Anachronisms and trying to sound old timey.

A friend’s comment on an early draft of Guild of Salt read:

“I think ‘picnic’ is an anachronism. They didn’t use that word in the 12th century, I’m pretty sure.”

My response:

“Well, if I was trying to be that accurate with my language, shouldn’t I have written the whole book in 12th century Anglo-Norman French?”

I don’t like anachronisms any more than the next guy: they throw you out of the story, turning the author’s world-building to ash, yet, to make the story readable to contemporary audiences, compromises are necessary. Very little historical fiction would be readable if it were written without a lot of anachronisms. Tudor-set stories should sound like Shakespeare, shouldn’t they? But how many of the book-reading public would actually buy them? I like Shakespeare, but I don’t think I’d like to “relax” by working through the five hundred-odd pages of “Wolf Hall” in sonnet format. So how do we thread the needle of contemporary prose and old-fashioned atmosphere?

When I started writing Guild of Salt, I realized I’d have to reckon with this. My first book — Trials Elsewhere — was a contemporary memoir, which I wrote in my natural “voice” as they say in the publishing world. But I knew instantly that my “voice” wouldn’t cut it for a medieval story, so I had to figure out a strategy to make it readable but — hopefully — old-timey enough sounding that it would still provide that sense of escapism people like me read historical fiction for in the first place.

My first step was to just come to terms with the fact I couldn’t please everyone. There’s always going to be someone who finds fault with your style or word choice, and the fact that words change meaning an awful lot doesn’t help.

I think it’s the sound of the words and diction that people react to. If it sounds modern or specifically like modern slang, people turn their noses up. The irony here is that it’s often better to use anachronism because language more accurate to the time can in fact sound pretty modern. Consider a potential line from a hypothetical story set in the late medieval or early modern period. A farmer looks at some wheat being threshed:

“This corn has a lot of crap in it.”

Most people would look at that and cry “anachronism!” almost instantly, or argue that the editing is bad because corn isn’t wheat. But, I’d argue the sentence is a lot more of the time than many I see in historical fictions. A quick check of the OED tells us that corn is:

“collective singular. The seed of the cereal or farinaceous plants as a produce of agriculture; grain.As a general term the word includes all the cereals, wheat, rye, barley, oats, maize, rice, etc., and, with qualification (as black corn, pulse corn), is extended to leguminous plants, as pease, beans, etc., cultivated for food. Locally, the word, when not otherwise qualified, is often understood to denote that kind of cereal which is the leading crop of the district; hence in the greater part of England ‘corn’ is = wheat n., in North Britain and Ireland = oats; in the U.S. the word, as short for Indian corn n., is restricted to maize (see 5).

And looking up “crap” we get:

Usually in plural. Husks of grain; chaff.

1649 C. Hoole Easie Entrance Lat. Tongue 171/1 Corn craps, Excreménta, órum.

So, the hypothetical sentence translates into modern English as: “This wheat has a lot of chaff in it.” I’d bet a modern reader would actually prefer this version to the first, if only because the word “crap” tends to put people off almost instantly due to its modern use as a bit of low-brow slang.

I guess it’s all about how things sound. It needs to sound right, more than actually be right. I guess it’s kind of like how in old World War II movies, high ranking German officers are usually played by English actors. The accent adds a bit of foreignness that “feels” right, but is actually completely wrong. The Germans ought to speak with German accents; really, they should just speak German with subtitles. There are exceptions (Tom Cruise in, Valkyrie James Coburn in Cross of Iron) yet American actors usually play the lower ranks. Hollywood just can’t seem to believe in German staff officers who don’t have a posh English accent. Would you buy into George Clooney playing General Keitel?

So the question became: if it’s all about the sound, how do I make my voice sound less modern? This wasn’t that hard. I just read a lot of books I felt had the right tone. This consisted mainly of re-reading the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey and Maturin series and C. S. Forester’s Hornblower books as well as a bunch of Jane Austen. In the same way a child picks up their parent’s verbal cues, I hoped I’d pick up some of their vocabulary and diction through osmosis. Those books aren’t medieval stories, but they all aim for a Regency sounding style (in the case of Austin, of course, it’s not contrived), and I felt Regency language was old-fashioned enough to sound the part, but is still modern enough to be readable.

I did make a series of compromises, however. I decided before writing that flow mattered more than exact wording, and so I use contractions wherever they smooth out the prose. I don’t feel too bad about it; it’s about how it sounds, after all, and people blend words together when they think and speak. I also went out of my way to avoid modern clichés because nothing sounds worse — to my ear — than hearing a 12th-century knight cry out: “Let’s kick some ass!” As I wrote, I’d usually put down the cliché as a placeholder, then go back and try to unpack or re-write it into something less modern. In this example, I might change the line to: “let’s see them off with a kick to the arse!” or something like that. Not great, but you get the idea.

How well I succeeded with this, only the reader can say, and I suppose a lot of people will say I fell short, nevertheless, that was my process.