No, no that kind of language. Well, not only that kind of language. This isn't a diatribe against the use of four-letter words in fiction; sometimes they're appropriate. And that's my point – appropriate language.
'Voice' is a word that gets used a lot in creative writing classes and workshops. I use it myself, and I'm not apologizing. As a copy-editor, which I am some of the time, I have to take great care that my tidying up of the prose an author uses doesn't have an adverse effect on the unique 'voices' of either the author or the characters.
And of course creating that voice, or those voices, is all a matter of the language the author uses. Sometimes those 'bad' words are part of it. Don't you find, though, that sometimes there's so much of it that it leaves you a little numb? One of the things a copy-editor has to look out for is repetition: over-use of a word, or two or three instances of the same word in a paragraph or half a page when it's clearly not done for effect. Over-use of the f-word soon becomes plain tedious, and loses the impact it is surely intended to have.
Unless it's done for effect, of course. One of the funniest short stories I ever read had the f-word on every line, and it worked, because it was deliberate, and – that word again – appropriate.
But that's not really how I meant to approach this topic. It came about because something reminded me of a talk I once attended by a well-known and successful author of historical fiction, mostly set in mediaeval England. She took questions at the end, and someone asked where she stood on the two points of view about the use of language: was she an advocate of the 'gadzooks' style, or did she take the view that to historical characters they way they spoke would have sounded natural, so authors should use updated language that sounds natural to the reader? She agreed that both were valid approaches, and placed herself on the 'language of the time' side, though she strongly denied (not without humour) that she would ever use the word 'gadzooks'. But then she said something like this: 'It's important to reproduce the language that would have been in use in the characters' world, in order to fix that world in the reader's mind.'
A kind of buzz went round the room. The questioner stood up again, and began to read from a copy of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, in the original 14th century Middle English. 'Is that what you mean?' she asked, after a few sentences.
Hm. Ever tried to read Chaucer in the original? Point made, I think; it certainly was that day. That was one red-faced author of historical fiction.
So – gadzooks or not, how do you 'reproduce' that language? I recently read The Witchfinder's Sister, by Beth Underdown, set a century or two later than our friend Chaucer, but still at a time when the language in common use wasn't exactly user-friendly to 21st century readers. She captures a flavour without going overboard. Likewise my good friend Chris Nickson, whose John the Carpenter trilogy is set in Chaucer's century; the language is simple, devoid of images and references which simply wouldn't have occurred at the time, and feels right, even though it bears little resemblance to the way people would actually have spoken in the 14th century.
So there you have it: my take on it, anyway. Quite simply, it has to feel right. Dialogue has to sound like the characters it's coming from; exposition has to reflect the theme and subject matter. I'm delighted to report that in most of the books I read, it does.
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