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Written by Paul
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Tuesday, 19 March 2013 21:35 |
I feel a bit strange posting this chapter, because I feel a bit like a thief. The fantastical airship bordello known as The Princess of Texas is something Naamah created, and she is including it in the second book of the Captain Blackheart Chronicles - on which work is currently underway. So she invented it, but by the vagaries of publication schedules I am the one who gets to premier it here. I consulted with her extensively to make sure I got the details right, and she vetted everything I wrote about it much more carefully than usual.
It's an interesting situation, because I love the Princess and I'm so happy to be writing about it, but it creates an interesting frisson between my take on the West as depicted by the Daedalus Files continuity, and hers. Naamah has a more fantasy-oriented and less plausible vision of our shared Weird West alt-history. She lets it all hang out, while I - as a history student and enthusiast - tend more towards a more grounded and gritty approach. Say what you might to that - I mean I write about airship pirates and tiger-women - but it's a distinction I see, believe me. Adding the Princess pretty much irrevocably stitches the Eden Kane stories to the same world as Captains Blackheart, Savage, and the rest of the crew envisioned in Vengeance and Valor. Naamah wants to have her characters pass through Century in her current book, and I am a bit leery, as I can't really fit obvious airship technology into the world of Pride & Prostitutes. I really think P&P may have to occupy its own continuum. I'm not sure about that. What I am sure about is that flying airship brothels are awesome.
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Written by Paul
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Sunday, 17 March 2013 21:25 |
Use of any kind of vernacular can be an iffy proposition in the written form. We love accents, after all - they give texture and color to language, help to establish place and time and character all at once. Think of great movie accents like Christopher Lee's mellifluous tones, Sean Bean's tough-guy Sheffield drawl - and not just Brit accents. Would Doc Holliday be the same without that Deep Georgia "I'm your huckleberry"? Try and imagine Hannibal Lecter without that awful faux-Maryland abomination Anthony Hopkins gave him, Rocky without Stallone's Brooklyn twang, or Sam Elliot without his bogus Texas. Accents are a tremendous tool for character development.
But on the page, they are harder to do, because you shade into the difficult realm of vernacular, phonetics, and the tricky waters of potential racism. How exactly does one write an accent? How hard do you lean on it? Can you really ever replicate an accent for someone who has not heard it? You always run the risk of making your dialogue hard, or impossible to read, which is not worth the trade-off in atmosphere. If you are giving an accent to a main character, you have to think long and hard, because you will not be doing it for one chapter, but for an entire book. Reams of dialogue, over and over, and you will have to be consistent with however you decide to spell things - that's almost like having to learn a whole other language.
And racism. There is a prevalent tendency to write minority characters in cartoonish accents (We don't need no stinkin' batches!) And playing them for comedy, this has the dual problem of perpetuating simplistic stereotypes while making your fiction sound like a cartoon. Also implying that characters with accents are not as smart as those without - if you write all minorities as unable to speak 'properly', then you are sending a message with your writing, and not a good one.
But on the other hand, if you depict nineteenth century backwoodsmen as speaking perfectly clear 'modern' English, then you will also look silly, and your fiction will lose verisimilitude. Accents are somewhat of a fascination of mine, and I study them whenever I hear them. We really don't know how people speaking in 1868 Louisiana would sound. We can make guesses, but accents do drift over time, and after 150 years things will sound very different. Go watch a movie from the 1940s and listen to the accents - they don't sound like modern English speakers, and that's because the sound of the language has drifted in the intervening 70 years. We don't sound like that anymore.
Short version: Grute talks in an indecipherable patois because it's funny, and I only need him around for part of a chapter, so I can make him hard to understand if I want. Because I have yet to laugh harder in this book than when I wrote his lines.
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Written by Paul
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Thursday, 14 March 2013 23:10 |
You might think the hardest thing to do in a novel is writing well-rounded characters, or choreographing action of the violent or porny variety. You might think managing continuity is the real workout (and in a long story or a series of them it can be), or you might think that painting a living, breathing world around your characters is the litmus test. It's not, the real demon to conquer is backstory.
When you have to give large swaths of exposition for the reader to know what is going on, it can be one of the most challenging exercises you will ever undergo as an author. Filling in backstory is not easy, and a lot of writers muff it. When they do, it comes out as an indigestible chunk of expository info known as Infodump. It comes with lead-in statements like "As you know, Bill..." or "You'll remember that..." And the obvious rejoinder is "If Bill knows this, why is Fred going to tell him again?" For the audience obviously. When you have a situation where all the principals know what is happening, then you can have a real problem on your hands.
This is why so many protagonists are n00bs, kids, or otherwise clueless about the backstory: so someone will have a narrative excuse to fill them - and the audience - in on the details. I tend to rely on good dialogue to help manage exposition, because when I'm reading, I don't mind if a conversation is obviously filling me in as long as A: it's also doing something else and B: is an interesting conversation. If you have to fill in background info, you can go a long way towards making it interesting by engaging the characters with it. Too often writers have backstory delivered as if it were the text on a museum plaque, rather than having the character giving the info fill in how they feel about it, thus making it personal. Personal is always better in a story.
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