As the writer of this post, I’m hoping its headline gives you, the reader, some hint of the style of what’s to come – a bit academic, lightened by wordplay – as well as the subject: a discussion about writing techniques for stories set in different times than our own.
My expectation that you will ‘get’ this rests on my assumption that you know ABBA is a writing website, and therefore I’m not likely to be talking time travel itself.
If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you might know I write historical fiction so the time shift in question will be into the past and not the future, also that I’m analysing a specific work-in-progress via these blogs, and therefore the time shift will be from now to that story’s early modern setting, 1612.
What a lot of expectations riding on seven words.
This sort of detailed consideration of the implications of words and sentences, and the inferences I hope a reader will draw from them, is where I’m at with the work-in-progress. It’s slow but fascinating stuff, Basically, we’re back to voice again.
To this end, I’m finding the concept of ‘planes of discourse’ helpful while disentangling the specifics of an historical voice. The term ‘discourse’ is itself mutable. Here, I’m using it in a linguistic sense of language that involves a writer and a reader, or a speaker and listener, in the process of exchanging ideas.
Discourse isn’t a one-way street. Like any communication, it takes two to tango. And just because one side intends to mean something, that doesn’t guarantee the other side will ‘get it’ or agree. It’s an age-old conundrum and part of a bigger social and cultural debate.
Emma Darwin introduced me to the additional notion of ‘planes’ of discourse – different levels at which ideas are communicated – in her PhD thesis about writing her historical novel, A Secret Alchemy.
In the thesis, she quotes Mikhail Bakhtin thus: ‘For the prose artist the world is full of other people’s words… He must introduce them into the plane of his own discourse, but in such a way that this plane is not destroyed.’
Emma explains: ‘In other words, a writer must make a particular synthesis of ‘other people’s’ words, with his or her own. In historical fiction some of those others’ words will be modern and some from history, and some will come from other modern writers’ engagement with historical words.’
For my WIP, this explanation has special resonance since I’m incorporating elements of a seventeenth century witch trial pamphlet into my manuscript.
In these passages of co-opted text, I get to use splendid and authentic phrases like Hellish Fury and Sink of Mischief and Villainy. Emma Darwin quotes A.S. Byatt calling such direct use of language from historic documents ‘ventriloquism … escaping from the plane of modern fictional discourse altogether’.
It is an efficient signal of otherness. As Emma notes, ‘If the degree and style of ventriloquism is well-judged, it can evoke the period for the experienced reader … within the first sentence or two.’
That is what I have tried to do with my story, opening chapter 1 with a fictional cover page for a pamphlet. It starts with two original sentences, followed by phrases manipulated and cannibalised from the original document.
It has been interesting to see how readers react to the historically accurate use of capital letters. One published novelist suggested I drop them, but they’re so characteristic of the age, I’m sure that would be a mistake. Dial back capitalization, yes. Avoid it, no.
As my main protagonist is a clerk of the court, archaic legal terms are readily available to signal to readers the otherness of the times, too.
Rather than witness statements, he refers to ‘examinations’. Rather than hearings, characters discuss the Arraignments and Trial (words that to me now look odd without capitals). I could have adopted the spelling Tryall, which is authentic, but to me looks heavy handed. I prefer subtler shifts: it’s never His Majesty, always his Majestie.
For her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, Hilary Mantel talked about taking contemporary English and shifting it sideways; the otherness of Tudor times is plain to the reader without the shift being clumsy, intrusive or, worst of all, laughable. That’s the voice I’m aiming at: unobtrusive otherness.
This decision sprang largely from reading. As a writer, I spent a large chunk of 2021 developing a historically characterized style for my point-of-view protagonist, but when I turned to reading novels that used a similar technique, I found most were too dense to finish.
I managed to re-read The Name of the Rose, but set aside Hawksmoor, Beloved, The Fanatic and others. That says more about the difficult and frustrating year I was having elsewhere in my life (as I’ve read some of these stories before and loved them) but it was a red flag for the manuscript: if reading stylized language was too much, writing it for another year or two was going to be miserable.
The solution: graded stylization. After a great deal of head-scratching, deleting and re-writing, I have decided only the text of the fictional pamphlet will be authentic in terms of language, spelling, punctuation etc. The main body of third person prose will be formal and modern with some characterized spelling and occasional longer, complex sentences. Free indirect discourse will be modern and can be staccato or fragmented as necessary.
I’ve not yet worked out how to handle dialogue, which for the historical writer is always a balancing act between sounding (at least a bit) historic and being comprehensible. I am tempted by some surprising dictionary entries of four-lettered expletives already in use, and, so far, have ignored the convention that bans anachronistic contractions such as ‘won’t’ from conversations. I suspect, however, like the prime minister, ‘won’t’ won’t survive for very long.
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