Odysseus had the right of it. Hang out with the swineherd for a while. Scope out the place and see what your friends and co-workers are up to safe behind the anonymity of a disguise. It is tough re-shifting your priorities back to job and friends, especially when you've been out on your own adventuring.
Travel gives you perspective. Hell of it is, the first thing I noticed is how filthy my place is at the moment. That's now shot up to the top of the priority list, and not just dusting but the big repairs I've been putting off, like re-doing some plaster, hanging new blinds, etc.
And the novel? Yes I learned things. I could say I am ready now...I gathered enough of what was important to me so I could start writing actual scenes.
But I have new perspective there, too. I saw a lot, I thought a lot. I crossed the Aegean with a copy of The Odyssey in my hand. I strolled the hills and listened to the goats and walked the stones of Minoan buildings.
It has become oddly much less clear where the demarkations are between Minoan, Mycenaean, Iron Age and Classical Greece are. Seeing so many of the artifacts close-up this way illuminates the similarities and connections as much as it illuminates the differences and changes. There are continuities of language and religion and material culture.
It is these continuities archaeologists are forced to use to expand upon the material they are able to gather. We don't know anything of Mycenaean religious practices, for instance, but there are familiar names which appear and we do know something of how the later Greeks worshipped the gods with those appellations.
And this is particularly true for the writer of fiction, who can not just turn the camera away from those parts of the scene that are inconvenient, inconclusive, or entirely impossible to verify with ground data.
More, there is a dark reflection of this; just as the historian has to borrow from the better-known to fill in the gaps of our knowledge, the writer is moved to borrow from what is better known to the reader in order to smooth their entry into the world of the story.
The place where this has currently become an impossible snarl for me is that many people have written many kinds of stories within this setting. Within the past few days I've been reading a vigorous and insightful new translation of Homer, browsing (with the filter of yet another language to bear with, as it is in French) a children's book of The Odyssey with the cutest illustrations, and sample chapters of a book that re-tells The Illiad from the point of view of the women of Troy (Euripides got there first), and of yet another Lara Croft clone that purports to be about an artifact from late Bronze Age Crete. Oh, yes; and reading way too many attempts by way too many museums to batter a public-friendly description into two hundred words or less.
And it should be obvious to everybody but getting it right (even if it were possible to get it all right) has little to do with making it readable. Or getting it to sell.
I made this argument myself before I set off. As I alluded to above, if look and feel is important to me, then I am ready, now, to reproduce the smells and sounds of the landscape of modern Crete (and only a few academics will know or care that not all the fauna I describe is properly contemporary). If getting that gut punch of five-senses description and strong characters and conflict and a little action is what is important (as I believe it is) then being sloppy with the research is okay. Being intentionally "sloppy" with the research is even better (that is, borrowing from what we can know, such as worship practices of 1st century Greece and Rome, or horticulture of the Christian age, but using details that came from life and thus carry that ineffable aura of veracity).
And so, yeah, research generated new questions. And some of those have sent me back to the top of the stack; what am I trying to write, and who for?
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