Time period pieces

I used to always think it was so fun to write stories that were set in the deep past, or in the fantasy past. Now I am not so sure anymore, and I have found it has become a bit "boring". It isn't bcause I don't like the more all-natural settings of the past, however ,that I find it boring, nor is it even because I yearn to discuss technology in my stories.

It is instead because I have found myself becoming very tired and even fed up with the way people were in the past. In short, I am very sick of how one dimensional characters in the past tend to be--and I find myself having a hard time trying to get around it. I want to create very colorful characters. Is that even possible if I am creating stories that are set in the deep past? I sometimes am not so sure anymore. I suppose the only way to do it is to use a "creative license"; but even doing that is harder than you think. As I am writing, I can always sort of "sense" what my reader might find ridiculous or not.

For example, let's say I want to do something like create a group of very gay pirates in the year 1650, at the very beginning of the Golden Age of Piracy. For the most part, we all know that nothing like this really existed back then -- open gays probably would have been hanged in reality, back then -- but, for the sake of a story, that's what we want to work with. Not only that, but we also want to make it so that there are plenty of very feminine women in the crew too. They know how to fight and use their cutlasses and shoot their flintlocks; but they're all very feminine and sexy. Just like women from our own time, in this post- feminist revolution time period.

Well, the first and most important question immediately becomes: How do we explain the presence of these characters, in that deep and dark 1650s past? How did they ever come to find each other? Why are they not all being hanged, like they would have been in that time in reality? Personally, I find it very hard to imagine a reader being able to read a story with such characters as those , without immediately calling "bullshit!" and obsessing over those stupid questions.  I think modern readers, in fact, are very rude when it comes to the manner in which they'll let writers use or not use imagination. A writer has to be very careful how he goes about doing it. Readers these days are like elementary school teachers in a Catholic school: They can't wait to shatter the bones in your writing hand with a ruler for some perceived wrongdoing.

Once something is too obviously anachronistic , readers and audiences back away, and fast. In fact, there is almost a sort of "cult of authenticity" that I have found exists around many of our most cherished stories and their respective time periods. On some level, audiences understand that all these stories are always "fake" in some way or other; but they also don't like details being inserted that are blatantly fake. THis is especially the case when that "one little detail" only pops up in one part of the story. The pirates all existing in a 1650's time period, that is otherwise totally the same as it was in reality, save for them all being cross dressers and queers and women, is a perfect example of this problem. The rude reader will usually not be willing to suspend his imagination to accept this. He will become all sorts of caught up on explaining to everyone how this was not at all possible in the real 1650s, etcetc. My response.. "yes we all know that asshole, now shut the fuck up about it." He does not shut up of course. In fact, this rude reader controls all the publishing houses. This cunt is completely in control. Somebody should blow his head off; alas he is inaccessibly locked away in his Ivory Tower....

Gay pirates not being allowed is only one of many problems, however. Another one that I have --at least when it comes to period pieces--is this rule on the dialogue, and how these morons all insist that it has to be and sound "like it's from the 1650s". Do I find old time speech romantic like everyone else? Sure I do, and I love it when it is there. I was just watching The Bounty last night, all over again, which features tons of authentic 1700s dialogue. But ultimately I don't really give a shit for if it is there or not. Usually all I care about is just the story and its outline and the appearance of the time period.That's IT!

 The dialogue, to me, does not and should not be obsessively tied to period in each and every film, which is the case now in our current cultural atmosphere. One cannot make a film set in the 1600s with people using a style of English like we speak now, and get away with it, because we are told its "ridiculous". Why though? Why? Again ,for me, this is not a problem. It's just one detail, and it actually doesn't make the story any harder to believe for me. I think our current rule on this "language must correlate to period" thing is mostly put in place, you see, for one reason in particular: It helps keep poor folks, who are not masters of language, from attempting to make films set anywhere but in their own time. If you look at who period films are popular for right now, you'll see that it tends to be very rich people and "respectable actors" are the only ones who do them. So you always get the Cate Blanchetts and the Kenneth Branaghs and these sorts doing them. Poor actors , or actors who represent a poor pocket of society, don't approach the stuff. I say fuck this to hell and back. Let the poors in. Let them talk in "regular" or slightly switched up dialogue. Who cares? Let these time periods breathe for the modern audiences. Let the jokes in the films be told in dialogue the modern audiences can easily understand. Use modern slang. Let pirates say homie and nigga and "this song is fire dude!" and things like this. It can stll be the 1650s and the beginning of the Golden Age of Piracy --- it just has a special twist.

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