Or, “I Am Become Author, Creator of Worlds.”

I’m helping a client with a novel set in the Napoleonic era, and for that reason I’ve been reading up on the Congress of Vienna, held in 1814 to plan the shape of post-Napoleon Europe: a history of the Congress itself, and biographies of some of the key participants.

Clemens Metternich, foreign minister of the Austrian empire, was made a Prince by his Emperor. According to his biography, his unphased valet asked him, “Will Your Serene Highness put on the same suit Your Excellency wore yesterday?”

Quite a nice line, I thought. The basic democratic instinct of the Common Man who has seen far too much of the ruling classes up close to be impressed by all that flummery. Almost, appropriately, Napoleonic in its tone.

Then I read a biography of Charles-Maurice Talleyrand, there to represent the newly restored King of France, who was also made a Prince, and whose unphased valet asked him exactly the same question …

Well, someone said it.

It’s a novel. Exact facts are important, but they are less important than telling a good story, which is no less true.

For a novel, it’s far more important that for all his brilliance as a statesman, Metternich was an utter drip of Fotherington-Tomas-grade wetness (whom, with his curly blond hair, he rather resembled). Given the choice of staying up late to a) draft an epoch-making treaty that would define post-Napoleonic Europe for the next hundred years or b) write yet another baffled letter to his mistress, the Duchess of Sagan, wondering why she wouldn’t commit to being his bit on the side in perpetuity, even though they could never marry because he had no intention of leaving his wife … Time and again he went for b). Honestly, I just wanted to slap him.

While the chameleon-like Talleyrand, on the other hand – survivor supreme, rogue, defrocked bishop without the slightest sense of shame or belief in God, who managed to stay friends with most of his mistress menagerie throughout his life, and to keep his head in every sense while working with equal facility for Louis XVI, Napoleon, and Louis XVIII – emerges as a fascinating character, an utterly unprincipled man of very strong principles.

This is why I like writing novels. You can pick and choose between what matters and what can be hand-waved away while getting across what you actually want to say. It’s a fine art because truth does matter. Take Patrick O’Brian’s sea-faring Jack Aubrey novels, which are famed for their research and packed full of nautical veracity … but at the same time it can’t be denied that rather than a man-of-war’s typical 8-9 knots, which doesn’t get you anywhere very quickly, his ships travel around the globe at the speed of plot, arriving just where and when they are needed for the story of the characters to develop.

Likewise I enjoy James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series of novels, which pay just enough attention to the laws of physics to give a realistic feel for interplanetary travel and colonies on the Moon and Mars and in the asteroids, a background for the emergence of and clashes between new nations and ethnicities out there in deep space, but get all hand-wavy over how humans who spent billions of years evolving on Earth can actually survive, breed and flourish in these hostile, radiation-riddled, low or zero gravity environments. That’s not important. What happens to the people is.

Really, it comes down to whom you’re trying to please, and how much you as the author can earn enough of their trust that they will overlook … some things.

Novels are about the people and you, the author, are God in their universe. Use that power wisely.

And if that kind of power makes you feel giddy – well, we are used to wielding it without going noticeably mad, so drop us a line to talk about it.