Going Back in Time - with A Pen
Writing a historical novel is like time travel. The lucky reader gets to vicariously live in another era, through the story told in the book’s pages. But after the author has done all the research, how can he make the reader believe the story actually lives in that period? All of the words on the page must somehow sound right, whether they’re dialogue, exposition, or quotations. The reader must believe she’s living the characters’ story with them – even though it takes place worlds away from her. But how on earth can an author pull it off? The vocabulary from that era may be so different that it’s hard to express what happened. Blackmail and homosexuality, for example, are fairly recent terms. To make life even more fun, sentences may no longer be put together quite the same way. Modern grammar discourages adverbs and encourages informality, habits that could mark social status centuries ago. Even harder is making the reader believe he’s listening to dialogue spoken centuries...