A few years ago, our editor — a young whippersnapper — politely, but firmly, informed us that our writing “revealed” our age. We were, she reminded us, writing novels for readers in their twenties, thirties, and forties. “Don’t use figures of speech and allusions that only our readers’ parents will understand.”
She pointed out an example in a proposal that she’d just rejected. One of our key characters was a young woman who habitually spoke in clichés. We’d put the following words in her mouth: “The truth is, I’m a carbon copy of my mother.”
The editor insisted that no one under fifty would use “carbon copy” as an analogy — and that most twenty- and thirty-something readers would have no idea what it meant. She went on, “I want to see dialog full of contemporary idioms and figures of speech.”
We grit our teeth and obediently expunged all antique phrases from our follow-up proposal, but the exercise struck us as absurd. Novels have a long shelf life. Few readers mind that Sherlock Holmes speaks the occasional Victorian metaphor… lovers of Jane Austin’s novels actually relish “decoding” her Regency language… and Janet and I enjoy rereading dozens of mystery novels written sixty and seventy years ago without much bewilderment at vintage terms such as “roscoe.”
We also pointed out to each other that it’s impossible to stay absolutely current because readers keep aging. (A 2011 case in point: Those “young” Generation-X folks are now 35-45 years old. You could look it up!)
I recalled the great carbon copy brouhaha when I read one of the comments added to our last post. Mary Fagan agreed with the notion that late-blooming writers have a better grasp on grammar. She wrote, “We older types, who were relentlessly drilled in language mechanics, may well be the last line of defense [for correct English].
At first, I agreed with all of Mary’s comment — but then our former editor’s rebuke hove into view. All at once, I began to question the value of “correct English” when we sit down to write a contemporary novel.
The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if our late-bloomerly concerns for proper construction, appropriate punctuation, and “classic” literary allusions and metaphors might be negatives rather than positives. Are our “correct English” skills driving us to write novels that younger readers — those tuned to MTV, addicted to texting, and indifferent to good writing — simply can’t understand?
Well … I took a deep breath and decided that my imagination had run riot. Happily, things aren’t that grim.
But I kept thinking about my question. We had written “carbon copy” in our novel chiefly because it seemed (to us) a nifty way of expressing the concept of unusual generational sameness. Is there a newer way of conveying the same idea? If there is, it didn’t spring to mind back then — and it still doesn’t today. (“Clone” is a possibility, but it seems to imply too much sameness. Carbon copies are identical in some aspects, yet different in others.)
An obsolete analogy still seems right to us.
And then, last week, I ran smack into another antique phrase. A novelist we know used the term “country bumpkin” in a blurb she’d written to promote her new book. Because “carbon copy” had sensitized me, I couldn’t help musing about the meaning a typical younger reader of contemporary women’s fiction (my friend’s genre) might assign to “country bumpkin.”
Probably not what the writer intended.
I presume that my friend had written “country bumpkin” because she couldn’t think of a “more hip” equivalent — although “more hip” is probably an aging adjectival phrase.
The pair of examples worked together to illuminate the broader implications of what our editor had been trying to tell us. She guessed that Janet and I had written “carbon copy” because we didn’t have the makings of a more up-to-date analogy in our minds. She worried that our “writing worldview” to coin a phrase didn’t match the “reading worldview” of our younger readers.
We’d never before given a name to a clear-cut late-bloomer liability — writer/reader worldview mismatch — a problem we were vaguely aware of, but managed to avoid thinking about.
Novels typically have a long shelf life after they appeal to the readers of their day. Most of the “classics” that people enjoy reading today were popular successes when first published.
Our editor didn’t point this out that specifically — but she clearly meant: “We need to sell your books today. You won’t start a reader buzz if readers perceive your language is obsolete.”
What’s the solution?
One fix is to lock yourself in a bygone era and write historical fiction — if this will accommodate the stories you want to tell.
The solution we settled on has two parts:
- We’re working to assiduously keep up to date with what my elementary school teachers called “current events.” We’re finding that the Internet is chock full of useful resources.
- We’ve expanded our research efforts to include many more things that impact the lives of our characters, from contemporary clichés… to the latest technology toys… to major societal trends.
I know! These seem almost impossible tasks. They’re proving both tedious and time-consuming. Please… add a comment if you can suggest a better way to skin this cat.
Found your website completely by accident – following a research trail for the current book, and decided this was a most interesting post.
One imprint of my publishers recently decided to republish two of my old romances as ebooks. I had to go back and try and bring them up to date, which was horrendous – and they’re only 20 years old! In the end we decided to leave one as an “80s set novel” because the premise on which it was set is now obsolete. And that’s another thing – situations that would bring about disgrace – or murder! – now don’t raise an eyebrow. I try and keep mine as up to date as I can, helped by listening to and interacting with my children, and social networking sites are invaluable for this, but of course, I’m also battling with our “common” language, being entirely English.
My reader demographic is 50+ and mainly female, as far as I can see, so I’m not too worried about upsetting the young. Quite enjoy it actually…
Well done on a great site.
My solution is to have the latest technology equipment conk out early on, and think up some quirky reason why my characters talk or act different than the norm. I get great fun out of the method, but it’s a little like cutting edges off jigsaw pieces to make them fit… wouldn’t recommend it to anybody because it causes problems down the road.
But to tell the truth, I like those little unexpected trails. They are what keep me excited about getting back to my keyboard every day. So, I guess the trick is how well you can entice readers into setting foot into whatever sort of world you create in the first place. I’ve been told it’s in the details, and I’m inclined to agree. If I could time-travel, I’d go back instead of forward, too.
But that is like so off-subject I am way not going there.
Seriously.
Suck it — ooops, I mean soak it up. For entertainment, read YA; and, as Bruce suggested, hang out in the mall and open your ears. Learn by osmosis, like learning a foreign language by traveling. Much more fun than those dreary slang dictionaries.
That’s when having younger critique partners comes in handy. Mine catch me on those very things. Then it’s up to me to decide. Case in point, in my latest WIP, my heroine is a Lucy-type character, who embarks on a new craft, gold plating leaves for jewelry. While searching for leaves, she comes across some delicate ones in what looks like a farm. She picks a few and gold plates them. It turns out they’re marijuana leaves.
)
I had to query my crit group as to whether it was implausible that she wouldn’t recognize them. It turns out a number of younger women wouldn’t know one it it lit up beneath their noses.
So I highly value my CPs and count on them to keep me relevant.
I don’t get out much. At 63, I’ve been divorced for years and my two daughters are well into their 20′s. In 2005, I started a series of novels based on the calendar year 2005-2006 which had, as main characters, high-school students.
What was “current” high-school slang around that time? Hadn’t the foggiest. The most recent slang I had was from my daughters and that was already 10 years out of date.
Fortunately, my target audience were old farts over 50. I trotted out several old-fart jokes which weren’t really slangy. The characters might slip out a few choice American mid-west slang words, e.g., “…that was really cool, rad, or whatever the current expression is…”
The Internet thoughtlfully provided me with a lot of Doublin Irish slang for my Irish characters. Who knows how out of date that is.
If I were to target a MG, YA, or 20′s audience for a current-era work, I’d spend lots of hours at the shopping malls listening and observing the demographics. Even then, by the time six months had gone by, probably pretty much any slang I’d picked up and used would be out of date anyway.
So, my opinion is that the slang choice, if any, depends both on your genre and your target audience. “OK” or “okay” is still valid and acceptable even if I used it myself 50+ years ago.
There probably isn’t any satisfactory answer to this problem. But it pays to understand who you’re writing for. I recently read a paranormal series that I enjoyed very much, but I was constantly being thrown out of the story by references to current personalities and memes. I was familiar with some, not with others, but what occured to me as I read was that in a few years, nobody is going to remember those people or memes. So the real question is — are you writing for the short term or the long term? Paranormal is an enormously popular genre, but it’s entertainment — here today, gone tomorrow. As popular as the series is right now, it’s unlikely to be attracting readers ten or 20 years down the line, so the obsolescent content doesn’t really matter that much. Literature, on the other hand, always challenges the reader, even if it’s only with references that are no longer current. It’s about education and a wider knowledge of the world than knowing who’s the latest hot topic.