Friday, April 27, 2012

A-Z April Blogging Challenge - X

X

Guess how many historical fiction novels begin with the letter "x".  You got it.  None. Zip. Goose egg. Zilch.  The English language has very few words that begin with x, most of them unpronouncible and most certainly not in everyday usage.

So, therefore, a little dictionary lesson:  xenophillia - defined as a liking for foreigners or strangers or foreign or strange things.

This is where the creative writing comes into play.  How to apply xenophillia to historical fiction.  My take on this is that we historical fiction buffs escape our current-day world into eras foreign to us and those times were populated by strangers.  We're not likely ever to meet them, are we?

I think this is maybe the biggest draw for me regarding historical fiction.  It gives me an opportunity to learn about how our predecessors, both famous and not-so-famous, survived.  A completely foreign way of living.  Survival was a tough gambit in centuries past and human life was not highly valued.  Unfortunately, it's still not valued in many places in our world today, but that's another topic altogether.

Did the human race have it tougher historically than we do?  I'm not sure.  In some ways life was simpler, but I don't think I want to go back to give it a try.

I'll just keeping reading historical fiction novels and get my fix that way.


2 comments:

  1. Yep, my X post was about xenophilia, too :D Guess X words are hard to come by! I saw five different ones on Xerox, and a few on "extreme", "exasperation", "existence", and other "ex" words. Maybe we should start a collective X list of topics for next year :)

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    1. lol! We sure didn't have much choice on this one did we. I think we'll have to start coining "x" words for next year. We've both used the only one available.

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