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…

The lush green work in progress

Our garden is not what it was. When we bought this house, five years ago, it had a ‘mature’ garden of unpruned shrubs blocking out the light from the back of the house and a monster privet hedge.
Over time, the Other Half - ably aided and abetted by my Dad (who says, and makes good on the saying ‘I’ll just rip it out, shall I?’) has removed all the shrubs, and chopped, hacked and, yes, ripped out the monster hedge. She has made a new border, altered the shape of the other borders (from straight to sinuously curving) and made a new sloping bed at the back. And now, following the demise of the last two shrubs a year or so ago, she has re-turfed a chunk of the garden. A small chunk, admittedly, but then it’s a small garden.
So we now have a beautiful patch of sink-your-toes-in green just outside the back door. For those of you in the horticultural know, we are aware that this is not the time to put turf down but, in our family, we decide when to do things on the basis not of the appropriateness of the season but of a) having the time b) having the money and c) having the inclination. Actually, c) trumps a) and b) pretty much every time. Inclination (otherwise known as being arsed) is all.
So, for two weeks we have (when I say ‘we’ I basically mean the Other Half who likes to commune with vegetation when she gets home from work on the basis that it tends not to answer back) watered and tended the new turves, hoping that they will ‘take’ and that the edges of each turf will not go brown and die, making the thing look like a shrunken, badly laid carpet.
Thanks to the assiduousness of the OH, it has taken. Hooray. And today when I was sitting on it having lunch (I’m allowed to sit on it, now it has ‘taken’) I was thinking how the process of writing a novel is a bit like this laying turf.

Stay with me here, people.

Each turf is a scene or a chapter and, if you’ve done your work properly and prepared the ground it will ‘take’ because you’ve done the preliminaries, got your subsoil right and put down a good matrix for the turf to lie on. In other words, your book’s structure is well thought-out and you write scene after scene, butting them up nicely against each other and hoping the joins between them don’t show. Or go brown and curl up. You want it to look nice and even at the end, not full of gaping cracks.
If your structure’s wrong, the scenes don’t lie properly, bits of them die because they’re in the wrong place, or you’ve not watered them (aka worked hard) enough.

The WIP, now I’m reworking the first 75% so that the last 25% will work properly has its share of brown curly edges. Some of the strips of turf are definitely in the wrong place and need to be cut up and laid in smaller fragments at the difficult-shaped edges of the garden. Some strips are totally dead and need to be pulled up (not hard because they’re not well bedded-in) and thrown away with a muttered ‘God…that so didn’t work!’ But – and here’s the bit which makes me want to curl up my toes in the lush green grass of it all – some strips are really beautiful. They are in the right place, they are bedded in well and they have nice green edges to match other strips up to. I am pleased with those bits. But they are only about half the story…

Fortunately (also fortunately for you, end of strained horticultural metaphor) the boys are away with their Dad all this week and are helping him move house next week, so, now that I’m on summer hols fron the day job, I have uninterrupted time to devote to the WIP.

Always supposing I can tear myself away from Wife in the North which, I have to tell you is considerably fab. But more about that anon.