Fantasy vs Reality...Imagined vs Real...Credibility

(Originally posted Tuesday March 8th 2007)

Over the weekend I was asked by a friend of very long standing to act as an adviser on a multi-media project that he is undertaking, a project which he hopes will eventually encompass live action, comic art and prose. In particular he wanted me to help him out in terms of the direction and dialogue as it was the one point on which he felt he was sticking a little.

Being asked to contribute to another artist's projects is on one hand quite daunting and on the other a real ego boost as someone has singled you out of all the creative types they know to solve a problem for them. The compliment my friend was paying me had both effects, but what it did most of all was cause me to take another look at the way in which I approach the issue of dialogue.

Fantasy is a genre that has many more negative stereotypes attached to it in the mind of the average person than any other non-offensive prose that I can think of. Even if someone has never read what would be considered to be a "cannon" piece of fantasy, everyone associates it with pointy-eared elves, gruff beareded dwarves and treasure-hoarding dragons.

Thrown in on top of this is the fact that one of the true pioneers of the modern genre was an Oxford Don and a wizard as far as medaeval languages were concerned. Tolkien had all that time and interest in dreaming up his languages and legends as was his passion, the stories only came afterwards, which is an important fact to remember.

Contempory authors are by and large not writing as a hobby or to indulge a whim, they're doing it to pay the bills (or in the hope of their writing being able to replace whatever else they do to pay the bills). The ineviatble result seems to be that we end up with stories that have bizarre words drempt up in an attempt to stick to the Tolkien rule of strange tongues. More often than not these are simple nonsense with a liberal amount of meaningless punctuation tossed in for colour.

There is also the temptation to fill the air with characters who proclaim: "Forsooth", "Verily", "True-Spoken" or even "Gadzooks!". And in this the author forgets the vital fact that they are not writing about the Middle Ages, the Jomon era or the conquest of the Americas. They are writing fantasy, a genre which suffers when made to ape bad historical fiction.

I recall reading Shakespeare and noting how much his Romans sounded like witty Elizabethans. I also recalled the way in which Romans themselves put speeches into the accounts they wrote of historical figures so as to put them in a contempory context. And even Homer, writing in the Bronze age, recasts the ancient warriors of the Trojan War as soldiers from his own time.

My characters might sound like blokes down the pub on a Friday night or even at times like football hooligans chanting at the opposing supporters, but I'd feel a fool if they sounded like a piss-poor amatuer dramatics society portraying an "authentic" historical dialect.