Keeping Your Reader in Your Historical Novel by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

Keeping Your Reader in Your Historical Story

As a historical writer it is important to make sure that you use the words of the period you have set your book in. For example if your story is set in the 1500s you could use the word hugger-mugger when talking about a sneaky person who is acting in a secretive way and elflocks to describe messy hair. Jargoyles meant that a person was puzzled about something in the 1600s while in the 1700s a person who was out of sorts was grumpish. In the 1800s people would have felt curglaff when they jumped into cold water and a man going for a post dinner walk while smoking his pipe was lunting. In the early 1900s a person who was drunk was referred to as being fuzzled.

Of course, it is important when using those words that the writer somehow explains what they mean such as, if a man said he was going for an after lunch lunt, the person he was talking to could reply. “I don’t have my pipe and tobacco with me today.” I feel that writers who use terminology from a different era or words or phrases from a different language without clarification are trying to impress the reader with their vocabulary and intellect. Speaking as a reader, for me what they are really doing is making me angry and interrupting the flow of the story. I am jolted out of the lives of the characters and into my life as I try to process the meaning of what was written.

As a writer you want the reader to be so caught up in the story that they don’t want to put the book down, you don’t want them to throw the book across the room because they don’t understand what has been said or done.

Another important aspect of writing historical novels or even novels set in past decades is to make sure that you do have the characters using devices that hadn’t been invented yet.

The ball point pen came into use in the 1940’s so you can’t have someone signing papers with it in the 1920s. The Charleston dance was introduced in a movie in 1923 and caught on after that, so a story set before that time could not have party-goers dancing it. While the computer was invented during World War II, it didn’t come into commercial use until the 1950/60s and personal use until the 1970/80s. Don’t have a person make a phone call before March 7, 1876, which is when Alexander Graham Bell patented his telephone and don’t have someone send a text on a mobile phone in the 1970s.

It is important to do your research when writing a novel set in the past, no matter what the year.

More historical words:

In the 1590s beef-witted described something as being brainless or stupid.

In the 1640s callipygian described a beautifully shaped butt.

In the 1650s sluberdegullion meant an unkempt, drooling person.

In the 1950s two people making out in the back seat of a car were doing the back seat bingo.

 

 

http://bookswelove.net/authors/donaldson-yarmey-joan/

 

                                   http://bookswelove.net/authors/donaldson-yarmey-joan/

 

What is a Chapter?

For more information about Susan Calder's books, or to purchase visit her Books We Love Author Page.  

Over the years I have read writing advice books and attended numerous courses and panel discussions on writing, but I don't remember a single discussion about what constitutes a novel chapter. Yet, I view the chapter as the unit of my novels. When I sit down at my computer, I don't aim to write x number of words or spend y number of hours at my desk or complete z scene that day. My writing goal is to finish the next chapter, or get as far along in it as I can. Ideally, I like to start a chapter and write it to the end in one swoop, however long that takes.  

My focus on the chapter in novel structure has led me to wonder, what is a chapter? Is the concept of the chapter studied so little because anything goes and there are no rules? Today I'll share my random thoughts on novel chapters as a writer and reader. I'd be curious to hear your ideas.

A chapter can be any length, from one word to a whole book, that is, a chapter-less novel. The only novel with no chapters I recall reading was short, about 150 pages. Evidently writers and readers like breaks in a long story. The most effective super-short chapter I've read was in the novel Last Orders by Graham Swift. The story involved a young man travelling with his father's four drinking buddies to dispose of his father's ashes in the sea. The chapters alternated between the viewpoints of the five characters. After several chapters of his father's buddies going on about the old days, we turn the page to the son's chapter, where he simply states Old farts. I found this hilarious and it expressed the son's frustration with his travelling companions better than 2,000 words could have done.

                                                                     
Chapter lengths in an individual novel can be consistent or wildly varied. I've written both kinds. Several years ago I wrote a suspense novel with five viewpoint characters. Each time a voice changed I started a new chapter and they couldn't all have equivalent amounts to say when their turns came. But, as a writer, I prefer consistent chapter length for pacing, so that high points in the story arrive at more or less even intervals. As a reader, I get more comfortable with a book when I know how long the next chapter will be. While it's good to shake readers up with story content, novels tend to work best when the reader is unaware of structure. Now I'm revising the suspense novel and combining voices in chapters, with scene breaks, making the chapters more even. I don't know if this will help the pacing, but cutting the numbers of chapters in half saves trees by using fewer pages.    

When the novel changes viewpoint, is it best to start a new chapter or break to a new scene? Not necessarily. Many successful novels fluctuate between points of view within a chapter, scene or paragraph. But my personal preference is for a new scene, if not chapter break, before a viewpoint change because I want my readers to be solidly in the head of a particular person and feel along with him or her.

What about titles for chapters? As a reader I either ignore them or find them clever. As a writer, I have enough trouble coming up with one title for a book, never mind fifteen or thirty more. If I ever go that route, I expect some of my chapter titles will add to the story experience, while other titles will be there simply to conform to the pattern I've set. The same with quotes and images at a chapter's start.

Now we come to the meat. I tend to view each chapter in my books as a kind of short story within the whole. Something needs to change in the course of the chapter. I think of each chapter as building to a mini-climax, which, hopefully, propels the reader to turn the page. That's why the ending is the most important part of each chapter. A great cliffhanger ending is a demand to keep reading, although continuous cliffhangers might start to feel melodramatic and manipulative. So I save my true cliffhangers for a few choice spots and try for intriguing endings with the other chapters.

A trick of some writers is to cut a dialogue mid-scene. For instance, Jenny tells Billy, "I'm pregnant" and the chapter ends. The next chapter starts with Jenny continuing, "What are we going to do about it?" This trick gets me to turn the page and contributes to suspense, but it also feels like cheating. As with scene breaks, I think there needs to be a gap of at least a few minutes from one chapter to the next, or a change of place or point of view.

Of course, these are all my opinions, derived from my particular reading and writing idiosyncrasies. There are no rules for novel chapters, but with their importance to a book's structure, I say let's bring them out of the shadows and give them a little more attention.

    

Dry Me a River by Karla Stover

 bwlauthors.blogspot.com

Here’s my idea for a mystery. The date is sometime in the mid-1960s. The place is New York. Someone murdered someone else and wants to dispose of the body. He / she loads up the body, drives for 6 or so hours, and dumps it in the Niagara River, near the falls. Safely back in Manhattan, the perp lets out that the individual was running from the law. There’s no body, no crime scene, and no evidence to shift through—EXCEPT—oops, the year is 1969 and the body shows up because that year the falls quit—well—quit falling. They went dry. And two bodies were found.

Nineteen sixty-nine was not the only time Niagara was dry. In 1848, a gale force wind began blowing off Lake Erie and caused thousands of tons of ice to jam up at the river’s mouth. For the next 48 hours, as the river bed dried and thousands of fish and turtles were left floundering, people flocked to the river. They couldn’t work because with the mill race was empty, and the mills and factories dependent on Niargara's water power had to shut down.

At first, venturing out on to the unexpectedly dry river bed was fun. People picked up bayonets, gun barrels, muskets, tomahawks, and other War of 1812 items. Some men with an eye to business drove a logging cart onto the bed and picked up 12-inch pine timbers measuring from 40 to 60 feet long. In as much as it could back then, the strange event became a tourist and media event. People walked from one side of the bed to the other, or crossed by horse, or in a horse-and-buggy. A squad of U.S. Army Cavalry soldiers put on an exhibition by riding up and down the bed. Downstream, some of the rocks which had been a boat hazard were blasted away.

But, then, it wasn’t fun any anymore. The more they missed the roar of the falls, the more people’s fear and anxiety grew. A Domesday scenario developed, and special church services were held on both sides of the border. Then, on March 31^st, the temperature rose, the wind shifted, and the ice jam broke apart, and the falls fell again.

The winter of 1847 – 1848 wasn’t unusually cold ,but the wind was the crucial factor. The Niagara River can only hold 2% of Lake Erie’s ice, and generally, 98% of the lake’s ice remains in the lake until spring weather melts it. The next time the falls stopped falling, it was a man-made situation. And two bodies were found.