Request for specific feedback.

[AG31]

I tried to make the language of one of my characters sound like what I heard from simpering villains in movies with medieval settings. One reader didn't get that and thought it just represented no ear for dialogue. If anyone's interested in giving me their take on the sound of the language, or suggestions about how to better achieve my intention, it's this one: An Enigma It's one Lit page, BDSM.

Does anyone have suggestions for a convention for titles for requests for this sort of help?

 

[ElectricBlue]

The problem for me was the formality of the dialogue, it seemed to be remote - as remote as your very formal narration.

Setting aside the repeated "ye" early on, which thank goodness you stopped using, I didn't get much of a sense that the spoken dialogue was in "a period piece" at all. At times, it read as if it were twentieth century, not 17th or 18th. Thinking about it, I didn't get much of a sense of time, nor place, from the story.

I don't think you did yourself any favours with the extensive preamble, which was more "writer's notes to self". The long introduction set up a tone as if the piece was an academic essay, and that same tone, maybe, followed through into the story - once I worked out where the story actually began. It wasn't easy to make sense of this one. I couldn't figure out the ending, either. I thought he was about to be hanged?

Doing the analytics is fine, but not at the same time as the story!

 

[AlinaX]

'Ye' is an odd word anyway. In old English it's you-plural and pronounced 'thee', but then for authenticitiy you'd want a more Shakespearean style of dialogue. But you have a Scottish character so the ye is still in current usage.

I agree the Foreword gets in the way, but maybe you could make it an afterword. When your story does start, it feels almost like a narrative voiceover:

This story begins with Jamie and Claire Fraser in a prison somewhere in eighteenth century Europe. Claire has been apprehended trying to free Jamie, who is awaiting execution the next morning. Randall, his captor, is threatening to have Claire executed as well.

"Unless, that is, you can think of a reason why I shouldn't?"

"Aye," Jamie said, "I can. I'm the one you want." The cool Scottish voice was matter-of-fact. "Let the woman go, and ye can have me. Do what ye wish to me and I'll no struggle. Bind me if you must and I'll not speak of it come tomorrow, but first you'll see the woman safely awa."

 

[Bramblethorn]

FYI, Diana Gabaldon is vehemently opposed to fanfic (despite Outlander having started out as Doctor Who fanfic.) Up to you what to do with that info, just be aware that there's a higher than usual chance of getting a takedown on this.

I tried to make the language of one of my characters sound like what I heard from simpering villains in movies with medieval settings. One reader didn't get that and thought it just represented no ear for dialogue. If anyone's interested in giving me their take on the sound of the language, or suggestions about how to better achieve my intention, it's this one: An Enigma It's one Lit page, BDSM.

Depending on which historians you ask and which place you're looking at, "medieval" ends somewhere between 1453 and 1517, though sometimes stretched as late as 1603 for the British Isles (the death of Queen Elizabeth I). By my understanding, the events of this story are set in 1743, so "medieval settings" may not be a great source for dialogue.

Perfect authenticity in dialogue isn't always desirable. It requires a great deal of research to get it right, and even one manages that, it can make a story impenetrable to modern readers. Authors compromise, writing in something like modern English but without glaringly newfangled language and throwing in enough period touches to evoke the setting.

This is the approach Gabaldon takes in "Outlander". Here are Jamie's first few lines in Gabaldon's original:

“Fell wi’ my hand out, when the musket ball knocked me off my saddle. I landed with all my weight on the hand, and crunch!, there it went.”
“Hurts bad enough sitting still. I couldna manage a horse.”

“It canna hurt much worse than it does. Get on wi’it.”

“It doesna hurt anymore!”

She drops in a few pieces of period vocabulary to establish that Claire's in the wrong century ("chirurgeon", "nurse" interpreted as "wetnurse" etc.) but beyond that, the main thing she does here is a bit of eye dialect to establish Scots accents. Her Scots isn't entirely consistent, either; some of her characters in that scene switch between "you" and "ye" more or less at random. For instance, from the same scene, Dougal addressing Claire:

“For a wetnurse, you’d seem to have some skill at healing. Can ye stanch the lad’s wound, well enough for him to sit a horse?”

It's the average American's idea of how Scots people talk, not meticulously researched historical content. (Gabaldon is an American author and the character of Jamie was based on Jamie McCrimmon from Doctor Who, which is not a reliable historical source.)

The villain, Randall, is English. So he doesn't speak in eye dialect, but otherwise I'd say much the same: it's modern-but-not-jarringly-modern English with a light veneer of period colour, and some villainous sneering.
Moving to your own story: I didn't see much in the dialogue that feels particularly 18th-century, but if you're just aiming for the same level of authenticity as the Gabaldon stories, that's not necessarily a big deal. What's more of an issue, IMHO, is that you do have some things that feel specifically modern American English. Here are some that I noticed:

"This is wonderful!First I need to soften you up."

"Soften up" in this sense is anachronistic. Google Ngrams is useful for this sort of thing: testing with the phrase "soften him up" shows no hits before the late 1930s. It seems to have evolved from the WWII military use of "softening up" fortifications via bombardment.

"Wonderful" used to mean something like "miraculous", "awe-inspiring" or "exotic" before it shifted to its present meaning of "really good". As far as I can tell, in 1743 it was still used primarily in the former sense although the latter was emerging; it's not a glaring anachronism in itself, but little things like this can add up to a modern voice.

"Aelred! I thought you were on reconnaissance!"

Anachronistic in the other direction: "Aelred" is a Saxon/Old English name that would be very rare after about the twelfth century. I couldn't find mention of this guy being a character in the Gabaldon stories - is he somebody you created?

"I would happily whip and rape him"

I'd have expected an 18th-century man to use "sodomise" or "bugger" rather than "rape" when referring to male-male sex, consensual or otherwise.

"Let's take a little break...I think I can keep you aroused just by staring at you."

Anachronistic. First attested use of "break" in the sense of "short pause between periods of work" is from 1861 (and it feels particularly American); first for the sexual connotation of "arousal" is about 1900.

The tips of some thongs bit the skin of his scrotum. The pain was not so great, but the proximity to his testicles caused a surge of fear to course up his torso.

Not dialogue, but since this is from Jamie's perspective, it should probably be in the kind of language he'd use, and "scrotum" and "testicles" sound far too scientific. I can't speak to exactly what was in use in 18th-century Scotland, but something like "bollocks", "bawbags", "bollocks-pouch" etc. would be less jarring here.

Does anyone have suggestions for a convention for titles for requests for this sort of help?

My rule of thumb is to focus on making the thread title informative for somebody who's reading it and trying to figure out whether it's worth their time to click on the thread.

Things like "please help me" or "feedback request" are too broad to be much help. For this one I might have gone with something like "Feedback wanted on historical British dialogue".

 

[Bramblethorn]

'Ye' is an odd word anyway. In old English it's you-plural and pronounced 'thee',

That's not quite right.

TLDR: there are two separate "ye"s in the English language. One is an old second-person pronoun, which was pronounced with a "y" sound, never "thee" AFAIK. The other is a modern misreading of the word "the".

Once upon a time, English had more letters than it does today. One of the lost letters (and my personal favourite) is "þ" (thorn), which represented a "th" sound. It was used in "þe", which is the same word as modern "the" and pronounced the same.

Over time, in some versions of the thorn, the middle loop drifted upwards, so it came to look more like a P, and then people stopped closing the loop, so it looked a bit more like a Y - although people familiar with this letter would still have understood that it wasn't the same.

However, when we started using movable type, we imported our printing presses from Germany, which didn't have a thorn. Printers substituted either "th" (for the correct sound) or "y" (as the one that looked most like a thorn), and the thorn fell into disuse everywhere except Iceland.

Later readers who didn't know the history of thorn would come across old signs and documents that used it (or the y-substitute) and get the mistaken idea that "the" used to be written and pronounced "ye".

Meanwhile, in middle English we used to have "thee" as the singular accusative (object) pronoun ("John, I will smite thee") and "ye" (pronounced with a "y") as the plural nominative (subject) pronoun ("John and Mary, ye have wronged me").

But in England "you", which was originally the plural accusative pronoun, eventually came to replace "ye", functioning as both nominative and accusative second pronoun. Later, it expanded further to replace "thou" and "thee" as first-person pronouns. This made some people extremely angry:



(Context for rant: using plural pronouns to address a singular person was a mark of respect, originally reserved for speaking to God. It was extended to show deference to kings - which is what the Quaker author above is complaining about - and then that courtesy use got expanded to everybody else as well.)

But AFAIK we never had a second person plural that was pronounced "thee".

In Scots, OTOH, "ye" won out over "you" to become the second-person nominative and accusative pronoun. After that, I think it underwent the same kind of expansion into singular use, and colloquial Scots has since developed new plural forms like "yiz"/"youze". More on the Scots here: https://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/ye

 

[AlinaX]

It's funny for me to see youze written out like that. I hear it more as, "What are yous doing tonight?"

But thanks for the explanation about ye.

 

[Bramblethorn]

It's funny for me to see youze written out like that. I hear it more as, "What are yous doing tonight?"

But thanks for the explanation about ye.

In Australia it'd be "youse", I'm not certain about the Scots!

 

[AG31]

@ElectricBlue
Here's a reply that I'm just going to cut and paste for each of you.

Thanks to all for the time and attention you spent on my request.

I should have emphasized more the "simpering villains in movies with medieval settings." I wasn't interested in reproducing Gabaldon's Scottish sound ("ye," was from the quoted paragraphs). Instead I wanted to create a despicable character, one I can hear in my head (although not very faithfully, apparently) from B movies of my childhood.

OoOoOoOoOo
And here is the personal reply.

I thought he was about to be hanged?

His wife led a bunch of men to rescue him. I didn't go into how... too distracting. But I thought I said it clearly enough. No?

"Doing the analytics is fine, but not at the same time as the story!"

I have now moved the Forword to an Afterword in the Smashwords version. I don't want to clog up the Lit pipes with a request to edit.

The problem for me was the formality of the dialogue, it seemed to be remote - as remote as your very formal narration.

See above, but also, I'm going to try to make it clearer where the Gabaldon voice stops and I start. Still, the formality seems to go with the period. Sort of...

 

[AG31]

Here's a reply that I'm just going to cut and paste for each of you.

Thanks to all for the time and attention you spent on my request.

I should have emphasized more the "simpering villains in movies with medieval settings." I wasn't interested in reproducing Gabaldon's Scottish sound ("ye," was from the quoted paragraphs). Instead I wanted to create a despicable character, one I can hear in my head (although not very faithfully, apparently) from B movies of my childhood.

OoOoOoOoOo
And here is the personal reply.

I agree the Foreword gets in the way, but maybe you could make it an afterword. When your story does start, it feels almost like a narrative voiceover:

I've now moved it to an afterword in the Smashwords version. I don't want to clog up Lit with an edit for a story that isn't much read anyway.

 

[AG31]

Here's a reply that I'm just going to cut and paste for each of you.

Thanks to all for the time and attention you spent on my request.

I should have emphasized more the "simpering villains in movies with medieval settings." I wasn't interested in reproducing Gabaldon's Scottish sound ("ye," was from the quoted paragraphs). Instead I wanted to create a despicable character, one I can hear in my head (although not very faithfully, apparently) from B movies of my childhood.

I think there's a better word than "simpering," and I wish I could think of a word that just meant "old," without resorting to the inaccurate "medieval," or the two specific "18th century."

OoOoOoOoOo
And here is the personal reply.

Wo! Thanks! I'll definitely re-read this if I should actually want to reproduce an authentic way of speaking.

FYI, Diana Gabaldon is vehemently opposed to fanfic (despite Outlander having started out as Doctor Who fanfic.) Up to you what to do with that info, just be aware that there's a higher than usual chance of getting a takedown on this.

I don't know much at all about fanfic, although I found out enough to publish this on AO3 and got a few thumbs up, or whatever it is they do there. I forget. I doubt Gabaldon will ever know about my little story.

My rule of thumb is to focus on making the thread title informative for somebody who's reading it and trying to figure out whether it's worth their time to click on the thread.

Things like "please help me" or "feedback request" are too broad to be much help. For this one I might have gone with something like "Feedback wanted on historical British dialogue".

I was about to say "Good advice," but I'm gearing up to post a message entitled "It's Obvious!!".... so I'll wait to mend my ways.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I don't know much at all about fanfic, although I found out enough to publish this on AO3 and got a few thumbs up, or whatever it is they do there. I forget. I doubt Gabaldon will ever know about my little story.

And if she purloined the character from 1960s Doctor Who (I did wonder about that, even before @Bramblethorn confirmed it), she could be told where to go, in no uncertain terms. That's a bit rich, pinching a TV character, then moaning about Fan-Fic. That would be a, "Fuck off," right there, from me.