The Hows and Whys of Hisorical Fiction 2

One of the most important things about writing historical fiction – particularly if you’re writing a dual narrative and have a contemporary voice as well – is to decide on a voice or prose style which conveys something of the contemporary world without actually attempting to imitate the language of the period. In Testament this was relatively simple as I couldn’t possibly resort to anything like a contemporary vernacular or I’d have been writing Chaucerian Middle English and that would have left the book with a very limited audience.
Still, I wanted it to be recognisably different from the voice used in the twenty-first century strand. I wish I could tell you what carefully thought out decisions that then entailed but that would be disingenuous. The truth is, I wanted to make it sound different, so I just did. By ear, or feel or whatever.
That’s how I do a lot of my writing, how I make a lot of the really important decisions – unconsciously. By what sounds or feels right.

Just to digress for a second about the general mechanics of producing a book, I am always astonished by the sheer number of books on writing which many other novelists appear to have read. Perhaps this is because, unlike painting, music, dance or acting, writing has – until recently – not been something that you went and studied until you got good enough to practice or realised you weren’t good enough to practice. So 'how-to' books filled a niche.

I’ll be honest: I don’t read books on writing. I never have (with the one exception of Stephen King’s On Writing which is more autobiography than how to book). I have a kind of bloody-minded ‘well, I read English at university, what the hell more do you want?’ kind of mindset, I suspect. So, as far as my own writing goes, there is a horribly arrogant feeling that I’ll find it out myself, thanks, make my own mistakes, find my own way, rather than doing it somebody else’s way. Which, of course, is why it took me almost twenty years and three books in the bottom drawer before I got remotely near getting published

In my defence, there’s also the slightly more relevant fact that I find it horribly difficult to assimilate lots of ideas at once, as in a ‘how to’ manual. I have picked up bits of interesting writing lore from reading blogs and, because these are bite-sized, single-idea messages, on the whole, I find that they stick in my mind. Often they explain to me why I do what I’m doing anyway but sometimes they are useful – ‘describe the coffin not the grief’ was a great one I picked up from the wonderful The Sound of Butterflies (though I haven't been able to identify the exact post - apologies.) ‘The writer makes a contract with the reader in the book’s first page’ was, I think, gleaned from the frighteningly well-read David Isaak’s Tomorrowville. But those are the only two I can remember off-hand.

All that is a long-winded way of explaining why I didn’t consciously sit down and try and plan what my fourteenth-century voice would sound like.

As I was going along, however, I noticed a few things:
I didn’t use contractions – I always used ‘would not’ rather than ‘wouldn’t’ ‘cannot’ instead of ‘can’t’ etc, including dialogue.

I developed a tendency to avoid latinate words in favour of more Anglo Saxon-sounding ones where possible and where it didn’t do violence to the rhythm of what I was writing. I noticed that I was doing this quite early on in the writing of Testament and it became a conscious decision thereafter. And it’s not just because one of the themes of Testament is the native Englishness of what’s going on in Salster but because most latinate words were introduced into English in the eighteenth century, three or four centuries after Testament is set. Linguists and grammarians of the time – under the pan-European influence of Latin and, possibly, a more national, lingering influence of the noble Norman French vs. the peasant Anglo Saxon thing – felt that English needed beefing up if it was going to be a suitable language for serious literature and public discourse. So, I decided that, if I could keep out as many fo these later imports as possible, I could create a pared-back, pre-enlightenment effect, if only to myself.

Similarly, in terms of grammar, I always tried to use the active voice, avoiding passive constructions and gerundive verbs. Again, I was aiming for a less circumlocutory, Latinate way of constructing things.

I’m not saying that no page of fourteenth century narrative in Testament contains any words or word-roots introduced after 1400 or other than subject-verb-object sentences – that would be difficult and dull – it just became a conscious effort to limit my vocabulary and to be selective about the kind of grammar I used.

Similes and metaphors present their own challenges. I once read an otherwise excellent Young Adult historical title where a character was described as being ‘drop dead gorgeous’ – such a jarring note that I almost stopped reading at that point. It was such an anachronistic phrase. And, even if I was wrong and it was actually a phrase which had been current in Tudor England, it’s such a popular phrase these days that to have it used in that context just felt very out of place – clumsy and maladroit.

But avoiding anachronisms isn’t enough. As readers in the US might say, that’s hist fic 101. You’ve also got to use your language to strengthen the feel that you are in another time and – therefore – another place. The texture of the language has to reinforce that feeling. So, for instance, modern-day similes and metaphors feel wrong, even if they might have been current then; de facto, they’re part of our world, not of the world of the historical characters, so they need to be omitted or altered.

The challenges presented by my current book, which has a mid-nineteenth century component were quite different, but I think they are going to provide fodder for another post…

Grammar Rant

Stuck in a Book’s blog today was about grammar. He’s a fan of accuracy and so one of his friends has started making references to the Grammar Police... Hmmm… and he seemed such a nice boy.

Grammar is one of those subjects which, as an English graduate, daily practitioner for many years of a profession involving the nitty gritty of language (speech and language therapy) and, now, as a writer, intrigues, fascinates and irritates me.

It intrigues me because of what you can do with it. The wonder of English with its delicate nuances – the subtle difference between ‘I would have been thinking’ and ‘I would have thought’ or ‘their misreading’ and ‘they’re misreading’.

It fascinates me because, as a working language, it has been given such a hard time by what you might call professional language people. All those eighteenth century grammarians, for instance, who thought English was only acceptable as a serious language insofar as it accorded with the rules of Latin. Well - hello Messers Grammarian! - English is a long way from Latin. It is an uninflected language for a start – we do not add bits to the root verb, as Latin does (amo, amas, amat), we use pronouns and auxilliaries (I love, you love, he, she or it loves – ok, we add ‘s’ to the third person singular. It’s an anachronism, live with it.).

And it irritates me. Because people mistake the point of grammar. Let me say this loud and clear. Grammar is not the same as good style. It is not to make things sound nice, to roll off the tongue sweetly. Grammar is there to make things clear and unambiguous.
Take all that huffing and puffing about prepositions at the end of sentences. It’s something you’re not supposed to go along with. But I can do no better than quote Winston Churchill – ‘that is the kind of pedantry up with which I will not put.’ Am I supposed to say ‘It’s something along with which you are not supposed to go?’ For goodness sake!

The fact is, a lot of what people claim is good grammar is actually pedantry. For instance, the ‘rule’ which says you shouldn’t separate the two bits of an intransitive verb – ie don’t say ‘to boldly go’ but say ‘to go boldly’. Why aren’t you supposed to separate these two? Because it leads to a lack of clarity? No, because some twerp of an eighteenth century Latinate grammarian had a bee in his bonnet about the way it sounded and decided that it couldn’t be allowed.

Grammar should be there to make our communications unambiguous. To ensure that we don’t stand about saying things like ‘did you mean she did it or you did it?’ As it stands at the moment, grammar seems to be ignored as a concept by one section of the population (the half which doesn’t know what an apostrophe is supposed to be for) and endlessly banged on about by another (the section which insists on ‘It is I’ when they are on the phone instead of ‘it’s me’.
Why is ‘it is I’ better according to them? Because it’s the right case. ‘I’ is the subject of the sentence (which could be written ‘It is I who am speaking’) not the object. Though I think an equally persuasive argument could be made out that you are the object of the sentence – you could re-write it ‘It is me that you are speaking to’…

But, apply the one and only rule of grammar – does it make things clearer? No. You just irritate the hell out of people like me if you insist on saying it. Because, basically, English does not need cases any more. Once upon a time, when we were turning from Anglo Saxon via Middle English into Modern English, we may have done. Anglo Saxon was an inflected language in which there was a considerable difference between ‘me’ and ‘I’ – only by using the right one could the person listening to you tell whether you were the doer of the action or the person unto whom (whom? – another case fright) the action was being done. But you don’t need that distinction in modern English – it’s obvious from the verbal context – word order and the use of verbs do not allow for I/me ambiguity. Or we/us. I mean, take the phrase ‘what are you saying to we?’ which would be perfectly acceptable in some world versions of English. We don’t like it because British English doesn’t phrase it that way – we use ‘us’ in that context, not ‘we’. But does it make a difference to the meaning? No.

My Mum has a habit of grinding her teeth if any of us say (as my children’s generation constantly does, and I find myself dropping into) ‘me and so and so went…’ instead of ‘so and so and I went..’. She just hates it. Why? Because, as the rule says, you wouldn’t say ‘me went’ so you don’t say ‘me and so and so went’ and you don’t put yourself first because that’s discourteous. Hence you end up with ‘so and so and I’ And it sounds nicer, even I have to admit that. But then that’s probably because when I used that version, I didn’t get disapproved of – it has pleasanter associations.

So, are we supposed to ignore apostrophe misuse?
I say it loud and proud. Yes! Unless it makes things unclear. But when you see ‘potato’s’ in the greengrocer’s you’d be a very unreasonable person if you thought ‘potato’s what?’

The point is, what something looks like in writing is almost irrelevant to how it sounds when we speak and, believe it or not, O literate nation, grammar arises from the spoken word. People can misspell or misuse ‘their’ ‘there’ and ‘they’re’ in written communications because there will be no misunderstanding! Contextually, you will know what the person means. You may be irritated. You may think the person writing is an illiterate cretin. But you will not be confused. Why? Because languages only allow homophones (words which sound the same but mean different things) to remain if they don’t cause confusion. The minute confusion arises, one of them will begin to be pronounced differently or dropped altogether. Written communication is different. We can see they’re different and so we don’t need to use context to work out which one of them the writer means. Until they use the grammatically wrong one.

So, do I have no grammar pride? No, not really. English is an evolving language. Soon, apostrophes will become irrelevant; infer will mean the same as imply and nobody will say ‘secretary’ in any other way than ‘sekitry’.

New words will emerge, new grammatical constructions to express new concepts, new relationships, new ways of thinking. Because otherwise, brethren, we would all still be speaking like G. Chaucer Esq. and I don’t know the last time you checked out the Canterbury Tales in the original but we SO don’t speak like that any more, innit?