November 2023's Writer Support Thread

[Havenstone]

There’s a fun conversation ongoing over at the “underused tropes” thread about the Tiffany Problem – how things that sound like anachronisms to us are in fact much older than we think (like the name Tiffany) – and I thought I’d pop up a link here to draw writers’ attention to it.

@TSSL linked to another forum thread on the subject that included a terrific note mining the memoirs of Pierre de Commynes for things that might strike a reader as surprisingly modern/civilized – a nice counterbalance to some of the more simplistic grimdark tropes about the European middle ages.

And it reminded me of an essay by David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) about the process of writing a historical novel. The whole thing is worth reading, but the part that stuck with me is about the difficult trick of writing in “Bygonese” dialect:

The more Moleskines you fill with the fruits of research, however, the more determinedly it must be hidden: lines like “shall I bid Jenkins ready the Phaeton coach, or might Madam prefer the two-wheeled barouche landau?” will kill.

And then you have to worry about language. Unless you have an entire historical novel made out of reported speech (easier to digest Bubble-pack) the characters must open their mouths at some point, and when they do, how are they going to speak? This is the “Lest versus In Case Dilemma”: the sentence-joint “in case”—as in “Eat now in case we don’t have time later”—smells of Late Twentieth Century English, but a “correct” translation into Smollett’s English—“Eat on the nonce, My Boy, lest no later opportunity presents itself”—smacks of phoniness and pastiche if written in 2010. It smacks, in fact, of Blackadder, and only a masochist could stomach 500 pages.

To a degree, the historical novelist must create a sort of dialect—I call it “Bygonese”—which is inaccurate but plausible. Like a coat of antique-effect varnish on a pine new dresser, it is both synthetic and the least-worst solution. Commonly, shall is used more often than will; if-less conditional sentences appear (as in “Had I but seen him, I would have shot him stone dead”); and contractions discouraged by old school headmistresses—like gonna—are avoided. Then, once your Bygonese is perfected, anachronism is waiting to blight it. For every obvious no-no (a feudal castle-builder complaining “Gravity is not on our side”) there are slipperier ones waiting to slip through: the editors and proofreaders of my late eighteenth century manuscript found a skip-load. Some were excusable: the verb to con as in “swindle” first appears in print in 1889, says the heaven-sent Etymological Online Dictionary. Others were more embarrassing, like brinksmanship: duh, it’s a Cold War term.

Getting the right flavor of Bygonese is a challenge for fantasy as well as historical novelists, though in the former case you only have to worry about being plausible rather than accurate. But the pitfall of “phoniness and pastiche” lurks pretty close to the surface for us fantasists too.

Edit: And speaking of being caught out by an anachronism: I really didn’t think this was a car reference!

low-profile | Etymology, origin and meaning of low-profile by etymonline

I would not have guessed that “lie low” is around 700 years older than “low profile.”