It's been nearly three years since I started writing Belief, the novel that's going to form the majority of my dissertation and which I'm not supposed to talk about until The Lauras has been published. Its development has been painful: the writing has been slow, the revising has been slow, the research has been impossible, and every time I dragged a chunk of it to Henry's office his response has been some iteration of, "Nope. Try again."
Until last week, when I showed him the seventh version of the first chapter, and he said, "This is it. Now make the other 140,000 words just like it. And add some more period detail."
So today I got to sit down with the printout that he scribbled on to try and fit in a little more period detail. I've been putting off adding more period detail for a while, because detail for a period that people who are still living can remember is an utter pain in the rump and other parts of the anatomy.
In the first chapter there's a single sentence about mother-daughter shopping trips. Practically a throwaway line. Except these shopping trips are supposed to take place in New York in 1963. I'm eternally grateful to the people who keep retro, vintage, mid-century and etc. blogs, because otherwise that one line would have taken me far longer than the three hours I spent on it. And I'm still nervous that someone my aunt's age is going to read it and take me to task over getting makeup fashions wrong.
The fun side of 'period' writing (I can see my mother now, having a fit because I called the decade of her youth 'period') is that I got to spend the entire day farting around on the internet and emailing relatives and can still call it work. Things I got to look up today: Jello salads, Bloomingdales, polyester, makeup, stockings, dresses, retro fashion in general, shag rugs, sunken living rooms, kitchen appliances, cocktail parties, first communion dresses, lunch counters, romance novels, movie heartthrobs, teen movies, drive-in movies, girl's athletics, field hockey, beach party films, 1969 current events, rocks glasses, the history of the words 'tart,' 'chick,' and 'queer,' and female sexual awakening because I'm 99% sure that my own was far from representative.
The best part of all of that was my discovery of the OED's historical thesaurus. How it works is this: you enter a word (in my case, 'tart') and it gives you a list of synonyms in the order in which they came into recorded usage, complete with a date of first recorded usage. So now I know that 'tart' came into use with the meaning 'woman of questionable virtue' in 1864, 'virago' circa 1000, 'carline' in 1375, 'minikin' in 1540, 'maness' in 1594, and 'lost rib' in 1647, and that there is a slew of other terms for woman with a range of connotations that really should come back into use because those commonly used now just lack something.
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