History Into Fiction

Writing a novel set in 17^th century England? Or maybe you just need a little inspiration every morning.

Phil Gyford runs a fun website called The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Each day, he posts an entry from the renowned diarist who lived during the time of Oliver Cromwell and the Protector’s son, Richard. Gyford’s labor of love has been in progress since January 1, 2003, when he published the first of Pepys’s entries dated January 1, 1660.

Pepys was a burgher and an accomplished musician with a voracious appetite for pleasure equaled only by his lust for knowledge of subjects ranging from the classics to the sciences and arts. The taverns of London were one of his favorite laboratories.

Gyford is a bit of a Renaissance man himself, with interests ranging from acting to graphic design and illustration.

In Part One (See August 5) of my discussion on creating believable speech for the historical novel, I proposed a two-pronged approach: immersion and technique.

Having accomplished our preparation before sitting down to write, we can now explore what I call the “mimetic” approach to dialogue and language.

I use the term “mimetic” because our goal should be to mime the diction and idioms of a particular era without recreating them exactly as would a court reporter. Real archaic dialect is harsh and off-putting to most modern ears. Anyone who was required to read Middle English in school has no desire to relive that experience in a novel.

The oil painter doesn’t precisely copy the reality of a landscape on his canvas. Rather, he employs techniques such as shading and perspective to fool the onlooker’s visual acuity. Likewise, a writer must resort to mimetic devices to summon a believable simulacrum of real speech.

1) Change Your Modern Mindset

At first glance, this may seem an odd injunction for writing dialogue. Yet in my estimation, it’s the most important of the tools we’ll discuss.

When I played basketball, the coaches told me to watch the stomach of the opponent I was guarding; the ball followed his hand, the hand his arm, and the arm his core.

Writing demands the same focus. We need to keep our eye on the unique world paradigms of our characters, and their dialogue will follow naturally.

A non-fiction book that made a great impression on me years ago was Julian Jaynes’s The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. The psychologist posited that, until the second millennium B.C., men and women had no consciousness as we understand it. Instead, they blindly followed the voices in their heads, mistaking them for the commands of the gods.

We should strive to understand the diverse ways in which the minds of those living during past ages worked differently. Accomplish this trick, and you may find that many of your problems with dialogue will dissolve.

Consider this passage by Larry McMurtry in Streets of Laredo:

Long ago, Gus McCrae had teased the Rangers by calculating how much fight each man had in him, as if fight could be measured like oats or some substance that could be placed on a scale.

“Call, now, he’s about ninety-eight percent fight,” Gus had said. “Take away the fight and he’d be so weak, he couldn’t mount his horse. But that’s unusual. I’m only about forty percent fight myself. Pea, I expect you’re about twelve percent or so, and old Deets about fifteen.”

Twelve percent didn’t sound like much to Pea, but he resolved to use every oat of it to struggle past the killer and get to the river where Lorena was. . .

McMurtry doesn’t cast his spell on readers by groping for peculiarly Western or frontier language. His characters simply think differently than we do. They have a Shakespearean bent for finding fresh metaphors and similes under every rock and tumbleweed. Not one word in the preceding passage would raise an eyebrow if spoken in any shopping mall today. Yet who among us would think of calculating the courage of a man by weighing it like a sack of oats on a scale?

2) Arch the Syntax

Altering the structure of a sentence, even slightly, can work wonders. Here’s an example from Umberto Eco in Baudalino:

From the courtyard of the Genoese came the laments of Niketas’s daughters, who were reluctant to have their faces smeared with dirt, accustomed as they were to the vermilion of their cosmetics.

A modern rendition might read:

Spoiled by their expensive rouge makeup, Niketa’s daughters cried out from their Genoese courtyard in protest at having their faces smeared with dirt.

The difference is merely a matter of a few centuries.

3) Judicious Use of Dialect

Anthony Burgess confronted the problem of rendering appropriate dialect in Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s Love-Life. Interviewed for Afterwords: Novelists Talking About Their Novels, Burgess explained the dilemma and his solution:

And yet the problem of an appropriate style stood in the way. Obviously the language had to be an approximation to Elizabethan English, but behind me lay the horrible examples of Wardour-street, the Sir Walter Scotteries of gadzooks, the embarrassment of thou and thee. Unlike the Englishmen of the South, however, I belong to a dialectal tradition that still uses the tutoyer long abandoned by the Queen’s English. In Lancashire we say “Where’s that going, lad?” and get the reply “I’m coming back with thee to thy place.” If I used tha in my novel, that would be close to a living tradition and fare enough from the artificialities of Wardour-street.

Diane Gabaldon weaves her mimetic illusions by incorporating a dozen or so phonetic Scot and Gaelic derivations, such as “aye,” “dinnae,” and “canna.” The secret to her approach is consistency and circumspection in their usage.

One bit of wile is to introduce a character with heavy dialect and have another character comment on the difficulty in understanding him. With the reader’s impression thusly set, you can slowly ease back from the dialect as the novel progresses.

Dialect can be particularly useful in indicating a character’s low social standing or lack of education and intelligence. But remember: Like garlic and chillies, a little dialect sprinkled in the right places goes a long way.

3) Foreign phrases

A patina of authenticity can be burnished into your prose by including an occasional foreign phrase within your character’s dialogue or thought. This convention is most often used for Latin, French, and Spanish. Many readers have at least a passing acquaintance with the Romance languages, but I’ve also seen this technique used to advantage with more esoteric languages, followed by a translation.

A variation on this theme can be attained when the author reminds the reader that the dialogue is spoken in another tongue, particularly in scenes where your character visits another country.

Here’s a superb example from Sena Jeter Nasland in Abundance, her novel about Marie Antoinette:

Now the King speaks in Latin, which I do not understand but know that he sounds as serious, as wise, and as dedicated to God as any priest. In the way that he stresses each word, it is as though I can hear him say Jed m’enage a’ cela de bon coeur, “I promise this with a true heart,” for he is the most sincere of men.”

Did you catch Nasland’s subtle double feint? She mixes in references to two foreign languages at once, expressing ignorance of one (Latin) while the seizing the opportunity to insert the second (French) for good effect.

In a future post, I’ll discuss the final three techniques in my Mimetic Toolbox.

Catching up on some long-overdue reading: If you’re working on a historical mystery and need some good psychological fodder for your characters, you might want to check out Max Holland’s list of the five best books ever written about conspiracy theories and the reasons they flourish. (See the Feb 2-3 edition of The Wall Street Journal, page W8).

Holland knows a thing or two about conspiracies. He wrote “The Kennedy Assassination Tapes,” published by Knopf in 2004.

He gives top marks to Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which studied right-wing groups such as the John Birch Society in the 1960s, and Robert Alan Goldberg’s “Enemies Within,” a more modern review.

John Fowles once lamented that getting the Victorian language right in The French Lieutenant’s Woman was the most difficult technical problem he had confronted in writing.

Success with historical dialogue depends on navigating the treacherous channel between the Scylla of sounding stilted and contrived and the Charybdis of coming off too modern and anachronistic. This daunting task is easier prescribed than accomplished.

I’ve come to rely on a two-pronged approach: Immersion and technique.

Diane Gabaldon is the lady laird of archaic speech. Of all the historical novelists I’ve studied, she inches closest to the precipice of inaccessible dialect without losing her footing. Few of us are blessed with her ear for precision or her acumen in Gaelic and Scots English. Even fewer of us have merited a companion book with glossaries and guides to Gaelic pronunciations.

In The Spider and the Stone, my novel about the Black Douglas, I gave up all pretensions of approximating Gabaldon’s flair for the brogue and peculiarities of speech in 14^th century Scotland. Instead, I took refuge in several techniques that comprise what I call my Mimetic Toolbox for writing believable dialogue.

In Parts Two and Three of our future discussion on this topic, I’ll open my bag of stratagems for your inspection.

Before commencing a new novel, I try for a running start by immersing myself, as much as possible, in the vocabulary, rhythms of speech, peculiar syntax, and sounds of my era. Diaries and primary sources are helpful. Keeping a notebook of phrases, terms, and curses is invaluable. To gain mastery of the Scot accents in Outlander, Gabaldon listened to Scottish folksongs, particularly those performed in live recordings. She learned a lot from overhearing the conversations of audience members during the lulls between sets.

While I was writing The Fire and the Light, my novel set in 13^th century Occitania, I listened to contemporary renderings of authentic ballads and servientes once sung by the medieval troubadours. I also read English translations of troubadour verse. Something in the timbre of the lute and viol from that period gave me a better sensibility for Occitan speech—or at least what modern ears might perceive this vanishing language sounded like.

Gabaldon also recommends reading other novels set in your era. Yet this can be problematic if you don’t have a firm grip on your own style. My former instructor, John Rechy, cautions students in his professional writers’ workshop against reading authors with a similar style to theirs, particularly while they have a novel in progress. He doesn’t want them to abdicate their natural style by subconsciously allowing another’s imprint to seep in and overpower. His admonition may also be warranted for novels set during the same time period. You’ll have to weigh the relative benefits and risks.

One last consideration: If you know in advance that you’ll be confronting thorny issues of dialect and speech patterns, consider avoiding the first-person point of view. The more distant you dial back the point of view, the less the reader will be aware of the variances between modern and antiquarian idioms.

In a future post, we’ll muck around in the Mimetic Toolbox.

How many times have you found yourself burrowing into research files, desperate for a vital clipping or article, only to discover to your horror that you failed to write down the full citation required to retrieve it?

Zotero feels your pain.

This nifty little add-on tool for the Mozilla Firefox web browser is a writer’s godsend. The program, easily accessed on Firefox with a single click of the mouse, helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources–citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects–and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. The extension includes the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references. Writers also have the option to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero uses mysterious algorithmic magic to sense when the computer user is viewing a book, article, or other object on the web. On many major research and library sites, the program finds and automatically saves the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Because it lives within the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications. Moreover, because it resides on your hard drive, it can communicate with software running in tandem (such as Microsoft Word). The program can also be used off-line (e.g., on a plane or in an archive without WiFi).

Zotero is produced by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and was funded by the United States Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Best of all—it’s free. You can download it at www.zotero.org

It’s worth a trip to the newspaper stacks if you missed Robert Messenger’s stirring remembrance of British writer George MacDonald Fraser in the January 17^th edition of The Wall Street Journal.

Fraser, best known for his “Flashman” novels that brought to life Britain’s nineteenth-century imperial adventures, died earlier this year at the age of 82.

Fraser was one of those rare writers of historical fiction who successfully straddled the publishing and movie worlds, having compiled numerous novels and more than thirty screenplays to his credits. Messenger, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, describes with admiration how Fraser’s protagonists were often the antithesis of the traditional hero: politically incorrect, toadying, lying, cheating, elitist, and racist. Remarkably, these flawed characters were quite popular with the reading public.

Among the many fascinating observations in Messenger’s essay is his reminder that Fraser took an unusually tolerant view about the need for movies and historical novels to abide by the “facts” of history. Discussing Kipling’s influence on the popular view of the British Raj, Fraser once wrote that the test should be not how precisely a work of fiction followed the written records, but whether it successfully reflected the countries and people portrayed.

Here’s a thorny problem that every historical novelist eventually confronts: What to do when a person, place, or event has been tagged with a well-known name or description not used during the time of your story.

I struggled with this conundrum in The Fire and the Light, my novel about the medieval Cathars of southern France. The most recognized designation applied to these alleged heretics (”Cathar” was derived from the Greek katharos, meaning “pure” or “clean”) wasn’t uniformly adopted until a few years after my characters lived. In fact, there was never just one, commonly-accepted term for the Cathars during the early part of the 13^th century. Some called them cloggers (after the shoes they wore) or Bon Hommes (the Good Men, but that appellation wrongly excluded women). Many if not most of their contemporaries simply referred to them as heretics and, with the exception of the ecclesiastics, did not distinguish them from the Waldensians, Paulists, and the other condemned sects.

To avoid confusion, I decided to judiciously use the term “Cathar” along with the other descriptions and beg the understanding of those more expert in the era than the average reader.

Another option is to insert a footnote into the story. Here’s an example from Michael Shaara’s Killer Angels:

“The General says to tell you that the Yankees are moving troops upon on the high Rocky Hill,* the one to the right. And there’s a signal team up there.”
. . . . .
* The Confederates did not know that the local name for that hill was “Little Round Top.” During the battle their most common name for it was simply “The Rocky Hill.”

The footnote works fine in a novel about the Civil War. The period is still relatively fresh to American readers, many of whom will have heard of Little Round Top. The fragile illusion of time turned back is not destroyed. But in my novel, set as it is in the Middle Ages and presented in a book designed to imitate an ancient tome, a footnote would have been jolting.

Another solution is to explain such variances in an author’s note at the beginning or end of the novel. This is often the preferable choice if more than a couple of language nuances and differences arise. But in Shaara’s case, to have mentioned this lone name change in his author’s note would have been using a hammer to swat at a flea that had long since flitted away.

Have you ever encountered an icon from your childhood that caused the heart to flutter with excitement?

I had one of those rare moments this morning. Framed inside a bold yellow banner and black base were these words set in an antique Western font:

Classics Illustrated.

I was was thumbing through the March 31 edition of Newsweek when I came upon an article announcing the revival of the comic book series by a company called Papercutz (www.papercutz.com). The old Classics Illustrated banner has been retained, but much about the original comics that flourished from 1941 to 1971 is changed. Instead of maintaining the same style throughout the updated series, Papercutz has chosen to recruit artists with widely divergent styles to create unique adaptations of the venerable works. The new Classics Illustrated are sold in hardback for $15, a heady price that may have some parents and teachers thinking twice.

Here’s something I didn’t know: There was a British edition of the Classics Illustrated that produced 162 titles, 13 of which have never appeared in America.

For those who pine for the original versions, Jack Lake Productions (www.jacklakeproductions.com) has been reprinting some of the first-edition comics since 2003.

I wonder how many of my fellow historical novelists were influenced by the Classics Illustrated? I can still remember waiting with keen anticipation for my mother, an English teacher, to bring home a stash of the comics. Many of the titles and their dramatic covers have never faded from memory: Ivanhoe, The Red Badge of Courage, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, and The Last of the Mohicans.

Alas, the comics have had a few detractors over the years. Some cranks questioned the wisdom of compressing great books into fifty pages of cartoons for fear that students would not read the original works when they were older. That seems to me as nonsensical as forbidding kids from playing with toy Civil War muskets because they’ll become too lazy to read Bruce Catton or watch a Ken Burns documentary.

Most words carry two types of meanings: 1) a literal signification; and 2) secondary qualities and feelings that have encrusted the word from years of accumulation and association.

Connotations can be positive, negative, or neutral.

I could—and perhaps should—have used an alternative for “encrusted” in the first paragraph. Did that choice suggest something unfavorable about the use of connotations? Would your reaction have been different if I had used “attached,” “enhanced,” weighed down,” or “accompanied?”

For the historical novelist, the spice of connotation can assist in evoking time and place. Connotation comes naturally, subconsciously even, for great writers. The rest of us need not despair; there are exercises and techniques that can help us become more cognizant of the impressions and intimations we conjure.

Think of a feeling or sensation that elicits an immediate negative reaction. For example, sinking is an experience that most people consider unpleasant (unless it’s into a featherbed). Without changing the literal meaning of what you want to say, rewrite one of your paragraphs using verbs or adjectives that evoke the sense of sinking, falling, losing control, slipping, going down. Did the changes transform the feeling or impression of your paragraph?

In The Game of Kings, Dorothy Dunnett crafted a splendid example of connotation. Her erstwhile Scot hero, Lord Culter, has just lifted the nubile Agnes Herries onto his saddle in preparation to ford a daunting river:

Discomfort claimed her. The saddle poked and prodded; the powerful feet threw up snatches of spray, and she was rubbed, pricked and jagged by Culter’s unaccommodating attire. He began moreover to talk to the horse. Mild resentment overtook her.

When they were halfway over, there was a sickening lurch. Culter exclaimed sharply; the pommel drove sharply into the girl’s side and briefly the sky was made, blackly, of a shaking, arched mane. Then horse, rider and heiress fell, stirrups free, and in a bruising splash of colliding bodies, Agnes Herries hit the water. Wrenched from periastral dreams she became Lady Herries, just thirteen years old, and screamed and screamed with choking, soundless hysteria as the current spun her in rough fingers and shot her, buoyed up by petticoats, straight down the Nith.

Dunnett enlisted a torturer’s armory of connotative words—poked, prodded, rubbed, pricked, jagged, sharply, bruising, soundless hysteria, rough fingers, petticoats—to build a sexual tension in what on the surface appears only to be a rude fall from a horse. Did you notice how, in the span of a few hysterical seconds, Agnes “became Lady Herries?” Can we doubt that Dunnett will bring the tension to a rousing climax a few paragraphs later when she has Lord Culter exclaim:

My God we need practice at that. Shall we do it again?

I suggested at the beginning of this post that connotations can be positive, negative, or neutral. It took a regnant writer to prove the hoary rule’s exception. The sexual act can be both painful and pleasurable–and words connoting sex can share in this ambivalence.

Here’s another, more famous, example from the godfather of connotation. Paid by the word, Charles Dickens never missed a chance to gild the lily. In his oft-quoted opening of Bleak House, we are immediately thrust into the shrouded, numbing milieu of Chancery Court:

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled amount the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs, fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and thoughts of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of the wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck.

The fog always gets top billing in this opening. But look closer at the verbs used: flows, rolls, creeping, lying out, hovering, drooping, wheezing, shivering. Dickens could have chosen other verbs to describe the migration of the fog, but he wanted to envelop us with a sensation of nefarious infiltration, of a disease invading every orifice of the body. The connotation here is negative to the point of despair.

Dialogue can also be rendered more authentic with subtle connotation. Mary Renault recognized this when she created speech for her characters in the ancient world:

Greek is a highly polysyllabic language. Yet when writing dialogue for my Greeks I have found myself, by instinct, avoiding the polysyllables of the English language, and using, as far as they are still in the living language, the older and shorter words. This is not because the style parallels Greek style; it is entirely a matter of association and ambience. In Greek, polysyllables are old; in English, mostly Latinised and largely modern. They have acquired their own aura, which they will bring along with them. Their stare, like that of the basilisk, is killing. (McCormack, Afterwords: Novelists on their Novels, p. 87)

Even changes in the spelling of names can create a shift in impression. In “L’Russe Besuhof,” a study on the names used in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Karen Beck of Columbia University has observed how the aristocrats of that era used the French or Russian version of Napoleon’s name, Bonaparte or Buonaparte, depending on their positive or negative view of him.

Sometimes connotations are unintended or distracting. Can you find the offending culprit in this excerpt from Florence, a history of that city written in 1897 by Charles Yriarte:

The funeral ceremony was a splendid one, the whole of Florence defiling past his coffin. Benedetto Varchi pronounced the funeral oration, and his tomb was erected by Varari who, it must be said, was not equal to the occasion.

We know what the author meant. Still, it’s difficult not to stop and imagine the various scurrilous acts that the Florentines might have performed had they been inclined to abuse and deface the coffin while defiling by it.

The moral of the connotation: Always edit your manuscripts with an awareness of the possible impressions and sensations created by the words, names, and descriptions you choose.

Historical novelists and screenwriters are a masochistic breed. We watch in dismay as our books are shunted off to the fantasy and science-fiction shelves. We endure the rebuffs of agents and editors who consider ours a difficult genre to market. We suffer through meetings with Hollywood producers who want the Battle of Stirling Bridge staged like Custer’s Last Stand—and while you’re at it, get rid of the bridge. We toil away in an era when Generation X thinks Malcolm X must be a saucy spoof of the television show about a family’s middle-born child.

And yet, despite Gore Vidal’s lament that his embrace of the historical novel shadowed his literary reputation, we persist.

Why? Many of us were seduced early in life by a hoary tale of battle or a whisper from some ancient ruins. After undergoing such Eleusinian initiation into the Akashic records, how could we not assay the world by looking over our shoulders? Like Persephone, we were kidnapped and taken to another world. In recompense, we are seasonally permitted to surface from our lairs and describe for fellow mortals what the nether realms of the past were truly like.

The archons of History took dominion of my soul at age ten, when a great uncle took me to the Civil War battlefield at Perryville, Kentucky. Across those rolling bluegrass hills, hardly changed since 1862, his father, a captain in the Army of the Tennessee, had fought aside the decorated father of Douglas MacArthur. A few miles away, I traced the harried footsteps of Daniel Boone and George Rogers Clark to the reconstructed stockade in Harrodsburg, the oldest town west of the Allegheny Mountains. Mossy stones there mark the graves of the first Kentuckians killed in Shawnee raids. Spirits still haunt that dark and bloody ground. They invaded my boyhood dreams.

All as a preamble: I launched this weblog to serve as a castle perilous where fellow time travelers, blurry-eyed from their manuscripts and pining for good company, can stop in to trade ideas and hone their black arts of conjuring the past. Readers and history buffs are also welcome to participate. I’ll offer my humble musings on the craft and post notices of events, reviews, and other news that inform the subject. Any leads or suggestions on how to improve the conversation will be appreciated. In the process, I hope to contribute a little and learn a lot.