Anne Potter
asked
Bryn Greenwood:
I loved this book. Stellar. How much fun did you have with Gentry's Middle English and what was the fun/discovery versus stress/pressure-for-perfection balance while you were writing from his POV? How did his way of speaking allow you more or less play with his character?
Bryn Greenwood
Soooo much fun. I've been obsessed with medieval literature since I was a teenager, and in college I studied Middle & Old English, as well as Old French. When I started out, I was writing Gentry's POV exactly as I heard it in my head, in actual Middle English. After about two chapters of that, I acknowledged that the vast majority of readers would not follow me that far, so I dialed it back a lot. I modernized all the spelling, a big chunk of vocabulary, while trying to keep a lot of the syntax. At that point, I finally felt comfortable that his POV would be accessible to most readers, but that it would still *feel* like Gentry to me. The thing I love about Middle English, and what I had a lot of fun with in writing, is that there are layers of intimacy that we don't have in modern English. Thee/thou is just one example, but my favorite is that in Middle English "kiss" is still a self-reflexive verb. So just as we now say, "he kissed her," or "I kissed them," in Middle English, Gentry says, "we kissed us," instead of "we kissed each other." I think that's incredibly intimate.
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Shabby -BookBistroBlog
asked
Bryn Greenwood:
Hi just finished reading and reviewing this amazing book. As a lover of tabboo , forbidden books, this book impacted me so deeply that I have been unable to move on. Just wanna say thank you for this life changing story . Not a question, just being thenkful....?
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