I’ve always been intrigued by the
past – especially certain time periods in the past. As I am a
life-long student of Ancient Egypt, of course that tops the list. It
is such an ancient land that the boundaries between past and present
sometimes seem to blur. Did you know that at Deir el-Bahri there
exists the stump of a tree planted at the time of its construction?
Now desiccated and surrounded by an ugly iron paling, it still sits
there in defiance of the millennia that have passed since it was
planted by hands long turned to dust. Such things never cease to
thrill me.
So, when I decided to write a
time-travel, Ancient Egypt was a natural. If you’re interested at
all in history, if you know how the past sparks your mind – what
would it be like to actually be there? To live there? What would your
daily life be like? How would it feel to realize that you could never
come home again, that everything you had always known was forever
denied you? Not just cosmic things like family and medicines and
knowledge and the immediate gratification of almost every wish,
though – everyday things like Mexican food, sneakers and hand
cream.
And so was born PASSION’S CHOICE, a
story about an average American woman thrust back into the turbulent
time of Pharaoh Hatshepsut. And the work began. To sit and fantasize
about living in another time and place is one thing. To make it into
a believable, coherent story that is historically accurate (a very
big thing with me!) is another. Would my heroine have worn cotton?
(No) Eaten lemons? (No) Had slaves? (No – at least during my time
period) Had toilets? (Yes, and flushed with water, but still very
different from our own) Had pets? (Yes)
Writing a time travel means creating a
believable, workable world with rules and parameters, just as must a
fantasy writer creates a world of cool orange oceans and children who
can fly up to the age of eleven, or whatever. A time travel is
harder, though, because you are writing about something that is true,
something that once actually existed. Most everyone knows something
about most time periods, though, making your mistakes that much more
visible. (Alternative histories and fantasy histories are completely
different animals.) And you daren’t let a fact slide, thinking it
is too obscure or unimportant to research. I guarantee someone will
catch it and call you on it.
Once given the basic fantasy aspect of
a modern-day person going back in time, there are just as many
restrictions as writing a contemporary ‘reality’ story. Not only
must you conform to the framework of history, you must accept the
mores and mindsets of your chosen time period.
For example, the Ancient Egyptians
believed most thoroughly in magic. In fact, to them magic and
religion were inseparable, two disparate parts of a single whole that
infused every aspect of life. The medical texts show this; the spells
which were to be recited by the priest/physician and the magical
texts which were to be inscribed on the bandages were given equal
importance as the physical medicaments. To the ancients, it was a
package deal; our perception of religion as one thing and medicine as
another would have been incomprehensible and more than a little
blasphemous to them.
It is tempting to create our own worlds
and live our own fantasies when writing time travels, but it is
imperative to keep your characters (time traveler him/herself
excluded, of course) and facts, lifestyles and beliefs congruent with
their time. Otherwise you end up with the dreaded ‘21st
century people in fancy dress’ syndrome. That’s just plain bad
writing.
No, writing a good time travel is
difficult, and – if it is going to be a good one – takes a great
deal more work than a simple contemporary story. You not only have to
have the viewpoint and beliefs of your time-traveler, you also have
to have the viewpoints and beliefs of the time traveled to. That
conflict, of beliefs and attitudes as well as technologies, is what
makes your story, and we all know that good books are nothing but a
series of conflicts arisen and resolved.
Bio:
Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson is a 7th-generation Texan and a 3rd-generation wordsmith who writes in mystery, romance, and horror. Once an actress and a singer Janis has also been editor-in-chief of two multi-magazine publishing groups as well as many other things, including an enthusiastic amateur Egyptologist.
Janis’ husband even proposed in a moonlit garden near
the Pyramids of Giza.
She and her husband live in Texas with an assortment of rescued furbabies.
