(Prefatory note: Again, apologies to Dear Author for stealing their style. I guess I’m in a epistolary mood these days.)
Dear various American authors of historical romances who are trying very, very hard to sound authentically British,
It’s not like I’m the foremost Britpicker of all time. Not even close. But I’ve noticed a distressing trend among your ranks in recent days. I understand that you are probably sick of readers bitching and moaning about how American authors sound too contemporary and too American, so you’ve decided to inject some authentic Britishisms to spruce up the joint. I applaud your efforts. However, allow me to offer the following vocabulary tips:
1. Your Regency- or Victorian-era English aristocrat isn’t going to use the word “git” as a term that means “jackass” or “fuckwit.” Why? Well, partly because it’s a term more closely associated with the working classes, and the class cultures weren’t quite as permeable as they tend to be today. Partly because the etymological roots for “git” are probably Scottish. And lastly, and probably most importantly, because it didn’t become common usage until the 20th century.
2. Similarly, your aristocrat isn’t going to be calling a person “twat” for similar purposes. Because it wasn’t used as such until the early 20th century.
3. Ditto “minge.”
4. Also, please note that while “twat,” “minge” and “cunt” refer to girlbits, and cunt is used almost exclusively in the U.S. as a pejorative term for females and sometimes for homosexual or effeminate males, these terms are used almost exclusively to refer to males (regardless of sexual proclivities or adherence to traditional gender presentation) over in Englandwickcestershire. EDITED TO ADD: OK, based on comments from honest-to-God British people, sounds like cunt and minge are unisex terms of abuse (though I feel compelled to note that cunt is used almost akin to the American “dude” in certain contexts and sub-cultures—at least, if Irvine Welsh’s books and several of the Scottish and Irish movies I’ve seen are an accurate reflection of contemporary usage). I’ve noticed, however, that there’s less consensus about “twat.” Language is fascinating! I also love the fact that I’ve now typed twat, cunt and minge more frequently in the past 12 hours than I have in the past three years combined. GO TEAM!
Ultimately, getting period and cultural voice right is more than just an exercise in using the proper vocabulary or slang words. It’s a matter of syntax, and imitating syntax is really freaking hard because you have to leap out of the language and culture you’re immersed in every day. Besides rearranging sentences, it entails avoiding structures that are ubiquitous in contemporary American usage but relatively rare everywhere and everytime else, e.g., using “get” as an all-purpose auxiliary verb. Your battle is an uphill one, and I recognize it. I also recognize that some of you couldn’t give two shits about hitting the correct period voice, and I salute you, because hey, we’re looking for good stories, and if the story is good enough, I, for one, would much rather read a book that doesn’t even try for a period voice vs. one that tries and then fails. Those of you who do want to try, I would like to recommend reading a whole slew of novels, letters and periodicals published during the era you’re going to write in and dissect the crap out of the sentences. Letters are probably going to be the best source of how people actually spoke vs. how some writer of that era decided people should speak. You’re learning a different language, and there’s no more effective way of learning a language quickly than immersion.
I’ll admit that on top of sounding like an insufferable know-it-all, I’m being selfish in this request. My leisure reading time is extremely limited these days—I basically have time when school is out, which means a month in the winter and three months in the summer. I’m interested in cramming as much quality entertainment into those months as humanly possible, and coming across jarring word usage is like walking right into a glass automatic door that doesn’t open on time. Slams me right out of the story, and the book has to work that much harder to draw me back into its world. My DNF pile grows every day. Have mercy on a reader on a student’s budget, eh?
Love,
Candy
Here is something I would like to know as a self-confessed newb to literary romance.
Is there someone who does this specific type of editing? Say if you wrote a book, and did all the research, but wanted a professional to peruse the manuscript where do you go?
I mean, I hired a content/continuity editor, and a copy editor (since I’m a newb and until I have a fully polished manuscript nobody is going to talk to me) Is there such a thing as a period appropriate editor? Or are there those who are willing to do such things?
I can do all the research I want in the world, but as has been pointed out numerous times in these comments, in the information age all info is not equal, and should I happen to trust a bit of inappropriate fodder I end up looking like I did nothing at all.
So I am curious. Who do you go to if you want someone to check your story in this specific manner?
I’m sure that’s right. We will all have different areas of knowledge and interest, and I, for one, would not claim comprehensive cultural knowledge of any period, not even the far more remote era in which I specialise. But I think all of us would spot the same gross historical, linguistic and cultural errors, the ones that could very easily have been checked, or which, like potatoes in a Medieval British context, should have been vetoed through ordinary general knowledge.
@Jenn LeBlanc: in serious non-fiction publication, manuscripts are peer-reviewed by other specialists in the same subject, as I’m sure you know. That is, one usually asks one’s own colleagues to read through the text and comment, and editors will usually send the ms. out to other experts who may or may not be personally known to the author. This is done even though the author is herself already an expert in the subject concerned. I am currently in the process of peer-reviewing 8 papers for a volume of conference proceedings myself.
I’m pretty sure that most novelists go through much the same process (getting other authors to read their work prior to submitting it for publication), but it isn’t called peer-reviewing, and of course, the readers are going to be looking more at plot and characterisation and all the things that make a good story than at factual minutiae.
What I would do, in the highly unlikely event that I decided to write a novel set in the past, would be to do my own research, as you have done, reading up as widely as possible on the chosen period, and in the case of a recent period (e.g. 18thC) , reading a lot of contemporary publications, and addressing specific questions to relevant museum curators or other academic historians. Serious re-enactment groups, though often formed largely of dedicated ‘amateurs’, can also be extremely helpful about matters like costume. I don’t mean people who just like to dress up in vaguely Renaissance-looking gear, but those who are seriously concerned with authenticity.
I would actually try to cultivate the personal acquaintance and friendship of established academic historians of the period in question, and try to persuade them to check passages, or, for a suitable fee, the whole book. As a museum curator, I often answered specific queries about material culture from historical novelists.
But, you know, the fact that you are taking this issue seriously, that you have done your own research, that you are concerned about getting it right — to me, that speaks volumes in itself, and I bet that if you have any mistakes, they will be small and insignificant ones (and even the greatest expert makes some of those). The writers who commit the real howlers do so because they are not bothered. And as some here have indicated, there are readers, too, who don’t care, as long as the story is good, so I suppose the less meticulous writers feel that time and effort spent on getting it right is wasted.
🙂
@Elizabeth
I think you answered your own question about why romance novels, especially those set in 18C England, are not more historically accurate. We are still coloring the novels with our own morals and ideas about what is or is not heroic.
Charles Fax is not my idea of a romance hero and I can’t imagine many writers would be able even to have the hero reading a book about farting in a way the reader would accept unless he was reading with a sardonic smile. And no romance hero could show up drunk to Parliament unless it was the beginning of the novel and we would expect him to be sober by the novel’s close. Can you imagine Georgiana as a romance heroine? Getting drunk while pregnant and the massive amounts of money she gambled away? And Emily Lennox seems like she got a romance—duke and all—but he was about as faithful to her as my dog is to a particular leg.
Even if the setting was historically accurate, the hero and heroine would have to be good upstanding Victorians—at least by the end of the novel.
Elizabeth, you’re perfectly right, of course, and that’s one reason I choose to write in the mid 1700’s rather than the Regency.
But there is a world of difference between “crude” and “low.” One is amusingly crass, the other is revealing your class orgins, and that hasn’t been acceptable until recently, when things like celebrating being “Essex” has become the norm.
Thank goodness, I say.
But when we write in the period, we have to be true to that period, as much as we can.
Isobel – loved your comment. It’s because when you write a historical you’re writing a real time, not a made-up one, and there are any number of variations. Sadly, there are also variations you can be wrong (and I’ve been there myself a time or seven).
Jenn, there is no one place you can go to, nobody who will check a romance novel for errors, which I call a big shame. It would be great.
But part of writing a novel is doing it yourself. That includes editing, fact checking and all the other stuff. Unless you’re earning a wedge and you can afford to employ people, and I think it shows when that happens. Like historicals that have “patches” of detailed knowledge and then “filler” sections that are badly researched. If you don’t want to do the research then write a fantasy historical (and let me add, I am so there).
Ag, love yours, too. And there are definitely egregious mistakes and annoying paper-thin historicals that are obviously wrong, or so vague they aren’t historicals at all. When I read my first Moning and the heroine tucked into sausages and potatoes in late Tudor Scotland, I knew I was in for a romp. But somehow, when books are so far-fetched they can’t be true, they are less annoying than the ones that purport to be accurate, but aren’t.
For me, the details add to the romance, and the more in depth they are, the better. Just as a generic fantasy is boring, so is a generic historical.
Charles James Fox was a pretty romantic bloke, for his time. It would be fun if we could do mistresses and all, and in the erotic area, it could be possible.
Jenn wrote:
If you don’t already belong, you might consider the Historical Novel Society (http://www.historicalnovelsociety.org). I don’t remember specifically anyone offering such editing services in their publication, but I wasn’t in the market, so probably wouldn’t have noticed. There is a yahoogroup also, and you need not be a society member to join the yahoogroup. You might find an answer to your question there.
I’d like to plug the society for readers of historical fiction. The two review issues they publish each year are worth the price of membership IMHO, and there are two other issues with interviews, articles, etc. There will be a conference in San Diego in June 2011.
@Jennifer
I actually find his romance with—and secret marriage to—Elizabeth Armistad VERY romantic. In fact, it’s part of the inspiration for my upcoming book.
I don’t see this at all, or I don’t agree with it any way. If I wanted to write about starchy, uptight Victorians, I would. But I don’t. I want to write about wild, slightly raunchy Georgians.
@Lynne: Yeah, I always seem to discover an error right after I return the galley. *sigh* I think that’s just what happens when you’re constantly trying to expand your knowledge base (as most of us are). History isn’t dead. New facts are constantly being uncovered and published.
I don’t demand a perfect book (and I don’t pretend that I can deliver one), but I want it to be clear that the author tried.
I cannot see suspending all the knowledge you have ever acquired to the point where you can accept the reality of vampires and people with no souls (ala Isaac Asimov) and be stopped in your tracks by a word that etymologically is a few years off the historical mark. I do understand that bone picking is popular because that is where you find the sweetest meat, but why don’t y’all go back to enjoying your writing and enjoying your reading? Yeah, I ‘burgeoned’, but only a little bit as opposed to burgeoning enormously. . .
These are words of wisdom! 🙂
Isobel Carr you are my new favourite person – Charles Fox as inspiration for a romance novel. SQUEEEEE.
These are totally different situations. The author’s own invention or creation follows the rules that he or she has set, but if a real person, place or historical era is incorporated into the tale, someone or something that actually exists or existed in real life, then those elements are subject to the rules of real life, not those of fiction.
If a contemporary story is set in a wholly imaginary town, the author is entitled to create the characteristics of that town as he/she thinks fit. But if it is set in present-day London or Berlin or New York, any description of the setting should correspond with the reality of those places — otherwise, why bother to use reality at all?
Virginia, this is obviously a ymmv situation, but for myself I find that when a writer makes the small details (clothing, speech, food) believable and accurate, I’m much more able to accept the big fantasy part – vampires or whatever – of the story.
If you don’t put the nails in properly, your whole stage will fall down in the middle of the big renunciation scene in the second act.
I think AgTigress covered this, but I have to concur. The GOALS of these types of novels are entirely different and I judge them on whether or not they meet their goal.
An historical novel is first and foremost an exercise in telling a story that could have happened. If you stray too far from this, then you’ve failed IMO (“too far” will of course vary by reader). It becomes a fantasy. Nothing wrong with that, but a fantasy with a historical-ish setting is simply not the same thing as an historical novel. What I ask for here is that the author is clearly attempting historical rather than wallpaper fantasy.
A science fiction/fantasy novel must create its own world and convince the reader that the fantastical is real. The book fails when there are holes in the world building, when things don’t make sense or add up. The reader has to grant the basic premise, or there’s no point in picking up the book, but the author then has to deliver on that premise.
10 signs you may be in for a Rough Read(TM)
1. Bloody hell, jolly good, tally ho, pip pip!
2. Och aye, weel, I dinna ken, me puir wee bairns.
3. Faith and begorra!
4. Come into my lodge, White Eyes, and touch my savage heart.
5. Oh, my stars and garters!
6. Namaste, Memsahib.
7. But of course, ma petite, je ne sais quoi.
8. Insha’Allah, little lizard.
9. Ah, so, young grasshopper.
10. Howdy, pardner.
OMG, I actually recognize #8!
I can do all the research I want in the world, but as has been pointed out numerous times in these comments, in the information age all info is not equal, and should I happen to trust a bit of inappropriate fodder I end up looking like I did nothing at all.
This is the heart of what Candy is complaining about. If you cannot distinguish reliable sources from fodder, you aren’t engaged in research.
And if you don’t have a solid grasp of history, no amount of research into the speech, customs, and mores of your book’s period will save you from committing howlers. Marsha Canham’s Iron Rose contains lashings of period nautical detail, but also alludes to bedsprings, Redcoats, and factories, in 1614.
I’ve always thought it would be funny if in a romance novel someone was trying to pretend to be something they’re not – like say a 21st century American man finds himself in 18th century Ireland and has to pretend he’s someone’s cousin – and totally screws everything up by saying “Faith and begorra.”
But that’s just me.
@DM. I hate to resort to snobbery, but you probably should be writing stuff like Will and Ariel Durant did instead of Harlequins. I read romance novels mostly for the sex.
Oh! Reminds me! Howler: male editor talking about the ridiculous stuff he has to wade through. Says a guy wrote purportedly sexy novel and referred to the ‘twin lobes of her clitoris.”’ Editor says, “I am still wincing and I’m not even female.”
@JamiSings. You would have a field day with Crichton’s
Timeline.
All of these posts are so intelligent and, some, obviously well researched, that I hate to even add my comment. But, can we PLEASE agree that the word “gel” as in, old aristocratic, grumpy crone using it to refer to the heroine in historicals, be stopped?! I have stopped reading books because I hated it.
While, during this historical period if my admittedly missing research is to be believed, ‘nice’ pretty much meant someone was ‘too stupid to know better’ as to its current meaning. And, there is my old stand-by of PRONE meaning horizontal as opposed to the original meaning of FACE DOWN (supine is face up). I have to say that I get some giggles from language used inappropriately, but it always pulls me out of a story to have to figure out what the author meant to say as opposed to what s/he actually did say. And then there are the sex acts that are anatomically impossible, especially if one is prone and nice.
Virginia Llorca, the genre we are discussing here is romance, not pornography. The attitude you express plays right into the hands of those who think they are the same thing.
Read books chiefly for the sex, by all means, but the whole point is that good romance novels are stories about one or more love affairs. They can be judged by the general standards of good fiction, and will measure up. They should be well-written, with imaginative and believable plots and well-realised characters. They should be properly researched. None of that detracts from any sexual content: on the contrary, it should greatly enhance it. Graphic sexual content did not even start to appear in the romance genre till the 1980s, and was not legal in any novel before the 1960s, so many great, classic romances contain little or no direct reference to copulation.
Pornography is a genre in which the central subject is copulation, and its goal is not to interest the reader in fictional characters and their lives, but merely to bring about the reader’s sexual arousal, possibly to orgasm. Pornography requires no conventional plot and virtually no characterisation, let alone sound historical research. Of course, there is good pornography and bad, like all other art and creation, and it can be entertaining to read, but it is not the same thing as ‘romance’.
Romance is sex with a special person whom you love: pornography is a quickie up against the wall with a bloke you met in the pub an hour ago. Not the same thing.
History gets in the way of your spank bank? WTF? Those of us who want historicals to be, well, historical should stick to writing non-fiction? That statement would imply that the entire genre of historical fiction (be in lit fic, romance, mystery, what-have-you) shouldn’t exist, which is patently ridiculous . . . or it ought to be.
There are publishers who specialize in one-handed reads, but most of us don’t write for them.
@AgTigress. Who said ANYTHING about pornography? “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” Change the word ‘hear’ to ‘see’ or even ‘believe’. And a quickie up against a wall is not pornography, babe. I did research that one.
@Isobel Carr. You guys go way off the deep deep end really quickly and being facetious is not the same as being NASTY, which your post qualifies as. NASTY. Spank Bank? One handed reads? Get out of the gutter. You guys. And I hate it when I get a column mention and they attribute my words to you. That really sucks. You guys.
Rich in appropriate historical detail and sexy are not mutually exclusive. Jo Beverley, Courtney Milan, Lynne Connolly, Joanna Bourne, and a host of others all pull this off on a regular basis, and I guarantee you that their publishers do not wish they were writing non-fiction.
🙂 You don’t recognise a metaphor when you read one?
Wow. Though actually, it’s closer than you think! Look up the etymology (not the definition, the etymology) of pornography. 😉
I have no problem whatever with the existence of pornography (though I always preferred visual to verbal, myself), nor with its use. But if you ‘read romance novels mostly for the sex’ (your own words), and regard the quality of the writing, the plot, the characterisation and research as immaterial and irrelevant, then you might just as well go for pure pornography, since you are spurning the other elements that make many romance novels good-quality works of fiction — and the elements that good writers of romance work hard over and strive to perfect.
That’s a pity, because you are missing such a lot. Pornography is all about the sex, and only about the sex, and plot, characterisation and research are immaterial and irrelevant. Looks as though you may be reading the wrong genre…
😉
@Virginia Llorca You said
Don’t know how else to interpret that except as we have. None of us was nasty with you (at least not by my standards). In fact, I think we were awfully polite considering how insulting you’ve been from the very beginning of hits conversation.
I’ve tried reading erotic novels, and have been unsuccessful. I find them rather rough going. I don’t think I’ve been insulting. Writing the way Will and Areil Durant do is insulting to you? The closest I’ve actually come to reading the type of book you espouse is Sandra Brown. And her use of the 26 available letters works out just fine. Whatever works for you, toots. Enjoy your choices. “Metaphor”? I edited and set galleys for Contemporary Books for years. It was the dawn of electronic typesetting and Optical Character Readers. My opinion was respected. I was an English Lit major at Loyola U, Chicago. You guys. Shucks.
Of course it is insulting to assume the poster is a writer of historical romances and then tell them they ought to be writing nonfiction. The implicit judgement is that their work fails in its primary goal, which is to entertain, and that they ought to stick to informative writing.
I think this speaks to a limited understanding of historical romance. The bar is indeed very high these days precisely because so many writers are delivering books that blend thoughtful research with skilled storytelling. This makes it all the more disappointing to discover yourself in the middle of a book in which the author has not taken the same care.
But more than that, your comment implies that romance is a not a genre we can ask a great deal from.
And this insults both the genre and those who have taken the time to post so thoughtfully here. It says romance isn’t worthy of discussion, and by extension, that those engaging in the discussion should spend their time in some other way.
Except that you’ve repeatedly denigrated those choices. Historical romance, according to your posts, is a genre we can’t ask a great deal from and it certainly isn’t one we should waste our time discussing.
Your so full of yourself. You take it all way too seriously, toots.
I didn’t and don’t insult anybody. You can take that to the bank, babe.
Your judgmental attitude is obviously a reflection of your ego. You only need to think YOU are doing your best. Or didn’t anyone ever tell you that?
Gotta go finish baking now. Have a happy, healthy and holy Christmas. Tons of snow here. So beautiful.
Indeed. Historical fiction, when written to a high standard, is a powerful and noble genre. Like all good storytelling, it entertains, delights, and illuminates the experience of being human, but it also tends to arouse interest in the past, and painlessly teaches that ultimate understanding that all historians and archaeologists are seeking, namely, how to identify the ways in which our ancestors were like us, and the ways in which they were different.
I think that some grasp of history is important for any cultured and educated person: humans are the only animals (as far as we know) able, because of language, to learn about things that happened before our own lifetimes, so it behoves us to make the most of that ability. And I am keenly aware that a great many people derive their knowledge of the past from fictional sources, so I think it is important that those sources are reliable, not misleading.
I don’t think any one of us here is a rigid perfectionist on these matters. We all make mistakes, and most mistakes are forgivable. But what does annoy me is the blithe conviction that getting the history right simply doesn’t matter: that history is as much a creation of the imagination as a fantasy world is. If a novelist can’t be bothered to take some trouble over accuracy when dealing with times and places and people that really happened and existed, then she should not be writing within an historical setting. She should write within a factual contemporary setting that she knows, or one that she can legitimately create as a fantasy world.
I have the liveliest admiration for good historical novelists. All I know about Tang Dynasty China, for instance, has been learned from looking at museum artefacts and reading the wonderful detective stories of Robert van Gulik. I don’t know much about the place and time, but what I know I can trust to be correct, and that matters to me, because Tang Dynasty China is not a figment of anyone’s imagination. It existed.
I don’t know how you can reconcile these two statements.
I’m not certain how anyone’s ego enters into this discussion. Romance readers come to sights like this one because we have voracious appetites for great stories, but limited budgets to indulge. We talk candidly about the books we read and hope others will do the same so we can find more great reads. The readers posting on this thread are talking about detail in historical romances: how much we do or don’t demand, which books and authors have worked for us, which ones have disappointed us.
I read and enjoy historicals in which the story takes precedence over the world building, but I like to know before I spend my reading dollars that this will be the case. If I can only buy one book, and I have the choice between a Regency with very little historical detail, and something like Joanna Bourne’s latest title, which will take me to new and unusual historical settings she’s constructed out of research into primary sources, I’m going to choose Bourne.
While I am certainly making judgments, prioritizing one kind of reading experience over another, I don’t think this makes me judgmental.
Yes. I take romance seriously.
The real question is, as a respected editor, why don’t you?
Virginia Llorca, it seems to me absolutely right and proper to take seriously the issue of the quality and standards of romance novels within the wider category of all fiction, precisely because there are so many ill-informed critics who dismiss all romance as formulaic ‘pornography for women’, aimed at readers wholly lacking in maturity, education and discrimination.
All categories of published fiction contain both good work and bad, but in some circles, romance is regarded as automatically to be placed at the bottom of the pile. This is simply not true. There are many romance novelists who, by any critical standards, are inspired, conscientious and highly skilled writers. To dismiss their efforts so flippantly by suggesting that we, as readers, are taking it ‘all way too seriously’ seems to me to denigrate their achievements.
I feel so validated to have inspired so much intelligent discussion. Thanks for listening.
@Isobel
Charles Fox and raunchy Georgians would be an auto-buy for me. I miss Jo Bev’s Georgians. The earlier parts of Anne Suart’s latest trilogy were Georgian set and used a fictionalized version of Dashwood’s Hellfire Club. The series got more wallpapery and less connected with history as it progressed, but it’s a great example of history marrying well with sexy.
Well, this seems to have rather devolved here, but I’ll add this, in regards to the word cunt:
It was a medical term until Beckett adopted it, and connected it to the derogatory when he was writing in the early 1900s.
Sara Lea: are you quite sure? What is your source for that information? All the evidence I have found is very much to the contrary.
The word first appears in Middle English, and according to Partridge, was already regarded as ‘legally obscene’ (that is, ‘unprintable’) by the 17th century. In the first, 1785 edition of Grose’s The Vulgar Tongue, it is printed thus: c**t, and has a pretty offensive definition (“The konnos of the Greek and the cunnus of the Latin dictionaries: a nasty name for a nasty thing: un con”) Huh: and I used to be rather an admirer of Francis Grose.
The word is basically Germanic, with direct cognates in Scandinavian languages and Middle Low German, but I imagine the ultimate derivation is, in fact, Latin cunnus, as Grose implies. It links in an interesting way, though probably fortuitously, with the 18th/19thC slang term cunny/coney, and hence with the modern pussy, because hares and rabbits (coneys), rather than cats, were once called ‘puss’.