Ravenous Wednesday with Kilt Kilpatrick!

Now you all know I do not play favorites. I love all of my beloved Ravenous Romance author pals. But I must confess I might just love today's guest a wee bit more than everyone else, but that's only because he and his wondrously creative mind live with me in one sexy kilt-clad package. He's my sword-fighting, Irish boyfriend and not only does he have a wicked thrust, but I'm in awe of his diverse talents.

Writing talents, you naughty people!

Okay, including his writing talents. Fine. You got me on that one.

I have read six short stories of Kilt's, as well his full-length novel The Manny Diaries (soon to be coming out with Ravenous Romance), and every one of his works is unique. So when I pestered him to do a post for Un:Bound and he asked what I'd like him to write about, I said...

Well, I'll let Kilt take it from here. Pull up a comfy chair, get a drink and settle in for Ravenous Wednesday with Kilt Kilpatrick!

That Inara Lavey, who says the nicest things about me, paid me an especially fine compliment the other day:

“A lot of writers just use one 'voice' even when they have totally different settings / characters. Kilt is very unusual in that his style and narrative voice runs the gamut. I would like him to write about using different styles/voices for each of his stories and how he does it.”

I love comments like that! It makes me very proud to be the David Bowie of Ravenous Romance, and I’m happy to pass on my secrets to being a literary chameleon to you, too. Stop me if you already know all this.

All writers know a good story depends on good characters, but your story's narrative voice and even the style you choose, are characters, too. At least, it can be helpful to think of them that way. In a first person narrative of course, this is already built in to your story – the narrator IS a character. But even in the third person, the narrative voice comes to life by the way you present its tone.

Think like an actor – Get into the mind of your characters. Do they have a lot to say, or are they terse and taciturn? Are they smart? Not so smart? Adjust their vocabulary accordingly. It’s frustrating as a writer when you have the perfect word in mind, but you know your character would never have it in their vocabulary! When in doubt, read your work aloud and see if you can picture the character saying the words you just put in their mouth.

Are they from around here? Or from long ago and/or far away, or from some place you just dreamed up? In a historical story, just as in science fiction or fantasy, you are taking people to another world – a lost world that no longer exists. People from the past are like us in many ways, but they don't always think like us, or do things the way we do. They don’t talk the same as we do, don’t necessarily believe what we believe or know what we know now, they suffer from things we no longer worry about – and all that is part of what makes them so interesting. And on the other hand, they are much more in tune with things we ourselves may have lost touch with.

If you can get into the mindset of your characters, finding the appropriate narrative voice becomes easier. Avoid anachronisms in your vocabulary and idioms. Nothing pulls a reader out of a story faster than the clunk of a word or phrase that doesn’t fit the setting. Not even an omniscient, all-seeing third-person narrator can get away with talking like a valley girl in a story set in Revolutionary France – unless you are going for a deliberately comedic approach, ala Monty Python or an adventure of Mr. Peabody and his boy Sherman in the Wayback Machine.

In my fractured fairytale, “Handsome and Grateful” I was going for just that level of goofy fun, and I actually had a real person in mind for my celebrity narrator: German cult actor Udo Kier. I pretended the story was the transcript of him reading the audiobook, complete with his own commentary, which leads to him giving up and taking the classic story in a completely different direction. Come to think of it, if we ever DO an audio book of that anthology, we’ll have to have someone say “Celebrity voice impersonated” – or hire Udo Kier to read it; he’d probably go for it… (Btw, if you don’t know who Udo Kier is, just think of Claus the Fish from the TV show American Dad and you won’t be too far off). Here’s a clip from H&G:

It was about this time when things seemed most desperate and their hopes for rescue were dwindling, that the brother and sister came upon a wonderful sight, and our story finally gets going. It was a picturesque little cottage, built appropriately enough in a 1920s Storybook design style: a charming, one-and-a-half story bungalow with a whimsical faux Tudor half-timber exterior and a playful, somewhat Gaudi-esque visual esthetic. But most surprising of all—well, only surprising if you had never heard this story before—the entire cottage was constructed from a basic gingerbread structure with a roofing of crispy cream wafers, topped with great spiraled bundt cake gables and a huge rock-candy chimney. Its fine lebkuchen construction was reinforced with butterkuchen and zuckerkuchen, and honey-glazed, almond-sprinkled bienenstichkuchen, with the whole place festively decorated with a colorful assortment of every kind of cake, cookie, and sweet imaginable…

Hansel and Gretel, now famished and exhausted, rushed to the miraculously well-preserved cottage and eagerly began to gobble up exterior fixtures and decorative elements to their heart’s content. So distracted were they while trying to sate their ravenous hunger that the young pair did not notice the pfeffernüsse door open, or see the black-clad figure observing the serious property damage they were causing.

“Ahem.” The stranger cleared her throat, for it was indeed a her. She was dressed all in black, as I mentioned, sporting a tall, peaked hat with a flat, round brim, and a long, slinky dress with an even longer slit up the side—the better to show off her long, slinky legs to good advantage. She was a handsome woman, her face a beautiful work of art with perfect silky skin, and the high, elegant cheekbones of a countess. Voluptuous waves of luxuriant golden hair spilled from under her hat and glittered like diamond dust. Her hooded, cat-shaped eyes regarded them with the languorous, dangerous interest of a panther.

“You seem rather large to be termites,” she at last remarked in a husky voice. The siblings looked up, startled and ashamed to be caught with their mouths full of candied cottage siding.

They dropped their ill-gotten handfuls and apologized profusely. “Oh, please forgive us, Lady,” they cried. “We didn’t mean to eat your house. But we became lost in the woods and we’re so hungry.”

The woman-in-black’s stern but alluring countenance softened slightly. “What are your names?”

“Hansel…and Gretel,” they replied courteously.

She raised one immaculately sculpted eyebrow. “Handful and Great Tail?”

It was a perfectly honest mishearing, but not without telling Freudian implications. They corrected her politely and she appeared to warm to them.

“Well, then, you must come indoors and stay with me awhile, my young Herr Hansel and Mädchen Gretel.” Before you could say Willkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome, she took them each by the hand and led them into her little house. The pair, too innocent to even to recognize the traditional garb of a wicked witch, followed as meekly as little lambs.

Ursula K. LeGuin wrote a wonderful essay entitled "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie." In it she taught me how important language could be in transporting the reader to another world. She focused on the heightened language used by fantasists like Lord Dunsany, Jack Vance and Tolkien, and of course you can see the same phenomena at work in the prose of Jane Austin and Shakespeare. So when I wrote "The Tiger's Tale," a fantasy set in British Raj India, I tried to go for that kind of lush evocative language, kept the humor very dry and understated, and avoided any idioms that Rudyard Kipling wouldn’t have used.

It was not just that there was a sea of people; the whole of creation was here, in a kaleidoscopic frenzy of sight and sound and smell: Gods and filth, spices and incense, stench and sweat and urine and feces, silk and gold and dust and rags, festivity and suffering. Always and everywhere the clamorous opposition of a dozen scents, a hundred voices, a thousand bright colors, everything mingling with wild abandon in uproarious profusion. Holy rivers flowed in an infernal heat, as though in the Hindu cosmos, the heavens and hells had collided long ago, leaving their ten-armed divinities to shrug and say: This is India.

In contemporary stories, you don’t have to do as much research, but you need to try to differentiate each character’s voice –and have to be especially careful to keep your own voice out! One of the biggest challenge for me writing the dialogue for Sabrina, my brainy horndog U.C. Berkeley co-ed who sets out to seduce a pair of Mormon Missionaries in “Later Days, Saints!” was to sound like her, not me:

I know, I know, this is the part where I go straight to hell. But honestly, can you blame me? Are you trying to tell me you wouldn’t have done the same thing in my place? Bitch, you’re such a liar!

So listen; there I am, minding my own business in the Swinging Bachelorette Pad. I should have been working on my term paper, but I was still collating my data and letting the outline marinate a while. Get off my case already, that’s my process, and you have to respect that, right? So anyway, I’m at home, just back from my last class of the day, kicking back on the couch grooving to Katy Perry in my sweet new iPod speaker dock and reading The Straight Girl’s Guide to Sleeping With Chicks, which is such a totally fucking awesome book, especially for a closeted tightass like you. So I’m laughing my tits off and plotting who I’m going to nail using this new-found knowledge. Yeah, that’s right! So better watch out, little Miss Sexypants! The doorbell rings and of course I think it’s you or Nanda or Akiko-chan so I just up and throw the door open wide, all set to yell, “Where my bitches?” in my hilarious pimp voice. But instead it’s these two Mormon boys, and I have to do this complete 180—Ehrrrrrrrrrk!—to rein in the crazy act and not terrify these guys. “Oh! Hi!” I say while I recover my balance, trying not to giggle and just smile like a non-crazy person.

Now you gotta understand, on any other day I would’ve just told them No, Thank You and to fuck off, but in a nice way. But timing is everything, isn’t it? I was still pissed about the LDS church pumping all those millions of dollars for that fascist proposition H8 and felt it was my duty to do what I could to undermine theocratic fundamentalism in some small way, or at the very least confront them with the inherent contradictions of their dogmatic paradigm—and well, they were just so damn cute. Shut up.

Sabrina was a very fun character to write, and so were the cast of high schoolers trying to survive the Zombocalypse in “Last Times at Ridgemont High.” I had several archetypes in mind: The Average Joe, The Jock Bully, The Cheerleader, The Teacher, each with their own voice. Here are two of them trapped in the boys’ locker room:

Damn, she was even sexier than her usual perfection, just sitting there against the wall heaving for breath, glistening with beads of sweat, her eyes wide with fear, her cute little cheerleading outfit torn in just the right places.

“J –Jerry?”

“Yeah. Take it easy, you’re okay now.”

“All those people – they were so horrible… Are they dead?”

“Yeah, I think so. Except for the, you know, walking around and eating you, yeah.”

She grabbed my arm. “Jerry, they were just attacking us. I think they were trying to bite us. They grabbed Suzie and Tiffany, and just started biting them everywhere. All the blood…” Her voice trailed off, and I gently pulled my arm loose.

“I know, Dee Dee. They’re zombies. That’s what they do. Hey, you’ve got to listen to me now. We’ve got to find whatever we can in here and then we need to get out of here.” They were beating and scratching on the door with no let-up. I was confident the door would hold up a while, but I wasn’t so optimistic if they started banging on the towel window’s less-impressive metal curtain. Time to take inventory. One big laundry bin with plenty of dirty towels. Significantly fewer clean ones. I started opening the cabinets.

“Jerry, do you think the girls on the squad are all dead too? Should we go out there and help them?”

“Yeah, no, I’m pretty sure that’s a real bad idea. I’m kinda amazed that you’re not dead, to be honest with you.” Aluminum baseball bats, hmm, a little light. Lacrosse sticks? Not really with those damn little nets. Discus and shot puts? Tempting but no. Javelin… maybe.

“Is everybody dead?” She stood up and hugged herself anxiously, looking around at the gloomy institutional florescent lighting, the grimly claustrophobic walls…

“Look, Dee Dee. I’m just as upset as you are. But we’ve got to be strong now, see? We’ve got to stay sharp so that we can get out of this alive.” I managed to keep my voice firm and tough. Badminton racquets? God, these things are ridiculous! I wondered where the groundskeeper shed was – that place must be chock full of machetes and pruning hooks and those sticks with the nail sticking out for spearing litter. God, one of those would be perfect.

“You’re really brave, Jerry. You’ll protect me, won’t you?” I nodded absently, hefting a swim trophy and approving the sharp edges of its heavy square marble base. Okay, that will bash a skull in nicely, I thought.

“I just wanted to say – I just wanted to say sorry for – for what happened in class today.” Yeah, yeah, I still hadn’t forgotten about that funny little pantywaist dorkwad crack, bee-yotch. Jump ropes? Jump ropes… must be something we can do with all these damn jump ropes…

“Jerry? You saved my life, you know?” Whatever. Hey, the lost and found box: padlock, padlock, padlock. Math textbook. Hey, these shoes might fit me. I held one up to my foot. Rock on.

“Jerry?”

Something in the soft way she said my name that time caught my attention. I looked over at her. She was completely nude, standing in the pile of her clothes like a statue of Venus, one arm draped gracefully across her chest, the other daintily covering her loins. “I just want to make it up to you.” She gently outstretched her hands to me.

I forgive you, I thought.

So that’s the secret; think like an actor to bring your character’s voice out. Think like a historian or a to bring your setting out. Think like a comedian, a librarian, a linguist, a lion tamer , an axe murderer, an angel…As a writer you’ll have a lot of hats to wear. Cinchy stuff, really. You can do it!

-Kilt

“Handsome and Grateful” is in Em Lynley’s anthology Bedknobs and Beanstalks

"The Tiger's Tale" is in Regina Perry’s anthology I Kissed a Girl

“Later Days, Saints!” is in Lori Perkins’s anthology Threesomes

“Last Times at Ridgemont High” is in Lori Perkins' anthology Hungry for Your Love

******