My time to shine! I write and narrate loads of historical fiction and nonfiction (see username). What I have learned over the years is that you cannot be 100% accurate, lest you risk losing 99% of...
My time to shine! I write and narrate loads of historical fiction and nonfiction (see username). What I have learned over the years is that you cannot be 100% accurate, lest you risk losing 99% of your audience. But don’t go entirely the other direction as well. People are looking for brief glimpses and small clues into a character’s background with the way they use language.
But above all, you don’t want the choices you make about delivery to get in the way of what you are trying to say with plot and theme, etc. Historical subjects are always challenging enough without adding more distracting layers.
So yes, often my highborn characters speak the King’s English and lower-class characters get rougher accents. It’s a shorthand between author and listener. As a writer and actor both, I find that particular character’s perspective in the text and let everything generate outward from there.
This is where I might take issue with OP. They say their protagonist speaks with an unaffected Modern Dublin accent in the Syracuse of 2500 years ago. But that grabs the wrong kind of attention as well. Give the listener or reader some brief and elegant acknowledgment that their language is not of this time and place and leave it at that.
My time to shine! I write and narrate loads of historical fiction and nonfiction (see username). What I have learned over the years is that you cannot be 100% accurate, lest you risk losing 99% of your audience. But don’t go entirely the other direction as well. People are looking for brief glimpses and small clues into a character’s background with the way they use language.
But above all, you don’t want the choices you make about delivery to get in the way of what you are trying to say with plot and theme, etc. Historical subjects are always challenging enough without adding more distracting layers.
So yes, often my highborn characters speak the King’s English and lower-class characters get rougher accents. It’s a shorthand between author and listener. As a writer and actor both, I find that particular character’s perspective in the text and let everything generate outward from there.
This is where I might take issue with OP. They say their protagonist speaks with an unaffected Modern Dublin accent in the Syracuse of 2500 years ago. But that grabs the wrong kind of attention as well. Give the listener or reader some brief and elegant acknowledgment that their language is not of this time and place and leave it at that.