Recently I noticed a review about one of my hist.romances which claimed some degree of anachronism – did people really bathe that much in the twelfth century? In fact my reading has shown there is a complete disparity of opinion over this issue, which meant I must make a choice. I did. I was writing fiction and I chose the scholarly fact that best backed what I wished to say.
I was also taken to task for using the word ‘puke’ because its roots are in the seventeenth century, which I knew. But I needed to imply a middle-aged woman vomiting up her insides on a ship journey. I could have used the word ‘vomit’ but even that dates from the fifteenth century. Exactly what words did they use for such a bodily function in the twelfth century? To substitute a word in Latin or Norman French or Occitan wouldn’t work at all. Nor would it be sensible in my opinion. So ‘puke’ it was. It’s powerful, short and sharp – exactly what this poor woman was experiencing. My feeling about language is that there must be a certain amount of leeway, especially if the story is enjoyable and is loyal to its timeframe. Then again, I suppose I could re-write the whole novel in Latin or Norman French…
Such things make me wonder why we can’t be more flexible both in reading and writing historical novels. Which made recent commentary by R.Clifton Spargo about the writing of the genre just the exact thing I wanted to hear:
- Through untold hours of research, you must investigate a past you didn’t live. And even though you don’t have ready imaginative access to the events, you must make them believable. A tremendous point upon which the adaptable new historical fiction writer will jump. Personally I think it makes for real freshness and excitement. Colin Falconer approaches his writing with exactly that idea and I wrote another post about his thoughts some time ago. In my own case, there are many aspects of the twelfth century which are argued about amongst scholars, or worse, where there is no evidence at all. The best one can do is endeavour to be loyal to one’s timeframe and then take a guess. One can’t be sure its an informed guess because the facts to back it up may not have been brought to light yet. So it is and will remain a ‘guesstimate’.
- Take your characters off the grid? Personally I love this idea. It is exactly what I think gives freshness to current independently published hist.fict . It has the capacity to scoop the reader up into a narrative beyond the more heavily laid down norm of the past. That must surely be a good thing. I think it stretches the art-form.
- Make your characters resemble people, not historical personages. Characters based on famous lives must behave in ways consistent with experiences their real-life models actually endured in history. And yet, you need to know those lives so well as to begin to forget them, much in the manner each of us forgets so much of our daily lives as we race through them. I love it when historical personages have pimples or boils, become constipated or shiver with cold, get drunk or admit to fear. I hate it when they are placed in the ivory tower of their own historical magnificence. I want to forget that Richard Lionheart was a perfect strategist. I love finding out from an author that as a youth, he might have dared a young girl to climb a fig tree hanging over a wall, knowing she could fall to her death. I want to believe that these people were as normal for their time as we might be for ours. Why not? Isn’t it what we want from our heroes of today – to know that the famous have a life that we can relate to. It’s the kind of thing that sells today’s weekly magazines after all. That Angelina Jolie has a history of breast cancer in her family, or that Kate Middleton has bad hair days or that Prince Charles hates seeing his tulips fold in the wind like mine.
- Make it new—‘there is no urgency to’ feel the urgency of repeating familiar detail. Here is a place only a novelist could go, where historians couldn’t. And so the reader can be given a reprieve from the info-dump that so many authors in both mainstream and independent writing still feel is necessary to the narrative. As a reader, I will always go to a scholarly non-fiction text if I want to find out more about the timeframe. Please, please, please I tell myself as I write – don’t be overt. Subtlety is the thing, Prue. Besides, is Spargo not saying that the novelist is writing fiction after all? Colin Falconer quoted Bernard Cornwell today. “If you are wanting to write historical fiction I always say, you are not an historian. If you want to tell the world about the Henrician reformation, then write a history book – but if you want an exciting story, then become a storyteller. Telling the story is the key.”
- Thank you, Bernard and thank you, Colin.
Excellent post, Prue! Two historical novelists I read avidly as a child were Rosemary Sutcliff and Violet Needham. They never put a foot wrong. Their language flowed easily and naturally, but never contained anachronisms. A certain very popular novelist writing today included in a Tudor novel the phrase ‘I just lost my meal-ticket’. Now that IS an anachronism, because the concept of a ‘meal-ticket’ is a modern one. On the other hand, the concept of ‘vomit’ or ‘puke’ certainly is not! Short of writing in Latin or Norman French, you have to use SOME word, and it has to be one your readers will understand. As for the small personal details of outer and inner life, this is where the novelist has the advantage over the historian. We extrapolate from the common human condition to portray our characters. The historian is not allowed to do so.
Thank you, Ann.
When I first began writing hist.fict, I was very concerned when it was suggested in edit that I shorten phrases such as ‘I have’ to ‘I’ve’, or ‘did not’ to ‘didn’t’ and so forth. However I took the editorial advice and whilst I was worried it would sound too much of our time, it actually smoothed out the narrative and made it a little less dense and wasn’t at all anachronistic because one assumes that the natives of the times about which we write MUST have spoken colloquially. How do we make Romans sound colloquial, or Anglo Saxons, Tudors, Stuarts and so on without bending language around corners?
And you are right, the historian is bound like a mummy in bandages by his fact. We surely have the luxury of creativity AND, as you say, extrapolation.
I have heard this from so many historical novelists. People criticize everything that isn’t exactly as it was in the 12th century–but you can bet if you wrote it in Norman French they wouldn’t like that either.
That’s because a certain kind of person seems to read only to find fault. I recently got a review of my chick lit series saying “Why doesn’t she get a better job and stop looking for Mr. Right?” Well, because then there would be no story. What the reviewer was really doing was criticising the chick lit genre.
And I think the people you’re talking about are simply criticizing the historical fiction genre. If they don’t want fiction, they can go read your source material in the original language. (And I love these marvelous paintings–especially the bathing one!)
Only they won’t. I think what they really object to is that you can write a wonderful story and they can’t.
VERY strong words, Anne. What I really feel as a reader, is that if the story has characters that really interest me (and by that I mean annoy, love, hate, want to yell at etc), the pace is steady and has the required peaks and troughs for interest, the plot strong and the settings are as true to what I as an uninformed reader might believe the twelfth century was like, then the writer will have fulfilled the brief of entertainment.
I want my stories to be ‘real’. If I wanted to place my characters in the 21st century, then I would be writing women’s fiction, but I want to write about the 12th century timeframe, so I would never take the era for granted. I studied it at university, it fascinated me. I read scholarly texts about the era. But then, what I wanted to do was not rehash and dispute the facts as they exist, but to write a creative story that keeps readers entertained. Because entertainment is the core foundation of providing fiction to be read. Education is the bonus but isn’t the foundation. There is this tiny facility in literature called poetic licence – “poet′ic li′cence n. licence or liberty, esp. as taken by a poet or other writer, in deviating from conventional form, logic, fact, etc., to produce a desired effect”. Personally I think writers in any genre should be allowed that to licence to entertain. As a reader, I love a little bit of creative poetic licence. I think to myself ‘Yes! This writer has skill and is stretching the boundaries (not of fact, but of the imagination) and extending the art-form. But of course, many will disagree. And it’s their right to do so.
How refreshing to see this approach being celebrated rather than the frequent harping about minute detail accuracy. I agree with you wholeheartedly. My only rules are that actual characters should follow the life timescales they led and that the settings, characters, etc should be at one with the time period. Language in particular, as you state very clearly, becomes almost impossible if one follows an absolutist line about word dating. We are after all writing fiction.
Feud_writer, I sometimes wish the occasionally pedantic would take a sentence and write in the way they think it should be written and then show it to the world. I have a feeling there are a few historical fictionados who would realise very quickly that being absolute is at the very least ridiculous, at the worst, down right impossible if one wants a book that flows with grace and pace! Thanks so much for reading my post.
I’m in the middle of re-reading Dunnett’s ‘House of Niccolo’ series, and the word choice question came to mind. She has a perfect balance between colloquial and formal no matter what language her characters are speaking, and if she uses an anachronistic word, I’ve never either noticed or minded. And Prue, aside from a little angst, you’re just as good!
Ah, angst! My favourite non-word! Thank you Pat for the compliment. Isn’t DD just the bees knees?
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