Author Archives: Jeannie Lin

History and Worldbuilding

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My critique partners and I were chatting it up last night and the topic of writing historicals and research came up. They asked me how long I researched before I felt ready to write and I told them not much. I just jumped into the story and researched as I went along. Of course, I wasn’t going to set the stories in China at first.

I suddenly had flashbacks — five years of library visits, trolling Amazon, a gazillion internet searches. I have books on horses of the world, on walled cities in China, on the Tang dynasty, the Song Dynasty. Hours and hours on the Chinese History forum. Wow, now that I’m looking at my shelf, I have books on Chinese weapons, the Art of War and other military texts, Chinese landmarks. And I consider myself a “light” researcher. Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story, I say. (I stole that from my mentor teacher, who always told me “Don’t let the truth get in the way of good teaching” when it came to science.)

Darn, it’s been a long ride. And it keeps going. I’m starting to research Taoism and demonology for my next project. No wonder historical authors want to stick to the same period for a while.

No matter how much you research an actual time, you still worldbuild around it. Or at least I do. Historians do it too. It’s the biased worldview that you start creating based on what you know. I have a loose construct of the regions of the Tang Dynasty mapped out in my head and the political structure. At some point, I have to start filling in blanks and making extrapolations of what kind of situation that would create.

Soon, you find something cool happening. You find that the history matches up with your worldbuilding as you continue to dig. There’s a certain way that empires rise and fall, I suppose. It’s all a feedback loop and, sooner or later, the stuff you’re making up isn’t so far from what could or did happen.

I’m still dreading the day someone smacks me down for gross historical inaccuracies. That’s okay. They would have had to read as much as I have to do it. Anybody that geeky deserves to wield the historical smackdown stick.

Whatcha Get?

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christmas_chick

A bit material, I know, but I would be lying if I said it wasn’t all about the goodies!

I was nursing a cold which I took as license to sit around sipping tea and eating butter cookies all day in my PJs. Hubby surprised me with a couple of adorable gifts. First of all, this chickie was waiting among my gifts. Umm…we like chickens. It’s a family thing.

Second, he also gained a bunch of brownie points with a ruby-slippered cookie cutter. Now I’m on the hook for baking cookies for RWA National conference next year.

My big score would have to be a copy of Lisa See’s Peony In Love from my Little Sis. I’ve been eyeing this for a while. At first I found it to be less accessible than Snow Flower since it takes a journey into the spirit world and touches on very deeply cultural beliefs about life, death and family as well as the ties between the living and our ancestors. On top of that, the story centers around the fall of the Ming dynasty, the role of women during the upheaval, and the literary culture of that time. Let me qualify the “less accessible” comment by saying I read it in one sitting.

But I keep on thinking of the story and the power of it. Lisa See takes a 17th century text and the lives of three women who wrote it and turns it into a haunting and compelling retelling that brings the women and their work back to the light. It was overwhelming for me to discover these works — you can’t help but feel this connection between the past and the present, within the story and then beyond it in your own mind even once you’ve stopped reading.

It’s a story that’s bigger on the inside than on the outside. (I’ve been watching Dr. Who. Can you tell?) In any case, I’ll be thinking of it for a long time.