The Voices of Our Characters
So you’re a writer? Mayhap young to your craft with scraps of papyrus scattered across the splinter-prone planks you use for a table. Beside you at the foot of your straw sleeping pallet, stacked like precious ivory, rests a neat pile of creamy parchment leaves. You imagine they but await their summoning. Aye, await in keen anticipation of the moment you reach out with fingers scrubbed clean of ink and manure – mucking His Lordship’s stables is your side job, your paying side job — to pluck the first of your Great Tale’s final draft pages and begin the journey to fame and glory your words will bring you. Do they indeed quiver, those fine pages? Or are the bloody-damned mice at them again?
Each precious sheet embodies your hard life’s labor. Fifty-three stalls mucked clean of piss-soaked straw and horse apples enough to require a forest of horse butts to drop. Truth be told, of the Baron’s stable of monstrously hu …humang ..humon .humongous … (You like that new word, huuu mon gous. How it swells thick and heavy on the tongue.) … of monstrously humongous war steeds, if the great piles of steaming shite they make represent the quantities of oats, corn, and sweet clover hay they dine on, then indeed, the brutes fare far better then you.
Your stomach growls. Hast been five bells since a dawnsfast of a pilfered apple and equally pillaged handful of oats. Another new word, that. Pilfered … pilll forrr ed. Pilfered and pillaged. Your fingers enjoy the swoop and swirl of their making. Of “pillaged” you are far too well acquainted with. Gods of blood and bone, last summer’s campaign against Duke Krazrok–
Shite! Me mind’s like a bloody yearling. Every which where but where it’s supposed to be.
Your quill resumes its scratching. A long line of watery ink strikes across one, two, three lines of script deemed unworthy to lie amongst the sublime beauty of your imagination’s labor. Ah … another fine new word … su bllliiimmme. Why, it sings with–
Sigh. Write, idiot! Quit wasting good ink.
Godsbedamned high and low! How … WHERE … to find the words, you ask yourself. How do these foul creatures of your dark, nether world make speech? Them with their long, sticky tongues. Good for snaring the unwary meal, true enough. But for the subtle twists and undulations of a syllable whispered or roared, coughed or spat? With what voices do your characters speak? In what form and fashion do their reptilian hisses and gruntings follow one upon the other? Surely not as ours do. And what of their thoughts, their emotions? Do they –
“SHITE BOY!”
Hell’s dark deep, the stable master calls. And me with not a word written.
~~~~~~
With my fantasy series, The Years of Bone and Ash, I’m confronted with four distinct alien cultures, each with its own “voice” arising from unique histories, worlds, and even dimensions: Terran, 1952 to the present (my voice); Krîllian (the indigenous folk of the world Krîl-lôc); Aestrâgorean with a smattering of its root culture, Cymru and Old Welsh; and by Book IV, we have a race of “demons” from a third universe altogether. They have adapted human/Krîllian form yet remain what they originally were: rapacious frogs on steroids with too many limbs and eye stalks, a lot of sorcerous power, and anger issues on account of … well, let’s not spoil the whole thing. Other than that, they’re great company at a party.
So my voice, as god of quill, ink, and creation, quickly becomes that of a keen minded, somewhat befuddled, 8th Century monk writing salacious fantasy tracks when the abbot isn’t looking. I fell into that quickly and easy. But then, when I speak for my creations, now there’s the rub. Using my godly voice as the foundation for syntax, etc., each race has to think, feel, respond, and speak in their own uniquely alien way.
This leads to building an understanding of their different origins, histories, physiologies … on and on and a rabbit hole of research, guesswork, and just plain, make it up as I go ’cause I’m god and creator of this bloody circus. Enough to keep the most ardent, coffee stoked, sleep deprived scribbler going for as long as he can sit at his desk and scratch away. This is why I write!
I highly recommend the master of historical fiction, Patrick O’Brian, and his British naval series as one of the finest examples of authentic character affect. You’re right there in early 19th century England with Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, the French at your throat, broadsides roaring fire and iron, bilge deep in blood and cannon smoke.
