Category: nonfiction

(In honor of Halloween, here’s a flash fiction piece from some years ago, when our late dog Emily, and our aggressive lemon tree, Bruno, were both still with us. I have zero recollection of having written it, but apparently I did, and I rather like it.)

At 5:17 the dog started to bark. Not casual barking, but real full-out crazed There’s a Serious Threat Out There barking, and at the back door (usually she’s in the front window, barking furiously at people walking dogs across the street from the house). So I stumbled through the kitchen into the sun room and looked out into the back yard. To my considerable surprise there was a man out there, a short, white haired man in a dirty automotive coverall, his back to the house; he had the hose in one hand and was watering our lemon tree.

Okay, we are not gardeners. But we live in a quiet mind-your-own-business neighborhood, and I can’t believe that any of my neighbors would come water our plants without so much as a “mother may I.” So I opened the inside door (there’s a security gate on the outside, remnant of the days when our house was owned by a paranoid little old lady living by herself) and cleared my throat. Emily was still barking her head off behind me, her tiny hackles standing straight up. The old guy turned around and smiled at me, brains drooling out of one corner of his mouth. “UH-uhhhhnh uhuh!” he said, gesturing at the lemon tree. Okay, so we let the tree get a little dry–but why would that bother a zombie?

I stepped back and slammed the door. The door is glass, but there’s that gate (suddenly the little old lady didn’t seem so paranoid). The windows are new, double-glazed. I was pretty sure one little old zombie wouldn’t be able to get in. But the dog’s barking was driving me crazy, and how the hell had a zombie got into my backyard? Seven foot walls on three sides, and an eight foot gate to the alleyway. And–frankly–the old guy didn’t look like the occasional zombies I saw out on Arlington Street, clambering over cars and chasing down pitbulls and pedestrians. He looked like an old Italian retiree who should be pottering around in the community garden down the block. That gave me an idea. I went back to the kitchen and peered into the refrigerator, then came back with an armload of stuff.

I opened the window. “Hi!” I was as cheery as I could manage. “Thanks so much for watering the tree! Want a snack?” And before he could lumber toward the window and grab my head I lobbed three tomatoes, a green pepper, and a bunch of basil out the window.

“Uhhhhh!Ahh!” He picked up the tomatoes, examined them, and roared in disapproval. He gestured at the tomato in his hand, shaking his head, spraying bits of brains. “Ahhh Ugahhuahh Michagbbbha!” He turned to the back of the garden, climbed up onto the roof of the laundry shed, and disappeared into the garden behind. I was pretty sure he’d gone back to his own garden, to bring back samples of what a real tomato tastes like. I locked the door and went down to the basement for the shotgun. When the old guy came back with his tomatoes I’d be ready.

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© 2026 Madeleine E. Robins

I’m running behind on everything today because I have too many meetings. I love the purpose of the meetings and I love the people I get to see, but they eat up time and energy. Today, then, I’m giving you something I wrote a decade ago. It’s a checklist for writers who are building worlds for their fiction. All fiction has a level of world building. This checklist is to help writers see that. It’s not exhaustive, and it’s not nearly as useful as some of my other work – but it’s short and it’s easy to use. It’s not the final arbiter of what goes in any novel. It’s a simple list to get you started in the thinking. Nothing more.  It’s not definitive… but it may be handy.
Let me admit that one of my books (Story Matrices) is more useful and for much more extensive world building. So is my teaching. And so is the most recent doctoral thesis – it’s the most useful thing of all. It’s turgid and difficult to read… and sometimes a short pieces is more useful than anything else, because when we build worlds for novels we do it in our own brains and using our own workspace. Think of this as a tool that can jumpstart your own work if you need a small boost. It starts, as much of my work does, on using history and historical sources.

Some useful topics to consider for novelists who find themselves using history in their fiction. This is the quick and dirty overview: it’s not complete. The aim is to get you thinking about critical questions so that you can address them in your writing.

1. Primary, secondary, tertiary

Basic classification of sources is always useful. Knowing that someone’s voice is intruding between you and a primary source or that the whole book you’re relying upon is a collection of studies by other people can make a big difference to how to translate the history you’re studying into the fiction you’re writing.

2. History vs past

One very handy statement that many modern historians make is that the past is the stuff that’s gone. History is a narrative that reconstructs it to suit our purposes. History is not the past. History does, however, reflect what we want the past to look like. This is unbelievably useful to fiction writers, because it means we can say “We’re constructing history to reflect the characters’ view of what the past should be like.” That story component, in other words, is translatable. As novelists, we can’ write an accurate past. We can, however, write a totally amazing set of histories.

3. Evaluating information and objects

No object is neutral. No information is neutral. Everything we seem touch, hear, think about is a part of our culture. When we use an object in our fiction, therefore, it’s going to be a lot more powerful if we understand its place in the culture of the world of the novel.

4. Place and time

Place and time together create unique co-ordinates. Find the exact place and time for your novel and you get a setting that is strong and can play an active part in the narrative. Use a generic place and time and you are more likely to end up with a generic novel.

5. Role of genre

Genre is an enormous topic. I can’t even begin to explore it in a paragraph or two. What it does is let readers and booksellers and critics know what sort of novel they’re reading. They’ll judge a historical romance differently to a historical fantasy, for instance. Presenting your novel within a specific genre makes a big difference, therefore, to how your novel is seen and interpreted. This means that the history you want to put into your novel needs to meet your target genre. If that genre has readers who are themselves very knowledgable about history, then you will need to know this and write with this in mind.

6. There are techniques to translate history into story.

Telling detail is one of the most studied, where a lot of background is given by the use of a few small words that the reader interprets. The important thing is that this is just one of many tools that writers use. If you’re not sure how to write the history into your fiction, then finding out what tools other writers use makes your task a lot easier. To find the right tools for the genre you’re writing in, find novels that have the feel you’re after. Work out what tools that writer uses, and experiment with them.

7. Nuancing place and time

This is closely linked toe genre and to using the most appropriate writing tools and to knowing what your audience is likely to expect. The level of nuancing you want to use and where you place your nuancing is what links all these things together, in fact. Quite often, with story, it’s not the large historical overviews that make the tale feel real and give the reader a sense of s story well told, it’s nuancing. Nuancing can be as small as whether hands are washed before eating using ewer and bowl on a sideboard or running water in a bathroom.

8. Religion and world view

So many writers get this wrong and so many historians are upset. The bottom line is, however, that whether the world view needs to be accurate and whether the religion in the novel needs to be at all correct relates to what kind of novel you’re writing rather than to historical accuracy. Time travel fiction gets religion wrong much of the time, and very few readers seem to be worried about it. Know what type of novel you’re writing and then see what research you have to do.

Mind you, as an historian, I’d argue that you’ll do a better job as a writer if you know what you’re deviating from when you modernise religion and world view.

I had such plans for this morning. I have a list of things I must do today. It’s now 5 pm on Tuesday here, I’ve not missed Monday your time which is when I intended to post today, but this is only the second item on my list.

Life is like that, with chronic fatigue. Plans go awry. Except that today it wasn’t only the chronic fatigue. There was the usual antisemitism, and there are riots (and since they are in places where I have friends, I follow them and try to understand) and, in Australia, someone tried to murder a politician. She’s very well loved and is fighting for her life. We know who the guy is who rammed her with his car, but we don’t know why someone who loves trees so much hated this particular human being.

How was I able to get past all this just enough to get to my list? I realised that the more we share hate, the more hate happens. Just like chronic fatigue., We shift into a declining spiral.

I’ve done everything I can do to challenge the fatigue today. Magnesium and crampbark now, Vitamin B12 shortly. And rest. Much rest. This is one of those days where even a little work gives me PEM and, if I don’t rest, I have to fight harder against the fatigue and it can takes weeks to dissipate.

This is true of the hate around us. We need to move gently. We need to take care of ourselves and everyone we can nearby. I’ve relegated these thoughts to my backbrain. Many of the things I sued to do, gently, to fight hate, are no longer open to me. I ran workshops bringing people together and gave writing skills so that hidden stories could be seen and understood. I did all this through women’s organisations. Most of them now encourage antisemitism. I’m pretty sure they don’t intend to help hate – they’re good people – but while they do, I’m limited. I’m also limited by the chronic fatigue.

I need the world around me to be more Pippa Passes. That lotus pool where the lotus cleans the water. I’ve said this before, but I need new ways through. I shall ponder. I have heaps of time to ponder today: I’ve not even had the capacity to make a cuppa yet. There are advantages to chronic illness, and thinking time is one of them. I have yet to discover an advantage to sharing hate.

I am in the middle of writing something up, but it’s not done yet. So here is a reprint from a few years ago.

I watched a lot of cartoons as a young person. Like, a lot. In New York City, where I grew up, we rejoiced in the–at the time–enormous selection of 7 TV channels (including the educational channel), and by 5 o’clock every evening at least two of them were showing cartoons: Warner Bros., primarily, but Woody Woodpecker and the Hanna Barbera slate, and Tom and Jerry… and those frankly kind of awful limited-animation series like Jonny Quest and Clutch Cargo. I imbibed them with a growing critical sense (if you can say such a thing of an 8-year-old), coming to the conclusion that Warner Bros., and later, the work of Jay Ward, were the clear winners.

Both were deeply subversive, and both partook liberally of the attitudes of their time, while mocking those attitudes pretty mercilessly.

I learned a lot about the 1930s and 1940s from Warner Bros. At the time, of course, I didn’t understand how much I was taking on board about, for example, life on the Home Front during WWII (blackout curtains, gas rationing, “Is this trip really necessary?” and the Little Man from the Draft Board), who the Hollywood hot tickets were (all Warners stars, of course). Some of the references were direct: Lauren Bacall wants rabbit pie, ordered by Humphrey Bogart, and Bugs Bunny happily complies, because, well, Lauren Bacall. Others were… well, let’s just say that when I first saw Katharine Hepburn in A Bill of Divorcement, I understood what Bugs Bunny had been going on about with the calla lillies.

Not all Warners cartoons repay rewatching: some of them are flat out appalling: there’s a reason why no one shows “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips,” or the horrifying “Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs” except at “midnight” screenings. And even the more every-day cartoons have moments that bring you up short and make you realize that, in fact, we’ve made someprogress since 1940. On the other hand, the sheer insane genius of “Porky in Wacky Land” or ” The Big Snooze” is hard to beat, and again, will sneak in all sorts of cultural and historical references you won’t find anywhere else.

And then there are Rocket J. Squirrel and his dauntless companion, Bullwinkle J. Moose, the Abbott and Costello of animation. As Beth Daniels says in this lovely article, “Rocky was the more intelligent straight man: a less hostile Abbott to Bullwinkle’s more secure Costello.” I kind of had a crush on Rocky when I was 7: he was so good hearted. And he put up with Bullwinkle’s repeated attempts to pull a rabbit out of a hat. What I didn’t realize when I was 7, because I was soaking in it, was the extent of the Cold War-era mindset the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show lampooned without mercy. Not just Rocky and Bullwinkle and their foils, Boris Badunov and Natasha Fatale (and their boss, Fearless Leader), but in Fractured Fairytales and Dudley Do-Right and especially, Mr. Peabody and his Boy, Sherman. Is there anything that Jay Ward and his team didn’t skewer?

The odd thing is that in considering these seminal influences and how they poked at all that was accepted in American culture, I realized the extent to which they also came from a set of very real values. Poking fun at the pokable is an honorable pastime. Pettiness sets you up for a take-down. Bugs Bunny may have been a self-admitted stinker, but he wasn’t… vicious. Daffy Duck delighted in tormenting Porky Pig, but he wound up hoist on his own petard at least half the time. And over in Rocky and Bullwinkle-land, our Hapless Heroes always seemed to survive, not least because the bad guys were just as hapless.

My husband and I raised our kids on the cartoons of our childhood. I like to think it was less from nostalgia than because we felt they gave the girls a useful toolkit for living in an increasingly nonsensical world. Also: Daffy Duck snarling “Of course you realize, this means WAR!” Priceless.

I need to work out. I have a schedule I try to stick with: four days of cardio interspersed with three days of weight training, because my doctor beat me about the head and shoulders about the need for weight training (which I find deeply boring) if I expect to arrive at Old Age in any sort of shape at all. So I have a schedule, which helps keep me honest. To be frank, I’m still sort of getting back into the swing of the routine after spending a week on vacation, but I’ve been pretty good, even when it meant bounding out of bed and starting to exercise.

However.

I have a cold. Coughing, sneezing, scratchy throat, the classic bug. Yesterday I did nothing. Which includes the cardio.

Today I am feeling better. By rights, and by my schedule, today I should do my weights routine. Except that I didn’t do the cardio, which I marginally prefer, yesterday. And I found myself having an actual, very dumb, conversation with myself about the moral imperative to do the weights routine today, on accounta I have a schedule, and if I do not keep the schedule then I am a bad person. Madeleine A opined that if I did not do weights today I would knock the whole schedule out of whack and then chaos would ensue. Madeleine B pointed out that I could do cardio or weights or nothing today, I might as well do whatever I prefer. Madeleine A responded that if I’m going to exercise at all, I should keep with the schedule, because schedule. Madeleine B pointed out that the schedule is entirely arbitrary, I invented it myself to give myself some structure, and that there is no external authority who is going to give me demerits or a spanking if I knock the schedule out of whack. At which point Madeleine A said, huffily, “FINE! You might as well not work out at all today! At least then you’d be back in the rhythm of the schedule.” Madeleine B noted that this might be an over-reaction, but again, there is no external authority who is going to come scold me and tell me that I am a Bad Person for skipping exercise when I’m sick.

At which point Madeleine C, a wholly separate entity, declared she was going to have a cup of tea and revisit the whole question in an hour.

It is a fine thing to create structures. Especially now that I am retired, I love my structures because they keep me from doomscrolling or watching too many reruns of old medical dramas. On the other hand, our structures can be manipulated into shackles, and nobody wants that. Balance in all things.

I once almost got into a fight with a Beefeater in the Tower of London when I dared suggest that Shakespeare might have been wrong about Richard III killing off his nephews.  Shakespeare’s version of the story has become enshrined as something “everybody knows.”  And “everybody knows” is a problem if you want to get something right.

I was thinking about this while re-reading Black London,* a terrific and fascinating book by Gretchen Gerzina about the history of Africans in England.  Early in the book Gerzina tells of going into a bookstore looking for material about people of color in London.  The saleswoman told her, with a touch of asperity, that everyone knew that there were no blacks in England prior to the end of WW II.  

In fact, there were so many blacks in England during the reign of Elizabeth I that she issued an edict ordering them to leave the country (it was largely  ignored).  And slavery, which we in America tend to think of as our own “peculiar institution,” was legal in England until as late as 1772.  There were African slaves in England–most of them domestics–because up until that point there had been no specific law against slavery.

What changed? A slave named James Somersett, brought by his owner to England from the Massachusetts colony, was beaten and left to die by his owner, Charles Stewart.  Instead, he was rescued, taken to the hospital, and when he was well, apprenticed as a free man.  By chance, a year or so later, Stewart saw his erstwhile slave, hale and productive, and demanded that the man be returned to him. A huge legal battle ensued, with public opinion vocally divided. The judiciary was forced to make case law, finding that, while colonial laws might explicitly permit slavery, there was no Parliamentary act or common law that made slavery in England legal, and that it was therefore illegal.

Somersett was freed, as were the 10,000 or so African slaves in England.

The slave trade continued, making port cities like Bristol and Plymouth into centers of commerce;  slavery in the British colonies flourished. But the abolitionist movement, stirred to life by the Somersett case, struggled against economic interests, and in 1807 the slave trade in England was abolished. It took almost thirty more years (1834) for the institution itself to be banned throughout the Empire.

That means that during Jane Austen’s lifetime there were black people in England.  It’s clear (particularly from Mansfield Park) that Austen was well aware of the slave trade as it was practiced in the British colonies, and her letters suggest that she was part of the abolitionist camp. Austen did not live a cosmopolitain life (she disliked London and Bath) but it is not unlikely that she encountered black Britons–those persons who had lived in England as domestics for decades, or had come to Britain after the American Revolution (many slaves were promised freedom by the Crown if they fought for England, and some took the offer and wound up there after the war–albeit not always very happily).  There was a tendency among white Britons to lump all people of color together, but at the same time freed slaves were arriving from America, immigrants from the British colony of India were arriving too. My favorite is the Bengali entrepreneur who introduced the word “shampoo” — meaning head massage — into the English language. He was considered “black.” He operated a spa (Mahomed’s Steam and Vapor Sea Water Medicated Baths) which offered a combined Turkish bath with massage (sounds great). As the British Empire spread its influence, there were more and more persons of color in England. The clerk Gerzina encountered at the bookstore may have cited “everybody” in her opinion, but she was dead wrong.

Whenever I hear someone saying “everybody knows,” I’m pretty sure I’m in for a whopping historical error.

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* Yes, I’m researching for Sarah Tolerance #5...