‘Jenny stared at the telegram, turning the envelope it over in her hands, not daring to open it. This must be the worst day of the war.’ (I read a comment on telegrams and the changing world on X, made this opening to a book to fit.)
The two sentences above would have conveyed a huge amount of information, and emotion to my parents’ generation (or even their parents). It meant, most likely, that her husband or son was dead.
It was the fastest means of communication, then. Well, long distance telephone was possible in some places. Expensive, very expensive: to the extent that my wife got two Christmas calls ever, from her grandmother in England. Now: I spend an hour a week on video chatting to our grandies. My parents would have considered that the most unimaginable luxury… as for their parents and grandparents, The idea would simply have been preposterous.
They would have struggled with a book with that in it, and failed completely to imagine how utterly commonplace that is, to someone who is not wealthy or powerful. The inverse of course is true: A lot of younger readers wouldn’t know what a telegram was, and how relatively rare they were, and what the implications of such a message were. That socially shared information, a massive shortcut for the author, scene setting and emotional baggage… has to be explained or the likely the reader misses it entirely.
Many such traps exist for the writer, especially the well-researched one. I mean, you’ve done all this work, YOU think everyone understands, for example, the mores of that time. Trust me on this: they don’t Even if you explain it, they don’t. I’m writing about the bronze age right now. Some of the research makes the taliban seem like modern sissies. The attitudes to life – let alone life outside their genetically connected clique, were rough as guts. Kill the men – or enslave them, probably castrato, kill any male children, take the women — women in losing cities started ‘showing their wares’ from windows when the fall of a city seemed likely — they would have considered normal, moral and right.
I could go on for a while, making you really, really glad to be alive now, and how Western Culture is really soft and nice – even compared to 50 years ago. But that really wasn’t the point. The point is you have to write a book the public want to read. I’ve read a lot of ‘write the book you want to write, or that you’d like to read…’ No. I am sorry, but if you’re identical to a large number of readers, life is that simple. Many of us are not.
It’s important to be able to love your book, to care so deeply about characters that they can make you weep. BUT it has to be accessible and understandable to a lot of readers. So: Dave cannot write his normal one-page natural German-style sentences, I have to at least trim my vocabulary and descriptiveness. I might like that, but I think few other people would. My advice, frankly, is not to be true to the period you write about, but withing limits to allow for modern sensibilities. Make me like the characters, if not their culture.
Mad Genius Club 
6 responses to “A common language”
The point is you have to write a book the public want to read. I’ve read a lot of ‘write the book you want to write, or that you’d like to read…’ No. I am sorry, but if you’re identical to a large number of readers, life is that simple.
I have heard that advice over and over and its refreshing to see someone point out that no, if you want to sell books, you have to write what will sell. Its not that you have to sell your soul, of course, but you do need to keep in mind the tastes of the readers you are aiming for and give it to them.
As for writing the story you want for modern sensibilities? In all honesty? I am wondering if what we think is what modern audiences want really what the readers want and not just how modern editors are dictating stories to be written. At least the readers circles that I am in, I find more and more folks who want the older stuff and love the older stuff and wax nostalgic about the older stuff which makes me wonder if there would be a fairly sized audience who would want that old feel with its dialogue tags, exposition and “telling” and all.
On historical attitudes: you can’t win for losing. I have run across a discussion of a Regency where the readers were complaining that a woman who had much to complain about in her husband by the standards of her time nevertheless made the main issue that he expected his martial rights. Didn’t she know what marriage meant? Didn’t she notice that her husband needed an heir? After all, to this day, you can have a marriage annulled for non-consummation.
Meanwhile, I am quite certain that there are audiences where a heroine who did not complain of that would be criticized.
But Puritan wives could (and did) complain if their husbands didn’t give them sex. LOL
I feel like a historical novelist needs to strike a happy medium between “the past is a nasty bigoted disease-ridden filthy hellhole, and you’re a bad person for being interested in it” and “the past is a fancy dress ball populated by modern concerns and demographics and the occasional quaint custom or turn of phrase that doesn’t make sense to us.” One of the things that impressed me about Georgette Heyer was the way she used sporting gentlemen with high-perch phaetons as a stand-in for the motorheads of her generation; she never explicitly draws the comparison or uses blatantly anachronistic language, but if you’ve read books like Murder Must Advertise or some of the other Wimseys that emphasize the Cool Car aspect of his lifestyle, you see a sort of family resemblance.
Dave does something similar in his Cecily (published under the Alida Leacroft name, in case anyone here is just joining us), where he contrasts the bravery of a seagoing naval character in the supporting cast, with all the petty backstabbing and bureaucracy of the rear echelons.
There are people who roll their eyes at how obviously they are the Bright Young Things.
Since I like Golden Age mysteries, I’m not at all bothered by the way Heyer merges the people of her generation and somewhat older with the people of the Regency. The way Josephine Tey tries to reinvent Richard II as a Bright Young Thing, complete with post-WWI cynicism about continental entanglements, in her play Richard of Bordeaux, now that’s a sin.