They Said What? Crafting Dialogue in Historical Fiction by Suzanne Adair

As an author of historical fiction, I deal with a special challenge that writers of contemporary fiction don’t face. Only within the most recent century of human history have we preserved recordings of speech. An author who writes fiction set in that time period can capture dialogue accurately. However the rest of us must take liberties and make assumptions when crafting our characters’ conversations. Here are the ways we do it.

Although linguistics experts agree that humans don’t speak the way they write, some writers simulate dialogue by duplicating the way people wrote their personal correspondence, such as letters and journals. Using this method, a character from King James I’s England would talk in big, windy phrases filled with “thees” and “thous.” The speech would be lush with alien terms. Familiar words would be spelled in bizarre, inconsistent ways. Capitalization would look random. The result would slow the story pace and kill the interest of many readers. And since many people of King James’s time were illiterate, the writer would only be representing the expression of educated people.

Obstacles like these convince other writers to swing the opposite way in constructing verbal communication for historical fiction. They avoid the snarl of “thees” and “thous” by inserting modern speech, complete with slang, in their characters’ mouths. They assume that the dialogue will be so familiar to readers that they’ll glide over it. In practice, however, this approach can jolt readers out of the story. When you’re reading historical fiction, you want to be immersed in the exotic world of a story set in the past. Even a reader who doesn’t have a degree in history knows that a couple of Regency rakes prowling London brothels together wouldn’t call each other “bro.”

Many historical fiction writers, including myself, adopt a sort of middle ground. They use dialogue patterns that are mostly modern, but they avoid modern slang and anachronisms. They also incorporate period slang and terms in a manner that helps readers understand meanings from context. The idea here is to avoid having the pace stall while keeping the reader immersed in the fictional world and conveying the flavor of what conversation from a past era might have been like. Achieving this balance is tricky. We’re equipped with a vocabulary suited for the 21st century. To successfully craft dialogue from this middle ground, writers must develop an internal detector that flags anachronisms and modern slang. They must also enlist a team of early readers to help them do the flagging. Access to a dictionary that shows when words entered the English language is essential.

To learn what style of dialogue readers actually prefer, I queried readers on LibraryThing several summers ago. Most who responded preferred the middle ground. “Too much reliance on antiquated ways of speaking makes it hard or annoying to read, but slang and words that are clearly modern take me out of the book,” commented one reader. Another observed, “If the author is trying too hard to sound period, it just sounds contrived to me.”

These readers also volunteered insights into what makes conversations among historical characters resonate as authentic. While writers might believe that regional dialect contributes to the period ambiance, readers say no, that heavy use of dialect distracts them from the novel’s flow. Also, writers who devote research time to understanding a culture well enough to craft believable insults and jokes usually produce believable period dialogue.

And readers enjoy conversations that sound “timeless.” Here we aren’t just talking about dialogue that’s suitable for a specific historical period, but dialogue that’s crafted well enough to be understood a hundred years from now, without a slang dictionary. That’s a tall order for all novelists, regardless of when their fiction is set.

What historical fiction author have you read who crafts timeless dialogue? What do you think of the use of regional dialect, modern slang, or antiquated speech patterns in historical fiction?

Bio:

Award-winning novelist Suzanne Adair is a Florida native who lives in a two hundred-year-old city at the edge of the North Carolina Piedmont named for an English explorer who was beheaded. Her suspense and thrillers transport readers to the Southern theater of the Revolutionary War, where she brings historic towns, battles, and people to life. She fuels her creativity with Revolutionary War reenacting and visits to historic sites. When she’s not writing, she enjoys cooking, dancing, hiking, and spending time with her family. October 2015, look for the release of her next Michael Stoddard American Revolution Thriller, Deadly Occupation.

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