Preventing Pronunciation Frustration

I don’t know about you, but it bugs me when I’m reading a book and keep wondering how I’m supposed to pronounce the names of the characters or the places. There’s a character in John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy calledPeter Guillam. How on earth are you supposed to pronounce ‘Guillam’? Turns out it’s ‘Gwillam’, or thereabouts.

Fantasy is particularly bad for this sort of thing, whether that’s names that are impossible to say or, for that matter, thinking you’ve pretty much got it right only to discover that you were wrong. How many of us got C’thulhu right first time? And who here can hold their hand up and say, ‘Yes, I was rolling the ‘r’ in Mordor long before Peter Jackson.’ Really? I’ll bet you weren’t.

So, in an attempt to prevent pronunciation frustration, here is a brief guide to how to say some of the names in The Blade Bearer. Because the last thing I want is annoyed readers. And to any professional pronunciation people, please forgive my attempts at phonetic rendering.

  • Markham of Mallarn: MAR-kam of MAH-larn
  • Rayne of Irenia: Rain of Ih-RENia
  • Maelcheon Mac Aefar: MAIL-ch-ee-on Mack AE-ih-Far. (The ‘ch’ is soft as in the Scottish word ‘loch’.)
  • Aeoland: AE-oh-land
  • Jeacas Chiron: JEE-cas KEYE-ron
  • Koseck: KOE-seck
  • Carnyth: KAR-nith
  • Talsany: TAHL-zanie
  • Adren: AH-dren
  • Prozhes – No idea how to write this out but the ‘zh’ is very soft.
  • Neghel – NAY-gell
  • Fen Llohan – Again, no idea how to write out the ‘ll’ but it’s how the Welsh say it, if that’s any help.
  • Magologist: Mah-GAW-loh-jist
  • Tyranna: TIH-ranna
  • Aeolyd: AE-oh-lidd
  • Will: Will

Making Short Work

I’ve been working on a short story which is now up on my website (for free).

It’s a satisfying process, mainly because of its brevity. You create this small thing that is, hopefully, entire unto itself, like a clockwork mechanism, each part fitting neatly with the others to create something that is pleasing in its modest scale.

Of course,  it’s not necessarily an easy thing, and there are plenty of masters of the craft to both show us how it’s done and to set the bar. While I was working on The Witch of Venn I kept thinking about Arthur Conan Doyle, and how the best of his Sherlock Holmes stories fit that model of the perfectly-formed vignette, the old pocket watch, oiled and beautifully crafted to fulfill its function. This is partly to do with the satisfaction of watching Holmes do his thing, trusting that a solution is on its way, delivered we hope with his customary verve and wit. Yet solving the puzzle is merely the clock bells chiming their pleasing tune – the pay off when the hands have completed their revolution.  What really matters, and what is so challenging for the author/ clockmaker, is putting the pieces together. The delight of pleasing chimes is seriously undermined if the watch doesn’t also keep time, ideally with a reassuring tick and movement of the hands. The story needs to sweep around, combining the cogs of character with the gears of plot.

I have no idea if The Witch of Venn succeeds on the terms of this tortuous simile. My process is to build the plot outline in my head as well as roughly sketching the characters, then to start writing and hope that the scenario is robust enough and the characters rounded enough that the piece will emerge. In this sense, of course, it is nothing like watch-making. It’s more akin to drawing, where you begin with the rough sketch and, layer by layer, refine it until you get something close to what you thought you wanted in the first place. But, still, your working and refining should not be visible in the finished product. All that refinement should be unseen. The decisions the characters make, the twists and turns of the plot, should generate the feeling, once the reader is done, that they could not have been any other way. Like at the end of a Sherlock Holmes mystery when we say, ‘How come I never saw what was staring me in the face all along?’ while also saying, ‘I wouldn’t want it any other way.’

Ultimately, what I guess I’m trying to say is that I want my short stories to be pleasing in their wholeness. I want you, dear reader, to be satisfied but maybe not too satisfied. Perhaps the best metaphor is actually the old 45 single. The short story should be like that 3’30” of pop perfection – splendid in its own right, yet somehow not quite enough. We should want more.

There are other stories on the way, so let’s see how they work out.

PS. I also need to work on my proofing skills. Apologies for the typos. I'll upload a clean copy soon. 

The Hooded Man

Pity those of us who were young D&D players and fantasy fans in the 1980s. There was - and I can't emphasise this enough - absolutely nothing for us outside of games and novels. What I mean is, there were no fantasy movies.

Or at least there weren't any half-decent fantasy movies. Ask someone of a certain age what there was to watch (usually on rubbish video taped off the TV) and they will give you the list: Krull, The Sword and the Sorceror, Ladyhawke, Dragonslayer, Willow, The Beastmaster, and - my personal favourite - Hawk the Slayer. If you haven't seen any of them then don't bother. Really. Don't. Go look for them on Youtube if you must but be prepared to be underwhelmed.

There was, however, one light shining in the darkness, but it wasn't in the movies, it was on TV. Robin of Sherwood first appeared in 1984 and, to a thirteen-year-old lover of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, it was wonderful. Where fantasy movies were cheap and nasty, all half-arsed scripts and terrible acting, this was well made, with proper actors acting ike real people. And it was kind of mucky. The world of Robin of Sherwood looked like the real world, or at least how we imagined the real world of England during the Norman conquest. A problem with a lot of the fantasy movies was their locations. Most were probably filmed in California to keep costs down (I could look this up but I have better things to do with my time). The only one that looked even vaguely like the worlds I imagined in my own head was Hawk the Slayer, which was a British movie. Robin of Sherwood had real, northern European forests and proper castles and longbows and broadswords. The characters spoke in British (mainly English) regional accents. The costumes were not outlandish nonsense. There was magic in it, but it wasn't overdone, no doubt because the special effects were not up to it. The show worked well within its limitations.

I watched a few episodes recently and was surprised at how well it held up. Yes, the music - which was wonderful at the time - is now a bit dated. Yes, the swordfights look too much like fencing. Yes, you can see some of the creakiness in the sets. But what holds up are the performances and the scripts and the general look of it. For me, it was hugely influential, depicting a world of magic and adventure that was grounded in some sort of truth. There is a very minor scene an episode in Series 1 called Seven Poor Knights from Acre, where Robin and Marian pay a visit to an inn. They're there to get some information. There's not much action, just a bit of dialogue and exposition, but it looks so good and reminds me of players in a role-playing game, visiting an inn to ask questions and move the adventure along.

I realised just how influential it was when I rewatched the first episode. Our first encounter with Michael Praed's Robin of Locksley is him running through a forest, carrying an animal he's killed while being pursued by soldiers and a nobleman. I have no memory of this scene but, somehow or other, twenty years after I first saw it, the idea of that as a splendid opening to a fantasy adventure must somehow have stuck.

Detail is the Devil

I was listening to an interview with the splendid Brian Eno the other day, where he spoke very eloquently about creative types doing too much. When writing music, there is a tendency to fill in every gap, to build up layer upon layer, proving by accretion that your work has weight. The requirements of the creator are often different from those of the listener or reader. What the consumer wants is nowhere near as much as the creator puts in. In other words, we overdo it, and by overdoing it we actually spoil our creation. 

This came into my mind when I was talking to some real, live people about fantasy writing. Two of us complained that a certain incredibly-famous fantasy author had rendered his work unreadable by giving too much lengthy detail about his world. Endless descriptions of clothing, ponderous depictions of meals. Another responded that there was a YouTube channel all about digging deep into this detail and showing what a magnificent achievement it is, how the author has drunk deep from the well of history and myth.

This is where writers of fantasy can go wrong. We create these detailed universes, filled with culture, racial and social tensions and memory, building and building our worlds. But then we forget that the reader - on the whole - wants a story. They want interesting characters and a strong plot, not page upon page of the writer proving how good he or she is at imagining alternate worlds. That, I'd argue, is what appendices are for. Some readers do want the deep dive and we should provide that background if we feel it's wanted. But not in the story. 

The problem is that we spend a lot of our time on world building and so we feel the effort has to be shown in the text. It certainly does, but not with excessive detail that puts the reader off. Build the world, devise all that lovely detail and context, but then get on with the business of spinning your yarn. The background will take care of itself and be just that: background. Detail in the story is there to help the reader understand the motivation of the characters, why things are happening and what might happen. Occasionally, we might permit the odd myth or history lesson, especially if it's short and to the point and not completely Basil Exposition. 

I've tried very hard with The Blade Bearer to keep the detail in the background and only bring it out when it's needed. If I ever start boring you, you will let me know, won't you?

Lazy Boy

I've come to the conclusion that I am not a fantasy novelist. I'm actually a lazy historical novelist.

Fantasy, and SFF in general, works best when it uses the fantastical element to do something that it couldn't do without that element. Otherwise what's the point? Nostalgia? Another level of escapism?

My stories have very little actual fantasy in them, particularly the short stories I'm working on right now. I could probably replace the modest amount of magic in these tales with some other device and the story would still work. Indeed, some of these stories - if not the novel - could actually be set in our world, maybe with just a few tweaks to make the story and characters real.

Trouble is, I am part historian and that gets in the way. I studied history at uni for many years so I have a thing about getting it right. The details need to be bang on, the setting and the culture and the religion and the politics all need to be as historically truthful as can be. Get something wrong or be too anachronistic and the reader is taken out of the story, as well as the author getting annoyed. Then there's research. I'd need to do a lot of work understanding the historical moment I'm using for the story and, quite frankly,  I've done enough historical research for one lifetime.

This is one of the reasons why I like writing fantasy, or made-up worlds. I get to use what I've learned about the past and how it works, but don't have the responsibility to get my facts right. It's my world, so I decide what's correct. There are exceptions. I do have to understand a little about how, say, medieval weapons work, how day-to-day life is led. Get that sort of detail wrong and it might spoil it for the reader. But overall I'm free to invent the world without too much need to read tons of biographies and social history. 

Which is why I think I'm not really a fantasy writer. I'm a historical novelist who can't be bothered with history. 

This doesn't answer the question of why have magic? Aeoland etc is pretty much medieval Europe so why not make it an alternate version of our world but without the wizards and hobgoblins? Excellent question. Any answer?