Using and Abusing Language

The Novel continues apace. The main character is now in a bind (Isn’t that where he’s supposed to be?) and trouble is all around him. Good. The deeper we get into it, the looser the writing becomes, it seems. Inconsistency is not desirable; I’d like it to be so loose throughout. Perhaps I can fix that during revisions.

What do I mean by loose? I mean the opposite of tight as in uptight or self-conscious. When the action is sailing along the writing does too. When the poor old author is trying too hard the writing betrays his discomfort. It gets tight. (This meaning has nothing to do with conciseness or verbosity.)

One day I became acutely aware of idiom and whether it properly reflected the time and place of the action, a time and place I personally did not experience—middle Europe during World War II. Sometimes expressions from middle East-Coast-America during 2011 slip in. Must I worry about that?

My response is this. The characters should use expressions of the time and place to the extent that I can represent them naturally. I try to do this by channeling (a fad word I won’t use elsewhere) people I knew from that time and place. I’m old enough to remember terms and expressions of the late 1940s. I had two uncles in the war who came back with favorite wartime expressions and European brides. And I had the good fortune to enjoy long exposure to central European people and culture during much of my own life. The trick is to hear those voices and mimic them. 

Once or twice my readers have objected to an expression I used as too modern, and I changed it. But since the characters are conversing in their native language or occasionally someone else’s language and only rarely in English it seems reasonable that the book, being written in English, might be a translation of their dialogue. The translator, who is also the author, is a twenty-first century American living on the East Coast and striving to produce a book his contemporaries will find readable.

The script for the recent remake of “True Grit” starring Jeff Bridges was so wooden and stilted that the dialogue was often incomprehensible. Did the scriptwriters actually believe late 19^th century people talked like that? Or was this some elaborate Coen Brothers joke that I didn’t get? Either way it nearly ruined a good story in spite of Bridges’ first-rate performance. You’ll have to see the whole movie to hear what I mean, but here’s a clip to tempt you.