Accenting Accents

Accents are always difficult. Movies tend to be the place we hear it most. Who can forget the festival of weird voices that is the move Highlander, where a Frenchman plays an immortal Scot and a Scot (or should that be Shcot) plays an Egyptian? It's a lot of fun, particularly if you're Scottish. Same goes for one of my all-time favourite movies, Brigadoon. And what about the bewildering range of regional accents among the dwarves in Peter Jackson's Hobbit Movies?

The great Mark Kermode has a good video blog about this. He emphasises the importance of the accent sounding natural, both to those watching who know the accent well, but also to those who don't have an ear for it but can spot someone who is not comfortable in their voice. An actor forced into using a voice they cannot truly inhabit is working at a disadvantage to themselves and to the movie. That awkwardness can chatter the suspension of disbelief. There's also the question of accessibility. You don't want the audience wondering what the heck the character is saying because the actor has gone full method on us and is utterly unintelligible.

There's a similar thing going on with accents in fiction. How do I write a character's accent in a way that makes it accessible to the reader, but also convincingly familiar to someone who might recognise it? One of the main characters in The Blade Bearer is called Maelcheon MacAefar. He has, to all intents, a Scottish accent. I used that voice to emphasise the difference between him and the other characters. He has to sound like someone from another culture but still be comprehensible, to have the voice of someone who has lived a hard life, who has struggled. That said, Maelcheon's voice is not that heavily accented. He used to speak in a much broader accent but it came across a bit too much like these guys so I softened it. Still, he clearly sounds different from the others.

I'm not that concerned that his speech will put readers off him. I figured readers won't mind working to get used to a voice as long as that voice sounds convincing and adds to the atmosphere to the book. There is one particular moment where Maelcheon, normally grim and laconic, tells a story that lasts for a good few pages, all in his voice. It's one of my favourite bits of the novel because it presents such a different view on the world we've been inhabiting till that point. I hope it's not off-putting - like an actor talking in an accent that just sounds wrong.

I do wonder what Scottish people will think of him. Will they say, 'Jings, this pseudo-Scots character is one groovy fellow?' Or will they react more along the lines of, 'Crivens, this guy's accent is really bad?'

Don't Shoot Now

Another day, another podcast. This time, two entertaining chaps were discussing the pointlessness of Rogue One and the forthcoming Han Solo movie. One of them said Rogue One did not need to exist because all we ever needed to know about the stolen Death Star plans was in Episode IV. Telling us how the rebels stole the plans and got them to Leia is of no significance - all that counts is what happened after that. Rogue One makes a movie out of a macguffin, a plot catalyst. What's the point in that?

This got me thinking about how we define fandom. To my mind, a true fan wants more stories in that universe, regardless of their content. We want to go back to that place, to return to the galaxy far far away and see more of it. The story that takes us there is only a problem if the finished product doesn't feel right. If the new story still feels like it's taking place in the world we love, then bring it on. I felt this way about the Hobbit movies. The first one was a bit ropy in places - lots of places - but I didn't care. I was just glad to be back in Peter Jackson's Middle Earth. It looked and sounded and felt like the rendering of Tolkein that I fell head over heels for back in 2001 with the first Lord of the Rings movie. I could forgive the flaws in Jackson's Hobbits films because I was a fan - though the adaptation left a lot to be desired, it was enough to be back in that place, going on this adventure.

Problems occur when we return to the same characters or the same world and something is wrong. What happens if it somehow doesn't feel right any more? I'm sure we can all think a movie universe where this has happened, where there is a new movie in a familiar universe but the vibe is all wrong, the plot is too clumsy (or absent) or the characters too thin. It might look like the world we know, might sound like it too, but there is something missing. There is too much to forgive, too many flaws to overlook or to not bother us. This connects, I think, to an earlier blog I wrote about nostalgia. We want to go back to that place but the place has changed, become a gaudy, empty version of the world we once loved.

This is what made Rogue One work for me. There was no real risk of compromising our experiences of the other movies because, by and large, our emotional investment was in a whole new set of characters. The the way the universe looked and sounded was right and, yes, there were some details that took me out of it - Darth Vader's oddly swishing walk, for instance - but the film didn't act like some old friend who has reappeared after years, much changed, but pretending they're still the same old pal.

It's for the same reason, though, that I worry about the Han Solo movie. Now there is a character who carries a lifetime of emotional investment for a whole generation.

The Deighton File

While Will's adventures are absolutely in the fantasy genre, his origins are not. I've written a few blogs about my influences, whether in role-playing games or TV shows, but it occurred to me the other day that Will, as a character and narrator, comes from a completely different genre, namely spy fiction. To be specific, the model for Will comes from the novels of Len Deighton.

One upon a time, Deighton was one of the biggest names in the spy novel, right up there with John le Carre.  His novels from the 1960s,  particularly The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin, are wonderfully cool, sharp, witty takes on the Cold War spy narrative. Deighton's main character, never named, is a brilliant first-person narrator, both a part of the world he inhabits but also an outsider, an observer awake to the absurdity of how his world affects others. He takes neither himself nor his superiors very seriously. At the same time, Deighton's nameless spy has a strong moral and ethical core to his character, one that drives him on and makes him a true hero, despite his low opinion of the shadow world of espionage. That and he is damned good at it. He is no James Bond, no slick superspy in a Saville Row suit and Aston Martin, but a real human being with money worries and bad relationships. 

Deighton was an influence in other ways. In the 1980s, as the Cold War was beginning to thaw, he wrote two spy trilogies centred around another first person narrator, this time the spy Bernard Samson. Samson is an older and more weary version of the un-named spy of the 1960s, one with family problems as well as work ones. The Samson novels showed me that you could write an ambitious trilogy, substantial and wide-ranging, but still have it grounded in a first-person narrative. From Berlin to Mexico City, Washington DC to Whitehall, Samson leads us through an ever-developing plot full of engaging characters and thrilling set pieces. Deighton's trick, though, is to forge a narrative voice that subtly reveals its own prejudices, letting us know that we are not getting the truth but only Samson's version of it. It proved that one character can be at the heart of a mystery that the writer can - hopefully- sustain over a long-form story.

This is where Will comes in. Sure, it's a very different genre, but many of the conventions correspond: the detached narrator trying to navigate his way through a world that is within his comprehension but often outside his control, one that sees good must be done but is frustrated by those around him who have their own agendas. And, hopefully, most of all, a narrator that we enjoy spending time with.  

But Deighton's last master stroke was the final book of his second trilogy, Spy Sinker. This novel looks back over the events of the preceding five books but does so from the perspective of various other characters, shows us the events of these novels from their viewpoint, in their voices. It adds a whole new level of enjoyment to what has gone before. It's an idea I could do a lot with.

A Sense of Place

Last month, I went on holiday on my own to a far-away Scottish island.

I'd never been on holiday by myself and it was absolutely wonderful. Day after day of just walking around the island, looking at the sea and watching the birds. As the schools were not yet on holiday, I pretty much had the place to myself. This being a Scottish island, the weather varied from sun-dappled warmth to driving winds and rain, not just in the same day but in the same hour. One day I was eating my breakfast outside and lingering over my walks; the next, going outdoors was like a stress test for waterproof clothing.

I had no real plan for the holiday - just walking and breathing the air and maybe seeing some puffins. My only concrete objective was to write every day. I had some ideas for Will the Wayfarer short stories and what better place to work on them than a delightful house on a headland, surrounded by sea and sky? I wrote ever day for four or more hours and, as I write pretty quickly, I finished off a short story and got started on a second one. I was excited about this second story as it was to be set on a fictionalised version of my holiday island. What could be finer than to spend a week on an island, writing an adventure story inspired by your surroundings?

It didn't quite work out like that. I got started on the story and wrote tons of words on the first draft but, as I was writing, I found the story growing. I had originally intended it to begin, proceed, and end on the fictionalised island, but once I started writing, I found myself really enjoying setting up why Will would travel to this remote place. As my holiday came to an end, Will was still some way away from arriving on the the island. This didn't bother me too much but it did remind me of an age-old creative question: do we evoke a place better when we're in it or when we're remembering it?  Can we more effectively pass on the sense of a landscape, a city, a house or a culture when surrounded by it? Or does some distance - in time and space - help?

There are good reasons for both. Remembering a place helps us to distil it down to an essence. Rather than being overwhelmed by detail, distance detaches us from the place and permits the writer to encapsulate his or her sense of it in fewer words. Brevity aids story telling, and a few well-chosen words can take the reader where the writer wants them to be more swiftly and powerfully than endless paragraphs depicting every hill, stream and pathway. Memory gives a sense of potent clarity that immersion can't. In a sense, memory allows us to better understand and transmit the meaning of a place, even if some of the details of how it feels are lost.

Yet it is detail that immersion provides. With sufficient discipline from the writer, immersion generates an immediacy in your words and can provide some unexpected images or symbols. Over a month after returning home, my memories of the island are increasingly general: impressions, feelings, over-arching vibes and mental pictures. I find it hard to summon up the wind on my face, or the clattering of the seabirds, the smell of the heather. Immersion delivers these experiences in a way that distance can't. I made a few notes when I was on the island - a habit I really need to develop - and these notes contain details that I could never come up with by memory alone. Such details can be very unexpected: the shape or colour of a cloud, the way the silhouette of a house is against the skyline, wind-blown sand scouring over a half-buried seashell.

By the time I left the island, Will had not yet arrived, so my writing about it was all memory and a few notes. Indeed, a good deal of the way the story ended up was inspired by a brief stopover on a nearby, bigger island - one with a cathedral and a castle and largish towns full of people. A trip to the local museum gave me loads of inspiration for some of the characters, ideas I had not had when I started on the story back on my holiday island. As the islandscape around me changed, and as I read more of the history of the place, so the direction of the story changed with it. Immersion inspired the tale, just not in the way I had expected. Had Will come to the island while I was still there, still building the story, I have no doubt the nature of the tale would have been very different. 

One day I'll go back to the island and have another holiday on my own. When I do, I'll write a story entirely embedded in that landscape, drawn from my daily experiences of the wind and the waves and the rain. I suspect it will have very little plot and very few characters, but if it can take the reader to that island, pass on even a hint of what it was like to be there for that one, sublime week, then I will have achieved something good.

Without Walls

It's odd when the things you read or watch resonate with your writing, even when the thing seems a thousand miles away from your own invented world.

I'm reading Richard Evans's history of nineteenth-century Europe right now and it's splendid. In depicting the decline of the journeyman craftsman in that period, Evans talks about how, once upon a time, it was easy for towns to limit who could get in and out because they all had walls and gates and towers and guards etc. Pity the poor journeyman trying to develop his craft when he rocked up at some town gate and the local guild didn't like the cut of his jib. It was simplicity itself to turn the traveller away. Point is, town walls were for more than defence. They served a social purpose, keeping out both undesirables but also just folk that the town's leading citizens didn't want for other reasons, such as journeymen who might undercut the local artisans or maybe even do a better job.

Then it occurred to me that very few of the town's in Will's adventures have walls. Stenock doesn't, for instance, and that's supposed to be a major trading post. At least, Will doesn't tell us about any walls. Stenock might have them but Will doesn't point it out. This is one of the advantages of a first-person narrative. We can get around what might seem like omissions because there will be stuff our narrator simply doesn't think is worth mentioning, either because he considers it and decides not to bring it into his story or because it never occurred to him. The absence of town walls in Aeoland might be so quotidian that it wouldn't cross Will's mind. Why draw our attention to the absence of something when it's presence is the notable thing.

So this got me thinking. Why no town walls? What if there is a reason within our invented world for their absence, a reason so commonplace that our narrator would just pass it by. In other words, what if the absence of walls was deliberate, a feature of Aeolish society? Suddenly my oversight becomes an opportunity. The towns of southern Aeoland - that is, the region of Aeoland most proud of its own wealth and security - have intentionally dispensed with walls because they believe themselves so civilised that they don't need them. Where is the threat that would necessitate gates and guards and all that malarkey? They might need that sort of thing in the north, where all the thugs and savages live, but here in the south we don't need walls. 

Where does this leave our journeyman, strolling into town in the hope of work to help him develop his craft? Or, rather, where does this leave the town guildry who want to limit the  number of wandering artisans plying their trade? No idea, but it's this kind of detail that we can work up into something. Is there drama to be found here? Alternatively, is this the sort of detail that really doesn't matter? I'd argue it matters that the author or world builder thinks about it, has the question in his or her head, ponders the effects of this approach to town walls. It might seem a needless detail - and we certainly don't want endless, egotistical paragraphs about Aeolish society's attitude to town defences - but we need to take these things on board, keep them in mind.