I'm hearing the voices again....

[Paul Whybrow]

This article in the Independent newspaper struck home with me:

Do you hear a voice when you read this? That might be more normal than you think

Research suggests that 80% of readers hear a 'voice' when reading a story, with only 11% denying that they heard an inner voice at all.

This made me wonder about how much to tailor the conversations in my novels, giving them a sprinkling of dialect, while avoiding spelling words phonetically. My psychological thrillers are set in Cornwall, which has its own language, rich Celtic culture and a distinctive accent. Here's a good example of it:



As mentioned in the video, there's emmets a-plenty in Cornwall. These are incomers from out of county, mainly holiday makers who swarm around like ants, giving the locals much of their income from tourism. Many stay and settle. Some of my fictional characters are Cornish born and bred, while others have moved here. This has caused me a certain amount of head scratching in how to differentiate their accents and attitudes.

There's been some fuss made about how the Cornish accent is spoken in television dramas. An adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's Jamaica Inn was panned, because the cast mumbled their words making them hard to understand. The hugely successful new adaptation of Winston Graham's Poldark stories has gone the other way, with most of the actors avoiding anything that sounds like a West Country burr. Only the farm labourers, the ignorant unwashed oiks attempt an 'ooh arr, yes sur' country bumpkin way of speaking.

Poldark stars decide to ditch Cornish accents

Do other Colonists hear voices when they create their characters?

 

[Bluma Bezbroda]

Definitely. I see and hear my characters very clearly. The same goes when I'm reading books/stories of someone else. Probably that's why I get so disappointed when I see movie adaptations- somehow, they never match how I visualized the heroes...

I also see the situations that I put my characters, sometimes up to quite a detail. It gives me much frustration, because I can not (in my opinion) show the scene that I have in my head with enough fidelity. That leads to overdoing it and we had many threads about over-describing, telling the reader what to see/think and generally patronizing....

As for the language, I write phonetically only when I want to make some point (I mentioned once the "Yay-zus" instead of "Jesus" with Dutch people). That actually gives quite a lot of stylistic/artistic possibilities for the MS, I learned to know

 

[Jason Byrne]

I feel like we had a thread going, about whether people see and/or hear (smell?) what they're writing about. I see and hear what I'm reading, very vividly. I also tend to give more description than necessary. It starts to get weird though, when you try to describe exactly what voice you "hear," when you read narration text like this line. What voice have you been hearing? You can't really describe it — even as you continue to hear it reading this. It's like a voice without voice. My father neither sees nor hears what he reads. Interestingly, he also writes non-fiction, and is by his own admission hopeless at dialogue. A correlation?

Single words like Yay-zuz really go far, I think. If that were in the midst of a line of correctly-spelled dialogue, it would season the whole scene for me. Phonetic spelling for dialects and accents are like spices, though my own use of spices is probably not a good example.

I ran into this when trying to portray San bushmen "click" language.
“À !’hà hè !nhòbá?” the old man asked, his language including some strange manner of deep cluck or click, as a cork pulled from a bottle.
“Hè !ú //gàòàŋ.” Again /Ti!kay gave the deep click of a popping cork, and now a click like the high tk tk by which to urge on a horse.
“Cluck-Ti-tut-kay,” he attempted to fumble with the impossible language, and chuckled to himself.

 

[Alistair Roberts]

Hard to listen to them if you don't hear them... er, well you know what I mean!

 

[Katie-Ellen]

I talk to myself when writing, often without realizing. When I do I'm 'being' the character. I 'see' and hear them, as if on a screen, yes, and it helps with conveying movement and gestures. Or at least, I hope it does. And chuntering to oneself like a saddo (guilty) helps keep dialogue more natural.

 

[Nicole Wilson]

Yup - I definitely hear and see when I read. I'm a visual person, so I actually have a movie running through my head while I read.

 

[KG Christopher]

I absolutely hear and see what I am reading. I just finished 'The Stranger' by Albert Camus and it's a narrated piece, you cannot help but be in the protagonists skin.

 

[Carol Rose]

Voices... faces... I hear/see them all. Took me a very long time to realize not everyone had that constant movie playing in their heads.

 

[J. Rook]

This article in the Independent newspaper struck home with me:
Do other Colonists hear voices when they create their characters?

That was lovely. Thank you for the post. Sometimes I do hear my characters, especially at moments of crisis. But the visual experience is with me most of the time.

 

[J. Rook]

I absolutely hear and see what I am reading. I just finished 'The Stranger' by Albert Camus and it's a narrated piece, you cannot help but be in the protagonists skin.

I have the same experience when I read Joyce.

 

[J. Rook]

I feel like we had a thread going, about whether people see and/or hear (smell?) what they're writing about. I see and hear what I'm reading, very vividly. I also tend to give
“Cluck-Ti-tut-kay,” he attempted to fumble with the impossible language, and chuckled to himself.

With this post I really need two, possibly three, emoticons. It is interesting, enjoyable, and challenging. I have never tried to describe what it is like to understand/use a language different to my mother tongue, but Jason shows me that it's possible.