How can I mix my modern writing style and imput with a midevil setting and plot?
I love midevil based stories, but I have so many modern opinions I like to put into my writing, plus my style of writing is not very midevil-ish. If you could hint me in the right direction (with out giving me the answers cause i want to write this myself) that would be amazing.
Please and thank you!
=)
This is a delicate balancing act, since the speech patterns that were acceptable in times past now sound stilted and even pedantic to modern readers. For instance, back in Charles Dickens’s day, contractions were used only by the lower classes. But to write dialogue sans contractions nowadays sticks out like Ebenezer Scrooge at the office Christmas party.
It’s important to develop a good ear for the rhythm and flow of period dialogue, by reading extensively in period literature. Some people have had excellent success mimicking period dialogue (Patrick O’Brian comes to mind), but usually it’s best to find a happy medium. Give your dialogue just enough of an “antique” flavor to keep the reader in the period without bogging him down in alien speech patterns. For example, in the time period in which my recently released medieval novel Behold the Dawn is set, modern-day English was almost entirely unknown, so I had to find a speech pattern that would be intelligible to readers while still grounding them within the setting. For the most part, I accomplished this simply by a judicious use of appropriate dialect.. just enough to give the reader the sense that he was reading a medieval tale, but not enough to make the story incomprehensible.
-K.M. Weiland
Historical and Speculative Novelist
http://www.kmweiland.com
This is a delicate balancing act, since the speech patterns that were acceptable in times past now sound stilted and even pedantic to modern readers. For instance, back in Charles Dickens’s day, contractions were used only by the lower classes. But to write dialogue sans contractions nowadays sticks out like Ebenezer Scrooge at the office Christmas party.
It’s important to develop a good ear for the rhythm and flow of period dialogue, by reading extensively in period literature. Some people have had excellent success mimicking period dialogue (Patrick O’Brian comes to mind), but usually it’s best to find a happy medium. Give your dialogue just enough of an “antique” flavor to keep the reader in the period without bogging him down in alien speech patterns. For example, in the time period in which my recently released medieval novel Behold the Dawn is set, modern-day English was almost entirely unknown, so I had to find a speech pattern that would be intelligible to readers while still grounding them within the setting. For the most part, I accomplished this simply by a judicious use of appropriate dialect.. just enough to give the reader the sense that he was reading a medieval tale, but not enough to make the story incomprehensible.
-K.M. Weiland
Historical and Speculative Novelist
http://www.kmweiland.com
References :
hey moony! That’s awesome – mixing modern with the old style! Well for a midevel setting I think of castles (you might be thinking something else but just keep reading) so maybe just have your story based in the real world only an island starts forming and in the future it grows and is taken over to become a medevil-like place with the parts you want for being midevil, like maybe certain creatures that appear on this island, the type of weaponry that you may want to include, the type of speaking and people and government, etc.
Otherwise, I think you can just make up your own world that is similar to today’s world… maybe a parallel universe sorta thing? lol.
Hope that helped you in some way!
References :