wasn't exactly wine and roses but in this world of ours you take what you can get!)
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