Tag: nikvincent

There are lots of reasons for creating speech patterns for characters. Sometimes it’s simply to differentiate one from another. It might be to imbue someone with a particular trait, say of annoyance or dizziness or of being an intellectual. Speech patterns maketh the man or woman in some instances.

Inventing a dialect for an entire community or race is something else, but can be key to the reader’s understanding, or can, at the very least help it.

Writers often invent dialects when more than one community appears in a novel, or, in SF or Fantasy, more than one race: dwarves and orcs speak differently from one another, as do humans from elves.

Sometimes only one race inhabits a book, but in that instance it is too easy for the reader to automatically read that race as human. Give it a dialect and the problem is solved. Invest that dialect with nuance and describing the race is also a problem solved. They describe themselves in the language they use.

There are any number of ways to do this.

We begin by limiting or expanding vocabulary, by choosing particular words, which might, for example, be arcane and not in common use. We might make up words or use compound words. We might also choose specific forms of words not usually used. for example, we would usually refer to a ‘speaker’, but for the purposes of a particular dialect we might choose to use ‘sayer’ instead.

We might choose never to abbreviate or use contractions for words like ‘not’ or ‘have’, so ‘wouldn’t’ becomes ‘would not’ and ‘could’ve’ becomes ‘could have’. We might go further still and never use negatives of any sort.

We might decide that a race has no words for things we take for granted so, for example, if something cannot be literally touched there might be no word for it, so ‘air’, ‘sky’, ‘breath’, ‘steam’ etc might be out.

There’s a great deal that can be achieved with tenses. Primitive races might use only two or three tenses. There is a lost language where the speakers referred to the future as being behind them and the past ahead of them. That would be an interesting way to write a race, and, now that I think of it, something that I’m not sure has ever been done in a novel. It’s an interesting philosophy, too, and instantly tells the reader something about that race.

A primitive culture in a novel might use only limited pronouns. They might never specify gender, for example.

It’s all about making choices.

Having made those choices, it’s about being consistent.

That’s the real trick, and that’s the difficulty, particularly when we’re narrowing the vocabulary and the tenses. If we limit ourselves it becomes harder to say all the things we want our characters to say, and it becomes tougher to differentiate between one character and another.

In those instances it’s useful if there’s a rhythm to the direct speech and forms of repetition. It’s important that the reader catch a refrain, becomes familiar with what is likely to come next.

Everything in writing has to be transparent to the reader. Nothing must seem difficult to understand on the page.

That of course, is where a good editor can be a huge help, making sure that the language is consistent, that nothing jars, that where tenses are limited there is no deviation. That there is music in the language of speech, because that’s what it is, after all… It is speech.

People, in the real World don’t speak in sentences. They don’t speak formally. They repeat themselves and hesitate and make a lot of unnecessary sounds that have little to do with words, and that’s not always possible in the written word.

Patterns and rhythm and shared words and phrases are possible, and those are the things that families and communities share. So, those are the things we try to use when we’re building a dialect.

Then the language that the races in the novel use must sit comfortably within the language of the book itself. While the voices of the characters of the races must be distinct there must be some echo of them in the text, some sense of their rhythm in the rhythm of the prose and in the story as a whole, otherwise the novel ceases to be about those characters.

It can be a bit of a balancing act and there’s a fine line to tread. And sometimes it’s possible to produce a book that is deceptively simple and linear from quite a complex set of experimental rules.

We hope we’ve achieved something a little like that with the Aux in the novel Fiefdom.

Dan had set quite a precedent when he named the Aux he wrote about in Kingdom. I loved Gene the Hackman.

He had a cast, but, in comics, casts are often small, and Gene was soon alone.

Writing a novel is an entirely different prospect, and with not only one Aux tribe, but several and with an ensemble cast, and with no pictures, so many more characters have to be named. It was a much taller order to come up with a convincing cast list.

Needless to say that cast list was my job.

Naming characters can be a lot of fun, and names are important for lots of reasons. I’ve named characters before, my own in my independent fiction and I’ve named characters in tie-in fiction, too.

Fiefdom is set in a different time and on another continent, so while it was fine for me to name some of the characters after movie stars, I wanted to bring in other cultural reference, and, because Fiefdom is set in Europe I thought it might be nice to look at Art and Literature. It didn’t hurt that those are two areas in which I also have a pretty keen interest.

Of course, the names also had to have some significance of their own, and they all had to show some qualities related to the Aux as a race. Gene the Hackman was, quite literally, a Hack Man, after all.

Oberon and Evelyn War, father and daughter were named after Evelyn and Auberon Waugh, the writers, father and son. War was an obvious choice, the spelling of Oberon was changed to reflect the King of the Fairies and, of course, we wanted a key female character. For what it’s worth, Evelyn also means ‘life’.

On the one hand, naming the leader of the Aux after the poet Ezra Pound was a simple choice, because the name conjures both the act of pounding the enemy to death and a dog pound. On the other hand it was a complex choice because the poet was a controversial literary figure. For those who are interested, a look at the poet’s biography explains it, for the rest the simple knowledge that Pound wrote a poem entitled In a Station of the Metro is probably enough.

All of the Aux characters in the novel were named in this way, for artists, writers, characters in novels, films, tv shows and so on. They all bear some reference. Some will seem obscure.

Some readers will not have heard of Frank Brangwyn, (BrangWIN, because who wants to lose?) who produced over 80 WWI poster designs, despite never being an official war artist. Austin Spar (SPAR as in practice fighting) was named after Austin Osman Spare, another favourite artist, who was employed as a war artist during WWI and who remained in London throughout WWII after trying to enlist, but being deemed too old. His home was bombed and all his work destroyed as a result, but he continued, regardless, and by the end of the war he was living in a cellar with two chairs for a bed and a number of stray cats.

Of course, names have been altered to fit the purpose, so that brothers Peter and William Blade derive from Peter Blake and William Blake, for example, Damien Hurts from Damien Hirst and Dorothy Barker from Dorothy Parker.

Naming the female characters was tougher than the males. We all look forward to a time when women are the equals of men in the arts, or at least when they are equally represented. It was never clearer that this has never been the case than when I was looking up eighteenth and nineteenth century artists and writers. Some men’s names sounded sufficiently feminine to be borrowed for female characters, hence Singer Sergeant after John Singer Sargent and Somerset Mourn after Somerset Maugham. But I wish there had been more great women to draw upon.

I did enjoy using Becky Sharp. Long may she reign!

Fiefdom is out now: UK | US | DRM-free eBook