Ventriloquy and Belief

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I finished a book the other day.  (Surprise!)  The Daughter of Time was one of those books that crept up on my consciousness for several months before I got around to actually buying it, and from buying it to reading it.  I don't think I had heard about it before this year, but I understand it is a pretty popular and famous work: a landmark book in the mystery genre, in fact. It is, I think, either the last or the second-to-last book in her Inspector Alan Grant series, the most celebrated, and takes place entirely within the walls of a hospital room.  (Which, by the by, gets quite old.)

The main character is a Scotland Yard Inspector, laid up for several weeks after an injury incurred on the job.  To keep him engaged while he's lying on his back staring at the ceiling, a friend brings him a collection of portraits from historical cold cases - everyone from Mary, Queen of Scots to Louis XVII, the boy-king.  Only one of them, however, catches Grant's eye: a painting of Richard III.  Intrigued by the story of how the wicked uncle murdered his innocent nephews, Grant begins to conduct a police investigation from his hospital bed.  An acquaintance assists by conducting all the research, and the story progresses methodically through back-and-forth conversation between the two men.

Unsurprisingly, this also gets old.  It would be bound to get old in any story that takes place within the same four walls with - let me think - one main character and only about five other people who regularly drift through to talk.  But I realized not far into the book that part of the oldness had to do less with those factors and more with the story not actually being a story.  It is a vindication of Richard III, plain and very simple.  Now, I happen to take an interest in Richard and could follow Tey's arguments with relative equanimity; but even agreeing, I was extraordinarily peeved by the authoress' tactic.  Because it becomes apparent as soon as Richard III's portrait shows up that what you, reader, are getting is Tey's opinion en toto, as articulated by Character 1 and Character 2 with occasional prompting from Random Other Peoples.  It isn't a novel, it's just, well, historical preachiness.

The Daughter of Time is an extreme case, and I would go so far as to wager that Tey intended for it to be.  The trouble, however - the trouble of an invasive author, if I could put it that way - is one that crops up and should crop up before every writer.  We've all heard books described as "too preachy."  It's usually applied to Christian fiction, and it is all too easy to stick our noses in the air and determine that people only say that because there is no longer a belief in objective truth.  Which is very probably the case, but does nothing to alleviate the issue as far as good writing is concerned.

We all have, or ought to have, core beliefs.  If we think we don't, it is only that we don't know what those core beliefs are; and at that point we had either better not write, or better keep our writing private, for the world doesn't need anymore hem-hah-ing and prevaricating.  So I'll start with the statement that we all have beliefs, and that on some level, we desire our writing to reflect that.  We hardly want readers thinking we condone abortion, or adultery, or marriage between believers and unbelievers, when we think just the opposite.  And oftentimes we not only don't want readers getting the wrong impression, but we also have an overdeveloped desire for them to get the right one.  As in, I-must-cram-the-Gospel-Jesus-and-the-Bible-in-if-I-want-to-honor-God-SOHELPME.

It is not a wholly unreasonable wish, and I am not here to tell writers exactly what balance to strike.  But if we desire to write a good story (which, I believe, is just as God-honoring and perhaps even more so than working in the Gospel inappropriately), we must be more attune to the characters themselves and not so quick to override their individual personalities.  We must let them be who they are.  Sayers mentioned this several times in regard to her famous character Lord Peter Wimsey, whom her Christian readers badgered her to "save" - and she ignored them, because it was not part of the character.  In a lesser sense, this is also true whenever a character of ours begins talking, especially about anything theological or philosophical.  Obviously we don't want to be seen as wrong ourselves, or propagate wrong-thinking, so we are more likely to switch into the mode of writing exactly what we believe to be truth in as clear a way as possible.  We do a little ventriloquy act through our characters, and an astute reader can tell.

Too often we think that in our writing we've got to try to evangelize not just the characters, but the readers - even though it is biblically clear that God ordained that work to be done through His Word preached, not through fiction.  Our business is to craft a good story, to let the characters think and say what they would think and say "if free-moving and placed within the literary field."  If that means that they think and say something wrong, well, then they shall.  It is my opinion that our core beliefs will show through the story in some manner; it just shouldn't be through ventriloquy.

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”

g. k. chesterton

Thoughts on Thinking

 "There is no doubt that some people who look intelligent, are intelligent; and there is no doubt that some people who look idiotic, are idiots."

- arthur c. custance, genesis and early man

But whether idiotic or intelligent, all people do think after one fashion or another.  Self-conscious thought is one feature of Man that is uniquely his, an element of what it means to possess the Imago Dei, and I don't believe any scientist or doctor has yet proved that it can ever be lost to a human being. 

This is not, however, to be a particularly philosophical post - all breathe a sigh of relief!  I want instead to take a peek at how this profoundly common action of thinking plays a role in the lives of our characters. Naturally, the way our characters think will be reflected in the way they speak; but it comes out even more starkly and with less polish in what the Experts call "internal dialogue."  (I'm not sure who thought that was a good phrase to use for it.  It makes me think of some gastronomic complaint.)  These are simply the character's private thoughts, the ones he never actually voices, but which are recorded so that the reader can get a peep inside the his mind.  In "stream-of-consciousness" stories, as far as I can make out, the story is driven and formed entirely by the narrator's thoughts; but in most novels, the internal dialogue is limited to a few italicized lines here and there when the protagonist's thoughts need to be known.

Internal dialogue is a very useful thing, especially when you feel yourself drifting away from the narrator's point-of-view, but until recently I had never stopped and considered it in detail.  Internal dialogue was simply the character's thoughts, and I wrote them as they came to me and seemed necessary.  However, the other day as I was looking over my writing it occurred to me that neither real people nor characters think in exactly the same manner; the voice of one protagonist's thoughts will likely not be the same as the voice of another protagonist's thoughts.  (I do keep coming back to voice, don't I?)

For instance, at the time when this realization popped up, I was comparing the two narrators of The White Sail's Shaking - Tip Brighton and Marta Rais.  They are very different characters and neither talk nor think in the same manner.  Tip talks to himself, aloud and in his own head, so that in many of his thoughts he refers to himself in the second person.  Marta, on the other hand, is much more normal: she thinks of herself as an "I."  This actually makes her more difficult to write.  In the scenes where Tip is alone, there can be that invisible "second character" - his own projection of himself - to allow for some dialogue; with Marta, I have discovered that I can't use the same technique.  Instead, I'll probably have to go back through her scenes and give her something physical to talk to, like Scipio.

Another interesting thing to consider is how one character's way of thinking can develop through a story.  Even more words seem to be written about "character arc" than are written about "internal dialogue," but it seems to me that when as a protagonist matures, he or she has to mature in the fundamental area of thought as well as in action.  Although the character himself does not essentially change from page one to the end (just as we don't essentially change from childhood to adulthood), every aspect of his life is altered to one degree or another.  The very manner in which he looks at the world will be different, maybe vastly, maybe only a little.

What comes first to mind could either be an example or a counter-example, depending on how you look at it.  Whichever it is, it comes in the form of Margaret Mitchell's much-reviled character Scarlett O'Hara.  Throughout the story there is a recurring theme in Scarlett's thoughts: "I'll think about (whatever) tomorrow."  It comes up repeatedly and reflects Scarlett's unwillingness to stop and consider her own actions, to consider the world around her in an at least semi-objective manner.  This theme carries through all the way to the end and to the climactic scene, where Rhett has left her and Scarlett is sitting alone in her house, thinking about what she can possibly do next.  And then she recalls Tara.  Tara, which she loves above everything else, which is more important to her than anyone or anything in the world.  She'll go back to Tara.  And with that of course comes the famous last line: "After all, tomorrow is another day."

This ending drives home the fact that Scarlett has not changed - and yet, at the same time, it shows that she has changed.  Only a little, I'll grant you, but in the phrasing of that last quote there is a subtle development.  Previously her line was, "I'll think about it tomorrow."  At the end it becomes, "Tomorrow is another day."  And there is a difference in that, because in a way she is facing rather than hiding from the future.  Even a character like Scarlett does have something of an arc.

So internal dialogue, gross as the phrase may be, is really a fascinating and useful little thing.  It doesn't usually play a massive part in a story, but the part it does play is important and just plain interesting to consider.  How do your characters think?  Looking back over the course of a story, have you ever been surprised to see developments that you never planned?  I certainly have - and I think it may be one of the most rewarding aspects of writing.

A Discussion of Dialogue

Last week Joy of Fullness of Joy very kindly invited me to do a guest post on her blog. This is my first time writing one, so naturally I am quite excited about it. Here is a snippet:

I am not much of one for dissecting story structure. I never enjoyed Literature classes for that reason; it seems too bad to pick apart an author's writing until it is hardly recognizable for the story it once was. I don't deny that there is some help to be gained from such dissection; as in the biological world, it is crucial for knowing the interworkings of those living words. But I was never fond of dissections in biology, and I think that has carried over into my reading style as well.

Despite that, however, I do tend to look at stories in two great parts: dialogue and narration. Dialogue is anything inside quotation marks (I lump the protagonist's thoughts into this category, too, since they tend to be in monologue form); narration is, well, everything outside. Both can be hard to write, but the area of dialogue is the one in which writers tend to have the most difficulty. How closely should characters' speech resemble "real life" dialogues? How casual is too casual, how formal too formal? How do we get to the point of a conversation without it sounding abrupt? How do we differentiate between characters' ways of speaking? There are a dozen questions that come up and conflicting answers to meet them.

to read the full post, "the discussion of dialogue," drop by Joy's blog!

Accents

My latest completed novel (read, not written) is Richard D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone, a romance set in Exmoor, England, during the late 1600's. I have long been aware of the variety of accents contained in Britain - think Henry Higgins - but I don't believe I have ever read a novel with such untranslatable written accents as Lorna Doone. Fortunately the main characters are not given accents, but for the lesser characters, Blackmore renders their ways of speaking phonetically; and when one of the good men of Exmoor relates a fairly important (and fairly lengthy) story about highwayman Tom Faggus, I could not understand one fourth of what he was saying.

But for all that, I found it to Blackmore's credit that he went to all that trouble to accurately portray the speech of country folk in the regions covered in Lorna Doone. While many people think that a British accent means dropping one's h's in Cockney style, in reality the whole of Britain is covered by different "dialects," which can vary even between two towns in the same county. Some are less noticeable than others, but the interesting thing about watching an excessive amount of British television is that, after awhile, you begin to notice different accents among the actors. These are often masked by voice training; for example, Colin Morgan, who plays Merlin in the BBC series 'Merlin', is Irish, but hides his accent in the series so that it only slips out on rare occasions.

Another book that uses British dialects, but less overwhelmingly, is Burnett's The Secret Garden. Taking place in Yorkshire, Burnett brings in the Broad Yorkshire speech of the working class, which has the two-pronged effect of grounding the reader in the location and portraying the different levels of society. These are even more clearly shown in the 2004 British TV serial "North & South," based on Elizabeth Gaskell's novel North and South. Whether it was intentional or not, I found it interesting that the change from the rural, slow-moving, peaceful South to the fast and industrial North is reflected in the different ways of speaking between the Hales (who have moved up from the South) and the Thorntons (a very Northern family). Daniela Denby-Ashe, who plays main character Margaret Hale, has a very soft and "round" voice, whereas Richard Armitage, who plays Mr. Thornton, speaks through his nose and with his jaw set, giving him a harsh tone. The series also differentiates between the workers and the masters of the cotton mills, for among the workers, the dialect of the region is much more pronounced than among the higher-class "masters."

Accents must be used with more caution in writing than in film, since phonetically-rendered speech can be cluttered and confusing, rendering the dialogue unintelligible. However, they are exceedingly useful and interesting when done well and deserve at least a passing acquaintance, as some knowledge of the dialects of different regions, whether British or not, bring depth and accuracy to writing.

A Bit O' The Classics - The Robe

I'm not quite sure whether or not The Robe counts as a classic, as it is no longer as popular as it once was; but it was a big hit when it was published in 1942 and had a movie made of it in 1953, so I suppose I can get away with stashing it in my Classics file. At any rate, the cloth-bound copy residing on my shelf certainly looks like a classic.

My feelings about The Robe are mixed, somewhat as though the "real" story was good, but Lloyd C. Douglas "messed it up" when transferring it into writing; as though the characters and events were real, but Douglas added things that muddied the waters. Naturally the entire novel is his intellectual property and there was no "real" story for him to ruin, but it is a credit to his writing that his characters are so real to me that they seem to exist separately from the author himself. On the other hand, of course, there is the disappointing fact that I wish I could separate them.

The line upon which my like and dislike are divided is that between the writing and the theme. Since I have already detailed what I disliked about the latter in my Goodreads review (which has spoilers) and on Squeaky Clean Reviews (which I strove to keep spoiler-free), and because I do not feel like going back through the shallow theology, I will simply stick with a discussion of Douglas' writing and the characteristics that made it stand out.

The characters were my first love of the novel, beginning right about at page three when Marcellus Gallio showed up and quadrupling on whatever page Demetrius appeared. Douglas did an excellent job of cementing the characters of both these main characters upon their arrival. We first see Marcellus through his sister Lucia's eyes as he relates to her an amusing (for him) anecdote about a banquet he attended the night before, and immediately the reader gets a picture of a carefree Roman Tribune; with this former-Marcellus as a comparison, the Marcellus who, after putting Jesus to death and winning His robe chapters later, is a broken man who cries out at intervals, "Were you there?" stands out in wonderful contrast.

Marcellus' Corinthian slave, Demetrius, is another sort of character entirely. He was bought by the Gallio family years ago to be Marcellus' manservant when the Romans brought him as a captive to Rome, and though the Gallio's good treatment of him has made him loyal to them, he privately longs for freedom and resents the army that made him a slave. He is taciturn and rigidly formal, as Douglas shows in Demetrius' first scene, with feelings displayed far more in action than words. His loyalty to Marcellus and his desire for freedom come to a wonderfully-written head after the crucifixion of Christ, when Demetrius is given the chance to escape and must decide between that and staying with a half-crazed master.

The history was very well presented, and I was especially interested by Douglas' portrayal of life in Palestine from a Roman's perspective. His depiction of Caligula was, perhaps, a little overdone, since it is thought that he was a fairly good emperor during his first two years, but it was refreshing to see how much research Douglas did on facets of Roman culture during that time.

Then there was the writing itself, the style of which was quite interesting. I particularly enjoyed Douglas' use of interesting verbs for dialogue tags; while he did not scorn "said," which such a lovely verb, he also speckled his conversations with words like "drawled." As the middle section of the novel is mostly made up of conversation, Douglas did well to employ other verbs so as not to beat the Said to death; these sorts of words (when not overdone, and also when used in conjunction with characters who would indeed speak like that) make dialogue pop.

(For a full review of The Robe with all its pros and cons, check either Goodreads or Squeaky Clean Reviews.)

John H. Watson, M.D.

Watson is underrated. Perhaps understandably so; after all, compared to the brilliant Holmes, Watson is hardly remarkable. But, then again, no one in Conan Doyle's novels is very remarkable when examined in the light of Sherlock Holmes (a fact of which that detective is keenly aware). Watson never fails to be startled by the minutiae of his friend's deductions, but is not quick enough to pick up on them himself, and his frequent inability to guess at the trail of Holmes' thoughts leaves many readers to conclude that he is a dunce.

Not so. Watson is no idiot, as he shows in The Hound of the Baskervilles, where he spends most of the book attempting to solve a mystery on his own; rather, he is the perfect foil for the eccentric genius of Sherlock Holmes. Whereas Holmes' talents lie in the realms of careful planning, plotting, and not a little deception, Watson is a man of action, generally ready with a pistol in his pocket to help his friend out of a tight spot. If not brilliant, he is brave, and never one to back out when the danger is high. His job is to fire at pygmies, throw smoke bombs inside rooms through open windows, and, most importantly, to do everything without asking questions or questioning Holmes' methods. As Holmes himself remarks in Hound, it is in the hour of action in which he turns to Watson for aid - and it is in the hour of action that Watson excels.

Holmes: "And when I raise my hand - so - you will throw into the room what I give you to throw, and will, at the same time, raise the cry of fire. You quite follow me?"
Watson: "Entirely.... I am to remain neutral, to get near the window, to watch you, and at the signal to throw in this object, then to raise the cry of fire, and to wait you at the corner of the street."
Holmes: "Precisely."
Watson: "Then you may entirely rely on me."

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: A Scandal in Bohemia.)

Another point that is often missed is that only a character like Watson could be written as a loyal friend of a man like Sherlock Holmes. If Watson were as brilliant as Holmes, it would be unreasonable to think that the two would be friends, for their talents would lie in the same areas, they would clash, and it would ultimately diminish from the grandeur of Conan Doyle's masterpiece: Sherlock Holmes.

Watson is most important, however, in his capacity as a filter between Holmes and the reader. While readers may be disgusted with Watson for not always "catching on," this only shows that they don't realize how very much in the dark they would be if there were no character in the story to whom Holmes explained his logic. There are only two other options: first, that there be no explanation at all; or second, that Holmes' thought processes would be explained in narrative form rather than in dialogue. The first would alienate readers by making Holmes into an unapproachable, and incomprehensible, character, as, without an explanation of his conclusions, Conan Doyle's detective would seem absurd. Indeed, many of Holmes' seemingly random conclusions do seem absurd until he has languidly explained them to Watson.

As for the second, this means would make the prose tedious and parenthetical. Something along the lines of, "'You took the train back from the country this morning,' said Holmes. He knew this from the little splotch of mud on the threshold, which was not one of the five hundred samples known in the city of London and which naturally indicated that he had been out in the country. 'And you were late.' This, of course, came from the fact that the mud was rounded into the shape of the flat of Watson's shoe, which indicated that he had been sprinting." It is so much nicer to set out this information in dialogue form, rather than having the author feed it to the reader in such a way as to indicate the former's assumption that the latter is an idiot.

Instead of burdening his stories with either of these options, Conan Doyle created the character of John H. Watson, M.D. As an intrepid friend, supporting character, intelligent sidekick, and narrator of Holmes' cases, he remains a classic and oft-overlooked figure in the familiar mysteries of Sherlock Holmes.

(Maker of graphic unknown.)

He Said, She Said

"...for I have just had it from Mrs. Long!"


A lot of writing guidebooks will advise you never to append any verb other than "said" to a section of dialogue, probably to avoid a stilted feel. In addition, they discourage the use of any adverbs to describe how the character is speaking. But the problem with these hard-and-fast rules is pretty easy to find - it's boring. Not just boring for the writer (quite a few things seem boring to the writer that truly are necessary), but boring for the reader, too. Constant "he said, she said, said Tom, said Jane's" in literature rarely convey the feeling behind the words, and tend to weigh down the dialogue.

Granted, it is unwise to throw out "said's" altogether, or even to major in other verbs. It's a good, old-fashioned, frank word, and it carries a lot of meeting when properly used. But sometimes it's not suited to how the character is speaking, and there is a better word to use that carries more weight and gets the point across. Of course, many times no verb is needed at all, especially when the reader knows who is speaking; then there is little call to tack on an idle "he said."

The same is true for adverbs. While it is true that being told in every scrap of dialogue that John intoned every word smartly and Isabel warbled gleefully is annoying, this is no call for throwing out all verbs and adverbs. It merely means that writers have to be careful that they do not abuse these things, but use them to the best advantage in their prose. It's very difficult, and even a little silly, to make any set, immovable laws about writing technique, because there are always exceptions and variations to every rule.