Chasing the Wind

[emo_snl]

   The turquoise sea sparkled in the sun, seagulls circled overhead, and the large square sail pulled fitfully, propelling the ship along. The crewmembers relaxed at their oar benches, trying to enjoy every moment of not rowing to the utmost. Jason stood near the steersman in the stern, watching the green hilly coast slide by to their right. He

Comments

[emo_snal]

I do always appreciate constructive criticism. And in this case I have indeed duly considered the point you raise. But I read a lot of historical fiction and nearly never do I see them actually explicitly saying "[this is all translated from ancient whatever]" because it's a thoroughly safe assumption. And as such "okay" may have been invented in the 20th century.... though that wiki article itself says the earliest written example is 1839, but literally every word of dialogue in there was invented centuries after the events take place, and "okay" will strike most readers in the appropriate context as a casual affirmation. If one used some funny young people slang like.. I don't know whatever the kids are saying these days (Jason was on fleek!), that might strike the reader as weird because it will distract them to thinking about funny 21st century youth trends, but I don't think okay is a distracting word.

Now where dialogue usually isn't changed is where the language hasnt' changed so much as to be unintelligible, IE the "Victorian England" historical fiction that certain demographics seem to have a mania for writing (for example on the writing website scribophile joined the historical fiction group and it seems to be entirely that stuff). Another writing project I've actually had in mind and you will likely see in future entries soon is a similar retelling of stories from Thomas Mallory's Morte d'Arthur. In this case the English IS both intelligible and... pretty creaky. I was thinking I'll probably tune up the dialogue a lot to make it more digestable while still trying to convey a natural use of "doth" and "thou" and all that. And maybe just a smattering for "forsooths" and suchlike in the non-diagogue texts as well for flavor. It will be interesting dialing in the the degree of modernization vs archiacness

[baron_waste]

I'm glad you took this in the spirit it was intended. It's a good story.