First, happy Good Friday! A day off is always welcome, even if it is cold, rainy, windy, and thoroughly unpleasant (did I mention cold?) AND my mail-order plants just arrived and it is going to be really difficult to get them in the ground in this weather because you just cannot dig in wet clay-based soils (it destroys the soil structure and makes it very tough for your poor babies to get off to a decent start).
I think I will pot up the container-grown ones in larger pots and put them under lights to wait; and the bare-root things can go in the extremely well-drained nursery bed or else in the vegetable garden, or maybe in VERY LARGE containers. I’ll get that done tomorrow, at least the bare-root shrubs, because I hate to let them sit around for any length of time. Then everything wait for the soil to dry out a little.
Meanwhile!
I finished my werewolf short story this morning (not super-short; wound up 9500 words, just about what I expected). It’s a prequel to the (as yet unsold, but it’s early days yet) werewolf book. The book’s working title, btw, is Black Dog, which I think I had better mention because I keep refering to it and it’s getting to be a pain to do that without calling it by name. The story’s working title is Betrayal. Turned out pretty well, I think, but I’m not a hundred percent sure I like the ending sentence. Not sure it does what I want it to.
I think I’ll send it to a friend of mine, see what she thinks. Then in a week or so I’ll read over it again, do any revision that seems called for, and send it to my agent. Heaven knows what she’ll want to do with it. Have me send it to short fiction markets? Hold onto it until Black Dog sells and then see if it fits an Urban Fantasy somebody’s putting together? There sure seems to be a lot of UF anthologies out there. Not a pressing question just yet, I suppose.
Anyway, thinking the other day about the way authors write the voice of child characters got me thinking about other kinds of voices in genre fiction. One technique that works extremely well depends on really getting the rhythm of language and also getting when and how to break grammar rules.
Here’s a sample of entertaining dialogue — take a look:
“Only once, really, but that was because I scared them and it was really Prothvar’s fault because I asked him to teach me and he wouldn’t teach me he just laughed and said I couldn’t but I knew I could so I did it to show him I could but he didn’t know I could and then he got scared and they got angry and that’s when I got scolded. But it was really Prothvar’s fault.”
How about that? The comma-before-conjunction rule totally ignored, plus one actual run on (find it?). Doesn’t that work beautifully to give a rushed feel to this speech? That’s Jaenelle from Anne Bishop’s Black Jewel’s trilogy; she was about eight years old. Doesn’t the one-pronoun-after-another thing really do the job of making Jaenelle sound like a young child? It’s all getting the rhythm of the language, plus breaking rules effectively.
Here’s another one:
“By the by, I think you, and, for that matter, Dick, are wrong about David, because you do not realize that he is an honest man, and of more importance, he is a man looking for the Truth, rather than, as you seem to think, one convinced he has found it, though, to be sure, he sometimes thinks he has found a large piece of it, and that makes him annoying, if not downright dangerous, but I do not think this happens as often as you think, and soon enough he is himself again, in which state he is less belligerent than you pretend, until you or Dick light his train, as you are wont to do.”
That’s Kitty from Freedom and Necessity, an amazing, complicated, historical epistilary novel with very slight fantasy trimmings around the edges, by Steven Brust and Emma Bull. Three different interesting things are going on here, all of which give Kitty a tremendously engaging and individual voice. Obviously there’s the super-long sentences (118 words!). Despite its length, this sentence is grammatically correct, which with this kind of sentence is a statement in itself. Also, of course,we’ve got a lack of contractions, which normally makes the writer sound like she’s doing a bad Mr. Spock imitation, plus the word choices of an educated adult (“to be sure”, “belligerent”). Plus the period slang (“light his train”). Kitty’s letters also have a LOT of italicized words in them, though that passage didn’t happen to have any.
The combination of the italicized words and the long sentences with the correct grammar, the formal word choice and the lack of contractions really produces a fascinating voice: an impulsive, breezy woman who writes a highly individualilzed version of the 1800’s educated-person’s style. Historical “feel” and personal “voice” all in one.
One more example of long, fast-paced sentences creating voice:
“He isn’t going to walk, he’s going to climb, which is quite different, besides being much safer than staying out here where he can’t really do much. Of course, there are a great many people who don’t do much and who are quite safe, though perhaps a bit boring; still, I’m afraid Eltiron isn’t one of them, which is probably just as well since most people don’t like being bored.”
And a page later, same character:
“I don’t believe I said he was a sorcerer, though it’s quite possible. Not, of course, a good sorcerer, or I doubt he’d have gotten into such a predicament. . . . It’s really quite fortunate you were here; it would have been very inconvenient to have the Matholych in Leshiya. Rather like having a basilisk in one’s cellar, which would be extremely awkward for practically anyone.”
This is Amberglas, a sorceress from Patricia Wrede’s early novel, The Seven Towers. Every word Amberglas speaks is so delightful it’s hard to stop quoting her:
“I haven’t the least objection to your making oaths and promises for yourself, though of course what you were suggesting does sound a bit extreme. But binding other people for all time is an exceedingly dangerous thing to do, particularly when they aren’t there, no matter how justified it seems, and frequently has rather unpleasant consequences for everyone. So I’d rather you didn’t, though it’s extremely good of you to offer.”
Isn’t that fabulous? It’s the free association and unexpected analogies which “make” the voice for this wonderful character.
Which is easier to read, the almost comma-free style of young Jaenelle, Kitty’s extremely comma-intense style, or the in-between comma usage + periods we see from Amberglas? Each gives a different effect, each is wonderfully suited to the character who uses it, and there’s no possible way you could give any of these character’s one of the other styles without totally changing how she ‘feels’ to the reader.
Here’s a completely different reason to use long sentences — this isn’t a character speaking, but a description of ongoing action:
“The stairs twisted and they ran onto a portico half-opened to the night, then over the high, covered walkway above Horda’s Garden, the night crisp and bright around them and Crise, below, rummaging with a Bec shadi for the small winter roses that lived, bright and chilly, under the mantle of snow. Lyeth scooped a handful of snow from one embrasure and, as she passed the next, aimed and let fly.”
The 53 words in the first sentence of that passage won’t beat out Kitty’s 118 any time soon, but it’s still pretty long! The scene this comes from involves a race. One of the ways the author (Marta Randell; this is her very good novel The Sword of Winter) speeds up the action during the race is by suddenly using a lot of long sentences and dropping some of the standard punctuation. Notice the lack of commas before two conjuctions that would normally have them. The change this gives the rhythm of the sentence is marked, even if a reader wouldn’t normally notice how that chance contributes to the “feel” of the scene.
So, long sentences! Takes me back to when I was writing my Master’s thesis and my advisor kept trying to take out by semi-colons! (I kept them, as I recall).
Now, what effects do short sentences produce? In dialogue and in description? Pay attention to a hard-boiled detective novel: that’s one place you see that kind of prose. Also, I just read my first Spenser novel (by Robert Parker, I must be the only person my age who likes genre fiction but had never read one). The AVERAGE sentence length on one random page of that novel was 7.73. Quite a difference! Admittedly, there was a lot of dialogue on that page, but then, there’s a lot of dialogue on lots of the pages of that book.
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