Whenever you begin putting together a new persona (in any setting, fictional or historical), it always helps to firmly ground yourself in a specific time. This is simply Good Living History—the narrower the range, the more focused your research can be, contributing to a more accurate impression. If you’re portraying a ‘longhunter’ (an 18th century market hunter), you don’t want to be drawing your ‘outer persona’ (aka clothing and accoutrements) from the 1720s or 1790s (even though they’re technically still in the 18th century); rather, you would focus on the 1750s through 1770s, since that’s the period in which these folks operated. If you have enough information from primary or secondary sources, you can even pin your impression down to a specific year, month, or week (this becomes easier to do the closer to the present one gets, as the amount of raw information (and therefore, potential sources) increases exponentially).
Deciding on a specific span of time makes your persona more authentic, especially if you’ve done your research.
Continue reading “The Cure for Temporal Headaches”