A Writer's Guide to Yes and No

So, thinking about how to write about seventh-century Anglo-Saxons raises questions about two simple words you would think no writer would need advice on: yes and no. But if you are writing out of your own time and place, you do need to be careful about what you do with these words. A few thoughts:

Modern English uses yes and no more often, I think, than did our ancestors in the past, and more so than speakers of other languages. In today's global village, where English is used so heavily as a second language, it seems this trait of English is leaking into other languages. I think modern speakers of Spanish, say, use sí and no more often than they used to.

Some languages get by perfectly well with no words at all that correspond to our yes and no. Finnish, for instance.  Classical Latin did not have words for yes and no. These languages get by just by repeating the verb. For instance:

Has he left?
He has left.
He has not left.

So if you are writing a story set in ancient Rome, you can help convey the feel of being in a different culture at a different time by not using yes or no to answer questions. And, as I say, if your story is set in a foreign country with a different language, or especially in the past, you can help convey that by omitting yes and no, or at least minimizing the use of them.

In my case, with The Sorcerer's Apprentice, I have all but removed yes and no from the manuscript. I do global searches from time to time to sift out cases when I used them without thinking, which I sometimes do. But the Anglo-Saxon language did have words for yes and no, so it needn't be a hard and fast rule. There are times when you really want to use yes or no because the character is being emphatic, and that's all right. Although they said yes and no less often back then, the times when they did use them, it was to be emphatic.

But the other tricky thing is that the Anglo-Saxons actually had four words: yes, no, aye, and nay. So if you're writing in old or middle English, you really need to know how to use all four. Wikipedia has an article on yes and no that can help you. Basically, if the question is affirmative, you use aye and nay. If the question is negative, you use yes and no. For instance:

Has he left yet?
Aye, he has left.
Nay, he has not left.

Hasn't he left yet? (Or maybe, Has he not left yet? has a better period feel.)
Yes, he has left.
No, he has not left yet.

So there you have it. I'll bet hat's a lot more words of explanation on how to use yes and no than you ever thought would be necessary.

What do you think? Have I got it right?

(Lots of good work on the project. I'm up to about 110,000 words.)

(Cross-posted at markpainter.us.)

More on Words

I've been thinking more about word choice, and I've decided I haven't beaten this dead horse enough, so let me say some more.

As I've said, one of the glories of the English language is that there are often three (or more) different ways to say something, Anglo-Saxon, French, and Greco-Latin. Each one has its own distinct color. Or flavor, if you like.

This is something that all writers need to pay attention to in their own work, even if they are not writing epic fantasy novels set in Dark Age England. Because the colors are going to work for you (or against you), so you need to understand them.

Greco-Latin verbiage is technical, bureaucratic, and polysyllabic. This language can communicate with great precision, which is why scientists and academics and the educated frequently employ it. The difficulty inherent in using this language is that it can feel abstract and colorless. And though it is precise language, its very technicality facilitates confusion. Audiences can be misdirected by this language, and its very sense of sophistication can be used to induce the credulous to conclude that important ideas have been expressed, when in fact the language is basically empty of content.

French words lend themselves to express beauty, artistry, vision. It is the language of grace and balance, a ballet of letters that can touch all the pleasures and mysteries of experience. French words lend themselves to poetry. They are the music of the soul.

Anglo-Saxon speech is short, punchy, and earthy. The words are crisp. They show meaning without bloat. They are words of feeling. Words of love and hate. Words of life and death. Blunt, hard words that make sharp thoughts and quick deeds.

Did you see what I did there? Ha, ha, yes. I am so clever. I did the thing I was talking about while I was talking about it. But I think even in these hastily constructed and self-conscious sentences, you can see what I'm driving at. Note too that I constructed more complex sentences to go with the more complex language, and simple sentences that go with the simple words. The longer sentences are sentences of mood and contemplation. The short, punchy sentences are sentences of action and passion.

(I am now 107,000 words into this project. I am no longer sure whether I have two long books or three short ones. Who knows? Maybe three long ones by the time I'm done. I've decided to just go ahead and write the damn first draft already, and worry about structure later.)

(Cross-posted at markpainter.us)

The Other Protagonist

I'm setting this novel, at least the beginning, in the year AD 656. Why 656, you ask? Well, in the year 656, some interesting stuff happened.

And that brings me to Wulfhere. After Easter of 656, Prince Wulfhere is heir to the crown of Mercia, his elder brother Peada having been murdered with the connivance of his wife, and having left this world childless.

By the way, does it strike you as odd that Wulfhere's father is named Penda and his older brother is named Peada, while he is named Wulfhere. Wulfhere is totally an Anglo-Saxon name, by the way. The first time I saw it, I guessed it meant "wolf lord," as in Wolfherr, in modern German. But I was wrong. That's a shame. I would love to be able to say the guy is named "Wolf Lord." Oh, well.

No, Wulfhere is cognate with the modern German Wolfheer. That means "Wolf army." What a name. Jamie over at the British History Podcast says it sounds like a name some online gamer would come up with for himself. (It would inevitably be a "him.") Any confusion you may feel about this should be cleared up when I tell you that "wulf" (wolf) is one of the 57 Anglo-Saxon words for "warrior" or "fighter." Anglo-Saxons have lots of words for fighter for the same reason that the Inuit have a lot of words for snow (actually a bit of a myth): because it's how they spent their lives.

Although this has nothing to do with my novel, I can't help but notice how different (and un-Anglo-Saxon) the names "Penda" and "Peada" are. They sound Welsh to me, and my research backs me up on this. Why Mercian Angle royals would be giving their sons Welsh names is a bit of a mystery, and even more so that they would name their first son "Peada," and then follow up with a thoroughly Anglo-Saxon name for the second son. (Unless I can think up a good rationale for that within my novel. Hm. Have to give that some thought.)

But, unless I come up with something clever there, that's a side point. In the novel, it is 656, King Peada has just been murdered, and the disappearance of Prince Wulhere launches the story.

(I have finished the first book of what is now certainly going to be a trilogy. It's about 80,000 words long, and I am shopping it to agents. Time to get cracking on the second book!)

Choosing the Words

Well, I discussed this Anglo-Saxon word choice thing with The Wife since my previous post, and she said, more or less, "Oh, I hate reading books written like that."

That took me aback. I asked her what the problem was. As she began to explain, I realized that what she was reacting against was stilted, pseudo-Elizabethan English such as Thou hast prevailed for the nonce, rapscallion, but upon my oath, thy victory shall be short-lived. Um, no. That's not what I mean, and I hope no one else thinks that.

Here's an example of what I do mean. I was doing some revision work on the project recently, and I came across a sentence where I had written that one of the characters had improved something. Improved is a word with Latin roots, and so I should not have used it there. The idea is to replace improved with a proper Anglo-Saxon word.

What would an Anglo-Saxon say there? What word would Tolkien have used there? I have to admit that I wracked my brain over this for a while, probably longer than I should have. Now, there are times when there simply is no good choice, and you're stuck with using a French or a Latin/Greek word. Even Tolkien got stuck like that sometimes. But neither do I want to use some obsolete or archaic word (like nonce in the above example). I'm not 100% opposed to using archaisms in my story. A few of them, sprinkled here and there, might help the story feel more real. But it's important to use them sparingly. Use too many and they begin to call attention to themselves, or worse; the reader starts tripping over unfamiliar words and is taken out of the story. That, I suppose, is what The Wife was objecting to.

So what I'm looking for is a word still in use in modern English that is Anglo-Saxon in origin and means improved. Call that Plan A. Plan B is to go ahead and use improved. It's not a terrible word. Most readers will ride right by it and not notice that it's a little out of place in the story. Of course, I absolutely have to avoid any word that's entirely anachronistic. Like okay, for instance, which is ubiquitous in modern English but would be jarringly out of place in a story set in the seventh century. But improved? I can get away with it, if I need to.

Improved means "made better." What would be the Anglo-Saxon way of saying that? Have you guessed yet? I am a little embarrassed to admit how long it took me to come up with the answer. And you will be, too, if you haven't already gotten it. It's staring at you right now. See it? Bettered. That's it!

In modern English, better is almost exclusively used as an adjective. (A comparative, if you want to get technical.) But it is also a verb and a noun. (When I say noun, I mean in the sense of "in the presence of your betters" not in the sense of "a person who places a bet.") Regardless, I think it's fair to say that most any native speaker of English is aware that better can be used as a verb, although it's a subtle enough trick that it might trip up a non-native speaker, even a very good one.

Using one word, better, as a noun and a verb and an adjective is distinctively Anglo-Saxon, and yet I can use it without causing the reader to become confused or taking the reader out of the story. That's because we all have a larger receptive vocabulary than our expressive vocabulary. In other words, we all know and understand many more words than we use in everyday communication. Those are the words I'm after.

Talking Like an Angle

When I was in law school, many years ago, I had a visiting professor from Poland, who was there to teach socialist law. (This was back when Poland was a communist country.) I clearly remember him saying to our class one day that it was a peculiarity of our legal system that "nothing is ever null, and nothing is ever void. They are only 'null and void.'"

He asked us if any of us knew why that was. And none of us knew the answer. I don't know how many of my classmates have learned the answer since then, but it took me about 35 years. But now I know the answer, and I'm going to tell you. (Because I don't know where my professor is.)

The great thing about English, and something every writer who intends to use the language should know, is that it is really three languages in one. The foundation of the English language is Anglo-Saxon. Layered over that is Norman French. And on the top, the roof, if you will, is classical Greek and Latin.

This is why English has so many words, and often words that mean the same thing, or are at least close synonyms.

When William the Conqueror and his buddies took over Anglo-Saxon England, their French became the language of rule. And that means it became the language of law. But there were still high-ranking Anglo-Saxons in post-Conquest England, and so it became customary in legal documents to pair the Anglo-Saxon legal term with the French legal term, to make sure everyone knew what they were talking about.

Of course, the language barrier between the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans stopped being a problem more than 800 years ago, but the custom of pairing Anglo-Saxon and French legal terms together in a legal  document persisted all the way into the here-and-now twenty-first century, and it is still going strong. "Null and void" is one such example. If you think about it for a minute, you can probably tell that "null" is a Germanic Anglo-Saxon word and "void" looks suspiciously French. (The "oi" diphthong is a dead giveaway.) There are many other examples:

terms and conditions

cease and desist

liens and encumbrances

goods and chattels

breaking and entering

will and testament

let or hindrance

due and payable

sale and transfer

have and hold

fit and proper

There are many more, but you get the idea.

This is important to anyone using the English language, because most of the time when you choose a word, you will have a choice between at least two and possibly all three types of English words: Anglo-Saxon, French, and Greek/Latin. Every word has a history! And that history colors your writing. So you need to choose words that color your language as you express your vision. Or shade your meaning as you tell a story. (Did you see what I just did there?)

Obviously, there is much more to be said about this than can be said in one blog post. So I'll be coming back to it. But since I'm writing a novel set in and around Mercia, an Angle kingdom, there's a second, more specialized issue. Most of my characters (with the prominent exception of Abanoub, the protagonist) are going to be Angles, which means that when they speak, they should speak in Anglo-Saxon words. If I take you into their private thoughts, they should be thinking in Anglo-Saxon words. When Abanoub talks to an Angle, he should use Anglo-Saxon words, too, because the person he's speaking to will need to understand him. (Mostly.) If I take you into Abanoub's private thoughts, well, that's different. He's not an Angle. In fact, if you remember his background, you'll realize that it is altogether fitting and proper that  he use Latin and Greek words in his own mind, since he surely speaks both those languages. His first language is undoubtedly Greek.

There are a lot of challenges to writing this way, but it's a lot of fun, too. More on this next time.

The Look of a Character

I'm not very visual when it comes to people. If you're trying to remind me of someone I have met, describing their appearance to me probably won't trigger my memory. You'll have more luck giving me their name or telling me something about them. Faces don't stick with me very well.

I don't know why that is, but I must not be typical, because novelists spend a lot of effort describing how their characters look. When I read a novel, this mostly just goes over my head, but if I want to write a novel, I'm going to have to pay attention to how my characters look and communicate that to my readers even if I have a hard time visualizing them myself.

I've written about creating Abanoub, the protagonist of The Sorcerer's Apprentice. But what does he look like? Modern technology is a great help here.You can just go to Google and do an image search of Egyptian Men. For better results, perhaps Young Egyptian Men or Attractive Egyptian Men or Handsome Egyptian Men or even Sexy Egyptian Men. The last one is different only in that you get slightly more pictures of Egyptian guys with their shirts off (and pictures of Justin Bieber and Zachary Quinto, for some reason), which for a writer is good, because Abanoub is definitely going to take his shirt off once or twice in the course of this novel.

In fact, I'm doing this for all the characters in The Sorcerer's Apprentice. I'm using Scrivener to write the novel, and Scrivener will allow me to pluck pictures out of my Google searches and save them with the novel, filed away by character for future reference.

For some characters, I find a picture on the Internet that jumps out at me as exactly how my character should look, and that's that. But that's rare. More often, I shop around for features, and come up with, say, these eyes, and these shoulders, and this hair, and these cheekbones, all from different pictures. Which is fine. I file them all away in Scrivener, and refer to them as I need to.

For Abanoub, I picture him as tall and lanky, with curly black hair. I imagine him with a relatively fair complexion, by Egyptian standards, with hazel eyes and striking dark eyebrows. There are reasons for some of this. Since he's going to be living in Anglo-Saxon Britain, I want him to look different enough from the other characters that whenever anyone meets him, their first reaction is, "Wow. Get a load of the hair and the eyes." Abanoub definitely stands out in a crowd, but not too much. Just enough to make it clear that he's different.

He's a sorcerer's apprentice, so I imagine him a bookish kind of guy. He's fascinated by books, by ancient learning, and by sorcery. If he were living in our time, we'd call him a geek. I guess that's why I want him lanky and fair skinned, as in, doesn't get out in the sun much. His looks tell you a lot about where he spends his time.

I'm still working on the other project, a science fiction novel, for a little while longer, so no word count here.

Abanoub the Apprentice

St. Abanoub

So I needed a name for my Egyptian Christian expatriate sorcerer's apprentice.

I figured the obvious thing to do was find a list of Coptic saints and see if there was a name that jumped out at me.

There was. St. Abanoub. Maybe it helped that he was the third name on the list. Okay, though, I told myself, you can't just pick a name in the "As" without checking out the rest of the list.

So I went over the list. Then I went over the list again. I don't know exactly why, but I fell in love with the name "Abanoub." It means "Father of Gold." I guess I just like the sound of it. I learned that Abanoub is a saint not just in Coptic Orthodoxy, but in Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism as well.

His story is here, along with a photograph of an alleged apparition of the saint in 2003.

Now, Abanoub is a fourth-century saint, and my Abanoub is a seventh-century Coptic Christian, so there's nothing very improbable about my hero being named after one of the saints of his Church.

The story of St. Abanoub is a grisly one. He was martyred at the age of 12, for preaching the faith to Roman authorities during the era of the persecutions of Diocletian. There are a lot of martyrs from this period, and their stories all sort of sound the same after a while. But I thought it would be interesting to adapt the saint's life into my character's life. As I mentioned, my Abanoub grew up during the conquest of Egypt by Arab Muslims. Perhaps he, too, in a fit of youthful zeal, challenged the religious views of the ruling class.

For my purposes, though, I'm going to imagine that my Abanoub did this when he was eighteen, because the image of a 12-year old boy getting beaten and tortured goes a little too far for me. So let's say my Abanoub, at the age of 18 and a little too headstrong, challenges the Arab rulers. It doesn't end well, only instead of getting killed, he just gets out of town. Way out. Like...Britain.

So there's my protagonist, Abanoub. And now you know why the blog URL is what it is.

No word counts just now, because I've had to set aside The Sorcerer's Apprentice for a little bit while I polish up a different novel.

Rome: Not Fallen Yet

Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire draws the line for the end of the Empire at 476, the year the last Western Roman Emperor was deposed, and most historians since have followed his lead.

This reflects a Western European worldview. The second half of the fifth century was a bad time for Romans living in Spain or Britain or France, but in the Eastern Empire, things chugged along as usual. The surviving portion of the Empire is usually dubbed "The Byzantine Empire" from 476 onward, but that is a modern convention. They called their state "The Roman Empire."

In the year 600, as you can see from the map above, a good portion of what we think of as the Roman Empire was still holding up over a century later. It was still the undisputed superpower of the ancient world. Not a lot had changed since 476 for the Romans of the East. But in the next 50 years, the Empire would lose half its area and between 65 and 75 percent of its population and GDP.

What happened? Mohammed. Islam. Arab conquest.

The wealth of the Roman lands seized by the Arabs was the basis of a new Arab Empire that would rival the old Roman Empire. To my mind, this is where you should draw the line between the fall of the ancient world and the dawn of the medieval one. This is where the remaining Roman Empire becomes "The Byzantine Empire," a second-tier power that is a shadow of the old empire.

The loss of Egypt to the Arabs in 641, fifteen years before The Sorcerer's Apprentice opens, is the key moment. The wealth of Egypt was the basis of Roman Power for almost 700 years. When it was gone, so was Roman power.

The protagonist of my story would have seen it happen. He would have been a child in Alexandria when it fell to the Caliphate. A decade or so later, when he is a young adult, he will leave Egypt and travel across the world, winding up in Britain.

Why?

The Arab conquest may well be part of it, although I would expect someone who was just a boy when it happened to be pretty used to the idea by the time he's eighteen. Things must have gotten dicey for him when he reached adulthood.

Today's word count is 57,161.

The Protagonist

Okay. The story is called The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Obviously, the protagonist is the apprentice. In Dragonslayer, the apprentice was Galen. The movie doesn't tell us anything about Galen's background, but he doesn't seem too different from anyone else in the story. He seems like a guy who grew up somewhere nearby.

I don't want to do that.

I want my apprentice to be a misfit. I want him to be someone the Anglo-Saxon community around him doesn't fully understand. I want him to look on the Anglo-Saxons from an outsider's point of view.

There's a really good writing reason to do that. If he's an outsider, and he looks at the other characters and the world in which he lives with an outsider perspective, then he's well-positioned to explain them to the reader, who is also an outsider. For example, a fellow Anglo-Saxon isn't going to explain to the reader how Anglo-Saxons are fair-skinned and often have red or blond hair, right? He or she is just going to take that for granted as something not worth thinking about. But an outsider would mention it.

Also, remember my first line?

From a window atop a lonely tower, perched on a lonely rock at the edge of a lonely kingdom, a lonely man looked out upon a lonely land.

Why is he lonely? After all, he's got a job and a place to live. A sorcerer's apprentice probably lives a higher standard of living than a peasant farmer's kid, right? But if he's an outsider, someone from a far-off land who doesn't quite fit in? Then he's likely to feel lonely and out of place from time to time even if he as a master and a community he calls home. That makes for an interesting protagonist. At least, to me.

The story is set in Britain. So I thought, what's the farthest country I can think of, one of whose sons might plausibly find his way to Britain in the seventh century?

People got around more in those days than you might think. Some people, anyway. Upper class people. Okay, I guess my protagonist comes from an upper class family. But where?

Someplace really far, like China or India, is not out of the question. It's not physically impossible. But there's no known case of a person traveling that far in the seventh century.

On the other hand, there's St. Theodore of Tarsus, who was Archbishop of Canterbury from 668-690, almost contemporaneous with my book. In 656, when my story starts, St. Theodore is 54 years old and living in Rome. But he was born in Tarsus, in the Byzantine Empire, and will later be living in Britain. So there's precedent for someone traveling at least that far.

I picked Egypt. Partly because if I picture a map of the Roman Empire at its height, Britain is in the extreme northwest corner, and Egypt in the extreme southeast. So, two places very far apart, but with a common heritage of having been in the Roman Empire in the not-too-distant past.

And there was some interesting stuff going on in Egypt in the seventh century. More about that later.

The Fall of Mercia

My wife is a United Methodist minister.

You may wonder what it is like to be married to a minister. Well, imagine you are married to a butcher. Now ask yourself how you, the spouse of a butcher, would feel about sausage.

That's what it's like to be married to a minister. Often I feel that way about the church.

So I decided my novel would be about Mercia. Then I read the Wikipedia article on Mercia, which, by the way, has this to say about Mercia and J.R.R. Tolkien:

J. R. R. Tolkien is one of many scholars who have studied and promoted the Mercian dialect of Old English, and introduced various Mercian terms into his legendarium – especially in relation to the Kingdom of Rohan, otherwise known as the Mark (a name cognate with Mercia). Not only is the language of Rohan actually represented as^[16] the Mercian dialect of Old English, but a number of its kings are given the same names as monarchs who appear in the Mercian royal genealogy, e.g. Fréawine, Fréaláf and Éomer (see List of kings of the Angles).^[17]

The mid-seventh century was a bad time for Mercia. The king, Penda, died in battle against Northumberland in 655. His eldest son, Peada, became king. Peada was already married to the daughter of the king of Northumberland, apparently an effort to promote peace between the two kingdoms, an effort that obviously failed.

The royal family of Mercia were by this time the only Anglo-Saxon kings who remained pagan and had not yet converted to Christianity. It is sometimes said that Mercia was the last kingdom to convert to Christianity, but the truth is, our sources only tell us what religion the royals were. The faith of ordinary people is left unrecorded. No doubt there were both pagans and Christians in all the kingdoms, though in what proportions we can only guess.

Anyway, King Oswiu of Northumberland was a Christian, and so was his daughter. That Peada, eldest son of King Penda, convert to Christianity was a requirement of the marriage. Peada did indeed convert and marry Oswiu's daughter, Alchflæd. After his father died, Oswiu took over. He annexed northern Mercia into Northumberland outright, and set up his son-in-law as a vassal king over the southern portion of Mercia.

But even that arrangement didn't last long. Just a few months later, at Easter 656, Peada was murdered at Oswiu's command and apparently with Alchflæd's assistance. I like to think of this as Peada stabbed in the back at Easter Mass. Yeah, I had days like that in church, too.

Peada had a younger brother, Wulfhere. Little is known of his life up to this time. After the death of his older brother, Oswiu took control of all Mercia and Wulfhere disappears from the story. But two years later, in 658, Wulfhere reappears, leading a revolt against Oswiu that re-establishes the Kingdom of Mercia with Wulfhere on the throne.

Now that's a story worthy of a fantasy novel. And so I decided my story takes place during Wulfhere's "lost years" of 656-8. If he spent the time hiding out, far away from Oswiu's assassins (likely), and if he had some help from a sorcerer's apprentice (highly unlikely, but you can't prove it didn't happen) who protected him from Oswiu's men and helped him plot and execute his return to power, well, that would make a pretty good story, I think.

Today's word count is 56,738.