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Light up the Forge.
Humans have favorites among their fantasies.
Ideas that have settled like ancient stains into the quilt of their collective conscious.
Think of the noble dragon, that omnicultural symbol of human fear and wonder.
Think of that neverending struggle between good and evil, horns and halos marking out
the sides of a war that will never end.
And think for a moment of that great gyre of all mortal things: Death, shrouded in shadow,
ever waiting.
Think of them, but also, as a point of respect to these deeply-etched concepts, under absolutely
no circumstances should you ever think of... oh, say, what a dragon might look like in
reality.
Delicate little wings trying to heft that camper van of a body; labyrinthine, gassy
intestine, as liable to blow the whole thing up as to shoot that legendary gout of flame.
And don't think for second about the logic of the whole good & evil thing.
Sure, the room service may be impeccable in heaven, but you'd miss good music before too
long-all the greats are almost certainly gathered in some smoke-filled, dimly-lit club down
under.
And really, I can't advise enough that you keep Death far out of your mind.
An entity who spends its whole eternity watching mortals so quietly, so intently... you start
to get the sense that it might be just as fascinated with you as you are with it.
Could be a bit dangerous, after all, getting all empathetic for Death.
No, certainly best not to mar these, the immortal paintings on the cave of the mind...
Yet, when they're put to you in the right way, you can't help but wonder, can you?
This is where the brilliance of sir Terry Pratchett lies.
Not just in his skill with satire, not just in the strength of his character as an author.
It's in that unifying voice he used.
The one that underpins and connects everything he wrote.
I've personally been aching to discuss Pratchett on the show for a long time now.
I am ravenous for everything we're going to discuss about his writing.
But before we do, I'd like to let you all in on what's happening here in the Foundry.
If you've been watching our videos, you'll know I've been keeping correspondence with...
something in the greater facility beyond the Foundry.
The messages I've gotten back so far have been... cryptic at best.
So far we've gathered... a bit of a god complex, maybe?
And not too much else beside.
So, this time we're going to try something a little... [shot of taleoids tearing pages
out of a Pratchett book] different.
That, however, can wait 'till the video's end.
Now, let's talk about Pratchett.
When I cracked my first ever Terry Pratchett book, I confess, I was confused.
Not because there was anything wrong.
It just... didn't feel like opening a book.
It felt like opening a conversation.
No matter what voice he was writing in-narrator, character, waxen expository, any permutation
thereof-he had the strange quality of sounding... familiar.
To put the experience in human terms, he reads like the most eloquent, droll-minded stranger
ever to share their story with you over a pint.
And the real magic is that he keeps this up.
Whether he's writing the boisterous, crackpot voice of Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully,
or the placid, inexorable voice of Death, he somehow maintains The Pratchett beneath
it all.
It's absolutely spectacular, and if you've never read his work before, almost guaranteed
to confuse and delight you the way it did me.
But the really good news here-the reason we're making this video-is that it's not just some
wondrous thing woven into Pratchett's DNA.
You can do this too.
In order to get there, though, we're first going to need to establish a thing or two
about voice itself.
Voice is... interesting.
Interesting in that we usually see it as a trait.
A person has a voice.
You recognize them by it.
The quality and composition of the sounds that leave their mouth are unique to them.
Together, these form a part of one's identity.
But when we start to talk about voice in writing, things get a little more complicated.
Because instead of anatomy or genetics defining the outcome, it's all experience and cognition.
And this gives writers a great deal more control over the voice they write with than the voice
that they speak with.
Enough control to change or mask their voice from piece to piece.
Enough to write in multiple voices within the same piece.
Enough for voice not just to be a term that describes an immutable aspect of the author's
identity.
I think voice is best understood through its relationship to style.
Think of writing style as a toolbox full of literary tools and devices.
An author might have many different toolsets for different situations-they might write
in different styles.
Voice, on the other hand, is the technique with which the author wields these sets of
tools.
To achieve particular effects, the author may use the same tool in different ways-they
may write in different voices.
Now, before we loop back to Pratchett, a caveat: it is possible to look at the entire body
of an author's work, find the voices and styles ubiquitous enough to identify them by, and
retroactively determine their characteristic Author Voice and Author Style.
But that's not what we're after with Pratchett.
We want to learn from him, not parrot him.
So, let's focus on what he does with all the many voices he uses in a single given piece
of fiction.
His book Guards!
Guards! strikes me as particularly diverse here, and I think it'll make for a fiiine
case study.
Let's pick out three examples...
Here, at the beginning of the book, we get our first glance at the protagonist, captain
of the watch, Sam Vimes: The city wasa, wasa, wasa wossname.
Thing.
Woman.
Thass what it was.
Woman.
Roaring, ancient, centuries old.
Strung you along, let you fall in thingy, love, with her, then kicked you inna, inna,
thingy.
Thingy, in your mouth.
Tongue.
Tonsils.
Teeth.
That's what it, she, did.
She wasa . . . thing, you know, lady dog.
Puppy.
Hen.
Bitch.
And then you hated her and, and just when you thought you'd got her, it, out of your,
your, whatever, then she opened her great booming rotten heart to you, caught you off
bal, bal, bal, thing.
Ance.
Yeah.
Thassit.
Never knew where you stood.
Lay.
Only thing you were sure of, you couldn't let her go.
Because, because she was yours, all you had, even in her gutters...
Distinct, and delivered entirely in character.
This is prose, mind you, not dialogue.
Free indirect speech.
Almost a smooth transition from third person to first.
Next, we skip ahead to about the book's one-third mark, where we find one of our main characters-the
intrepid, simple, do-good watchman, Carrot-trying to understand the librarian of Unseen University
as he attempts to explain something about a missing book.
Oh, and an important aside: the librarian is an orangutan:
"I know it's a book.
What's its name?"
The Librarian sighed, and held up a hand.
"Four words?" said Carrot.
"First word."
The ape pinched two wrinkled fingers together.
"Small word?
A. The.
Fo-" "Oook!"
"The?
The.
Second word . . . third word?
Small word.
The?
A?
To?
Of?
Fro-Of?
Of.
The something Of something.
Second word.
What?
Oh.
First syllable.
Fingers?
Touching your fingers.
Thumbs."
The orangutan growled and tugged theatrically at one large hairy ear.
"Oh, sounds like.
Fingers?
Hand?
Adding up.
Sums.
Cut off.
Smaller word . . . Sum.
Sum!
Second syllable.
Small.
Very small syllable.
A. In.
Un.
On.
On!
Sum.
On.
Sum On.
Summon!
Summon-er?
Summoning?
Summoning.
The Summoning of Something.
This is fun, isn't it!
Fourth word.
Whole word-" He peered intently as the Librarian gyrated
mysteriously.
"Big thing.
Huge big thing.
Flapping.
Great big flapping leaping thing.
Teeth.
Huffing.
Blowing.
Great big huge blowing flapping thing."
Sweat broke out on Carrot's forehead as he tried obediently to understand.
"Sucking fingers.
Sucking fingers thing.
Burnt.
Hot.
Great big hot blowing flapping thing ..." The Librarian rolled his eyes.
Homo sapiens?
You could keep it.
Two characters this time, almost exclusively dialogue and beats, but dominated by one distinct
voice all the same.
And our last example: just a single moment of reflection about half way through the book,
but a telling one.
This is less about the voice of the character, the dragon expert Lady Sybil Ramkin, and more
about the narrator voice that follows: "Hwhat," she said, "is the meaning of this?"
If a Ramkin had ever been given to introspection she'd have admitted that it wasn't a very
original line.
But it was handy.
It did the job.
The reason that cliches become cliches is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers
in the toolbox of communication.
About four sentences of soliloquy, right in the middle of third-person dialogue.
Even more, it's not even a character in the story-it's the narrator!
So here we are.
Three separate voices Pratchett used in the writing of a single book.
This is, of course, only the tip of the iceberg.
But it'll do for our purposes, because we only need the three to begin to see that there's
something tying all of them together: They're all tonally disarming.
That is, the tone they're written in catches us off our guard.
In the first example, Sam Vimes is a caricature of himself.
His sorry, drunken state and his toxic relationship with the city could have both been played
very grimly, but instead it's a slurry, entertaining mess of free indirect speech.
In the second example, Pratchett's decision to let the prose degenerate into disjointed
beats and dialogue as the characters go through the motions of a game of charades totally
turns our eyes away from the expository nature of the scene-ultimately just a pair of characters
helping each other get up to speed.
And then, in the last example, Pratchett takes the time to step out of character and lampshade
how archetypal Lady Ramkin is for us.
This persists through almost every part of the book.
Pratchett wrote every voice between its covers in this disarming tone.
And the effect is to harmonize all of them around it, creating one greater, underlying
voice that carries through the entire piece.
Something which, for obvious reasons, we've been calling a unifying voice.
Now, to be clear, in most of Pratchett's writing, the disarming tone is only a piece of his
unifying voice.
His voices are also unified by treatments of style like relaxed structure and present
narrator.
For now, though, just the one example will have to do.
I only needed to show you what this look like in Pratchett's work so that I could talk about
how to use it in your own.
If voice is a technique applied to an element of style, and we understand that an author
can use multiple styles and voices within a single piece, then the key to creating a
unifying voice within a piece is to do as Pratchett did with tone in all three of our
examples, and dedicate one or more particular elements of style, wherever they show up,
whichever voices or styles they're used in conjunction with, to a particular technique
or purpose.
That's a mouthful, and a mind-full.
Let's look at this in another context.
In a work of horror the author might decide that throughout the piece they're going to
use the sensory details to influence the mood of it.
In such a work, even during relatively light scenes where the language is gentle, the characters
are getting on well, the plot is at equilibrium, our sensory attention would forever be on
the rasping sound of the patient's voice, the filmy sheen deep in the grandmother's
eyes, the darkness at the end of the hallway-the most dissonantly uncomfortable sensory details.
And this-no matter which elements of style the author should choose to use at any given
point-will create a stylistic and vocal through line between all of them.
A unifying voice.
Using this method might not turn you into Terry Pratchett.
The man was knighted was for a reason.
But putting this to use in your own work will at the very least help you to capture a little
piece of what makes his work so unique.
And that's what we're going to be attempting the short story at the end of this series,
so stay tuned!
In the meantime, I did promise I had something to share with all of you about the goings
on of the Foundry.
And I do.
[AD SMOOTH CUT] But first, briefly, I'd like to take a moment
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It's a great way to help out the show, while getting your hands on some useful tools.
A big thanks to our friends at World Anvil for sponsoring this episode.
And when you visit the site, do keep an eye out.
You might find they're just as much Pratchett fans as we are...
Now, let's talk about what's been happening here at the foundry...
[AD SMOOTH CUT] Letter by letter, I've started to notice something
strange about my mysterious correspondent.
I'd assumed they were typing on old book pages just because they had nothing better to use.
But over and over, in the comments of our videos and in conversations on our Discord
server, you've all continued to push the idea that there's more to the book choice-the content
of the pages.
And...
I mean, this is only really a hunch, but going back through all of them, there does seem
to be something there.
A connection of some kind between the pages... and their writing.
Sometimes it's the tone, sometimes the content, sometimes the choice in vocabulary.
Whatever it is, I can't help but feel that they're somehow... influenced by the materials
they're writing over.
So, this time instead of a letter, I'm sending back a book... if it can still be called that.
Something more contemporary, and something, as we know well, with a unified voice.
I have... no idea how this is going to work out, but... hopefully it sets a good example
for them?
Shots in the dark.
Maybe we'll finally get something useful back.
At any rate, that's all for this all for this episode!
Thanks for watching, and keep making stuff up!
We'll see you...
next time!
Bye!