THE BLOG
Why The Modern Language?
It’s not a mistake, not an oversight – I do realise English hasn’t always been spoken as it nowadays is. Nor is it some silly kind of attention-seeking, a for-the-sake-of-it bid to stand out. No, I do have my reasons, and the first is simply that we don’t know how sixteenth century people spoke. We know how they wrote – or at least how some of them wrote, those who could, and in the kinds of documents that have come to us down the centuries (wills, court documents etc). And, yes, there are letters, too, here and there, but letter-writing has always had its own conventions and probably never more so than when writing was new to much of the population. What I mean is, letters weren’t exactly dashed off. (Actually, practically, they couldn’t be – writing with a quill was a laborious business.) They can’t tell us all that much about how people spoke.
Even nowadays we speak very differently from how we write, which you’ll know if you’ve ever had to deal with transcripts. Consciously and unconsciously, we do a lot of tidying up to articulate ourselves on a page, and of course that’s largely what the skill of writing is – for all of us, in everyday life.
Not one just for novelists, then, this issue of how best to ’translate’ speech and thoughts into the written word. Not just for historical novelists, either, because think of regional or other societal variations… On the one hand, it can seem ridiculous for some characters or narrators to be speaking so-called Queen’s English, but, then again, is it any better to confine them to, say, phonetic spelling?
The answer is, of course, that there’s no answer. There are no hard and fast rules – every writer feels his or her way with each voice to a position somewhere on a spectrum, and hopes that readers will go along with it.
And, anyway, this talk of variations should serve to remind us that there would never have been any single ‘Tudor-speak’. Still, most writers want at the very least to give an impression of people in the past speaking differently from how they might speak if currently around and about. So, how to do it? Well, you can make an educated guess – and some guesses, in historical fiction, are more educated than others, by which I don’t mean to be rude but just to recognise that some writers take it as a more pressing or diverting issue than others do, and fair enough, each to his or her own. So, currently in historical fiction, we have everything from slightly stilted dialogue (the avoidance of contractions, for example – ‘do not’ rather than ‘don’t’ – which for some reason I’ve never fathomed is supposed to be old-fashioned, as if people in the past didn’t use contractions) to full-on cod-Tudor, with, along the way, sprinklings of archiac words or expressions and subtle differences in cadence and inflection. You could of course eschew guesses altogether – forget hankering after accuracy, if it’s impossible – and instead invent a language or style of speech that ‘feels right’.
‘Feels right’ is interesting. The academic Laura Saxton makes a distinction that I like, between ‘accuracy’ and ‘authenticity’. Cast your mind back to the BBC televised Wolf Hall, for example: the dark cloaks in which the men skulked and swished. That felt right… right? It was authentic, yes? Well, what it wasn’t, actually, as far as historians can ascertain, is accurate. The clothes of gentlemen of the court, at that time, were brightly coloured. But that’s not what twenty-first century viewers expect; it would feel wrong, it’s out of step with the twenty-first century popular understanding of Henry’s court. We’re not going to take Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell seriously if he’s dressed in pink silk.
I’d say it’s similar with vocabulary. Let me run this one past you: which of these two words ‘feels right’ to you, as a Tudor word? ‘Brat’ and ‘wrongfooted’. Just two from a list of words/expressions that I’ve been keeping, lately, for the purposes of this piece: words, the origins of which I’ve stopped to check before deciding whether or not to use them. Surprised you, huh? There’s you, thinking that I bung in every ol’ modern word … but the truth is that there isn’t a writing day that goes by, for me, when I don’t check the origins of at least a handful of words or expressions to see if they were in use in the sixteenth century. Not that I won’t necessarily use them if they weren’t, if I think that I can get away with it…but at least I am then making a conscious decision (if only on ground of spurious authenticity), not a ‘mistake’.
Brat: sixteenth century. Wrongfoot: first recorded usage, 1928.
So much for ‘accuracy’. Where I come a-cropper with some readers, though, is that just as with the viewing, it’s authenticity that’s important to the reading experience. For some readers, the dialogue that my characters speak just seems ridiculous, it jarrs, it ruins that crucial suspension of belief and the reader puts the book down (or, er, even throws it across the room).
And I do understand. Really, I do. Why do I do it, then? – if there’s a spectrum from cod olde English to contemporary, why do I set up camp at the far end of it?
Well, many – most? – writers of historical fiction want to stress the difference between ‘then’ and ‘now’. It’s where they find their inspiraton, it’s what interests them, draws them: it’s where the story is, the drama. And the same can be said for many readers of historical fiction, too: part of the pleasure, for them, lies in the strangeness. But for me, the opposite is true. What draws me isn’t the difference but the similariities. It’s not what I’d expect of myself, being a believer that each of us is largely a product of our of time and place… but, well, there you are: it turns out that for the purposes of fiction-writing, I don’t see myself as writing about Tudors but about characters who just happen to be Tudor.
My ‘job’ as a fiction writer, as I see it, is, basically, to make things feel real (and for ‘things’, read ‘people’, ‘relationships’, ‘dynamics’, ‘situations’… anything, everything). I want to have my readers feel that they are there, in a particular situation with particular people. The last thing I want to do is flag up differences, because that – I feel – creates distance, and the characters become curiosities.
Think back to that business of accents. It depends on your position, doesn’t it – are you ‘with’ those characters, are you right there in their world with them, perhaps even, kind of, one of them? Or are you looking and listening in from the outside, observing them? When you are reading one of my novels, I want you to be there, I want that to be your world, your people. And nobody ever hears him- or herself talking in an accent. The way I speak is normal – it’s you who has the accent.
Having said all that, I have a confession to make. It’s not that my reasons aren’t heartfelt, as I hope you can tell… but, well, they didn’t start out as reasons. I’ve made them into reasons in retrospect. At the time of writing my first historical novel, I was following my nose. That first novel was about Anne Boleyn, and one of the two narrative voices was to be hers. What struck me from my reading of her was that she was forthright, outspoken, uncompromising and, above all, for her time, ‘modern’. How was I going to re-create her on the page? Well, not by having her speaking mannered ‘old-fashioned language’. That wouldn’t work. This was a woman who, on at least one occasion, had foreign ambassadors so disgusted by the language that she used that in defiance of protocol they turned on their heels and left the room. In a situation such as that, what would I have her say? Frankly, ‘Christ’s fut’ or anything like it just wasn’t going to cut it.
So, that’s why, in my novel, she ‘speaks’ in up-to-date language. Because, in her time, her world, that was what she did.
When I’d finished The Queen of Subtleties, my agent and editor each compiled a list of words which had, for them, jarred: words that had gone too far. I was grateful for their efforts and I did study those lists, but in the end decided to ignore them because, otherwise, I’d be writing by committee; the result would be cautious, mealy-mouthed, which was exactly what Anne Boleyn wasn’t. I’d had a vision for that book, and I decided I had to stay true to that.
And, on the whole, I liked the result, which was why I went on to write similarly in subsequent books although not as yet as uncompromisingly – as ‘in yer face’ – because none of those subsequent characters have quite required it. I do understand that for some readers the modern language ‘gets in the way’, and I sympathise. But that’s how the stilted voices of many other historical novels seems to me. I want to write historical novels that I’d want to read: ones in which I can believe utterly in the people and imagine myself there.
