October Review Challenge, #16 - Preferred genre

October Review Challenge, #16 - "What genre do you prefer to write in?"

For me, this is definitely historical adventure. I really, really enjoy period pieces, particularly if there’s some sort of action, mystery, or caper involved for there to add intrigue and excitement. In episode 2 of Dream Machine, Requiem for a Dreamer, Ryan asks Leah why she likes writing historical fiction so much, and she gives a stripped down version of my reasoning:

“Everything’s just more interesting, okay? They way people talk, dress, live. Imagining what it would be like to live through important moments in history, but better. No, like, rationing food or fending off the plague. And when things get tough, it feels like an adventure, not... boring regular real life.”

That’s the rough gist of it. I love the trappings, like the dialect and the details of every day life. But I also love the sense of living through history, albeit from (at least in some ways) a more comfortable vantage point in the present. I’ll take my indoor plumbing and effective vaccines, thank you very much.

Adonis is set in an alternate-history Ancient Rome, which I also love, though this is my one project from then. I also like WWI, which my early play Mrs. Loring and parts of the related Tailor at Loring’s End involve. The various Jeeves and Wooster thoughts I’ve had have been just after, and I personally like to insert more references to it than the originals tend to. Brockhurst, my Downton Abbey-inspired larp, is smack dab during the war itself, and a small-group tabletop The Bloom of May references things that happened during it.

But the Victorian age, basically the long 19th Century, is my most frequent setting. The 1880s are the time of the Mrs. Hawking plays and all related pieces, like my roleplaying game Silver Lines. Mrs. Hudson Investigates, my Holmes-related radio play done for PMRP, is around the same time. Another radio play, an adaptation of Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue done with Jeremy Holstein, is in the 1840’s, still technically within Queen Victoria’s reign. I love it aesthetically, I love the manners and the language, and I’m just a bit of an Anglophile in general. But even more than that, the imperial British way of life is rife with drama and makes for strong conflicts to critique and make points about. I am fascinated by the time, but in order to stay honest, I try to incorporate and acknowledge and even deconstruct the evils of it.

I need to write more modern day things, for the sake of producibility concerns. Period pieces are unfortunately expensive. But this is what I'd do all the time if left to my own devices.


Photo by John Benfield