Paying Attention to History

If you’ve been visiting Running After My Hat for more than a few days, you already know about what you might politely call my serial attentiveness. Theoretically, this is a blog about writing. But then, oh, yeah — there’s stuff about music. And true, I rattle on sometimes about reading, too, but isn’t that sorta kinda like about writing? Oh, well, all right, yes I do post — but less often! — about tech stuff, and politics, and art and photography and poetry…

When working on a large-scale project like a book, similarly, I sometimes wander off the main road, suddenly absorbed in distractions of landscape and weather and architecture.

Oddly, this sometimes works to the advantage of the book in question (although, all right all right fine, it sometimes does not — and probably just as oddly).

A few weeks ago, I posted an excerpt from what I think of as my work-in-progress, whose working title is Grail. The excerpt was linked to a post about the importance of setting in fictional works — certainly not a topic which will catch most writers by surprise, because together with character, plot, and the author’s voice, good handling of setting is one of those elements frequently cited as critical to a story’s success.

The post you’re reading now, however, is not about setting, plot, etc. It’s about history. That is, what happened in your setting(s) before your characters showed up?

As I work my way through Grail‘s first (fifteen-plus-year-old) draft, taking notes, every now and then I come upon a few paragraphs or entire section which I vaguely recognize as the footprint of a moment of distraction. These passages may or may not survive to the final manuscript; I may in fact have already eliminated them in one of the two intervening drafts. But there’s often something interesting about them in their own right.

One such passage has to do with the history of a fictional small town in southern New Jersey — a town named Asphodel.

There’s a real town, named Delanco, at about the same location, and I’ve posted about it before, months ago — because it’s my home town. The real Delanco lies at the junction of the Delaware River and the Rancocas Creek. (Legend has it that the town’s name was formed by combining the first portions of the names of those two waterways; the result, Delranco, was deemed not exactly optimal for town boosterism, so the town fathers dropped the “r.”)

The fictional Asphodel also lies along the Delaware, at a point where a fictional creek jogs off to the south and east. (Its name, like Delanco’s, also comes from the two bodies of water. The name furthermore has potentially useful links to Greek mythology — not a point to be sneered at, I thought, when I first came up with it.)

As I wrote about this fictional town, I found myself wondering how it might have been settled in the first place — and how this hypothetical history might be woven into the fabric of what I was trying to do elsewise with Grail.

In the except linked below, you’ll find a brief history of the town of Asphodel. Aside from its value (if any) as an exercise of imagination, this passage works in a number of cross-references to a lot of  associations (some rather obscure) with the real legends of the Holy Grail, legends now centuries old.

(Frankly, I like the faint whiff of homesickness and nostalgia which even disguised descriptions of Delanco can induce. That alone justifies the exercise in my little-boy mind.)

One more note: the history of Asphodel has absolutely nothing to do with the history of Delanco. And the images displayed in the excerpt? They’re just there, as the saying goes, for illustrative purposes.

[Link to Grail excerpt: Asphodel, New Jersey]