Use of the initial dash instead of quotation marks is found more often in Europe. Some American and British authors will also adopt the dash to highlight unusual or affected dialect.

In an essay for the October 25-26 weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal, novelist Lionel Shriver lamented the growing practice of dispensing with quotation marks for dialogue in fiction. He attributed this trend to “the broader popular perception that ‘literature’ is pretentious, faddish, vague, eventless, effortful, and suffocatingly interior.”

By forcing the reader to labor in distinguishing speech from narrative–so this theory of the snobbish mindset goes–true literature winnows the many who are called from the few who are chosen.

In historical fiction, however, there can arise a compelling reason to trade quotation marks for the initial dash or to use no marks at all.

The dialogue dash creates a distancing effect that can be particularly effective in historical settings. For example, if you want to portray a character as cold or introspective, the dash choice, or no dialogue marks, can offer an added layer of emotional insulation. Frazier used the dash with fine effect in Cold Mountain to evoke the numbing effect of the Civil War and to mimic a mythic, Homeric tone for his story.

Also, the author who tells a story that alternates between two eras can create a visual and psychological switch by foregoing quotation marks in those chapters that are set in the more distant time period.

But author beware. Many readers abhor the loss of quotation marks. I’ve even read reports of shoppers who have refused to purchase a book because of this choice of technique.

Nearly a hundred pages in, I was struck by the close personal point of view adopted by the author in recounting the events that had led up to the battle. I’d never encountered such an unusual melding of fictional techniques in a historical work, not even in the New Journalism of the 1960s authors such as Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer.

I then turned to the copyright page and had two surprises: I’d been reading a novel and, what’s more, one published in 1938.

The lesson here—apart from the admonishment that a reader should always check his assumptions about a book before opening it—is that the historical novelist has at his disposal many tools to cast the spell of authenticity.

By adopting an omniscient point of view in his opening, Romains delays the introduction of any character until the reader is first educated as to the circumstances and context of the war. This unusual technique might not make it past an editor today, but it certainly worked for me. There is, of course, the hallowed rule that the author should never jolt the reader from the spell of the story; but rules are made to be broken.

Two additional observations on techniques used by Romain in Verdun:

* What should the author do when lengthy sections of dialogue or written material read verbally must be included? Romains broke up such potentially off-putting monologues by inserting personal mannerisms. Here’s an example:

“A small raid on the extreme eastern flank of Despois’s division. Several yeards of trench lost. Will be retaken, he says, at dawn today. Hm . . . ah . . . Wants you to have that section of 155’s moved at once from south of Hill 285 to a point southeast of Marrieux Wood.”
As soon as they were don with, the messages were dropped gently on a slowly growing pile. At a certain point in the procedure, however, he picked up a sheet of paper rather larger in size than its predecessors and, this time, condescended to bring into action two fingers of each hand.
“Here’s something from Marie’s division. . . ”

* An author published in a foreign country is at the mercy of his translator. Romains, I’m afraid, was not well served at times in the translation from French to English. The French soldiers who are the main characters are constantly referring to each other as “old chap” and speaking Victorian-sounding language such as “Pretty rough stuff, that.” There is also the occasional sentence structure at odds with the action being described. An example:

Suddenly—tzabc! A splitting bark that seemed to take them full between neck and cheek. Then a sharp whining sound which obviously came from behind them, slightly to the right, deepened to a more accentuated tone as it passed overhead, still to the right, continued its angry grumple skyward, while there came to their ears an echoing “boom,” as though a heavy door had been slammed in their rear.”

The above description is many things, but certainly not sudden.

In his essay (See WSJ, February 6, page A18), Mr. Larson mused how, in his experience, prominent Republicans and conservatives seem much more interested in, and informed by, history than do their Democratic counterparts.

Larson explained this perceived phenomenon by noting that “Republicans look to the past for inspiration but often to the future with trepidation. Originalists at heart, they tend to see only the shining city on a hill of earlier times and not its darker neighborhoods.”

Liberals Democrats, in contrast, “have always looked to the future with hope and embraced marginalized groups. When they look back, even to the deeds of their own former leaders, they see a trail of tears like the one over which Andrew Jackson drove out the Cherokee.”

Liberals with impeccable credentials for championing American history–such as Bill Moyers, Dale Bumpers, Tom Hanks, Mario Cuomo, Richard Dreyfuss, and Steven Spielberg–did not make Larson’s list.

Could it be that liberals and conservatives simply cherish different “histories?”

Volumes have been written on progressive subjects such as the civil rights movement, women’s suffrage, the New Deal, the abolitionist movement, and the Vietnam War protests. Few conservative authors seem drawn to these subjects. In contrast, conservatives have been particularly attracted to subjects such as Civil War military operations, Churchill, MacArthur, and Napoleon.

There are, of course, always exceptions to such broad generalizations. Former President Jimmy Carter and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, at opposite ends of the political spectrum, have both published Civil War novels.

Perhaps the fault, oh Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in our definitions of what constitutes history.

If only I had been armed with “The Power of Point of View,” a new handbook written by Alicia Rasley and published by Writer’s Digest Books.

Alicia and her husband Jeff are long-time friends from Indiana. I knew Alicia to be a fine novelist, having won the coveted RITA award from the Romance Writers of America. But had I also known that she was such an expert on POV, I would have thrown myself to the mercy of her adeptship years ago. She first became intrigued with POV while writing her master’s thesis on the stories of Edgar Allen Poe and his experimentation with the first-person “unreliable narrator” technique.

Without a doubt, the 265 pages of this impressive work offer the most comprehensive and understandable treatment of POV that I’ve had the pleasure to encounter. In addition to her in-depth analysis of the various persons and their permutations, Alicia provides exercises and suggested readings to demonstrate what she teaches.

My favorite aphorism from the book: “You don’t choose POV; it chooses you.”

For those who want more of Alicia’s wisdom, check out her website and blog about editing.

Let’s continue the tour:

4) Describe dialect without phonetically spelling it.

I had my characters in The Fire and the Light comment on the harsh differences they heard in spoken Occitan, Latin, and Norman French. In The Spider and the Stone, one of my Scot Borders characters expresses disgust at the heavy brogue of a Highlander. In both instances, the reader is offered a sense of the variant sounds without being forced to wade through them visually in the text.

5) Substitute a more recent and less intrusive language that retains an archaic ring to the modern ear.

Steven Pressfield is the Solon of this brilliant sophistry. I admire the lyrical narratives that he devises in his novels that are often set in the ancient Greek world. This example from his Tides of War can be studied from many angles:

Without the walls awaited war: within, pestilence. Now arose a third scourge: one’s own countrymen, made desperate by the first two. The poor cracked first. Driven by want, they took to plundering the homes of those of middling wealth, which stood vulnerable owing to their banishment of watchmen and stewards, all save the most trustworthy, who themselves took to crime to pay a physician or an undertaker, which professions amounted to the same thing. What good was money if you would not live to spend it? A gentleman would perish, bequeathing his treasure to his sons; these, anticipating their own imminent extinction, ran through their patrimony as fast as their fists could scatter it, abetted by every species of parasite and bloodsucker, seeking the juice as it spilled. You saw it, Jason. Disease would carry off a man’s wife and children; bereft of hope, he sets his own flat alight, then lingers in numb katalepsis, nor disclaims his offense to the brigadiers hastening onto the scene as the blaze consumes the tenancies of his neighbors.

In just one paragraph, Pressfield has effectively applied several of our tools:

* Arched syntax and changed mindset: “Without the walls awaited war: within, pestilence.” War and pestilence are forces with wills of their own. At once, we are launched into the ancient perspective of the world.

* Poetic entry: “Now arose . . .” We can hear the bard regaling us amid the flickering shadows of the hearth fire.

* Foreign term: “Katalepsis” is Greek, and yet we know what is meant here because of its context and English equivalent, “catalepsies.” The usage adds authenticity without obfuscation.

* The substitution of one archaic language for another that is even less comprehendable. Here Pressfield recruits Victorian words to stand in the stead of the ancient Greek: “middling,” “flat,” “gentleman,” “brigadiers,” and “tenancies.” We have no idea how ancient Greek really sounded. How then is a writer to evoke that period without coming off stilted and cartoonish? Some might mistake the use of these terms for imperial anachronisms, but Pressfield knows what he’s doing here. He performs a stunning sleight-of-hand by subconsciously firing our “history” nerve synapses. We hear these 19th century Dickensian mots and are transported into the past without knowing how it was accomplished. This may be the reason that a British actor who plays an ancient Roman or Greek hero in the movies or on stage sounds more authentic to American audiences.

Mary Renault used a variation of this technique when she created dialogue for her characters that inhabited the ancient world:

Greek is a highly polysyllabic language. Yet when writing dialogue for my Greeks I have found myself, by instinct, avoiding the polysyllables of the English language, and using, as far as they are still in the living language, the older and shorter words. This is not because the style parallels Greek style; it is entirely a matter of association and ambience. In Greek, polysyllables are old; in English, mostly Latinised and largely modern. They have acquired their own aura, which they will bring along with them. Their stare, like that of the basilisk, is killing. Take the following sentence, which I have just picked at random from a magazine: “High priority is to be given to training in the skills of community organizing and conflict resolution.” It contains no concept which Plato did not know, or, indeed, did not in fact deal with. But it comes to us steeped in notions of the company report, the social survey, and so forth. When I see writing like this in a historical novel I know what the author is after. He wants us to identify with the situation of his characters as if it were our own. But it isn’t, and identification thus achieved is a cheat. You cannot, as an advertising copywriter would say, enjoy a trip to fifth-century Athens, or Minoan Crete, in the comfort of your own home. You have, as fare as your mind will take you, to leave home and go to them. (Authors on Authors, p. 86)

6) Render the narrative language or dialogue more archaic.

Here’s a solution you may never have considered. Given all of the warnings against alienating the reader with heavy period language, why would a writer choose such a counter-intuitive approach? John Fowles explained his reasoning:

But I soon get into trouble over dialogue, because the genuine dialogue of 1867 (insofar as it can be heard in books of the time) is far too close to our own to sound convincingly old. It very often fails to agree with our psychological picture of the Victorians—it is not stiff enough, not euphemistic enough, and so on; and here at once I have to start cheating and pick out the more formal and archaic (even for 1867) elements of spoken speech. It is this kind of “cheating,” which is intrinsic to the novel, that takes time. (Afterwords: Novelists Talking About Their Novels)

As Pressfield’s Greek philosophers would admonish, all of these mimetic devices should be applied in moderation.

Phil Gyford runs a fun website called The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Each day, he posts an entry from the renowned diarist who lived during the time of Oliver Cromwell and the Protector’s son, Richard. Gyford’s labor of love has been in progress since January 1, 2003, when he published the first of Pepys’s entries dated January 1, 1660.

Pepys was a burgher and an accomplished musician with a voracious appetite for pleasure equaled only by his lust for knowledge of subjects ranging from the classics to the sciences and arts. The taverns of London were one of his favorite laboratories.

Gyford is a bit of a Renaissance man himself, with interests ranging from acting to graphic design and illustration.

In Part One (See August 5) of my discussion on creating believable speech for the historical novel, I proposed a two-pronged approach: immersion and technique.

Having accomplished our preparation before sitting down to write, we can now explore what I call the “mimetic” approach to dialogue and language.

I use the term “mimetic” because our goal should be to mime the diction and idioms of a particular era without recreating them exactly as would a court reporter. Real archaic dialect is harsh and off-putting to most modern ears. Anyone who was required to read Middle English in school has no desire to relive that experience in a novel.

The oil painter doesn’t precisely copy the reality of a landscape on his canvas. Rather, he employs techniques such as shading and perspective to fool the onlooker’s visual acuity. Likewise, a writer must resort to mimetic devices to summon a believable simulacrum of real speech.

1) Change Your Modern Mindset

At first glance, this may seem an odd injunction for writing dialogue. Yet in my estimation, it’s the most important of the tools we’ll discuss.

When I played basketball, the coaches told me to watch the stomach of the opponent I was guarding; the ball followed his hand, the hand his arm, and the arm his core.

Writing demands the same focus. We need to keep our eye on the unique world paradigms of our characters, and their dialogue will follow naturally.

A non-fiction book that made a great impression on me years ago was Julian Jaynes’s The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. The psychologist posited that, until the second millennium B.C., men and women had no consciousness as we understand it. Instead, they blindly followed the voices in their heads, mistaking them for the commands of the gods.

We should strive to understand the diverse ways in which the minds of those living during past ages worked differently. Accomplish this trick, and you may find that many of your problems with dialogue will dissolve.

Consider this passage by Larry McMurtry in Streets of Laredo:

Long ago, Gus McCrae had teased the Rangers by calculating how much fight each man had in him, as if fight could be measured like oats or some substance that could be placed on a scale.

“Call, now, he’s about ninety-eight percent fight,” Gus had said. “Take away the fight and he’d be so weak, he couldn’t mount his horse. But that’s unusual. I’m only about forty percent fight myself. Pea, I expect you’re about twelve percent or so, and old Deets about fifteen.”

Twelve percent didn’t sound like much to Pea, but he resolved to use every oat of it to struggle past the killer and get to the river where Lorena was. . .

McMurtry doesn’t cast his spell on readers by groping for peculiarly Western or frontier language. His characters simply think differently than we do. They have a Shakespearean bent for finding fresh metaphors and similes under every rock and tumbleweed. Not one word in the preceding passage would raise an eyebrow if spoken in any shopping mall today. Yet who among us would think of calculating the courage of a man by weighing it like a sack of oats on a scale?

2) Arch the Syntax

Altering the structure of a sentence, even slightly, can work wonders. Here’s an example from Umberto Eco in Baudalino:

From the courtyard of the Genoese came the laments of Niketas’s daughters, who were reluctant to have their faces smeared with dirt, accustomed as they were to the vermilion of their cosmetics.

A modern rendition might read:

Spoiled by their expensive rouge makeup, Niketa’s daughters cried out from their Genoese courtyard in protest at having their faces smeared with dirt.

The difference is merely a matter of a few centuries.

3) Judicious Use of Dialect

Anthony Burgess confronted the problem of rendering appropriate dialect in Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s Love-Life. Interviewed for Afterwords: Novelists Talking About Their Novels, Burgess explained the dilemma and his solution:

And yet the problem of an appropriate style stood in the way. Obviously the language had to be an approximation to Elizabethan English, but behind me lay the horrible examples of Wardour-street, the Sir Walter Scotteries of gadzooks, the embarrassment of thou and thee. Unlike the Englishmen of the South, however, I belong to a dialectal tradition that still uses the tutoyer long abandoned by the Queen’s English. In Lancashire we say “Where’s that going, lad?” and get the reply “I’m coming back with thee to thy place.” If I used tha in my novel, that would be close to a living tradition and fare enough from the artificialities of Wardour-street.

Diane Gabaldon weaves her mimetic illusions by incorporating a dozen or so phonetic Scot and Gaelic derivations, such as “aye,” “dinnae,” and “canna.” The secret to her approach is consistency and circumspection in their usage.

One bit of wile is to introduce a character with heavy dialect and have another character comment on the difficulty in understanding him. With the reader’s impression thusly set, you can slowly ease back from the dialect as the novel progresses.

Dialect can be particularly useful in indicating a character’s low social standing or lack of education and intelligence. But remember: Like garlic and chillies, a little dialect sprinkled in the right places goes a long way.

3) Foreign phrases

A patina of authenticity can be burnished into your prose by including an occasional foreign phrase within your character’s dialogue or thought. This convention is most often used for Latin, French, and Spanish. Many readers have at least a passing acquaintance with the Romance languages, but I’ve also seen this technique used to advantage with more esoteric languages, followed by a translation.

A variation on this theme can be attained when the author reminds the reader that the dialogue is spoken in another tongue, particularly in scenes where your character visits another country.

Here’s a superb example from Sena Jeter Nasland in Abundance, her novel about Marie Antoinette:

Now the King speaks in Latin, which I do not understand but know that he sounds as serious, as wise, and as dedicated to God as any priest. In the way that he stresses each word, it is as though I can hear him say Jed m’enage a’ cela de bon coeur, “I promise this with a true heart,” for he is the most sincere of men.”

Did you catch Nasland’s subtle double feint? She mixes in references to two foreign languages at once, expressing ignorance of one (Latin) while the seizing the opportunity to insert the second (French) for good effect.

In a future post, I’ll discuss the final three techniques in my Mimetic Toolbox.

Holland knows a thing or two about conspiracies. He wrote “The Kennedy Assassination Tapes,” published by Knopf in 2004.

He gives top marks to Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which studied right-wing groups such as the John Birch Society in the 1960s, and Robert Alan Goldberg’s “Enemies Within,” a more modern review.

Success with historical dialogue depends on navigating the treacherous channel between the Scylla of sounding stilted and contrived and the Charybdis of coming off too modern and anachronistic. This daunting task is easier prescribed than accomplished.

I’ve come to rely on a two-pronged approach: Immersion and technique.

Diane Gabaldon is the lady laird of archaic speech. Of all the historical novelists I’ve studied, she inches closest to the precipice of inaccessible dialect without losing her footing. Few of us are blessed with her ear for precision or her acumen in Gaelic and Scots English. Even fewer of us have merited a companion book with glossaries and guides to Gaelic pronunciations.

In The Spider and the Stone, my novel about the Black Douglas, I gave up all pretensions of approximating Gabaldon’s flair for the brogue and peculiarities of speech in 14^th century Scotland. Instead, I took refuge in several techniques that comprise what I call my Mimetic Toolbox for writing believable dialogue.

In Parts Two and Three of our future discussion on this topic, I’ll open my bag of stratagems for your inspection.

Before commencing a new novel, I try for a running start by immersing myself, as much as possible, in the vocabulary, rhythms of speech, peculiar syntax, and sounds of my era. Diaries and primary sources are helpful. Keeping a notebook of phrases, terms, and curses is invaluable. To gain mastery of the Scot accents in Outlander, Gabaldon listened to Scottish folksongs, particularly those performed in live recordings. She learned a lot from overhearing the conversations of audience members during the lulls between sets.

While I was writing The Fire and the Light, my novel set in 13^th century Occitania, I listened to contemporary renderings of authentic ballads and servientes once sung by the medieval troubadours. I also read English translations of troubadour verse. Something in the timbre of the lute and viol from that period gave me a better sensibility for Occitan speech—or at least what modern ears might perceive this vanishing language sounded like.

Gabaldon also recommends reading other novels set in your era. Yet this can be problematic if you don’t have a firm grip on your own style. My former instructor, John Rechy, cautions students in his professional writers’ workshop against reading authors with a similar style to theirs, particularly while they have a novel in progress. He doesn’t want them to abdicate their natural style by subconsciously allowing another’s imprint to seep in and overpower. His admonition may also be warranted for novels set during the same time period. You’ll have to weigh the relative benefits and risks.

One last consideration: If you know in advance that you’ll be confronting thorny issues of dialect and speech patterns, consider avoiding the first-person point of view. The more distant you dial back the point of view, the less the reader will be aware of the variances between modern and antiquarian idioms.

In a future post, we’ll muck around in the Mimetic Toolbox.

Zotero feels your pain.

This nifty little add-on tool for the Mozilla Firefox web browser is a writer’s godsend. The program, easily accessed on Firefox with a single click of the mouse, helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources–citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects–and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. The extension includes the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references. Writers also have the option to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero uses mysterious algorithmic magic to sense when the computer user is viewing a book, article, or other object on the web. On many major research and library sites, the program finds and automatically saves the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Because it lives within the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications. Moreover, because it resides on your hard drive, it can communicate with software running in tandem (such as Microsoft Word). The program can also be used off-line (e.g., on a plane or in an archive without WiFi).

Zotero is produced by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and was funded by the United States Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Best of all—it’s free. You can download it at www.zotero.org