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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37774
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37774
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I feel for you. I write about the Anglo-Saxon period in England and I am careful to portray my characters living and working in huts and wooden halls and guarding their villages with wooden palisades. No matter. My readers conjure up castles out of thin air.

Of course, this is how fiction works -- how all of languages works, really. We can paint a very large and detailed picture with a few words by pulling images out of the reader's head. If the images are not there already, it is very hard to force them in. And if the reader has associations with a word, a time, a setting, an implement, or a title, it is very hard to break that association.

In my case I suspect that any scene or implement that suggest medieval times to my readers, a sword, a horse, etc, brings a whole cascade of medieval associations flooding in, with castles mixed in there willy nilly. The reader ends up convinced that they have already seen a castle in the story when there never was one.

I think to a certain extent you can combat this with description. But to the extent that this succeeds, the reader will be aware of the dissonance between their stock of images and the image you are presenting. The question then is, which is more authoritative to them, the images in their head, or the words in your text.

If you can make your writing authoritative enough -- if they believe the portrait you are painting -- perhaps they will adjust the images they have in their heads. If not, they are more likely to believe the the images in their head are correct and you are the one committing anachronism.

But I don't think you are ever going to win at this game entirely. A certain portion of your readers will still see huts in Rome. A certain portion of mine will still see castles in an 8th century Northumbrian village.

They key thing, I believe, is to make your writing as authoritative as possible, but not to go so far in trying to convince the inconvincible that you ruin the story for the readers who are ready for what you are writing.

Original score: 50