The Dreaded Anachronism

Aline's blog about youthful slang hit a nerve with me. Nothing dates a book faster than slang. If you're paying attention, you can tell when the English-speaking characters lived just by their vocabulary. I am an historical novelist, so I don't have to worry about my dialog being dated before the book comes out. On the contrary, I'm always trying to figure out if my dialog, dialect, slang, is appropriate to the period. If there is anything that a historical novelist dreads, it’s anachronism--a thing out of time, an act whereby a thing, a custom, a word, is attributed to a period to which it does not belong. This is particularly bad in a historical novel because it will take your reader right out of the story if Queen Elizabeth (either one) says "Groovy man," or "that is phat!" Or if Caesar checks his Rolex before he conquers Gaul. Yet a historical novelist is not writing a history book. She is taking us back in time and letting us live in a different world for awhile.

How do you deal with historical terms that may be unfamiliar to the reader? How do you convey a sense of dialect or vocabulary of the time without being confusing or taking the reader out of the story? I deal with this constantly.

I've used this example before, but it is perfectly illustrative of the dialectic difficulties of the historical novelist:

I am proofreading my latest Alafair work in progress when I come across a sentence in which Alafair says:
"... it’s a big flap every night at bedtime until Mama or Daddy goes in there and knocks some heads together.”

"Hmm," I say to myself. "Would a person use the phrase 'big flap' in June of 1916? Perhaps I should look it up." So out comes the etymological dictionary, in which I discover that the first known use of the term 'big flap' was noted in 1916, being used on the battlefields of World War I among British soldiers.

All right, I think. Alafair, living in rural Oklahoma in mid-1916 would probably have not heard 'big flap' used like this, but she may very well have said 'big flapdoodle'. For according to the previously mentioned etymological dictionary, the word 'flapdoodle' was common in the U.S. and Europe dating from 1839. So I change 'flap' to 'flapdoodle', feeling very proud of myself.

One week later I'm doing historical research by reading a book which I had bought many years earlier at the Enid, Oklahoma, Historical Society entitled Reflections From the Roadside, a Quindecennial Chronology. This is a reprint of the diary kept by Oklahoma homesteader Henry Harrison Reynolds from January 1912 through December 1926. I am reading his entries for June 1916 just to see what's going on in the world that an ordinary person would remark upon and what do I see in the entry for December 1915? I quote:

"There has been a big flap for months over drilling a test well for the city north of town."

So when some reader tries to take me to task for using an anachronistic dialect terms, I can say with confidence and through direct experience that even the experts can be wrong.

It’s one thing to be accurate about historical events, dress, and vocabulary, but how do you go about making sure that your characters behave and think in a way that is appropriate to the time and place they live in? How do you handle it when your character doesn’t subscribe to the same cultural attitudes as you do? Try writing about Oklahoma in 1919 when perfectly nice people with all the good will in the world would use what today would be very offensive terminology without thinking twice about it. How do your characters deal with what we would now consider unsavory beliefs and mores like sexism/classism/racism?

In my novel Hell With the Lid Blown Off, I have a character who is homosexual, and lives in terror of discovery. No two ways about it. If he were discovered, it could be the end of him. And that is the way it was in middle America in the 1910s. After that book came out I got an email from a very troubled reader wondering what I was trying to say. Did the societal attitude in my book reflect my own attitude. To which I answered, God, no! But that’s the way it was, my dear, which is why it’s so important we don’t gloss it over. Remember how bad it was and make sure we never go back.

'Ow's she cuttin', me cocky?

The ongoing posts about dialect, accent, and unique sayings have made me smile, and also made me think about the challenge writers face when creating dialogue in a region or among a group of people with a special lingo. It doesn't have to be an ethnic or geographical group; cops, for example, have their own shorthand for talking among themselves, often referring to the number of the criminal code offence being investigated or the outcome of a call. Outsiders rarely know what the sayings mean, and a discussion among two cops might be incomprehensible to anyone else. Medical personnel, and many other professional groups, have a similar insider language. The writer faces the challenge of how much of this insider language to use, in order to make the scene sound authentic, and how much overwhelms, districts, or confuses the reader.

One of the most unique and colourful, as well as incomprehensible, dialects in the English language is Newfoundlandese. Newfoundland was largely settled two to four hundred years ago by the Irish and West Country English, who brought their own rhythm and dialect with them, and because it's an isolated island, there was little influence from outside until recently. A lively, colourful language evolved, much of it tied to the sea upon which they depended. Some of the unique vocabulary is disappearing now but lingers in the smaller villages and outports. The title phrase in this post means "How are you, my friend?"

My father was a Newfoundlander who, although he moved away as a young man and lived his life as a philosophy professor in Montreal, never lost his love of his homeland and often used phrases unique to there. "Say n'ar word" was one of his favourite, meaning "don't say a word". Another was "knee high to a grasshopper" when referring to something very small. Most Newfoundlanders today can switch back and forth between dialect and standard English, and increasingly the quirky language of the countryside is disappearing, but on my visits there, I found people turned it off and on at will, depending on who they were talking to. Get two Newfoundlanders together, possibly trying to tease a "come from away" like me, and their conversation became incomprehensible.

When I was writing FIRE IN THE STARS, set on the Great Northern Peninsula in western Newfoundland, I wanted to give a hint of the local village language without distracting or confusing the reader. Trying to write "Newfoundlandese" necessitates many apostrophes, as they tend to drop their H's and the G's on the end of ing. The resulting string of written dialogue looks like a mess that the reader struggles to decipher. I opted to sprinkle the examples lightly, to give just a hint of the flavour.

Reaction to my efforts was mixed. Many readers thought I had captured the sound of the language perfectly and they felt as if they were back in that village. A few Newfoundland readers thought I had overdone it and fallen for stereotypes. As a come-from-away, I was very concerned about this possibility, and in fact I had downplayed the dialect in order to avoid it (and for the reason noted above). The language I put in the book was very much what I had heard in the little villages in remote northern Newfoundland.

But any outsider writing about a world that is not their own runs the risk of failing to capture the authentic flavour of a culture. I think we need to do the best we can, research, visit, read, talk to insiders, but then go for it. Venturing into the unknown and exploring new vistas is what writing is all about. If I only wrote about white, middle-aged, urban female psychologists like myself, I would soon run out of ideas.

Not to mention bore myself to death.

A Delightful Turn of Phrase

I (Donis) can't stay too long today, Dear Reader. I have set the day aside for my Work In Progress and I must get back to it, for I'm on a roll. Well, not really a roll. More like an ooze. I'm on an ooze, but that is better than nothing, and if I stop, it's very hard to get started again.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an entry for my publisher's blog about the physical perils of writing (check it out here), in which I talked about how an author risks eyestrain and carpal tunnel and numb-butt by sitting too long at the computer. I try very hard to moderate my sitting by getting up and doing some exercise every hour or so, but when you're in the zone sometimes that gets past you. I'm sure you have read the latest research that states that "sitting is the new smoking", which means that sitting too long is very very bad for your health. Therefore, I try to work standing up as much as possible. The only problem is that standing for long periods hurts my back and my feet. I try hard to maintain good posture, but there is only so much I can take even then. The only solution I can think of is to trade off sitting and standing, interspersed with periods of walking, yoga, jumping jacks. Otherwise, the only other remedy is to sit in a chair like Mork from Ork. I have tried it, and it's really rather nice, as long as you can keep from smothering yourself.

On another note, I loved my blogmates' entries below on colorful phrases and expressions. I love a good turn of phrase. In fact, I try to use colorful Southern/Western American phrases for the titles of my books, which can cause me some consternation when I can't think of anything good. I usually wait for one of the characters to say something appropriate. For my W-I-P, (working title: Book Nine) I'm still waiting.

I grew up among people whose goal was to curse in the most imaginative language possible, which can really increase your vocabulary if you apply yourself. My mother was particularly good at coming up with ways to express disapproval using only G-rated words. One of her scariest curses was "I heap coals of fire upon him." The words themselves weren't as frightening as her throaty growl and the curl of her lip over her eyetooth. My father had been a Marine, and knew words that I don't understand to this day, but he had a house full of little daughters and controlled his language heroically. He often had the pee-waddin' scared out of him and wondered what in the cat-hair was going on.

My grandparents—and parents— had the most wonderful way of putting things. One grandparent was born and raised in Kentucky and the others in Arkansas at the turn of the Twentieth Century. Their language and vocabulary was absolutely Elizabethan. When Grandma went to garden over yonder, she put on her gauntlets and hunkered down to tend her “yarbs”.

I, of course, was desperate to get rid of my Oklahoma accent when I was young and speak completely standard American English. My accent is not as strong nor my vocabulary as eccentric as my parents’, nor was theirs as strong and colorful as their parents'. My nieces and nephews in their thirties sound more standard yet. But after years living away from my native place, I saw on a news program an interview with two teenaged girls from Tulsa. They sounded like Valley girls. I was shocked. What happened to that beautiful twang? That poetic way with words? That delightful Scotch-Irish combination of humor and fatalism? Oklahoma is what linguists call a “Transitional state”. My husband, also a native Oklahoman, has an accent that is different from mine. (Mine is more Appalachian, his is more Plains) One thing I specifically wanted to do with the Alafair Tucker series was preserve something of a way of speaking that seems to be rapidly disappearing.

Knowing your mosquitoes and other things

Sybil's and Aline's posts about colourful phrases and expressions that reflect the culture that created them got me thinking. We writers often venture very far into alien territory as far as culture goes. If we only wrote about our own backyards, we might soon run out of things to say. It's the rare author that can write original and compelling stories about the same small corner of the universe. Most of us lead fairly safe, mundane lives, notwithstanding the subtle, secret intrigues that seethe beneath the surface of the most ordinary neighbourhoods. First novels often mine our own experiences and are set in our familiar world, but by the time we get to novel number ten, we are casting our net far wider. How many stories are set during war, revolution, or other catastrophe? How many deal with turmoil and pain far beyond what we ourselves have lived? Crime writers in particular can only rely on personal experience so much (one hopes).

Yet writing about locales and people other than our own presents a challenge, unless one is content with cardboard characters, cliched settings, and a formulaic plot where anybody can be plugged in with equal plausibility. As an outsider, a writer could spend years before truly capturing the essence of a people and a place, but few of us have that luxury. Yet when we try to write from the point of view of someone with an entirely different life experience from us, we risk being superficial at best or fraudulent at worst. This is true when a man tries to write a woman't point of view, a middle-aged writer tries to capture a teenager's view, or a white person tries to write as an indigenous person. In extreme cases, this is labelled "appropriation of voice" and can be offensive.

As sensitive souls, we writers all have our lines in the sand. How far we venture outside our comfort zone depends on our skill, the type of story we are telling and how real and profound the characters have to be. Some of us are bolder than others, willing to put on the cloak of a serial killer or a Hitler, whereas others are reluctant to stretch our imagination and empathy beyond the narrow confines of our past. In addition, some of us restrict our reach out of respect for the authenticity of others' suffering.

Yet this challenge of stepping into another's shoes and getting it right confronts us when we write about anyone other than ourselves. How does a Canadian get inside the head of an American? A New Yorker inside the head of a Vancouverite? How does a Montreal-born Ottawa girl like me write about Newfoundland, as I did in my upcoming book FIRE IN THE STARS, and create real characters who don't sound as if they've stepped out of an episode of Republic of Doyle?

One solution is to stick as close as possible to what you do know or can find out. If you have Newfoundland friends or family, pick their brains and summon their presence while you are writing. Imagine their voices and reactions.  Shamelessly base your characters on them; steal their anecdotes and life story. Read books about Newfoundland, hunt down stories on the internet, check the Dictionary of Newfoundlandese. And once you've written the book, ask your friendly Newfoundlander to read it for realism. Luckily Newfoundlanders will give it to you straight.

Another solution is to visit the place you are writing about. The amount of detail and authenticity you will acquire cannot be matched by your imagination or all the books in the world. The smell of the place, the daily sounds and sights, the way every clerk and cashier calls you "m' dear" or "darlin'". The more time you spend in the place, not doing the touristy things but wandering and listening, the more you can capture its flavour. And the essence of the people. You will still be an outsider, but your characters may do a passable imitation of the real thing.

Dialect and sayings are especially tricky. They reflect not just the geographical origin but the age, class, and sex of the speaker. Thanks to their long history of isolation, Newfoundlanders have a wealth of colourful sayings and words, many of which reflect the hard-scrabble, no-nonsense, fishing life they led. But a outport old-timer is much more likely to use phrases like "Long may yer big jib draw" and "Was ya born on a raff?" than a young "townie" from St. Johns. Aside from the risk of getting it wrong, putting too much dialect or strange words into your book makes it tough going for the reader, and if they have to work too hard, they will lose the enchantment of the story. No writer wants that! As with many things, a little dialect goes a long way.

True dat! Old trout.