Register

Register, in writing or speaking, is the socially or contextually conscious choice of vocabulary and grammatical structure. Those people who are apt to adopt more than one register most commonly do so in formal and informal registers. In some cultures this is part of formal education   — notably France where written language has a distinctly different register from spoken. In other cultures, changes of register are used by people who move between different social groups as part of their daily lives, such as teachers and social-workers. Register differs from diction in that it is socially or culturally aware (even if subconsciously).

Writers love register. It enables them to set the scene, the atmosphere, the social status, the background.

a) "Oh woe! Oh woe!" she cried, tremulous but stentorian, "we are undone!"

Whoever she is, her register is telling us something about her. At the very least, this is set in the past - anywhere from the middle ages backwards. If I put her in a toga, we are in ancient Rome, and she's a soothsayer.

b) "Lawksamercy if he hasn't gone and done it again," she hawked and spat, "and it's these old bones what'll have to clear up the mess if I'm any judge."

Now to demonstrate the extremes of register I'm going to put those two statements into the mouth of my son's favourite character, The English Butler.

a) "I'm sorry," he announced to the assembled guests, "but an incident has occurred."
b) "Ahem," the English Butler cleared his throat to gain the attention of the assembled company; "his Lordship has had one of his turns, and I must deal with it."


The English Butler's register is without emotion - and consciously so.

Writers can use register to great effect, therefore, to distinguish between characters, between time, place and setting. Between formal situations and informal; between characters who know eachother well and ones who are strangers. This has its pitfalls, of course. The two most common are register blindness and register seepage.

Register blindness is when the author has his own strong style, and it dominates to such an extent that all characters start to sound like the author - or whichever of the author's styles he happens to be using. I know that Derek Prior won't mind my mentioning that in an earlier draft of Cadman's Gambit, he had an aboriginal shaman who kept talking like Basil Rathbone, and a group of professional assassins who spoke like a gathering of English country vicars. It wasn't through poor characterisation, but through inattention to register. (I should add that in rewriting these parts Derek really went to town!)

Register seepage occurs when the characters' register creeps into the narration. Sometimes this is not an issue. In Mike Dennis' novels, strong first person point of view means that the register of narration is the register of the main character. In most chicklit and pretty much all romance, the register is informal vernacular with good grammar - so the narrator's register is the same as most of the characters'.

Register seepage is at its worst in historical and fantasy fiction. Heroic fantasy is set in the Forgotton Realms™ European middle ages, where everyone says "unto" instead of "to" and "wherefore" instead of "why" (or instead of "where" in the bad cases). You get an awful lot of Yoda-speak. (Word order change will you, and wise will you sound.)

This is okay as long as only the characters speak this way, but it is all to easy for the author to get swept along by the characters to the point where he uses "unto" in the narration. And "atop".

"Atop" is a bugbear of mine. It isn't a fancy way of saying "on". "Atop" means "on top of the highest point of". So in the missionary position, the man is "on top of" the woman, not "atop" her. But the Star can be atop the Christmas tree, however silly that sounds. YKWYA... 

Register can be a powerful tool, and is a key part of the author's armoury, as it enables him to avoid lengthy character establishment and even to minimise nametagging in direct speech. It is something of which authors should be aware, so feel free to prod me for more if my explanation isn't clear or detailed enough.

Character Dynamics

It is a truth universally acknowledged that new writers have lots of really good ideas for new characters. Wait. That came out wrong. New writers put far to many characters in their books. I actually mine my first two books for characters to reuse.

The rule that many characters is wrong is one that I would encourage you to break. But before you do, practise and understand character dynamics.

Unless characters are joined at the hip (Merry and Pippin), each character has his own story. So if you settle on nine main characters, you will have nine stories to write (or eight in the case of LOTR). When the characters are together they will share the same story — so this makes it a little easier. When they are separated, there are TWO things to keep track of. The first — that most people get right — is spacetime. You have to keep track of where they are in space and how long it has taken them to get there. Fantasy writers are really good at space but hopeless at time. Chicklit writers seem to be the reverse. The second — that less people get right — is character dynamics.

Character dynamics manifest in two key ways, continuity and discontinuity. (The former seems to be harder for new writers.)

When characters who form part of a protagonist group or the protagonist's frequent entourage are established, their emotional relationship with the other characters should also be established. The development, evolution or steady condition of this emotional relationship should continue consistently. Example: brothers whose relationship is established as one of uneasy and unequal competition should continue in that competition until something occurs to alter the dynamic. Let's imagine they survive a dangerous encounter: subsequently, both attaches more value to his brother than to his own superiority, so rivalry diminishes, however we still expect to see occasional echoes of their former relationship.

Now the more characters you have, the more stories you have to write, and the more character dynamics you have to manage. Lets add a bit stat math to the question. Combination (nCr) determines how many different character relationships there are in any group. Taking Merry and Pippin as one character you get:

{Frodo, Sam} {Frodo, Gandalf} {Frodo, Aragorn} {Frodo, Merry & Pippin} {Frodo, Boromir} {Frodo, Legolas} {Frodo, Gimli} { Sam, Gandalf} { Sam, Aragorn} { Sam, Merry & Pippin} { Sam, Boromir} { Sam, Legolas} { Sam, Gimli} { Gandalf, Aragorn} { Gandalf, Merry & Pippin} { Gandalf, Boromir} { Gandalf, Legolas} { Gandalf, Gimli} { Aragorn, Merry & Pippin} { Aragorn, Boromir} { Aragorn, Legolas} { Aragorn, Gimli} { Merry & Pippin, Boromir} { Merry & Pippin, Legolas} { Merry & Pippin, Gimli} { Boromir, Legolas} { Boromir, Gimli} { Legolas, Gimli} 

In all, 28 character dynamics. That's 28 stories for the character relationships alone. If, heaven forfend, you start to think about three way dynamics, you get 56 combinations. Tolkien wisely avoids some of the combinations above, and others he only touches on very lightly. Those that he does develop, he develops thoroughly. Those that he does not, he leaves well alone.

I find a helpful way to think about character dynamics is as a soap opera. Soap operas (and teen drama series) focus on character dynamics to the exclusion of plot - the whole key to continuity is the established relationship between characters, to such an extent that a moment of drama can be created by nothing more than having two characters whose history we know well meet in the street. Imagine Alexis and Crystal bumping into eachother in Starbucks.

Character discontinuity occurs when characters are separated, and undergo change, development or evolution while separated. When they meet again, their dynamic is altered. While this is more difficult to write convincingly, it is a ball that few writers drop, largely because it is a case where character dynamics influence plot dynamics. It's also, however, something that happens a lot more often in Real Life — but in real life its effects are generally subtler.

Character proliferation often arises from the naturalistic fallacy that I discussed a few days ago. RL is full of people that we know well. It is reasonable therefore that in a story that takes place in the protagonists' home town, we will encounter an awful lot of characters, and many of them will influence the plot. To avoid proliferation, one of the storyteller's friends is recombination. This is taking several real people whose influence on the protagonist is similar and combining them to make one character. The other is using characters as emblems of their group – so make only one jock, one cop, one storekeeper – but let them voice the opinions and deliver the influence of the crowd they represent.

Finally I would advise every storyteller to be very clear on who is an agonist and who is just a character. A character is anyone who is established (described and depicted) for present or future use.  An agonist is any character whose words or actions influence the plot, either directly or indirectly. Sometimes an agonist is a character we never meet, such as the hero's father who we get to know through the hero's reminiscences or reflections. Sometimes they are obvious, like an antagonist.

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A footnote about Points of View. I'm sure I will talk about this more. Strong POV is when the author consciously chooses to narrate only what a specific character sees, experiences and knows. When the author uses strong POV he will typically point it out explicitly. There is a bit of a fashion at the moment to use strong POV, but where each chapter uses the POV of a different character. When this is done, the character's name is usually used in the first sentence of the chapter. Or the chapter title is the character name — a device that I think belittles the reader's intelligence.

Using this strong POV technique when there are many characters can work well, as long as the writer restricts himself to using only principal characters who are going to develop through the course of the story. When there is a chapter devoted to the POV of one random agonist, I guess it's okay, but it starts to get both difficult and (sometimes) annoying when every agonist has to have his own chapter, or worse, a random character gets a whole chapter to his POV because the author knew there was something the reader had to know, and none of the main characters were present to witness it. If the latter happens, then the plot is not compatible with the narrative technique, and one of them needs to be altered.

Weird Words #2 - Exquisite

Wonderful word, this one. Common usage is as an alternative to "great" that sounds more expressive.

1. Executed with exquisite skill. 

Coupling 'executed' with 'exquisite' and the further x of 'skill', and the whole phrase is redolent of finesse, precision and expertise.

2. The exquisite pain of romance.

Here the usage is possibly just the same - 'exquisite' is being used as an emphasizing word that has neutral connotations. Compare it with the following;

3. The wonderful pain of romance.

4. The terrible pain of romance. 

'Wonderful' and 'terrible' are both providing emphasis, but the former with a positive slant, the latter with a negative. It is conceivable that the writer of 2 was aware of the precise denotation - even the derivation - of the word, but you can see how it may be used as an alternative to 'consummate' (adj.) which just means "complete" or "full" - or as a truss-word - it strengthens the structure of meaning without adding details.

One of the consequences of the use of exquisite purely for emphasis is that the adverb exquisitely often ends up as a fancy alternative to very. This, in my opinion, is a pity. 

Consider the "standard" definition of exquisite which is "fine, precise, detailed, delicate", the which arises from the etymology, which means "sought-after". Here's why I think it's a wonderful word. If you didn't know the etymology, you are probably still using the word correctly. Consider 1 in the light of this; 'exquisite skill' would likely increase the value of whatever is being done so skilfully, hence make it more sought-after. Consider 2, and romance is certainly something that continues to be sought, even once we know that it can be painful. 

The reader who appreciates the meaning of exquisite will feel that it has added meaning in these cases, whereas the reader who does not will not be further enlightened by your usage, but will nonetheless get a sense of what you seek to say.

This sense of rarity gives exquisite its connotation of desirability, and explains why the bad guy often uses it to describe unpleasant things. It's because he's educated, probably British, and he knows what it really means, but he's messing with the hero's head because he knows that the hero is blue-collar and thinks that exquisite means expensive.

5. You will be tortured exquisitely until you talk.