In a critique group recently, I was told that characters living their lives in the 24th century wouldn’t say ‘Fuck’. It was, apparently, anachronistic.
That got me really thinking about the language we use in our writing, especially when setting stories in non-modern times. Language changes and develops over time. Dickens is far more florid and verbose than modern writing, and he was only writing in the mid-nineteenth century. Go back a couple of centuries more, to Shakespear, and the language is even more difficult to understand.
If you read writings from the Anglo-Saxon or Roman periods, well done, they’re different languages altogether.
But, if I wrote a story set in Roman Britain, would I write the dialogue in Latin? Of course not, because my readers almost certainly wouldn’t understand it. I’d write it in English.
My point is that when we write in periods outside of our own, we are acting as interpreters for our characters. The language in my novel set in the 24th century wouldn’t be ‘modern’ English and so I have to translate the characters words to something that readers will understand. It’s easier when writing about the past as we have real world examples to draw from – but the future?
Making up futuristic curses like the title of this post strikes me as forced and gets in the way of empathising with what the character is saying. If a character is shocked by something they’re experiencing, then a modern cuss lets the reader understand instantly what that character is feeling and expressing. Letting the reader get on with the important bit of enjoying the story.
It might seem strange having a Citizen of a futuristic orbital habitat using a ‘modern’ swear word, but at least you know what they mean by it.
So, will I carry on having my far future characters swear like troopers? Hell yeah!
Thanks for reading
Rik