It’s not often I point to writers in other fields for this blog, but I want to steal an idea from one Lu Wilson (who uses any pronoun so I’m going to mix it up).
Lu writes a wiki-blog-garden, which means their posts are hard to sort or read in order. Their site branches by topic and theme, but the posts also cross link, which means the new posts feed is useful but might be the worst way to read the site.
Just today (at the time of writing) she posted about live coding synths in real time to make music much like playing a keyboard. And every so so often she would write a word in UPPERCASE for added EMPHASIS.
Except that this is all a ruse. A con to hide the truth of this format choice. The words chosen are key phrases but they also have one other common trait. They all have three or more SYLLABLES.
I know this because it says so at the bottom but I hadn’t really UNDERSTOOD why it was done this way. I did gain a little insight later, because after reading it I noticed there was a single word which had the wrong case. He had missed the word ENCOURAGE.
After I noticed this, I told them about it and they said it would be fixed. When I went back to check it again I was amazed. The rogue word hadn’t been CAPITALISED. It had been DELETED.
And that was when I REMEMBERED.
Many months ago, Lu had posted to her blog about voice. Not voice as in sound or pitch or timbre, all of which you might assume Lu would care about, given his thoughts on gender, but rather in the voices with which she writes. Yes, thats MULTIPLE voices, one for each main project.
This FASCINATED me. Until I read this it had never occurred to me that choice of word length or rhythm was something people did on purpose. I always just write like I speak, which means yes I ACTUALLY talk this way¹, and the next word I write is USUALLY the first or second that comes to mind.
But if you highlight words with more than two beats, it makes you take notice of the rhythm with which they are read and the way in which they are likely spoken if read aloud. By making three-beat, four-beat, five-beat, and so on, words all caps, it forces you to ration them and only use them in places where a long drawn out word can be fully and slowly ENUNCIATED to capture a listener².
This is why Lu had simply removed the word ENCOURAGED.
It wasn’t a key phrase, it didn’t need to be shouted, so there was no point using a complex word.
But the thing is… I’m a MAGICIAN. I revel in long words. COMPLICATED words. SESQUIPEDALIAN words. I am ENAMOURED with the SENSATION of each POLYSYLLABIC CONSTRUCTION LOVINGLY EXTRUDED to an ATTENTIVE AUDIENCE. My PERFORMANCE CHARACTER is that of a MISUNDERSTOOD ACADEMIC, DESPERATELY EXPLAINING IMPOSSIBLE RATIONALITIES for INEXPLICABLE PHENOMENA. I INCOHERENTLY OVERSATURATE LISTENING SPECTATORS with DIMENSIONAL ANOMALIES and MATHEMATICAL ODDITIES to OVERRIDE any PREVIOUS FOUNDATION of REALITY.
I have never written or performed as ANYONE else.
I only perform as all my worst, most ANNOYING traits, bundled up into a single pompous dickhead.
Why?
Because only in the magic circle of staged fiction can I express this part of myself.
Master Payne FAMOUSLY said that before a magi can become great, they must work through the reason they learned magic in the first place. Some inner trauma or wound which made them seek the role of the most potent, clever, and AMAZING person the room.
Looking inward…
Do I really use magic as a way to get people to listen to me? Is this my wound? I don’t try to come across as a suave master of the arts or a cool trickster, but I act like a weirdo and expect people to think of me as the strangest stranger, all so that they will pay ATTENTION.
I recall as a child having trouble feeling heard, and wishing I could make people listen. I had things to say, and I read VORACIOUSLY, CONSTANTLY EXTENDING my VOCABULARY… Thinking that this was the OPTIMUM path to be taken SERIOUSLY. But it had the OPPOSITE effect. People thought it sounded funny. You think these long words sound strange from a 43 year old sleight of hand artist, picture them coming from me when I was twelve.
The first time I was mocked for using a long word I was a route helper on a fun run. My heart defect kept me out of the more intense sports, such as long distance running, so the teachers put me to use telling other students which way to go. When asked how far it was to the finish I wasn’t sure so gave a vague reply. The tired runner misheard, wrongly echoed “seven miles?” And I loudly told him that I said SEVERAL.
The sentence “I said SEVERAL”, in full, was the nickname that nearby group of peers called me by until I left for college³.
Ever since I have been drawn to people and places who allowed me to indulge in my LINGUISTIC PREDILECTIONS.
EDUCATION.
COMPUTER PROGRAMMING.
FANTASY ROLEPLAYING.
And now… MAGICIANS.
What’s changed is that it isn’t just my circle of friends who will put up with me talking like a weirdo. Normal people can be WILLINGLY SUBJECTED to it. Sometimes I can even con myself into the belief that they are ENJOYING it.
But now, having looked at people like Lucy Darling⁴ changing her entire mode of speech to better connect with strangers, and Rob ZABRECKY⁵ changing his to INTENTIONALLY distance himself from them, I wonder if there might be something to it.
I have thought for some time about making a new act. A new PERSONA. As you may guess from recent posts my intent was to focus on a theme of folklore not quite bizarre magic but witchcraft ADJACENT. In building this act I have used a lot of words like COINCIDENCE, ALMANAC, MANIFEST, PARANORMAL, DESTINY, RITUAL, EFFIGY, CONSENSUS REALITY, ETCETERA.
In short I have been building the same act, just with new tricks and ALTERNATIVE TECHNOBABBLE. This is not what I wanted.
But maybe there is hope for me. In one of Lu’s posts they stick to a one beat style and point out in it that since that first post on two beat style, she has used it so much that he can now switch to it in live speech.
This may be what I need. Magic is more live than people think, even scripted shows need to ad-lib from time to time, ESPECIALLY close up or parlour.
I don’t know if I’ll go with a hard beat limit, there are some fairly normal mundane words with three beats, and many rare words which contain merely two. Randal Monroe wrote a book which only used “the ten hundred words people use the most often” and it was called Thing EXPLAINER.
I think the thing I need to focus on is being more grounded and simple. There’s a reason most old spells and potions used what we now think of as funny names for things. Eye of newt is a one beat style name for the seeds of BRASSICA JUNCEA, which you may know in two beats as mustard. Eye of newt rolled off the tongue, and was made of words people knew. They had seen newts and eyes and newts with eyes. But at a time when spices were VALUABLE COMMODITIES, mustard was rare⁶.
Beats aren’t the only part to this though. Lu’s many styles also vary with sentence length, phrase re-use and even CERTAINTY.
One style Lu uses is a more improv- a less structured- a self correc- a stream of thought style. Using a hyphen to rewrite- to rephrase what came before. Like a person speaking in real time- in the moment- off the cuff.
Even though it is meant to read less contrived, to me wrtiting that way feels UNNATURAL.
What I really want to strive for is to be more APPROACHABLE. More RELATABLE. To script in a way that lets me meet people where they are. Rather than dragging them kicking and screaming into my fictive world, I would inject my fiction into theirs and have it feel like a real event that happened to them, not a show they observed. Because in a quirk of fate, no one believes a real person would talk the way I do.
In short: I have to get more NORMALER.
…
Also I think there might be a grain of truth in my wife’s belief that I am AUTISTIC.
¹ Well okay not this way, as you may have guessed I am doing something special in this PARTICULAR post.
² It is strange that listener is only a 2 beat word, given that it appears to be a 2 beat word, listen, with an added one beat suffix. Somehow the full word eats a phoneme.
³ I now see the tragic IRONY of this because you can say several with two beats. You can also say different, a word I have been trying to avoid this whole time. But the broken part of my brain that makes me use these complex words also makes me try to speak EVERY SYLLABLE in SEVERAL and DIFFERENT and even LISTENER. Me and Steven Toast are the only humans on earth who pronounce the A in MINIATURE… and he’s FICTIONAL.
⁴ Who I’m now sure took on a pair of two-beat names because CARISSA didn’t roll off the tongue nicely.
⁵ I think this is his real name, but it wouldn’t surprise me if I found out he changed it to sound more jarring
⁶ Not as rare as something like saffron, but I’m trying to build a NARRATIVE.