((Hello! I love the way you do your GHB; there's lots of genuine personality, and that can be pretty hard to pull off. <3 Would it be alright to ask for a guide on how to write sentence structure the way you do for him? And would it be alright to use it for a recurring 'magical and mysterious' D&D NPC? If you'd rather we didn't jack your speech, that's completely understandable and I apologize! Either way, thank you so much for letting us see your great muse <3 ))
OKAY SO. Way more than 48 hours later, here we are.
The first thing about GHB’s speech as I do it is to make it sound like a bible and a Shakespearean era play had a child, and they are accustomed to giving orders. He uses a very old register, and while sometimes messing around with modern idiom, like “to clown down am” is fun, sometimes it just isn’t going to work. After 5 years writing with him, I am pretty good at even speaking his way, but the time of writing him gives me some space and leeway to experiment.
The orders part comes across in his verb, subject, and object order. The Verb is the doing word, and it comes last, as in the imperative in English. Instead of
“(Subject) I (Verb) walked to (object) the shops”
He omits the subject as much as he can, especially the personal subject, and tends to refer to people as belonging to themselves. This is a personal idiom and leaves room for personalisation in the form of, “My righteous self” or “her assertive self”. This is distinct in his speech because most often, the adjective or adverb comes after the noun or verb respectively. To return to our previous example:
I walked quickly to the local shops
QUICKLY TO SHOPS LOCAL WALKED.
Break these rules when he’s upset, feels condescended to, or livid, or sometimes just when he’s asked. The important thing is that GHB knows he is difficult to understand and is perful enough that he can get away with not caring. Use the breaks sparingly, though: this is heartspeech, it is his way of speaking from the pusher.
That’s the main thrust of his speech, with different terms of respect, like “Motherfucker” “sibling”, “Sempai” and Imperial, thrown in which you’d probably change a little depending on setting, and a whole lot of emphasis on the religious structures of his world propping it up.
The main thing: the paint he wears is his face, his flesh face is his head. No one he does not trust should ever see his head. Little insistences like that go a long way in making a character for me.
I’m pretty sure I have more in the Tutorial linguistic and tutorial personal tags? Possibly in chronological order is best.
