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This is important even if you are writing in the first person. First person narratives can be in danger of sounding anonymous and samey. I’ve read a few first person teen novels which, apart from the names, you could be forgiven for assuming were all about the same heroine, a sort of generic ‘15/16 year old modern girl’. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s an expert at work:
You know that old film they always show on the telly at Christmas, the Wizard of Oz? I love it, especially the Wicked Witch of the West, with her cackle and her green face and all her special flying monkeys. I’d give anything to have a wicked winged monkey as an evil little pet. It could whiz through the sky, flapping its wings and sniffing the air for that awful stale instant-coffee-and-talcum powder teacher smell and then it would s-w-o-o-p straight onto Mrs Vomit Bagley and carry her away screaming.
(“The Dare Game”, Jacqueline Wilson, 2000)
And we know this girl. She’s exuberant, imaginative, funny, a rebel – Jacqueline Wilson’s ‘Tracy Beaker’. It looks easy, but it’s not. It would be VERY easy to write something similar but far less engaging:
There’s an old film they often show on the telly at Christmas, the Wizard of Oz. I’ve always loved it, and my favourite character is the Wicked Witch of the West. I like the way she cackles, and her green face, and all her special flying monkeys. I’ve always wished I could have a wicked winged monkey for a pet…
This has lost all its energy and sounds written down, not spoken.
Then there’s the pitfall of dialects and regional accents. Here, a little goes a very long way. Unless you yourself are steeped in a dialect or accent, it’s easy to get it wrong and sound phony. Avoid “begorrah’s” and “eeh, by gum’s”; avoid too many dropped ‘h’s’ and rhyming slang. Of course, if you are really at home with an accent, it can add enormously to your writing. In this extract, an eighteenth century Yorkshire drummer boy walks out of a hill – and out of his own time:
“I wasn’t so long,” said the drummer. “But I niver found nowt. I isn’t t’first in yon spot; sithee, I found yon candle. Now I’s thruff yon angle, and it hasn’t taken so long, them bells is still dinging. It’s a moy night getting. But come on, or they’ll have the gate fast against us and we’ll not get our piggin of ale.”
“Who are you?” said Keith.
“I thought thou would ken that,” said the boy. “But mebbe thou isn’t t’fellow thou looks in t’dark.”
“Earthfasts” William Mayne, 1966
If you’re not this confident (and most of us aren’t), be sparing in your use of dialect words. The reader will be able to use a few subtle pointers to ‘fill in’ the accent from his or her own experience, and that’s better than getting it wrong. Slight changes to grammar will sometimes help. A nineteenth century servant girl might be l
14 Comments on Hearing Voices - Katherine Langrish, last added: 3/21/2010
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Verily, Kath, thou hast strucketh ye nail firmly on ye head. Forsooth.
I remember once reading a novel in which a cave-dwelling cro-magnon uttered the line, "I haven't got a problem! He's the one with the problem!" The author would have had to work very hard after that to win me back; and she didn't.
What John said! I like having modern touches in an ancient world setting too. In Ithaka there's a slogan chalked on a tavern wall which reads POSEIDON RULES!
Well, why not?
Have you seen that wonderful Blackadder episode -
"The wise woman? The wise woman? Three things must ye know of the wise woman. First... she is a WOMAN! And second ... she is wise!"
I think the key to slang, especially when writing YA is to use it to enhance the feel and attitude of your characters but otherwise find different ways of creating genuine voices. I just finished writing a YA set in 1983/1984 punk rock California. The slang we used back then is practically archaic and also confined to a relatively small group of people, so I concentrated more on how my MC thought about situations and how she reacted rather than filling her mouth with lots of Californianisms.
Nice to have the 'hath' 'hast' stuff sorted out.
Very timely and helpful post from my point of view, Kath! I'm just wrestling with this in edits. Firebrand has 16th century characters but like your Halewyn, they transcend time. And what's more, the narrator is telling us in English (looking back quite a while, too) what he'd originally have said in Gaelic.
So while I avoided 'OK' and yelled out loud when I caught myself describing a moon like a 'floodlight', I am going to let him use the word 'thug', and I'm still swithering over 'stroppy'. (Anybody know how old that is...?) I don't mind an anachronism or two - as you say, so long as I know they're there...
Kath, you would have got away with 'exploded' in your Troll saga. Some Norsemen might have been to Iceland and see the volcanos and geysers there. Also, caught whales can explode if you don't cut them up in time.
Don't be too hard on Aragorn, though. He's in a very formal situation when giving that speech. I don't suppose our coronations here have less high-flown language.
Lollity, Nick, I'm trying to get the image of that exploding whale out of my head now...
When I was a kid I didn't notice how pompous and highfalutin' Aragorn is in the Return of the King (I must have liked pompous and highfalutin' then). It was only when I went back and read it a few years ago that it hit me between the eyes. It seems so unlike him and I wonder if Tolkein ever regretted it. It seems especially unlike delicious Viggo, hem hem.
I've read Dark Angels, Kath, and 'take me to your leader' didn't jar for me a bit! As in, I didn't go 'ooh, tut-tut, Kath', but then get to the end and think 'ah, I see: that's all right then'!
Another curious thing is that books set in Ancient Rome seem to get away with modern-sounding dialogue more than most. Robert Harris's 'Pompeii' is a case in point (all right, not strictly Rome) and his other Rome books, are a case in point. The characters use entirely modern idioms and yet it works. I wonder why this is. Perhaps it's because we think of Rome as an advanced civilisation, a forerunner of our own (just lacking in iPhones) and so 'modern' is its mood.
Mood is what it's about, ultimately. The words and phrases we associate with certain contexts. A story set in the age of Beowulf, by contrast, would probably avoid all Latin-derived words if it possibly could.
Thanks Fiona! And no, I wouldn't expect or want it to jar or to be a puzzle for the reader, but I did feel I had that freedom with this character to be playful if I felt like it. In fact his 'voice' changes dramatically at one point later in the book.
Love the exploding whale, Nick, and point taken. I did in fact think of puffballs which explode, and I may in fact have used the word once or twice - but the point is valid and in general it's a good principle.
Very interesting post, Katherine.
Nick, I think Rome gets away with a more modern idiom because it's a totally different language, so one can happily find a modern equivalent: no one is expecting you to write in Latin. With periods where they spoke an older form of English, it's easy to get caught in a slightly stilted compromise between modern and archaic forms.
Oh and Kath if you would only add the difference between "-eth" and '-est" then perhaps people who want to do "olde Englysshe" in ads etc would not make such prattes of themselves!
It is one of my pet peeves!
I have a peeve too - people who pronounce the 'Y' in 'Ye Old Tea Shoppe' as if it were the modern letter 'y', when we all know that it's actually a thorn, and that the word should be pronounced 'The'.
Charlie: I have to confess I was one of those dumbies who pronounced the "Y" in Ye. I didn't know it was a thorn. Thanks for the tip. It's amazing what you pick up around the place. I learned something new today!