Over on the Book of Face I noted that I had once had a conversation with novelist Tim Powers. His thing is taking some historical character and weaving them into a tale of occult weirdness. So he has to stick to historical accuracy about the character, but then find some super-bizarre explanation for some seeming trivial historical detail from their life. So in THE ANUBIS GATES he has a cabal of evil Egyptian priests make a doppelganger of Lord Byron to do their evil bidding because we have a real letter from one of his friends remarking that they could swear they saw Byron on a London street when it was known he was in Greece at the time.
Anyway, he remarked to me that what matters in fiction is not that something be accurate, but that it feel accurate to the reader and that sometimes strict historical accuracy will wreck a story. He said he once wrote a story set in the 20s and discovered in his research that the word “groovy” had been coined by jazz musicians in the 20s. But he could not use it in the story because it is a word so identified with the 60s that no reader would believe it. I found that interesting.
To this observation, more than one reader responded to the effect that, “This is known as the Tiffany problem, because Tiffany was a common name in 13th and 14th century England, but no historical novelist would use it for a character in that era, for the reasons you mention.”
All of which leads me to offer you the following incredibly deep dive into CPG Grey’s researches into what turns out to be the Urban Legend of the Tiffany Problem, in which he dove deeper than any normal person would dive to discover that Everything We Thought We Knew About the Tiffany Problem is Wrong.
Enjoy!
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