2021 Snowflake Challenge #3: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
Saturday, January 9th, 2021 12:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tippetariuswrites
Challenge #3: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
In your own space, tell us who, from one of your fandoms, would you most want to have dinner with (or tea, or a random afternoon visit), And why? This could be a creator, an actor, a costumer, a set designer, a director, a character, a composer, anybody! What would you talk about? What are you dying to know? Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
I'll say Patrick O'Brian, if he were still alive. I started reading his Aubrey-Maturin series last summer, and I've been enjoying it. I often read with an eye to improving my own writing, and there's a ton I could learn from him. I'd probably ask him how he did his research, which works of fiction and nonfiction most influenced him, what kind of writing schedule he kept, how he planned out his books, and what advice he would give to writers wanting to improve their craft.
When some authors write period fiction, they often pack in historically accurate details that stick out too much, details that feel less like an organic part of the story and more like a signpost that says, "Hey, just a reminder, we're in the 1800s now, and since I spent hours and hours researching this period, I'm going to explain exactly how a Jacquard loom works."
O'Brian doesn't do that. There's something very natural and flowing about his prose, almost like reading an account by someone who might have lived during the Napoleonic Wars. The downside is that unless you've studied 19th century nautical terms, you're often going to have a muddled idea of what's going on. But O'Brian writes in such a way that it doesn't really matter. I still enjoy the characters and their banter without knowing much about the world they live in (though I really should make an effort to learn more). It also helps that one of the two main characters, Dr. Stephen Maturin, is a stubborn landlubber who never quite absorbs all this naval lingo either.
