The Elusive Art of Making the Dead Speak

By HILARY MANTEL - Wall Street Journal

There's a question that confronts a writer of historical fiction on her first page: How did the dead talk? Even the recent past has a voice different from ours. If writers are too lazy to grasp that fact, their work grates on the ear. When today's TV and Hollywood clichés pop out of the mouths of an earlier generation, fiction and drama lose credibility. But any skilled writer can find the right idiom for recent decades. If in doubt, find a person of the right age and ask, "Did you ever say that? What did you say instead?"
Those of us who write about the far past, beyond living memory, beyond the reach of recording instruments, have harder problems to solve. How do you give the past a human voice without betraying it or making your reader furiously impatient? Too much period flavor, and you slow up the story. "Nay, damsel, be not afeared," may be authentic, but it will make your reader giggle. If you give way to an outbreak of "prithee" and "perchance," then perchance your reader will hurl the book across the room.

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The challenge goes beyond single words. You need to catch the tone of your chosen age.

So should you go for modern idiom? If you do, it must be neutral, as nothing dates so fast as this year's slang. Yet neutral can seem flavorless. So what to do?
Relax, I think; accept that you will never be authentic. Recently I've been writing about the early Tudor period. We simply don't know how people conversed in that era. Our sources are mostly official: government records, legal documents. The private letters that have been preserved tend to have been kept because they were important: That is, they deal with formal matters. We simply don't know how servants talked between themselves or how the mass of illiterate men and women communicated.
Also, words have changed their meaning since the Tudor era. If I used them now as they were used then, I would confuse and frustrate the reader. The verb "let" for example, now means "permit"; to the Tudors it meant "forbid." What we call a clever man, they called a "witty" man.
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