Madeleine E. Robins's Blog: Madeleine Robins: Journal, page 12

Going It Alone

There are all sorts of resources available for writers who want them: workshops, classes, beta readers, bars, books, peers, and people who just love to have you bounce ideas off them. They all have their virtues. Yet for some of us, it’s very hard to show what you’re working on to another person until you’re done and ready to send it off to be accepted, rejected, edited, published… Yes, I’m one of those people.

Not entirely. I discovered early-ish in my writing career, when I was making the l...

Balancing Act

So I’m writing this book, set in Englandin 1812. And somehow a group of the people sometimes referred to as Gypsies, or Travelers, or Tinkers, has appeared and is playing arole in the story. And the research, and the ramifications, and the competing needs to be accurate in both my depiction of these people, and my depiction of the attitudes of the society around them, is making me a little crazy.

Let me just say: I am one of those people who gets a little testy when I encounter historical fic...

Death and the Writer

I’ve been thinking about killing people.

In books. Killing characters, great and small. First, why kill a character? Is it something as mechanical as “because the plot needed someone to die there?” Why kill aparticularcharacter, then? What does it do for the story? For the other characters in the story?Yeah,this is where I get a little woo-woo and fuzzy, because I’m a write-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of girl, and often I don’t know why I kill someone off until I finish the work.And even when...

For God’s Sake, Put on Some Clothes (mark II*)

Note: Your Mileage May Vary.

Last night my husband and I found ourselves watching The Transporter the way you do after a major holiday: flopped on the couch, too tired to move, watching The Thing That’s On because where’s the remote?). It’s a fun-dumb movie, lighter fare than I had expected, very violent but curiously… well, light. Almost sweet. The film was made in 2002, which means it’s now moving into the realm of Elder-Statesmovie, and its star, Jason Statham, looks curiously young and bli...

Words and Pictures

There are someillustrations that are so integral to my memory of books I read as a kid that to say the name of a book calls them immediately to mind. Say“A Little Princess”and I think ofSara Crewe, pale little face framed by a cloud of dark hair, sitting disconsolate in her wretched attic, or a little more optimistically, of Sara, cracked bowl in hand, looking dreamily out over the London rooftops. Both illustrations are from an edition ofA Little PrincessI did not own–we had it in my classro...

My Cyber-House

I have become, in what I hope is the nicest possible way, a bit of a martinet about tone and discourse in my living room. I love good chewy discussions, but I try, regardless of my level of engagement (or frustration or incomprehension or general bogglement) not to name-call or make generalizations. And if I catch myself slipping, I try to reverse the trend. Because I really, truly do believe (in part from watching my kids, who are passionately political, but really good listeners) that we’re...

Publishing Is Not a Monolith

As I have done a lot lately, I spent the past weekend with my aunt and uncle, helping them with some household stuff. My uncle is an emeritus professor of anatomy at UCLA; my aunt ran the Chancellor’s Communication Service. Both have decades of involvement with the university, and both of them are much accomplished and smart cookies.

At one point, as we were eating lunch, I was discussing my current search for employment, and a couple of jobs in which I am interested. My uncle seemed puzzled,...

Fight Scenes: Time Dilation

Sabre Fight from The Duellists

I sawInterstellarlast week, a hugely ambitious, very heady film about…oh, kind of everything. The future of the human race. Striving. Time. Love. Space. Loneliness. Duplicity. Ecology. Parenthood. It’s beautiful to look at (well, Christopher Nolan) and well acted, and curiously soggy in places when Nolan attempts to be genuinely affecting. And the dialogue is mixed so low in places that I swear I missed some important plot points (when you’re married to a sound e...

Raising Feminists, the Movie Edition

I was going to write about my current obsessivehobby of beading, but thenSeven Brides for Seven Brotherswas on TV. And I was appalled all over that I let my impressionable daughters watch it when they were small, and impressed that it didn’t seem to do them any lasting harm.

My family watches a lot of movies, and many of them are old musicalsfrom the 40s and 50s. Seven Brides for Seven Brothersis a1954MGM musical based on a short story by Stephen Vincent Benet called “The Sobbin’ Women.”Out in...

Words, words, words

I love my Compact* Oxford English Dictionary. Yes, it weighs a young ton, and requires a magnifying glass to read, but it’s a gorgeous reference, and one of my favorite world-building tools. Especially when there’s a word I want to use and am not sure it works in period. You don’t want your 13th century German serf saying “okay,” or your 19th century English maiden talking about “actualizing her personhood.”** Because that’s wrong, and it will yank the smart reader right out of the story.

But what about when the word is right but no one will believe it? My favorite example of this is the word “dude.” If you don’t immediately think of Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, you doubtless hear Keanu Reeves saying “duuuude.” And yet.

See the chap on the left? That’s Evander Wall, a New York City social lion in 1880s, who was known in the papers as The King of the Dudes. The word “dude” dates at least from the mid 1800s (and may be related further back to the medieval word “dudde,” for clothes, as in duds). While “dude” was often used to indicate a city-guy who is out of his element anywhere except in the city (thus “dude ranch”), it was also used (per Wikipedia) as a job description.

So: Dude is a perfectly legal mid-1800s word. But if I set a story in a Victorian-era steampunk setting and have a character refer to another as a “dude,” most readers will be snatched up by the nape of the neck and pulled right out of my narrative because it carries a weight and an image that doesn’t fit.

A similar case: I was reading a book set in 1815 in which the hero uses the word “libido.” Perfectly fine Latin word that the speaker, a university-educated gentleman, would have known. Except that “libido”, as a word, has Freud’s fingerprints all over it. I was startled out of the story and had to take some time to talk myself back into it.

English is a fabulous language, but it’s not a set-in-stone one. It shifts. Jane Austen gives her hero and heroine a little run-in in Northanger Abbey about the word “nice.”

“I am sure,” cried Catherine, “I did not mean to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should not I call it so?”

“Very true,” said Henry, “and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! It does for everything. Originally perhaps it was applied only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement—people were nice in their dress, in their sentiments, or their choice. But now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word.”

I am happy to say that Henry’s sister more or less mashes him flat for teasing poor Catherine about her word use. But it does point out that a word that used to mean one thing might later come to mean something else, and if you’re writing in a past setting, you want to know when that change happened. “Relationship,” in the sense of “Louise and Jim are in a relationship”, is relatively new in the language–Miss Austen, in fact, would not likely have recognized its use that way. The word was meant to express a familial link, or the way in which two things or people behave toward each other.

Words aren’t just the tools that lay out a narrative in a nice linear (or non-linear) fashion. They can be brilliant world-building tools. Language can set up the formality of a society, the caste relationships, the manners and beliefs of a people, as well as the beliefs or personalities of characters. If you’re writing in a period, or near-period setting, spending a little time on your words can set the scene–and save your readers from the disorientation that comes with the insertion of Keanu Reeves into the narrative.



*compact here means 18″ x 11″ x 3.6″ and 15 pounds. You could kill someone with the thing.

**honest to God. I saw this once. My head has not returned from the exploding place.