Jyre's letters are always fun. As Dusty pointed out to me previously, a young orphaned girl in a medieval inspired fantasy universe shouldn't be able to read or write. Well, it kind of debacles the whole story to change that, since it all started with the idea of Jyre pestering Nightfall with her letters. (Yes, I just used debacle as a verb.) This morning along with a little more explanation for why she can write, I did another revision of her first letter. I expect all of her others to get similar makeovers to this one.
I did something I had always resisted doing, and that was drastically changing the ‘tone’ of the letter by removing a lot of things which I saw as “chatty” habits or “sloppy” ways of making writing “bad”. The worst one was the use of ellipses everywhere. With… and… and... over and over, which is a very chatty thing to do, but I don’t think any child who is getting the hang of writing would ever do it. The next thing I did was remove all of the ‘yoda-speak,’ which is the way so many phrases were written backwards. Again, I don’t think any barely literate person would ever actually do that. Next, I removed most of the commas and apostrophes and indulged in the liberal use of the word “and”. I removed any ‘big’ words or complex phrases and tried to tell everything as simplistically as possible. I removed "I feel" or "I felt". I kept the verb tenses simple and often incorrect. I wanted to make it all one paragraph, as Jyre would likely not understand paragraph breaks, but that gets monotonous to read, so I just reduced the number. I put in two glaring mistakes… “a orphan” and “The Ladys House” … but I suspect even those will bug people. The challenge is to create something that looks like Jyre would actually write, but without frustrating the reader. That’s why she still has good spelling – though appropriate, I think that would do more harm to the reader’s experience than good.
I did something I had always resisted doing, and that was drastically changing the ‘tone’ of the letter by removing a lot of things which I saw as “chatty” habits or “sloppy” ways of making writing “bad”. The worst one was the use of ellipses everywhere. With… and… and... over and over, which is a very chatty thing to do, but I don’t think any child who is getting the hang of writing would ever do it. The next thing I did was remove all of the ‘yoda-speak,’ which is the way so many phrases were written backwards. Again, I don’t think any barely literate person would ever actually do that. Next, I removed most of the commas and apostrophes and indulged in the liberal use of the word “and”. I removed any ‘big’ words or complex phrases and tried to tell everything as simplistically as possible. I removed "I feel" or "I felt". I kept the verb tenses simple and often incorrect. I wanted to make it all one paragraph, as Jyre would likely not understand paragraph breaks, but that gets monotonous to read, so I just reduced the number. I put in two glaring mistakes… “a orphan” and “The Ladys House” … but I suspect even those will bug people. The challenge is to create something that looks like Jyre would actually write, but without frustrating the reader. That’s why she still has good spelling – though appropriate, I think that would do more harm to the reader’s experience than good.
