Styles of language

Looking back over my posts from 2008 I found this interesting snippet from  Phillippa Gregory. Talking about writing, language and languages, she says:

"In terms of styles of language‚ I deliberately took the choice to use fundamentally modern language‚ but quite pure and quite simple. So I don′t use slang and I don′t use modern idioms. This is to make it acceptable to a wider audience and to write as well as I possibly can without being limited by language. For example‚ if I was to write a novel set in France and there were French people speaking French to each other − I wouldn′t put that on the page in French‚ I′d put it in English − and the reader understands as it′s part of a convention of reading a novel‚ that when someone is speaking Russian or French you don′t get a page of Russian or French − you get it in English.

If someone said to me that the past is a foreign country‚ it seems to me that it speaks a foreign language. So in terms of any notion of thee and thus and thy‚ superfluous words‚ I tend not to use them as it′s so strange to the modern eye. You also gain nothing by using them and the chances of rendering them correctly are very slim.

In the case of early modern society we don′t know how they spoke‚ we know how people have written down Shakespeare plays‚ but we don′t know how people actually spoke or what they sounded like. We do believe however that Anne Boleyn maintained the French accent throughout her life as she believed that it made her a bit special‚ I mention this in the novel. But in terms of how actually people spoke‚ we don′t know‚ so I won′t even make a guess."

This seems sensible to me, and  maybe that is because it is the way i approach writing historicals, too. I allow some of the local Northumbrian dialect I hear around me every day to  filter in where it is appropriate for the character and some Scots that is used today by my neighbours/and or heard on various trips north of the border. This isn't to try and add a historical edge to the story, but to help with characterization. Wander around Newcastle's main shopping street - Northumberland Street - any day of the week and you will hear  refined BBC type accents rubbing shoulders with Geordie and all the stops in between. (Sorry, no pun intended)

Personally I dislike the accent that predominates in Eastenders and the one I find the hardest to "translate" is the Rab Nesbit Glaswegian. I hear echoes of Northern Ireland in Australia, and can hear differences in American speech without know where in the US the speech originates. The whole subject of language is a fascinating one.

The Woodville Curse

Croaky voice this morning. This cold has been brewing for a day or two and now its here. The sad thing is I cannot lie in bed like I used to! I'm more comfortable up and about. The paracetomol has lifted the worst of the symptoms so I'm doing some work before the effects wear off.

I'm reading The King's Curse by Philippa Gregory and finding it a depressing tale. One thing I had not realised before opening this book was how many Plantagenets were still around in Tudor times. A vast family, and most of them healthy, unlike the Tudors, who were the absolute opposite. Poor genes, or was it the curse? Gregory has taken up the rumour that Elizabeth Woodville and her daughter Elizabeth spun a curse on learning of the death of the young Plantagenet princes in the tower - whoever killed them would fail to rear sons and grandsons of their own. I first read this in the White Queen, and thought what a stroke of genius it was.

When daughter Elizabeth married Henry Tudor she became a victim of that curse, for her eldest son Arthur died very young. Her second son lived, but most of his children died in the womb or shortly afterwards. One son survived into his teens before he died. Two girls lived into adulthood - Mary and Elizabeth. His one illegitimate but acknowledged son died young. It was not a prolific record for a king with so many rumoured extramarital affairs.

Believe in curses or not, there is a strange rightness to the fact that it exonerates Richard III because I think I am right in saying that though his son died, he died before the Princes in the tower, and before the curse was made.

Gabaldon and Jamie's charm

My attention has turned to Gabaldon's Written in My Own Heart's Blood now. It was published in 2014 but the waiting list was long at my library and I don't care for the these later novels enough to pay the high price they demand. So I waited, and lo! patience is rewarded.

I remembered that Jamie was thought to be dead at the end of the last book, and that Claire had married Lord John. Then the news came through that Jamie wasn't dead and the book ended. Well, this one starts by trying to kid people that Jamie is still dead. I'm 85 pages in, and Jamie and Claire still haven't re-united. Now some people might argue that this is artful suspense; others might claim this is sheer bloody-mindedness on the part of the author. Keep 'em in suspenders as long as you can!

There will hundreds of fans out there who have no problem with the complex relationships that pepper the series. After so long away, I'm having a hard time fixing who everyone is. The members of the family Fraser aren't so bad; it's the hangers on like Dottie and Rachel who give me problems. Plus which there are new characters no reader will ever have met before. And I see we're still fixed in the American war in 1778. Duh. (I wonder why Americans  like English history so much? I have absolutely no feeling for the American wars of Independence and I assume that unless there are English forebears involved, Americans would feel the same way about English history. But out of the 240 million or whatever the US population is now, only a small percentage will have English roots.)

Gabaldon writes with such detail. Every thought, every wriggle of an eyebrow is recorded. No wonder each book reaches 800 plus pages. Growing bored with it last night I flicked ahead to see what else might be in store and noted two gruesome operations and a time shift section. There are also places where Jamie tells Claire very prettily how much he loves her, and I suspect this is where Jamie's charm lies. Every woman dreams her man will say these things to her!

On the other hand, the writing has a strange page-turning quality I find hard to define. It isn't literary, like Mantel., and not lyrical like Chadwick. Nor is it attention grabbing like Gregory. It is chatty in style, almost as if she were speaking direct to the reader. There is wit in the dialogue, beauty in the description, sound common sense and philosophy mixed. There is also the banal and the commonplace and it does go on at great length, At times I long for the story to move forward. Why haven't Claire and Jamie met yet? I might skip ahead.....

The White Queen and my thoughts

A lot of people will have enjoyed the White Queen on tv. I wished I had enjoyed it more. But I'm one of those people who go on about zippers in medieval clothes, and heroines who barely age between 24 and 46 in spite of living in perilous times and bearing 12 children. At the end of the series, Elizabeth's jawline was firm, sculptured and would be the envy of any sixteen year old. True, they made her look pale and sometimes she had a hint of bags under her eyes, but that's all.

Richard was never well cast in my view. There was something strange about Richard as portrayed here, and perhaps the fault lies in the dialogue he was given, but he always seemed wooden, as if that lovely padded jacket he wore was in reality a steel corset that kept him rigid. And the lines themselves - "I am the King! You will breathe for me!" he says to his dead son. No actor could make those lines work. Maybe the actor wanted to give Richard a brooding sense of wickedness held in check, but if he did he ought to have realised it did not blend well with the character's actions and dialogue.

The series never made clear who dealt the Princes in the Tower the final blow. (or if it did I missed it!) Was it Anne Neville? Or Margaret Beaufort? The curse on the boys' killer, made by Elizabeth and her daughter Elizabeth, seems to point to Anne (she died and her son died) but not to Margaret, whose son lived to father sons of his own, but then one son died.  One survived, but all Henry VIII's sons died, of course. Well, make of it what you will, the curse was a stroke of genius on Phillippa Gregory's part. I'm assuming the idea originated with her, and wasn't some folk tale she'd tapped into.

I thought the it was also a stroke of genius on the part of the film-makers to have the actor's breath cloud the air even when they stood in front of a roaring fire, hinting at the coldness of their surroundings. So many of the scenes were set in stone castles or churches, and they would have been cold indeed. But then they went too far. The Battle of Bosworth Field was fought on 22nd August and they filmed it in snowy, winter conditions with leafless trees!

My other gripe was that two actors looked so much like each other that I never got them straightened out. I think one bearded  gent was on Tudor's side and the other was on Richard's side. But have two big burly men with curly brown hair and beards made it so easy to confuse them. I think the acting award for the series goes to the actor who played Stanley. The one who played Margaret Beaufort was good, but by the end I had had enough of her mouth rolling grimaces, and to go to a man and ask him to sacrifice his son for hers was a step too far...the woman was obsessed and borderline mad. But there I go, confusing character and actor, so she must have been good.

Post Battle Sex

I set out to watch The White Queen when the series began and lost interest after two episodes. Zips fastening gowns are so uncool in a medieval series. Zips have to be easy for the costume department, I understand that, but if they must use them instead of the authentic and quite erotic criss-cross lacing, then why don't they make sure the cameras don't catch the wretched things? Think of the love scenes involving laces they could do....

This last episode featured Richard of Gloucester, and I was curious. Always a Richard supporter, I think the casting director must have taken note of the facial reconstruction on Richard's skeleton done recently, because the actor portraying the character has a distinct resemblance to that model head. It's just a pity he lacks charisma. He gives very little to the camera, hasn't a distinctive voice, and his role is to stand by a lot of the time. He comes across as shy, earnest and a tad boring.

But then, Gregory's novels always give dramatic precedence to the women and of course, it is Elizabeth Woodville's story. I do wonder at the seeming preference for filming women-on-top sex. In the three episodes I've watched, I think every sex scene showed the men lying passive beneath an active woman. Perhaps the men were just too tired when they got home after all those battles.

For me, the best acting award goes to Janet McTeer, who died slowly in this weeks's episode. I also thought she had a distinct resemblance to Ms Gregory, though if they stood  side by side the disparity in their height would ensure absolute recognition! I heard Gregory speak at Alnwick Castle a few years ago, and she is tiny, hardly more than five foot two I should imagine. Inside that small frame there lurks a forceful personality and a strong work ethic.  I've often wondered if some of the characteristics of her characters rub off on Ms Gregory!

The pic is of Tim, who knows how to relax!

Horses for Courses

Carlisle - Gatehouse

Here's a link you should read - a Guardian critic who adores Mantel's writing. Click
I know reading is a subjective thing and all sorts of prejudices come between the written word and the readers' eyes, but in my view Mantel is a cut above other writers of historical fiction in this country today. You may disagree with me, and I haven't even read Bring up the Bodies yet, but I have just finished Gregory's Lady of the Rivers (the one about Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford) and it makes an interesting contrast to Wolf Hall.

Gregory's prose is workmanlike, journalistic even; she explains clearly, but there is a distinct lack of originality in the way she strings her words together. The sentences are smooth, but in no way lyrical. Her style works, no doubt about it; the stories are told, her sales are phenomenal and people wait anxiously for the next new work.

But Mantel's prose is so very different. Lyrical, yes, thoughtful, yes, and certainly original. Anyone who looks for literary skill as well as a good story, will enjoy Mantel. Those who simply want a good story, without frills and not requiring them to think too much, will no doubt prefer Gregory. Horses for courses? Of course. We all know what we like, and why.

I went on a trip to Carlisle last Thursday, which is why pictures of the castle are featuring on my blog right now.  I'll talk about the castle in my next blog.

Clever novelist

I have to give Gregory credit for the ending of The White Queen. All the way through the book the hint of witchcraft is maintained and comes to fruition when Elizabeth Woodville and her daughter Elizabeth curse whoever killed the Princes in the Tower. They know it is not Richard, and suspect Buckingham and the Stanleys but cannot prove it. The curse decrees that the firstborn son of the culprit shall die through the coming generations until there are only girls left....well, we know who that pinpoints as the culprit, don't we?
So Gregory has avoided angering the Ricardians, found a novel way of stating the guilty party (no pun intended) and given the reader a flavour of the unease, uncertainty and distrust of the times into the bargain.
Good for her. But I still don't care for her heroine.

The White Queen

I'm still not enamoured of The White Queen, which is most odd, as I expected to like it. I buy very few books in hardback these days, but it was one of them. Nor can I say exactly why I'm not ripping through it at a rate of knots. There's something almost reported speechish, something quite passive about the voice in which the story is delivered, almost as if the main character is fatally pre-determined. Elizabeth and Edward share one of the most amazing love stories in history and yet there is no hot, fiery centre in the central figure of Elizabeth. She is cold, thinks herself related to the watery spirit Melusine and seems fuelled by hatred more than love.

Historical novels

I listened to Front Row on BBC 4 last night courtesy of the Listen Again feature and enjoyed 30 minutes of discussion about historical novels.
Interesting to hear the different views put forward. Novelists claim to explore and explain the past, while Tristram Hunt is tired of the relentless detail that fills most historical novels.
Phillippa Gregory, Antonia Fraser and others talk about how they see their work. Some cannot write without the facts ..."I never invent anything," while others are prepared to look at the facts and make a stab at interpreting them. Others, unnamed, the narrator said disparagingly, happily change the dates of battles and other facts without a qualm if it will make a better story! An intriguing listen.

I recommended Lisa McMann yesterday. Today I popped over to read through her advice once more and lo and behold the thing is unobtainable. I guess Nathan recommended her and people flew to her site and crashed it. I'll wait a few days and see if it recovers.

The pic? Looking out from the formal gardens at Cragside. That's the road that takes us home.

Writing, Nathan and Bookbag

"There's good reason for this rule to apply -- one of the absolute most important attributes of any successful writer is the ability to scrutinize their own work in order to improve it and make it better. The minute a writer starts thinking what they write is genius is the moment they stop scrutinizing their work for places where it can be improved upon, changed, or, most importantly of all, removed. A healthy skepticism is an essential tool in a writer's arsenal. Also bourbon."

This quote comes from Nathan Bransford's blog and it is so true.

However, it is too late for FAR AFTER GOLD. In exactly one month's time, my book will out in the world for public scrutiny. I cannot improve it now, but believe me, I worked hard on it, and I learned a great deal about writing while revising it. The picture above is my image of Oli, one of the characters in the book. Elaine Dingsdale of Bookbag says in her review: He's a beautifully depicted character who really brings the book to life with his hero worship of Flane and his empathy with Emer, whom he immediately recognises as a kindred spirit and fellow misfit. His maturity and attitude were tremendous and with wisdom beyond his years, I was moved close to tears on several occasions."

This time of year is for reflection on what has gone and what is to come. I'm comfortable with what I've achieved in 2008. I'm not one for making resolutions and even less do I broadcast the ones I think about in my deepest thoughts. What I will do is spend the next month publicising my book whenever and wherever I can. It needs my help. I'm an unknown name and I don't want Quaestor to regret that they took a chance on me.

I'll still be working on KEEP TRUST, which is going well, but I must become a PR person. It doesn't come easily. Those who ask me about my writing must think I don't want to talk about it, because I can never think of anything witty or interesting to say about it. To say creative writing takes up most of my waking hours sounds pretentious and dreadfully snobbish, and unless the person you speak to does it themselves, it is hard to make the subject interesting.

Perhaps when (if, girl, if) I become established, (if ever) I'll have learned how to talk about what and how I write and an interesting and friendly way. I remember how Phillippa Gregory performed so confidently at Bowes Museum and applaud her. At the moment, I feel tongue-tied with embarrassment. And I notice my over use of the word interesting in this piece.

And finally....

I found an interview with Phillippa Gregory in which she states:

"In terms of styles of language‚ I deliberately took the choice to use fundamentally modern language‚ but quite pure and quite simple. So I don′t use slang and I don′t use modern idioms. This is to make it acceptable to a wider audience and to write as well as I possibly can without being limited by language. For example‚ if I was to write a novel set in France and there were French people speaking French to each other − I wouldn′t put that on the page in French‚ I′d put it in English − and the reader understands as it′s part of a convention of reading a novel‚ that when someone is speaking Russian or French you don′t get a page of Russian or French − you get it in English.
If someone said to me that the past is a foreign country‚ it seems to me that it speaks a foreign language. So in terms of any notion of thee and thus and thy‚ superfluous words‚ I tend not to use them as it′s so strange to the modern eye. You also gain nothing by using them and the chances of rendering them correctly are very slim.
In the case of early modern society we don′t know how they spoke‚ we know how people have written down Shakespeare plays‚ but we don′t know how people actually spoke or what they sounded like. We do believe however that Anne Boleyn maintained the French accent throughout her life as she believed that it made her a bit special‚ I mention this in the novel. But in terms of how actually people spoke‚ we don′t know‚ so I won′t even make a guess."

An author who thinks differently is Patricia Finney. I once tried her book Firedrake's Eye but didn't get very far with it as I found reading it was rather more of a struggle than a pleasure. A review of her book A Shadow of Gulls says she "endows her players with a rich language--essentially modern English lightly laced with fanciful syntax and Elizabethan vocabulary."
On Nov 26, 2003 Roz Kaveney wrote in the Telegraph : "The books' language is a triumph. Finney finds a workable compromise between anachronistic slanginess and a verbose rhodomontade that would probably more accurately represent much of Elizabethan speech."

Now rhodomontade is not in my trusty dictionary, but rhodo means rose coloured. However, the internet tells me it means "pretentiously boastful or bragging." Still, it doesn't tempt me to go find the book and read it. Would you?

My cover!

Here it is!

My cover!

My very first paperback cover!

And the publication date has moved up to January 2009!

I'm very pleased with it. I didn't want what I call a "half-naked-couple-in-a-clinch" cover even though a good friend of ours reminded me, once he heard I was writing, that "shagging sells!"

My publisher assures me that the runes top and bottom roughly spell out my name and the title and not something like "Halfdan was here...."

The other highlight of the day was the visit to Bowes Museum to hear Phillippa Gregory speak as part of the Durham Literary Festival. She is smaller than I imagined, and spoke very well for over an hour. Mary Queen of Scots she'd always avoided as a heroine because everybody's done her, and besides she'd always thought her an idiot. Mary had claims to three crowns and lost them all. She had three husbands and lost them too. Well, to lose one is unlucky, to lose two is careless and to lose all three must mean she was an idiot.

Phillippa went on to explain how she'd come to realise that most of the original documents were written by Polydor Virgil and deliberately biased. There are one or two letters, but they are suspect. No one wrote of Mary until the Victorians took her up, and they too were biased, though in a different way. They saw her through a blinkered male perspective and the resultant histories made her sound romantic but idiotic. (I rush to get this down before it all fades away. If you get the chance to hear Ms Gregory say it, do go and listen. She says it all so much better!)

So she read My Heart is Mine Own by John Gay and began to see Mary in a different way, began to do the research, visit the locations, and walked around the house talking to herself until she felt she had grasped Mary's "voice"- how she felt, how she was - and then began to write. The tale begins once Mary leaves Scotland and instead of finding herself at the head of an army ready to take back her Scottish throne, is quietly taken to Bolton Castle and locked in. Her jailor is Lord Shrewsbury, married only 14 months to Bess (of Hardwick fame) and inevitably, he falls in love with Mary. To make matters worse, Bess is a self-made woman of frugal habits. Can you imagine anything worse if you were Bess than having this Queen thrust upon you, demanding not only 32 courses at dinner every day but white wine too - not to drink, but to wash her face?

There was much more and all of it entertaining. Such as why Ms Gregory uses the first person - to really get inside each of the three protagonists - and why she does not write of Mary's death -

because the sixteen years of Mary's imprisonment were filled with plots to escape and that would have been too tedious to recount. So the book covers only a portion, and uses the Duke of Norfolk's execution as a forerunner of Mary's own death.

Autum colours are slow

Autumn is coming slow this year. Only the horsechestnuts have turned so far and the rest of the trees are thinking about it. For sheer eyecatching colour we'll never outdo places like Canada, but we do get a sublety here in a our native trees which I find pleasing. The ornamental rowan in our garden is bright scarlet, yet the same variety of tree fifty yards away on the other side of the cul-de-sac is still partly green.

Today I finished the final check on WsB and sent it off on its journey to some publishers' in-tray where it will wait to be judged. In fact I was so keen to send it off that my finger slipped and the publisher duly received a copy of their last post to me - and I didn't realise I'd sent it until the automatic acknowledgement popped in to my in-box. By then I'd sent off the real post, and duly received another acknowledgement. They'll be tired of me already.

Today I sent my publisher an author bio and a photo of me. I expect it will go in the media kit he's proposing to put together. Any day soon I should receive some copies to give out for review - if I can persuade any newspaper reviewers to take it on!

I bought a ticket to hear Phillippa Gregory speak on Sunday. She's taking part in the Durham Literature Festival (17th-26th October) and we'll drive down to Bowes Museum for 3pm since that's where she going to be. Look out for pics of the museum....and maybe the lady herself, if she doesn't object.

What next?

I've done a swift 48 hour re-run over FAR AFTER GOLD and sent it back to Quaestor.

Found some mistakes, too, even though I thought it was perfect when I sent it off. As I pushed the button that would send it on it's way, my finger lingered...I had the nasty feeling that if I went through it again I'd find even more things to change. But there comes a time when you have to let go. Gulp.

So now I'm thinking about covers. Will it be plain, or with a picture? A headless female in a beautiful costume, or are they old hat now? I've read many of Gregory's but not this one even thought he cover is gorgeous.

Some of the newer historicals do feature the full figure now, though they may be looking at something other than the reader, as in Chadwick's new book, due in October.

Doing the grocery shop in Tesco yesterday I paused by the books section, and the cover that caught my eye was this one - which I hope to read soon.
It is attractive. But I also noticed that many of the books on display had plain covers. In other words, they had plain colours and symbols rather than people or landscapes photographs. I expect the covers I've illustrated are expensive, and perhaps publishers are cutting back on cover costs.

Some research in a big book store is obviously called for, and I shall not resist. It will be a pleasure! Perhaps more importantly, I should be thinking of promotion. I shall. Tomorrow. Honest. I've put a short announcement on Authors and Books blog today, and notified RNA cyber group. That's a start, but I'm sure there's lots more to do. Meanwhile, I've got critiques on one book to attend to, and a rewrite on a second that's gone on hold for a little while. And my friends wonder what it is I do all day apart from watching tennis in the Olympics! Sheesh!