The Present is Another Country: N M Browne
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| Being a bit sixth century... |
I have been thinking a lot about age recently. Not because I
am old, you understand, or at least not exactly. I’ve been thinking about the
impact age has on language and experience and how much that matters when developing
a character on the page.
Everyone comes from
somewhere; a place, a time, a set of values and part of being a writer is, I
think, developing an awareness of that. We can learn to speak in other voices,
but only after we have first recognised the implicit bias of our own. I don’t
think that bias is a problem by the way, it is part of an author’s voice, but,
if we want to change that voice to convey a different set of experiences and
attitudes it takes effort, research and careful observation: it is really
tricky – two words which in themselves date me and my voice to a very particular
twentieth century middle class milieu.
These days the gap
between me and my would be YA readers is almost a chasm. I live on the analogue
side of a great divide: I’m notebooks and fountain pens, film cameras and fixed
landline phones. I’m thick paper directories, filing cards, the London A to Z
and badly folded paper maps. I am from a time when research was difficult, when
you couldn’t google someone before you met them, a world of postcards, letters,
difficult handwriting, typewriters and short hand typists. Fortunately I mainly
write historical or speculative fiction. I can still hear the attitudes of the
nineteenth century, echoed in my memories of my grandmother and great grandmothers
( my grandmother was 102 when she died a couple of years ago.) I wonder how
easy it is for children growing up with 'Love Island' to grasp the shame of a
child ‘born out of wedlock,’ the fear of the workhouse, and the reverence for
the word of a doctor.
As a writer, it is my
job, to convey the thought world of my characters to the page in an accessible way.
The older I get, and the further my world diverges from that of those born now,
the more I appreciate what a challenge that is. It is a tough job but someone’s
got to do it ( as some twentieth century meme would have it) I’m happy to be
one of the many someones who choose to take that 'tough job' on.
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