Wheat Googling #1

Hello, I’m Grace. Welcome to my newsletter.

What is wheat googling?

It’s a (pretty obscure) fandom term for what you’re doing when, while writing a fic, you do a cursory google of a quick detail, then resurface hours later to find yourself immersed in an academic treatise on the precise composition of the wheat that would have been most commonly consumed in 17th Century England, how it was farmed, when it was harvested, and what all this meant for how the bread tasted. All so you can include a line like…

“She chewed the dense, rather bitter bread meditatively.”

Of course, your character knows that the particular disagreeable taste of today’s bread is because she had to use a lot of rye flour (my personal conviction is that no-one actually likes rye flour) - rye is a lot more resilient than the nicer flours, so it was cheaper. She also knows that her bread includes grains from lots of different plants, because she’s from the 17th Century, and mono-cultures would have been considered far, far too dangerous for a community who knew that a failed harvest meant going hungry. A range of grains, with their different tolerances for heat, rain, soil type etc. was a lot safer. (I mean, it still is, but…)

But none of that ends up in the text, and if it does, my friends (who are always my first editors) make me take it out.

“Your research is showing, Grace.”

So why do it? Why does it matter what the composition of bread was in 17th Century England? Especially when that particular story, for example, involves some pretty intricately constructed time travel mechanics. It’s not exactly hard realism.

Partly, it’s about the process of researching it. Searching for that little tidbit gave me a much better sense of what it felt like to be alive and living in a small English market town in 1604. An idea of what it might feel like to be able to see the food that you and everyone you knew would be eating later in the year out of the window. The anticipatory horror of seeing those crops fail, and knowing that no matter how much you tighten your belt now, in a few months you are all going to starve. I got a sense of the intense drudgery of having to prepare enough bread for a household that, at that time, basically lived on it. Of planning out your baking to make best use of a single load of fuel for the oven - very hot for about 45 minutes, then cooler, so perfect for biscuits etc.

The actual story might never directly allude to any of this, but the way it all informs the characters’ mindsets will be present beneath every line. It is the reason they will feel both familiarly human, and culturally distant from us. And that tension, that opportunity to engage with what humans in a completely different setting might actually be like (and by extension, to think about what, if anything, humans are actually like), is for me one of the great pleasures of stories.

The other reason I’ve never attempted to curb my wheat googling habit is, I suppose, because I think I’ll get more interesting answers. I can thought experiment all I like, but I don’t think it would ever have occurred to me that what you would find in the large chest in the upstairs bedroom of a late Elizabethan town house was grain. Now I know, it seems obvious.

Solutions that I invent to problems that I have inferred are unlikely to be as interesting as the solutions that the thousands of people for whom these problems carried desperate urgency came up with. I write stories. Naturally that involves a lot of making things up. But for me, making up stories has always felt like it uses the same part of my brain I use for solving maths problems: take a bunch of different components and find the answer that can account for them. And when those different components incorporate the ingenuity and decisions of real people, my answers become infinitely richer.

I hope you enjoy the rest of your day!

Grace xx