Writing As Conspiracy Theory
I love Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum for a variety of reasons; the one I want to discuss right now, though, would be its unique plot. A group of editors at a publishing house that has to deal with conspiracy theorists and occultists decide that the 'hidden plan of the Templars' that one of the potential clients 'uncovered' was unimaginative and poorly constructed; by starting from the point that what they created was nonsense, they managed to brilliantly construct a secret history of the world by assembling historical facts together using false logic - just as the 'Diabolicals' did, but without an agenda or believing any of their 'connections' were true.
For pure fiction, especially historical, those are the best kinds of stories. (Alan Moore took it even one step further by making connections between different fictional settings in his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series). That is one of the tools that I'm using in writing my story.
For example: when I was a kid, I visited the Maitland Art Center and was enchanted with the artificial Mayan courtyard that was built there; that was begging to be included in some way. Was there any other connections that could be made? Well, one of the foremost experts in the Aztec language lived in central Florida for a time as a teenage; Robert H. Barlow. Barlow was also a weird fiction writer, and corresponded with famed horror author H.P. Lovecraft... who came down in 1934 to visit Barlow for two months. In turn, our local university had quite the collection of weird fiction from Lovecraft's circle in its Special Collections at the school library (something I discovered to my great delight when I started college).
From this, I could construct a fictional family to take the place of the real one that made the donation; link it back to where they personally knew Barlow, and Lovecraft would've met (and inspired one of the characters in his final stories). The Mayan courtyard was constructed for some occult purpose; Barlow would've been drawn into it as one of the few people that could decipher the language.
This was part of the backstory of what I had already established when I began writing my short story Everybody Comes to Marlowe's, and the central mystery surrounds a rare book that the missing history professor was looking for, written by Barlow and self-published, regarding an Aztec/Mayan presence in Florida in pre-Columbian times. It's these leaps of logic that build the structure of the fictional setting; and is something I find great use for in writing.
For pure fiction, especially historical, those are the best kinds of stories. (Alan Moore took it even one step further by making connections between different fictional settings in his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series). That is one of the tools that I'm using in writing my story.
For example: when I was a kid, I visited the Maitland Art Center and was enchanted with the artificial Mayan courtyard that was built there; that was begging to be included in some way. Was there any other connections that could be made? Well, one of the foremost experts in the Aztec language lived in central Florida for a time as a teenage; Robert H. Barlow. Barlow was also a weird fiction writer, and corresponded with famed horror author H.P. Lovecraft... who came down in 1934 to visit Barlow for two months. In turn, our local university had quite the collection of weird fiction from Lovecraft's circle in its Special Collections at the school library (something I discovered to my great delight when I started college).
From this, I could construct a fictional family to take the place of the real one that made the donation; link it back to where they personally knew Barlow, and Lovecraft would've met (and inspired one of the characters in his final stories). The Mayan courtyard was constructed for some occult purpose; Barlow would've been drawn into it as one of the few people that could decipher the language.
This was part of the backstory of what I had already established when I began writing my short story Everybody Comes to Marlowe's, and the central mystery surrounds a rare book that the missing history professor was looking for, written by Barlow and self-published, regarding an Aztec/Mayan presence in Florida in pre-Columbian times. It's these leaps of logic that build the structure of the fictional setting; and is something I find great use for in writing.
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