The Write Stuff: Method Writing

[AndyC]

Discuss @David Flin 's latest article here

 

[Alex Richards]

I'm reminded of those recent Ladybook Guide parody books which work very well because someone's clearly spent a lot of time looking at exactly how sentences are phrased.

 

[SenatorChickpea]

One thing I would note when it comes to anachronism: writing a period piece in a modern style is an absolutely valid artistic choice, so long as it is a choice.

I read Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls earlier this year and that doesn't eve attempt to imitate the Homeric and Euripidean sources it draws from. At one point Achilles' men sing modern drinking songs, for example ('Why was he born so beautiful, why was he born at all?') and yet it works.

Or another modern take on Homer, Barry Unsworth's criminally unknown The Songs of the Kings which uses the wonderful device of writing one protagonist's perspective in prose layered with poetry in the manner of Robert Graves- and meanwhile Odysseus thinks and talks in the manner of a New Labour spin doctor (the book was published in 2002.)

So if you're going to be modern, be modern- but understand the effects that will have on the reader.

 

[Tabac Iberez]

It can be a bit less obvious than that. Women in combat aircraft today is not too much of a stretch; put that into a story set in the 1940s, and you need an explanation. The Misfit series has this, and it has an explanation for that. Without that explanation, that would be a simple matter of modern attitudes that wouldn't be appropriate.

I've met a lot of good ideas that have lived and died on this. If you're going to go modernist in a historical setting, you need to go all the way and commit fully and make it good. One or two errant slips and the charm of the lot has taken a steep dive.

 

[Tabac Iberez]

Claudia Edwards once wrote an otherwise good book The Taming of the Forest King, in which men and women were in combat units in a sort of late medieval sort of period with added magic. The Colonel of the regiment was a woman, her second-in-command a man. The logic and consistency of the situation was maintained. Right up until the point where there was a Ball they attended. The second-in-command went in uniform, obviously. No problem. The Colonel of the Regiment wore a ball gown.

I'm not inclined to dismiss this out of have since you could quite feasibly write any number of ways for this to make sense, but if there's nothing there before then there'd have to be a hell of an explanation for it after though.