First of all I really appreciate your contribution, as it is indeed well motivated. I agree with most of what you have said and I greatly appreciate your sincerity in admitting that some of these criteria might remain subjective. There is just one point in which I am not sure to agree completely with you and it is when you say If you're just going to write another piece on his and Danton's dueling personalities - a trope that cliché and dull from a literary perspective as well as, in my view, a poor interpretation of the historical events of the fall of the factions - no one has any reason to read you, if only because that's already been done to death.. Most of narration is made of topoi, I think these can still be potentially interesting if the author is able to add a new twist to them (which is of course, an ominous task); I am not saying to base the fall of the factions just on this (that would be in my opinion ridicule), but a writer can still consider also this aspect if he/she applies to it a completely new scheme. Another point which is generally unclear to me is about manipulation: which are the boundaries between manipulation and interpretation? Your example was straight forward, but, sadly, I believe that manipulation can be more subtle and insidious (and sometimes even unwillingly made), so how can you avoid out without being dry and giving up on the fictive part?
I think I must explain myself. What I am trying to do -as foolish as it can be- is not writing another fictive account on the 1792-1794 period (which, I think, I do not have enough skills/knowledge to do), but try to do something from the perspective of women's memory. I have been doing (and still do) a lot of research into mémoires and preservation of personal and political memory (and I must admit that your lj was an enormous trigger for this idea) , which I think can provide the ground for a good narrativa that can actually say something new if not on the Revolution itself, at least on copying with it (as we are both lovers of Hugo, you will understand me if I make as an example of what I mean the last volume of Les Misérables, where in potential there is this sense of `copying with the past' that affects Marius). And I think this perspective will gain more from a women-narration, as in fiction on the period, women tend to be even more stereotyped than men (but this seems to be a general trend contemporary literature, I generally found much more difficult to find well-written women-characters than men-characters.) What will come out of all this, I still do not know - (I have sketched few chapters, but I am sure that in few months, when I'll go back and revise them I will just erase everything).
Re: Part 4 (oops.)
There is just one point in which I am not sure to agree completely with you and it is when you say If you're just going to write another piece on his and Danton's dueling personalities - a trope that cliché and dull from a literary perspective as well as, in my view, a poor interpretation of the historical events of the fall of the factions - no one has any reason to read you, if only because that's already been done to death.. Most of narration is made of topoi, I think these can still be potentially interesting if the author is able to add a new twist to them (which is of course, an ominous task); I am not saying to base the fall of the factions just on this (that would be in my opinion ridicule), but a writer can still consider also this aspect if he/she applies to it a completely new scheme.
Another point which is generally unclear to me is about manipulation: which are the boundaries between manipulation and interpretation? Your example was straight forward, but, sadly, I believe that manipulation can be more subtle and insidious (and sometimes even unwillingly made), so how can you avoid out without being dry and giving up on the fictive part?
I think I must explain myself. What I am trying to do -as foolish as it can be- is not writing another fictive account on the 1792-1794 period (which, I think, I do not have enough skills/knowledge to do), but try to do something from the perspective of women's memory. I have been doing (and still do) a lot of research into mémoires and preservation of personal and political memory (and I must admit that your lj was an enormous trigger for this idea) , which I think can provide the ground for a good narrativa that can actually say something new if not on the Revolution itself, at least on copying with it (as we are both lovers of Hugo, you will understand me if I make as an example of what I mean the last volume of Les Misérables, where in potential there is this sense of `copying with the past' that affects Marius). And I think this perspective will gain more from a women-narration, as in fiction on the period, women tend to be even more stereotyped than men (but this seems to be a general trend contemporary literature, I generally found much more difficult to find well-written women-characters than men-characters.) What will come out of all this, I still do not know - (I have sketched few chapters, but I am sure that in few months, when I'll go back and revise them I will just erase everything).