Tonight, insight into the creative process. Or rather, my creative process.
Because other novelists work very differently from me. They amaze me. Some author friends on Facebook will say, “Well, I only got 1,000 words down tonight. Had the flu and my mother died, but that’s no excuse. Got to punch those numbers up tomorrow.”
Me, at this point I get in about one scene a night. Often only a few paragraphs. After that I haven’t got a clue what comes next, and I won’t know until the next day – maybe. It may take a couple days or a week before I figure out how to coax my characters into going where I need them to go.
It should get better as I get deeper into the plot. Then things will move by themselves. I’m setting up my shots at this point.
Anyway, this is what I’ve been working through recently:
There’s a story (only one) about Erling Skjalgsson that’s not included in Heimskringla. You find it in Flatey Book. I’ve mentioned it here before. It’s the Tale of Erling and Eindridi.
Eindridi was the son of the famous chieftain Einar Tambarskjelve, a very important man. I won’t outline the story tonight, but basically it’s about how young Eindridi gets into a compromising situation with Erling’s daughter Sigrid. Erling is furious, and Eindridi has to undergo the Iron Ordeal (you may recall that ceremony from The Year of the Warrior) to prove that he hasn’t dishonored her. Then old Einar, Eindridi’s father, nearly goes to war against Erling over the insult to his son. But the business is resolved through the two young people getting married.
It’s been my intention from the beginning to include that story in my current Erling book. But there were points I wondered about.
For one thing, another story mentions Eindridi’s wife, and she’s not Sigrid Erlingsdatter. I forget her name, but she’s somebody else.
Now that doesn’t invalidate the story by itself. Wives were a tragically perishable commodity in those days. Childbirth often carried them off. Rich men frequently went through several wives. Still, I found it odd that the connection wasn’t mentioned anywhere else (as far as I know; might have missed something).
Also, I saw Erling and Einar as fairly friendly. Just an assumption on my part, but call it an artist’s instinct.
On the other hand, there is a well-attested marriage alliance that I thought required more explanation. We know that Erling had a daughter named Ragnhild who married Thorberg Arnesson of Giske, son of the powerful Arne Arnmodsson, and one of a group of brothers who swung a lot of weight in the time of King (St.) Olaf Haradsson and his successors.
The Arnesssons were a family divided in Olaf’s time. Some of them supported the king, others opposed him. At the Battle of Stiklestad, where Olaf died, there were Arnesson on both sides.
But Thorberg was one of the pro-Olaf Arnessons. He even went into exile in Russia with Olaf. So why would he marry the daughter of Olaf’s greatest domestic enemy, Erling Skjalgsson?
And I had the brilliant idea – audacious by my mousy standards – of replacing Eindridi with Thorberg in the anecdote. It would achieve narrative economy while solving a problem of motivation.
So I’m doing that. And nobody can stop me.
There was one further problem, though. Last night I had a worrying thought – “Wait! For this to work, old Arne Arnmodsson (Thorberg’s father, if you lost your score card) has to be alive in 1022. But I always had the idea he must have died young.”
This was because there was another brother named Arne Arnesson. And the usual custom in the Viking Age was not to name a baby after a living relative. The old Norse believed that the soul followed the name, you see. So if you named the baby Arne after his father, Papa Arne would likely drop dead. Only one member of the nuclear family at a time was permitted the same name.
But I did some more research and learned that old Arne is believed to have lived until around 1024. So it’s cool. They must have adopted Christian naming practices in the family by the time Arne Jr. was born.
Such are the travails of the historical novelist.
