The elusive essence of place

I had a fascinating experience while visiting the historical sites featured in my work-in-progress (WIP). It’s that curious feeling when a place is both not quite what you imagined and yet more real, more awe-inspiring than you expected. It reminds me of seeing the Eiffel Tower for the first time—no matter how many pictures I saw or descriptions I’d read, nothing compared to standing before it, and I realized how my mental image, my paradigm, fell short of the real thing. Your image may be less, or more, but it will probably miss the essence of what the tower is.

This experience stirred my thoughts on the challenges authors face when trying to bring a setting to life. No matter how much research we do, or how vivid our imaginations are, there’s always a gap between what we create and what the reality may have been. As historical fiction writers, we strive for authenticity, but there are limits to what we can accurately know—especially when the place we’re writing about has changed over the decades.

That was exactly my experience last week when my wife and I were in Budapest. The visit was part vacation, part research mission for my WIP. The climatic scene of my upcoming novel occurs in the Central Café on Károlyi Street, so it was a must visit for us. I’ve done research on the historic café, examining both writings and photos from the time. After writing the scene, I could feel the setting as though I had been there. Concurrently, I knew the ambiance I felt was a creation of my mind. Yes, the image was girded with facts, but also with what I created between the facts, the stuff that made it come alive for me and the reader.

Well, when we visited the café, I had that sense of misalignment, the sense I’d gotten it wrong, even though the details were pretty much right.

Here’s the café entrance the day we visited.

And now a look up at the facade. Beautiful!

The inside was an understated opulence, but also we were amused by a piano and violin duo inches from our table playing their rendition of New York, New York.

Notice the beautiful detail on the ceiling and the detail of the chandelier.

Now, look at a picture of the café from the first decade of the 1900s (the earliest photo I could find). The space was elegant in its own way, but a significant departure from the current café. And after examining several photos taken over the years since then, it’s clear a dozen or more remodels have happened. And no sight of the piano duo!

However, the visit wasn’t wasted. For example, the intersection of Károlyi and Irányi Streets is a more compact area than I’d imagined, making me rethink the blocking of the scene. At one point our hero dashes across the intersection and into the café, a much quicker dash than I thought. I’ll need to tighten that up.

And the steps. They play a key part to the scene’s climax, leading to a mezzanine above the main dining room.

While these steps are likely not original, I counted them, how many to the landing, and then to the top, again, an important blocking detail in the narrative. Although the number of steps may have changed by one or two, the effect would be the same, and now I could see it more clearly than ever in my mind. No, I could feel it more clearly than ever.

So, what did I learn in this? First, as an author, I learned you can’t get it all right. There are some things that will be unknowable. This is where general knowledge of the era, culture, and, in this case, other cafés will support your work. The most important thing is you must make it come alive for the reader, while not conflicting with known facts.

Second, there is something here for readers as well. Know that despite the author’s best efforts to get it right, settings are there to support the drama, the narrative, and while the best historical fiction authors will never knowingly mislead or lie about a detail of setting, it’s all about supporting the effect of the story. Because in the end, a story is a story, people leading messy lives that are often in conflict with one another, and setting is a servant to that.

The question no one asks

Many of you know my WIP (writer-speak for work in progress) is a historical mystery novel featuring Máté Nádasdy, who you met in Death’s Visage. Family and friends enjoy hearing about my novel and always ask questions like, “How many pages have you written?” and, even more telling, “When is it going to be done?”

But the question they never ask, probably out of courtesy, is, “What’s taking so long?” I usually preempt the question by talking about the editing process and how I expect to go through six, seven, or more revisions. But last week, I spent the better part of three hours on a minor research project for the WIP. Consider this an object lesson in what I do and one reason historical fiction is so time-intensive.

In my WIP, I have our hero, Máté, jetting around 1800s Budapest by cab (horse-drawn carriage) to most of his appointments, which was a common means of transit but pricey for a middle-class coffeehouse owner. While a person of Máté’s means might use a cab occasionally, it’s more likely he’d walk or use public transportation.

And here we come to my research. The public transportation system in Budapest in 1889 was a hodgepodge of different modes: horse-tram, electric-tram, horse-drawn omnibus, funiculars, cog railways, and cabs. So I first had to find transit maps from the period and overlay them to determine what was available for Máté in March of ‘89. And then out came the highlighters:

Why do I expect you to have any interest in such a minor point of my narrative? First, this is a significant part of the work of a historical novelist: digging into the past to create as authentic a setting as possible. Readers expect it in today’s data-saturated world. They presume nothing less than an absolute replica of life on that day in that location on planet Earth. The bar is higher now than it’s ever been for authors, exactly because there is so much historical information available. For example, anyone with a cell phone or laptop can access historical maps of Budapest and overlay them with the modern city and buildings. Quite something, eh?

In the end, it comes to trust. Has the author done the work necessary to engender the trust of the reader, and does that effort shine through in the narrative? Often the effort is covert, laying behind settings and the political and social forces that influence the character’s motives and actions. But the scaffolding must be there, else something is lost, something the reader can feel but often not articulate. Trust is broken.

I’m reminded of a quote from Johannes Brahms, the renown Romantic composer. He said he would work a composition over and over until it was technically perfect. Then he went on, “Now if it expresses something deep, something of the heart, that is different, but perfect it must be!”

Readers want engaging stories that express something deep and of the heart, to borrow Brahms’ words. But underneath that must be a structure that is perfect, one that supports the characters, their loves and loathings, their successes and downfalls. That’s what makes a story, not an obvious structure. In fact, the structure should be all but invisible, for when you are caught up in a story, who thinks of such things as the accuracy of the horse-tram system?

So, back to our original question. What’s taking so long? Scaffolding, settings, characters, story. What else could it be?