The Spice of Strife

I’ve realized that there’s no way I could be a book reviewer.

Granted, I don’t often review books on this site because I believe it’s generally not great to go talking smack about your peers (and having been on the receiving end of that smack before, I know how badly it can mess with someone’s ego and mental process).  But even if I weren’t an author, I’d have a hard time being a reviewer because every time I stumble upon something that annoys me, I can’t move on until I’ve created an entire blog post about that one niggling point that really bothers me.

So here we go.

It’s not that I wasn’t able to see that this nameless book had some good points.  A very epic quality to the prose told a very interesting story that interpreted mythic verse as reality.  But as I thumbed through it, I began to notice something.  Or rather, a lot of somethings.  A lot of shirtless dudes fighting other shirtless dudes.  A lot of very powerful men doing very manly things.  A lot of…dudes.

Not so much else.

And it just sort of slipped into my consciousness: “Man, this book is a sausage fest.”

I felt bad for it.  I’m not usually happy when I have criticism for a book.  But there it was and I couldn’t really deny it.  There were a lot of dudes being dudely, but not a lot of chicks or even non-studly dudes.  I offered that criticism to a few people, professing my sausage fest accusation with it and the ensuing feeling of despair.  To my surprise, a few people actually liked that it wasn’t “politically correct” in offering a lot of non-male perspective.

Personally, I hadn’t thought that fantasy, as a genre, was rather inundated with political correctness to begin with and while I certainly didn’t agree with the statement, I could…kind of understand the reasoning behind it.

But political correctness wasn’t really on my mind to begin with.  And that’s when it hit me.  While reading this very manly book about very dudely dudes being very bro-like in the name of brohood, I realized that I wasn’t offended.

I was bored.

Hence why this post was made.  Not to vaguely condemn a book I won’t mention, but so that we can learn from it.  Because there’s a lesson to be taught here and it revolves around voice.  Specifically, diversity in voice.

We’ve covered before how conflict is the soul of a story, haven’t we?  How the story evolves when two people with different motivations collide through means that deny either of them their goals?  Let’s talk briefly about voice.

Voice, essentially, is character.  It is the summary of their goals, their motivations, their loves, their losses, their relationships and their hatreds without actually demonstrating those.  The voice is in Logen Ninefingers when he jumps off the cliff.  The voice is in Locke Lamora when he discovers his friends after narrowly escaping the Gray King.  The voice is in Gariath when he punches a rock as though it would change something.

Essentially, the voice is the character in both a few words and in every word.  Because in everything they do, their voice is present, and in every aspect of their voice, their character is present, including (and especially) their conflict.

This is where the value of a diversity of voices becomes something very useful to a story.  When a character’s conflict is always present and always personal to them, we become more invested with that character.  When the villain’s conflict is different and thorough from the hero’s conflict, we become as invested in that character as we do in the hero.  And when those two characters come into conflict, we, the reader, are on edge because we’re not sure who we really want to win.

We are invested in both voices.  The loss of either is crushing to us.

And by the same hand, when two voices are similar, we’re…less interested.  When two guys basically want the same thing and go about it in mostly the same ways, we’re kind of less impressed when they start coming into conflict.  When Manly Dudeson has to sleep with a lot of women, beat up a lot of monsters and go on a lot of adventures to secure power and Dudely Manson has to sleep with not as many women, beat up a few more monsters and go on a slightly different adventure, we, the reader, don’t really care who wins because it’s basically the same thing.

That’s an extreme example and not precisely fair to the unnamed book.  But it serves to illustrate a point there.

When we recommend having lots of different characters, we recommend that for the sake of having a vast and varied conflict.  When two characters want different things, they frequently come into a clash with each other.  When two characters go about different ways to getting the same thing, they frequently come into clash with each other.  When two characters are the same and do the same things, they could still clash, but it’s a little farfetched and not that interesting.

Voice, essentially, is the key to engineering a conflict outside of the cliched Good versus Evil dynamic.  By having a lot of them, you have a lot of conflict and thus, have a lot of story.

Which leads me to another issue that has occasionally troubled writers.  I’ve talked about how a diversity of voices is key to a successful conflict.  And I’ve also strongly hinted that a lot of the voice can hinge on things like gender and race.  This leads to a sticky subject for a lot of aspiring authors.

How do you write the voice of a character that is someone you’re not?  How do you, a male, add the voice of a female character?  How do you, a straight person, add the voice of a gay character?  What if you mess it up?  Is it even worth trying?

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: yes, but put some thought into it.

Because key to understanding a voice is being sensitive to that voice.  It’s about genuinely asking yourself how this character would react to this conflict, how they handle this other character, how they do this activity.

Note that I said “this character” and not “this race/orientation/gender.”  The first mistake these authors make is in assuming that people who are different from they are, physically, are not actually people. 

Certainly, upbringings will be different and that will influence things, but to assume that all of one gender, one orientation or one race do all the same things is a fundamental flaw that I think a lot of writers (especially fantasy) fall into.  People like to be able to categorize things, fit them neatly into their worldbuilding, and people don’t typically work that way.

So how do you do it?  By thinking.  By trying.  By sometimes failing.

Failure sucks, of course.  It definitely hurts.  But it’s worth more than easy success.  Success will glut you and teach you nothing.  You can only really learn from failure.

And sometimes you learn from other peoples’.

Consider carefully when you’re writing what you want to accomplish with a character.  If they are reminiscent of another character, you will likely find your audience wondering why two people who do the same thing are around.

Hopefully, you’ll have an answer.