Increasingly, I’ve been pondering the ways that my background as a speaker of “outer circle English” has shaped the way I write my characters. They say write what you know, because the authenticity of your voice will show. But at times, I feel like writing Revolving Door has been an exercise in the opposite: in writing what I don’t know.
As a preface, I probably need to outline my linguistic background. I’m Singaporean; Singapore is an ex-British colony, and English is the language of business and of instruction. But the kind of English we speak in vernacular contexts—Singlish—is really an English creole, mixing grammatical structures and vocabulary from several languages—most notably Hokkien, Malay, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Tamil. Indeed, growing up, English was only one of at least five widely spoken languages in my vicinity, and even within my family, 3 different languages were used daily.
But English and Singlish were the ones I had the most exposure to by far, particularly as a student. Because our classes were taught in English, most of my literary diet was also in the English language. The books we studied in school and the ones we talked about in our friend groups were usually by authors from the United Kingdom, the United States, and occasionally Australia.
I started with Enid Blyton (British), then graduated to Deltora Quest (Australian). After a diverse and messy stint with a dozen different favourites randomly picked out off library shelves, the Flora Trilogy (American) became my favourite book series. Then the Lord of the Rings (British) did. I read Wuthering Heights and Richard the Third (both British) for my ‘A’ levels, and today, I add the Leviathan Trilogy (American), Moby-Dick (American), Pride and Prejudice (British), and To Say Nothing of the Dog (British) to my roster of favourite novels.
It is not a particularly diverse repertoire. And yet it was typical of someone of my profile—a Singaporean literature student. In my mind, there was no dissonance. To me, stories were about escapism to a world that doesn’t exist, and said fiction was an atlas of cultures I had no other contact with.
Yes, the alternate universe steampunk San Francisco of Flora Segunda and the Literally England of Wuthering Heights were about as real to me as Middle Earth, and all occupied the same region of my mind for a very long time. In my mind at the time, these were the places where stories were meant to happen.
I began writing my first novel when I was 9, inside a school exercise book. In that novel, the main character, a violinist, discovers that her new violin is magical, before it transports her into a fantasy world where she learns how to play it to overcome a series of trials.
I never got past page 20, but how I wish I could find it again. I would like to imagine being that version of me again, putting down the first words of their first novel, taking their first steps on what—unbeknownst to me at the time—would be a grand journey of over a million words.
You could tell, even then, how all my influences were leaking into my writing: video games, music lessons, and the secondary worlds that are so common in British children’s fantasy. There was no sense of locality in these stories; they simply happened in a Generic Fantasy Land which just so happened to resemble the English countryside.
Those settings weren’t the only literary import that sat at odds with my lived reality. I used to admire authors who had an intrinsic understanding of UK and US dialects of English, because these books would often effortlessly render character voices and accents like those heard in film. “Character voice” and “character accent” were synonymous in my head.
And so, it was beyond disappointing to find that my own attempts to replicate them came out looking like an apostrophe soup. I didn’t understand patterns of elision, why certain speech patterns omitted certain words or vowels. I applied every single elision I had ever seen at the same time, like so:
What’re ya sayin’? Ya s’pose he’s pullin’ m’ leg?
I would construct these monstrosities to make a character sound casual—usually some jaunty rapscallion type—because it’s what I had seen different authors in different books do. Except, of course, each author was effecting a different accent, and I lacked that context, because I had never heard those accents in real life.
I’ve since come to embrace that character voice is about so many things other than accent—how patterns of speech reveal patterns of thought, fears, desired outward image. And I still don’t know how to write those English accents. But I now understand that those authors are able to write them because they frequently hear them.
I could, however, write a mean Singlish accent. I could write a Singaporean teacher, a Singaporean hawker centre auntie, a Singaporean politician. But alas, there were entire campaigns to eradicate Singlish in common parlance, and these language policies ultimately inculcated in me a sense of shame about my own dialects in professional settings. So I never wrote a Singaporean character speaking Singlish for fear of being seen as unsophisticated (in a way that writing an “unsophisticated” regional UK dialect wasn’t, for some reason).
In my formative years as a young writer, British and American literature came to form my internal conceptual model of what writing is before I was cognizant enough of geopolitics to interrogate how this situation came to be. I wrote largely Europe- and US-adjacent settings, and if I did write about Asian cultures (or ones coded that way), it was typically in a self-orientalising way—as if favouring the tourist guide version over my lived reality. (I couldn’t reconcile my lived reality with the versions of East and Southeast Asia portrayed through the Western gaze.)
And you can feel all of this, at times, in Revolving Door. Why are there so many American and British characters and settings in my stories? Because, for a time in my life, I believed stories were meant to be set there.
I created most of Revolving Door‘s principal cast when I was 18 and still in school. By then, I was starting to understand the catharsis of diversity and representation (ironically, for someone living in a place both very culturally diverse and lacking a widespread discourse on such issues). That is what saved the RD cast from being blander than it is. 18-year-old me, who had never set foot in the Western hemisphere before, decided that they would begin the story in the US. I was an avid fan of the Flora Trilogy by Ysabeau Wilce and the Leviathan Trilogy by Scott Westerfeld at the time; the fact that I have a character from San Francisco and a rural dweller who enlists in the British army signifies the indelible imprint my interests at the time have left on RD.1
1 Both of these series are also quite diverse and address issues of representation, I should note! The Flora Trilogy is set in an AU California (“Califa”) where the Aztec Empire overcame European colonisers and now controls the state through a puppet leader. The Leviathan Trilogy visits countries across the world during World War 1, exploring their political complexities in some depth, and it has both bisexual and gender non-conforming main characters.
I’m the sort of person who holds fast to basic details of my characters’ profiles, even when my understanding of the world, history, and current issues has grown. I’m reluctant to ever change my characters’ names, backgrounds, and even designs, except slowly and incrementally.
But that begets a problem. A lot of the character profile choices I made as a teen because “it’s cool and I want to combine everything I find cool from stories I like” don’t hold up under the lens of realism. For example, I realised in 2018 that the last name “Arbora” (which I came up with in 2014, apropos of nothing besides associating Fen with trees) does not sound even remotely Fiijan or Malaysian, his parents’ cultures. But because I’d already written his name into the novel, I came up with roundabout genealogical explanations and gave him middle names and relatives with parts of his name, rather than even thinking of altering that basic biographical fact.
Revolving Door has been a 13-year project in “yes-and”-ing the creative decisions I made at 18. Why does my character look this way and live in this location? Here’s a family history that explains it. Why does my character have a middle name that makes no sense being from their culture? Well, because they have a relative with that name for whose culture it would make sense.
So, although I look back and wish that I had geographically spread out my principal cast just a little more, I never changed anyone’s place of origin. And as a result, the fact that my principal cast has two Brits, one American, and a few characters from a world based on a work of British literature will always stand as testament to the baggage of my writerly origins.
Although I never lived long-term in the US, I consumed enough American media growing up that I can fake a generic American feel in my dialogue. If Adelaide sounds natural, then I’ve succeeded. Hong Yi too, though realistically, having only lived in the US for maybe two years, he wouldn’t sound quite as American as how I wrote him.
I say “generic” because I don’t have enough local familiarity to pin down the dialect of a specific locale. I’ve never been good with writing regional American and British dialects I’ve never heard, and I don’t think I can ever be. The most I can do is look up common phrases / expressions from that locale and apply them as markers of places of origin.
The fact I could not simply “figure out” accents and dialects was devastating to me, as someone who has always striven assiduously to make my depictions of real-world locations feel true to life. But while I can take virtual walks on Google Maps and read location-specific forums to get a feel of being on the streets, I cannot learn how to speak like a local just by watching videos. Perhaps this is simply something I do not have a sense for.
For a long, long while, I thought this made me a bad writer—a lack of instinct in turning spoken words into sounds, coupled with the insurmountable hurdle of being Singaporean.
Yes, I’m sure that I could have researched my way to compelling realism, but that’s the thing, isn’t it—I was trying to write in regional accents that authors from England and the US would not have had to go to such lengths for, all just to imitate them. When they write about cultures beyond their own, the don’t tend to be very accurate, either. The difference? Perhaps because of global power asymmetries, they don’t tend to have to care if it’s poorly done. No one (until recently) has had the platform to criticise it, in the same way that western, Anglophone professionals regularly criticised poorly-written regional accents close to home.
These days, I have decided I no longer care that much about regional English dialects as some hallmark of good writing, particularly after coming to recognise that accents are often seen as a way to exotify a character to a global northern, Anglophone audience.
RD has a lot of characters speaking a lot of regional dialects! I don’t think I am able to adequately research every single one, and I refuse to only put in that effort for a select few while allowing others to be inaccurate.
I think of creative writing as the act of translating experiences into words, and here, perhaps, the translation is literal. This is, after all, a story where two main characters have the ability to hear everything everyone says in their own language—the nature of the story’s text as an approximation of the true experience is somewhat encoded in the worldbuilding.
And this story is probably a better translation of the scenarios I envision if I’m not trying to clumsily effect dialects I’ve never heard, from regions I’ve never lived in, from cultures that aren’t mine. Some of my characters probably do speak differently from how I write them, and I am perfectly happy for readers to imagine them expressing themselves in a different way, if they know those voices better. I have merely translated them through the lens of my own linguistic history.