The Magellanic Diaries 4

Monk-Time

late 15th-century miniature of Jean Miélot, scribe and priest

Almost immediately after deciding I would write a historical novel, I became preoccupied by a challenge I had never imagined facing before. To begin, I had never imagined I would write a historical novel. Whatever my historical interests, my dramatic and narrative preoccupations had always been contemporary. In a contemporary context, a serious fictionist intent on creating fully conceived characters will set about developing for them richly imagined psychological and biographical worlds, of relations, experiences, ideas, and emotions. To the extent that a character departs in fundamental ways from a writer’s own embodied engagement with and experience of the world, the challenge is greater. I don’t note this as a problem. It’s a creative pleasure, so long as a writer thinks he ultimately can meet the challenge. This is a subject that many have politicized in recent years, unfortunately, rather than let it persist as the cre…