Weave The Games

Remember, remember, the fifth of November...

Well, I have a blog tour post for you! And it's a little bit different from what I normally do (but hey, I like being a tad different recently, haven't I?)

The Game Weavers is Rebecca Zahabi debut, showing a darker and intolerant Britain where the national sport is no longer football but Twine, a game where players - Weavers - craft creatures from their fingertips to fight each other, watched by thousands.

Seo is Twine's youth champion, and he hides his sexuality. When he is outed as gay by the media, his can't use his magic to save him from what's to come. With help from his brother, Minjun, and Jack, the man Seo isn't sure if he's in love with or not, Seo has the get his life back of track, ready for one of the biggest matches...

I am thrilled to welcome Rebecca Zahani to the Pewter Wolf and chatting about how she found the voices of her characters! I want to thank Rebecca for finding time to write this guest post and I want to thank Emily from Conker Communications for email and bearing with our zany conversations!

And if you want to say hi to Rebecca, pop over to her website, rebeccazahabi.com. Plus, if you are curious about Game Weavers, you can go to Zuntold Publishing's website. 

Now, ONTO THE VOICES!!!

Finding Your Voice

Voice is difficult to get right, and yet publishers are always speaking of ‘new voices’ and ‘finding your voice’ in writing. So what is this elusive voice?

One thing the readers seem to notice in The Game Weavers is the narrator’s voice. It’s unusual – present tense, third person, with clipped sentences – and some people struggled with it at first, until they found their stride after the first few pages of the book. It’s something I was very conscious of while I was writing: I tried to create a consistent, engaging yet slightly unusual, voice for my narrators.

I’ll speak about two of the main characters of the novel: Minjun and Seo. There is a third narrator, Jack, but I feel he has a simpler way of speaking and telling his story, as he is there to offer an anchor to the reader.

Minjun – A child’s voice
Let’s start with Minjun. Minjun is in the strange position of being the youth champion’s baby brother. The idea for Minjun came to me while I was reading Kit de Waal’s My Name is Leon (which I highly recommend). I loved the way she wrote Leon’s childlike voice, the way he observed and understood some, but not all, of what was going on around him. It gave her the freedom to touch on very harsh subjects, but lightly, as Leon only understood and was affected by part of what was going on. The tragedy was obvious to the reader, but not always to him directly. It was a very powerful read. In the same way, Autobiographie d'une Courgette by Gilles Paris is a French version of that childish narrator, coping with very hard life circumstances.

I knew from the start, when I first sat down and scribbled a few scenes on paper, that I would write in the third person, present tense. It helped me both with the childlike voice, which gave Minjun such a strong presence in the story, and it also allowed me to move through time more freely. I could write long flashback scenes in the past tense without it jarring with the reader, which meant the chronology of the story was more fluid.

Minjun was the perfect prism through which to see Seo’s struggles: he understands some of what his brother is going through, and he loves him, but he doesn’t quite get all the ramifications, and he himself feels a slight unease about his brother being gay, which he can’t quite pinpoint. He’s innocent, although he’s been influenced by the intolerant background he grew up in, and he’s trying hard to show his brother his love. But to express all of that, I needed a very particular voice, otherwise it might have fallen flat.

Seo – Words for the un-wordy

On to Seo now. He’s Minjun’s older brother and the Twine champion.

I am a talker. I love talking, and that’s how I solve most of my problems. Case in point: I write to express what I feel. But as I was working on The Game Weavers, I was wondering what happened when a character wasn’t good at sharing their feelings, or even at understanding them. Sometimes your feelings are obvious to outsiders, but impenetrable to yourself. It’s harder if you can’t put them in words, if you can’t share them, if you can’t explain what’s going on inside your head. I wanted to write about someone who was different from me – who couldn’t really put into words what he was going through.

That’s how I wrote Seo. He is struggling with his sexual identity and his coming-out, but he can’t express it. So he can’t tell his brother he loves him, or his adopted father that this is hurting him. This is where the pared-back voice helped: by keeping a step away, sticking to short, curt sentences, I could try to reflect how difficult it was for Seo to share what he was going through. Not all heroes can tell us their own story. Sometimes they need us to make the extra effort, to try to understand them, and cross the gap ourselves.
Writing is always a balancing act between making things clear for the reader, telling an engaging story, and trying to show what is going through the narrator’s head. It’s not always easy to find a voice which reflects what the character is feeling. With Seo and Minjun, I needed to show how they were similar, where the incomprehension grew between them, how they found ways to bridge it without words.

I’ve worked on other projects, but I don’t think I’ll ever write a novel with the same voice as the one I used in The Game Weavers. It’s unique to the brothers’ story.