Use of language in The Flight of the Heron

Contractions

This investigation was inspired by three things: first, bookhobbit’s excellent post on contractions in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, second, Luzula posting a searchable ebook of Flight of the Heron and, finally, my intuition when writing and reading Flight of the Heron fic that a canon-typical style should avoid using too many contractions, because the book itself doesn’t. Was I right?

Having done some investigating, the short answer is yes and no: Broster does use contractions fairly often, but she usually prefers not to contract phrases that could be contracted, and does so significantly less than a typical modern author would.

I started by doing a quick, non-exhaustive search for contractions in the text of the novel. Here’s what I found: this shows all the contractions used ten or more times, with the number of uses of the corresponding uncontracted phrase for each one and the ratio between them. This table has been updated from the version originally posted on Dreamwidth, which neglected some of the possible uncontracted phrases:

Also of interest are contractions which were never used—here are all the ones with more than fifty uses of the uncontracted phrase: he’d (444 he had, 122 he would); couldn’t (102 could not); who’d (70 who had, 10 who would); you’ve (65 you have); wouldn’t (62 would not).

There are quite a number of contractions, then, but the uncontracted phrases are used more often. No phrase is contracted more often than not, and if we include the never-contracted phrases, contractions are used on just 14% of the occasions when they could be.

The numbers in the above table gave me another idea. Broster’s most-used contraction relative to the uses of the uncontracted phrase is he’ll, whereas her most-avoided is he’d. Now, Flight of the Heron is written in the third person past tense (and mostly from the point of view of male characters), so we’d expect to get a lot of he had in the narration, whereas he will is basically only ever going to appear in dialogue. The rest of the table bears this out: all but one of the contractions used are in either the present or future tenses or the first person and would generally occur only in dialogue, whereas all but one of the never-used contractions are in the past tense and so would be expected more often in narration.

To test this I had a closer look at the top five contractions: ’tis, I’ll, don’t, I’m and that’s. Of the 197 total uses of these, 192 are in dialogue; four are in writing by the characters and one is in a character’s directly quoted thoughts—none are in the narration.

Conclusions so far, then: there are some contractions in dialogue, but not very many, and virtually none in the narration.

When searching for those most-used contractions I also looked at whose dialogue they were being used in. Side characters who speak in written-out vernacular dialect (mostly Scots, but the nice bit of Yorkshire dialect from Mr Fosdyke contains a high concentration) tend to use contractions more often than others, including cool exotic ones like thou’rt. As for the main characters, Ewen uses many more contractions than Keith: of those 192 contractions occurring in dialogue, 46 are Ewen’s and only 21 are Keith’s. Of course, this might just be because Ewen has more dialogue than Keith, so I did a quick search for phrases like ‘said Captain Windham’ to check for this—but after correcting for the number of times each character’s name appears in dialogue tags, Ewen still uses contractions more than twice as often as Keith. I suspect this may have to do with the formality of the setting: a lot of Ewen’s dialogue is spoken to his family and friends, in a context where he might be more informal, whereas much of Keith’s dialogue is spoken to fellow officers, superiors and enemies, to whom we might expect him to speak more formally.

A further bit of speculation: perhaps formality may also explain the odd anomaly in the above table that I’ll and he’ll are among the most-used contractions, while you’ll is used much less often. You will and you shall (especially the latter, if one is very grammatically pedantic) are used by characters telling other characters what to do—giving orders and commands—and this implies a more formal setting than the simple statements of intention or likely future action made in the first and third persons.

I then looked at how Flight of the Heron compares to other books, concentrating on one contraction, don’t—one of Broster’s most-used. bookhobbit uses Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman as an example of a ‘typical’ modern contemporary novel: it has 32 don’ts for every do not, a much higher ratio than Flight of the Heron’s 0.37. I was also interested in how Flight of the Heron compares to contemporary books written in the 1920s, and to books from the 1740s, when it’s set. Here are the results:

So Flight of the Heron not only uses don’t much less than a modern book, it also does so substantially less than contemporary novels from the 1920s—in fact, even less than novels from the 1740s, although it’s closer to these than to anything else. (It does, however, use don’t much more than Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell or the novels of Jane Austen, for which bookhobbit also gives numbers—I guess the Regency period in particular hates contractions?)

Dialogue tags (with a digression on writing advice)

I was musing about the different styles of dialogue tag used in fiction, and thought this would be another interesting topic to investigate in the language of The Flight of the Heron.

First of all, some definitions: for the purposes of this piece, a dialogue tag is a verb which has a piece of dialogue as its object—most often the word ‘said’, as in ‘Do not be a fool!’ said the young man in the loch.

There are 443 uses of the word said in the novel. I started my investigations by going through and classifying how these saids were used. The verb can go before or after the dialogue; it can be attached to the speaker's name, a pronoun or another noun describing the character, and it can go before or after this noun. Here’s how often Broster uses each possible construction:

Some notes on this:

• Broster never uses the fourth possibility for arrangement, said character, ‘Dialogue’.
• I counted any noun (or noun phrase) other than a name or pronoun in the third row—so the young man in the loch, the Highlander and the Prince all went here. I also counted the construction a voice said, ‘Dialogue’ in here.
• There are another 60 saids in dialogue, and 46 in the narration that are not dialogue tags.

Broster’s favourite way of phrasing a dialogue tag is ‘Dialogue,’ said Name. Roughly two-thirds as often as that she uses ‘Dialogue,’ pronoun said, and roughly two-thirds as often as that, ‘Dialogue,’ said epithet. The said comes before the dialogue occasionally in all three forms, but there are very few ‘Dialogue,’ said pronouns and no uses of the ‘Dialogue,’ character said phrasing with a name or epithet. This roughly corresponds with my intuitions about how common each type of phrasing is, so by this very unscientific method it looks as though Broster’s use of dialogue tags is fairly typical. The only thing we might remark on is the absence of ‘Dialogue,’ character said with names and epithets, which is definitely something authors do—but my impression is that this construction is more modern and/or American, so it's perhaps not surprising that Broster doesn't use it.

But ‘said’ isn’t the only word that can function as a dialogue tag, and authors can use plenty of alternatives (sometimes disparagingly called ‘said bookisms’). Broster, it turns out, likes these quite a lot. Here are some of her favourites:

(These numbers come from doing a simple search of the text for each word, so they will include uses in contexts other than dialogue tags).

There are 509 total alternatives to said in this table, not inconsiderably more than the 443 saids. And this is just words with more than 20 uses—I noted several others less frequently used.

Having looked at these general tendencies, I decided to investigate Broster’s use of dialogue tags in more detail by going through four representative dialogue-heavy scenes from the book. I picked the conversations between:

• Ewen and the Prince in part 2, chapter 1, from ‘Avanti!’ cried a voice to the end of the chapter
• Keith and Guthrie in part 3, chapter 3, from the beginning of the chapter to ‘ye’re gaun tae sup wi’ me.’
• Ewen and Keith in part 4, chapter 7, from ‘Windham!’ he exclaimed to ‘...and a happy end to your journey!’ (this was a fun one to revisit... :D ;_;)
• And Ewen and Archie in part 5, chapter 4, from the beginning of the chapter to its last, its mortal wound.

I counted whether each piece of dialogue was accompanied by said, an alternative to said, or either of two alternatives to dialogue tags: describing the speaker’s actions on the same line, and letting the dialogue stand alone with only the context to make it clear who’s speaking. Here are the results:

A dialogue tag with said is actually Broster’s least used common way of formatting dialogue! Her favourite is to use an alternative to said, followed by describing the speaker’s actions and letting the dialogue stand alone.

(I notice that, here, alternatives to said are used more than twice as often as said itself, whereas the total count of alternatives in the table above is only about 15% more than the total uses of said. There are several possible explanations for this—it could be that said is used outside of dialogue tags more often than the alternatives, or that alternatives with fewer than 20 uses are numerous and significant, or that these four scenes aren’t actually representative of all the dialogue in the book. I suspect that all three contribute.)

So, conclusions! It’s interesting that even though Broster is, as I hope we can all agree, a fairly good writer, two of the most distinctive features of her dialogue—the frequent use of epithets and of alternatives to said—are two things that often come up in writing advice about what to avoid. I think this illustrates the importance of subtlety over absolutism in the principles of what makes writing good. Writers often resort to epithets as a means of avoiding repetitive use of the characters’ names, and constantly using epithets just for this reason isn’t good writing—but, with a bit more thought, epithets can create some particular effects of which a good writer might choose to make use. Broster is particularly good at using them for a sort of ironic commentary, as in these examples:

[Major Guthrie is testing Keith’s patience with ribald comments which he doesn’t find funny.] ‘And that’s how ye repaid his hospitality, Major,’ finished the humorist as they splashed through the Tarff.

But Lachlan continued to pour out Gaelic. ‘Eoghain, marrow of my heart, ask me for the blood out of my veins, but do not ask me to let the heron live...’ [several more sentences of impassioned pleading.] ‘Stop!’ said the marrow of his heart peremptorily.

(I won't quote it here because it’s too sad, but there’s one very memorable use of ‘his enemy’ as an epithet which certainly belongs in this category!)

Or epithets can be used to draw attention to relevant features of who the characters are—for instance, calling Keith the Englishman in a scene where he’s complaining about the dreadful noise of the bagpipes, or repeatedly calling Charles Edward Stuart the Prince rather than Charles to highlight the importance of his status to Ewen and to the rising.

As for ‘said bookisms’, a lot of the criticism centres around the idea that they’re ‘telling, not showing’—for instance, simply telling the reader that a character ‘shouted’ a piece of dialogue is much less effective than describing how the character crosses the room to stare down at whoever they’re addressing, clenching their fists and turning white with barely-suppressed rage. But this criticism applies mostly to words which, like shouted, describe the speaker’s manner, rather than to ones like asked or went on which simply describe the function of the dialogue in the conversation. These might be regarded as more neutral alternatives to said, if not used too excessively—and, looking at the table above, it’s clear that Broster greatly prefers this type of ‘said bookism’ to the shouted type. And I think there is something to be said for occasional use of the shorter, more efficient description of a dialogue tag like shouted or exclaimed (Broster’s favourite ‘character’s manner’ dialogue tag) rather than slowing down the action for lengthy descriptions of what the character is doing every time you want to make it clear that they're exclaiming their words.

It’s long been an opinion of mine that most writing advice given in the form of absolute rules is a bit useless. Good writing is much less a matter of ‘do this, don’t do that’ than it is of ‘think about what effect you achieve by doing this, and make informed choices about when and why to do that’. I think this investigation gives some support to this view!

Names

One of my favourite things about stories with historical—specifically eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British—settings is all the beautiful subtlety of characterisation, relationship development and intimacy that can be conveyed through the level of formality of the names characters use for each other. I thought it'd be interesting to investigate this topic as applied to Flight of the Heron, a book which features a carefully-delineated relationship progression and quite a bit of emotional repression. Thanks to Luzula for encouraging me to do so. :)

First of all, here are all the names used for both Ewen and Keith throughout the book, with how many times each appears:

*This will be an overestimate, because some of them refer to Ardroy the place rather than to Ewen.

(In all these analyses I’ve combined ‘Captain Windham’ and ‘Major Windham’, as they are effectively the same form of address, only differing in which rank Keith has in different parts of the book).

Ewen is referred to by name more than Keith, and has more different names. Both characters are referred to by first name more often than anything else, and this is more the case for Ewen, with first name-only accounting for 63% of the mentions of Ewen, vs. 60% for Keith.

I then chose four scenes to examine in detail: two from early on in the book and two from later on, one from each character’s point of view in each case. I looked at what names the narrative uses for the two characters, and what names they use to address each other. Here are the results for these:

Chapter 1.6, from beginning of chapter to ‘…his legs felt abominably cold’. Keith’s POV.

• Narrative references to Keith: Keith (15), Captain Windham (6), Keith Windham (5)
• Narrative references to Ewen: Ardroy (17), Ewen (5), Ewen Cameron (2)
• Ewen addressing Keith: Captain Windham (5)
• Keith addressing Ewen: Mr Cameron (4)

Here we’re very much in the formal early stages of Ewen and Keith’s relationship—they address each other by title and last name only, and Keith mostly thinks of Ewen as Ardroy rather than by his first name.

Chapter 2.3, whole chapter. Ewen’s POV.

• Narrative references to Keith: Captain Windham (17), Keith (13), Keith Windham (5), Windham (1)
• Narrative references to Ewen: Ewen (39), Ardroy (1)
• Ewen addressing Keith: Captain Windham (7)
• Keith addressing Ewen: Mr Cameron (5), Ardroy (4)

The names here are still fairly formal. The use of title vs. first name in the narration has swapped round, as each character thinks of himself mostly by first name and the other mostly by title/last name. But there’s a little less formality in Keith’s speech than in the last scene, with the less formal ‘Ardroy’ joining the more distant ‘Mr Cameron’. It’s noticeable that Keith uses ‘Ardroy’ in more emotionally charged moments—for instance, in his first surprise on recognising Ewen, and after he accidentally hurts him.

After this I made brief stops in another few pivotal scenes in the middle of the book, where I picked up some interesting subtleties. In chapter 3.5—the first time Ewen and Keith meet since the above scene in 2.3—Ewen addresses Keith as ‘Windham’ as soon as he recognises him, and continues to do so for the rest of the chapter. He goes back to using ‘Major Windham’ in 4.3, when he thinks Keith has betrayed him—and then returns to ‘Windham’ in 4.4 after accepting that he didn’t. Keith addresses Ewen as ‘Ardroy’ throughout these scenes.

Chapter 4.7, beginning of chapter to ‘…and a happy end to your journey!’. Keith’s POV.

• Narrative references to Keith: Keith (38)
• Narrative references to Ewen: Ewen (29), Ardroy (4)
• Ewen addressing Keith: Windham (11; two of these are ‘my dear Windham’ ♥), Keith Windham (1)
• Keith addressing Ewen: Ardroy (3), Ewen Cameron (1)

We’re very much on a ‘friends’ level of intimacy now, with consistent last name-only addresses from both characters. It’s noticeable how often Ewen addresses Keith by name in this scene—it’s as if he’s going out of his way to affirm the intimacy implied by calling him ‘Windham’. Keith thinks of himself by his first name only; but in contrast with the earlier scene, the narrative is now calling Ewen mostly by his first name too.

Chapter 5.5, ‘God’s curse on you…’ to ‘…and the oncoming patrol’. Ewen’s POV. This is quite a bit shorter than the other scenes—there are no whole chapters in the later part of the book from Ewen’s POV where both characters are present—hence the smaller numbers.

• Narrative references to Keith: Keith (6), Keith Windham (2), Windham (1)
• Narrative references to Ewen: Ewen (14)
• Ewen addressing Keith: Windham (2)
• Keith addressing Ewen: Ardroy (1)

The more intimate forms of address are clearly still here in dialogue, despite the small numbers. And again, Ewen thinks of Keith with more familiar forms of his name as well—the narrative here doesn’t use Keith’s title at all.

For ease of comparison, I then calculated the relative frequency of use for all the names in each of these scenes. The following table shows uses of each name (in narration and dialogue) per 1,000 words:

These numbers broadly bear out the conclusions above. Both characters tend to think of themselves by first name more than anything else. There’s a clear pattern of the names used in dialogue becoming more familiar over the course of the book, and observable meaningful changes in the level of familiarity even within sections and scenes. Interestingly, the names used in the narrative follow the same pattern: the POV character’s first name is used disproportionately more in each scene, but in the two later scenes the non-POV character’s first name also appears disproportionately, and there are no narrative ‘Captain’s or ‘Major’s, and fewer ‘Ardroy’s in these later scenes. The names used in the narrative, even for the non-POV character, are consistently more familiar than those used in dialogue.

Now, the narrative names are a bit tricky here—the narrative is basically omniscient even while it stays within one character’s head, but on the other hand the names used in narrative are clearly influenced by the characters’ feelings and the development of their relationship, so I think this is fairly notable. The increase in familiarity of names in the narrative over the course of the book is a lovely little detail of style. I especially like that Keith thinks of himself as well as Ewen by first name more, and by title less, in the later scene from his POV—it gives a sense that he’s letting his guard down emotionally, letting himself exist around Ewen as ‘Keith’ rather than ‘Major Windham’. Of course, neither character ever addresses the other by first name—but I think this is a good thing, because the significant switch to first name terms is always such a good part of a fic. :D

I already had a definite sense that Ewen and Keith's use of each other’s names changes with the development of their relationship throughout the book, but it was great fun and very interesting looking at this in detail and seeing how precisely the pattern is worked out as the story and their intimacy progress. Once again my admiration for Broster’s writing is only increased!