Writing the period just so

[breakinglight11]

A very important skill to develop if you're going to write effective period pieces is striking a particular balance between authenticity and familiarity. On the one hand, one of the great appeals of period pieces and key to making them engaging and effective on their own merits is capturing the feel of it. You need to ground your audience in a sense of the time and place to provide context for the events unfolding and the people involved. That can entail everything from deep things like mentalities and attitudes and lexicons, to cosmetic things like what they wore and what they ate and how they did things. Those things have to be realized in some way, felt in some way, or the environment won't feel significant or real.

However, this does not mean it's necessarily a good idea to reproduce the period exactly. You have to take into account the fact that your audience has the baggage and sensibilities of modern people. Some things are not going to read the way they would in the period, because the modern audience may not have the necessary context. It's very easy for historically accurate things to come off as silly or off-putting.

This is the reason I don't include toooooooooo much actual Victorian slang in the Hawking plays. A lot of it sounds too silly— "neck oil" for alcohol, "collie shangles" for fistfights, et cetera. Sometimes that silliness works for you, depending on your desired effect, like how the pre-WWI slang Bertie Wooster uses helps support what a ridiculous person he is. But if you want the audience to take the proceedings seriously, you have to choose what you include carefully.

At the same time, capturing the "voice" of the time is CRUCIAL. It doesn't necessarily have to be a hundred percent historically accurate voice, but a FEELING of authenticity in the way people talk is, in my opinion, key. I've gotten pretty good at it with all the practice I've had over the years; it's one of the most frequently commented-upon aspects of my work.

Wardrobe is another aspect I consider this for. I confess I admire the costume designers who are brave enough to dress characters in period clothes that were perfectly acceptable then but look silly to modern eyes. "Mad Men" was good at this. I am too attached to everyone looking beautiful that I tend to stick with aesthetics that stood the test of time. But there's definitely a balance to achieve

Go too far one way, they don't get invested in the world. Go to far the other, they get yanked out of it.