by S.L. Dove Cooper
“Can I name a character Ieësalwin or Nieëske? Do I need to spell it Ysalwyn or Neeska or something like that so fantasy readers are more comfortable with the spelling and don’t have to deal with an umlaut?”
You’re not really asking yourself whether you can spell words this way. Tolkien uses them. Fëanor is right there. Anne McCaffrey’s F’lar and Mercedes Lackey’s shin’a’in both exist. In fact, apostrophes in fantasy spellings are so incredibly common, they were already satirised in the 1990s. (Diana Wynne Jones’s The Tough Guide to Fantasy Land calls it out at least once and it is not the only time. There’s even a TVTropes article dedicated to the concept.) Better yet, once upon a time when you were young and still in school, writing stories with your online friends, you included diacritics and apostrophes similarly because you were young and that was what great fantasy did. Using “weird” punctuation in fantasy writing has a long, tapestried history and it’s never bothered you before.
No, you’re asking “Will I get hurt if I include this spelling?” because the spelling is drawing from a non-English language and, for better or worse, if you admit to using it, people who recognise what you’re doing will mark you as Other for it. They’ll take that aspect you care so much about, love so much about your history and the things that shaped you, and make fun of it, just as people have your whole life.
“Haha, those people can’t even speak properly” is a thing you’ve heard multiple times when you went to university. You grew up with a child’s understanding of adult news, believing that the government wanted to ban the way you form words from national television lest poor, innocent people are forced to listen to your sing-song nonsense. Today, your accent, however clear it is, is still subtitled on TV because it is de facto declared incomprehensible. When it appears in shows, it’s used by the stupid, dumb caricature, or a criminal. Heaven forbid a show or a film set in your region is actually filmed starring people with accents from that region.
Somewhere along the line between child and teenager, you lost as much of your accent as you could. You don’t read or write the language you grew up speaking because, quite frankly, the only time you ever saw it was one week a year, and you grew up believing that it was, for once, people making jokes at their own expense instead of being the butt of someone else’s. After all, who in their right minds has that many diacritics in a sentence or thinks consonant sounds should be spelled like that? You could make similar arguments for other languages, of course, but you don’t because those are real languages. You didn’t know, at the time, that the defining line between a language and a dialect is largely political. You learn that there is a chance your language, the one you grew up speaking (well, one of them) but not reading or writing because no one ever taught you, will die out in your lifetime or shortly after.
Your question isn’t about whether you can do something that SFF is known for doing. It’s a question of whether you dare to be that vulnerable, even if people don’t know that you’re offering them something precious and easily squished. That you’re offering them trust, and a welcome into a small part of you that has been bruised and battered for as long as you’ve been able to speak.
You see others wrestle with the same question. You encourage them to write the stories that are true to them and forget the haters. Who cares about the haters, anyway? (You care, actually. As do the other people wrestling with these questions. You all care a lot, as you would when it’s a small piece of your heart and trust offered freely and generously to those willing to share it.)
You dip your toes in. Learn about yourself. It takes a while, but eventually you work out that there are two ways in which your history informs your stories: the ways you can choose and the ways you can’t unless you put in a lot of hard work pretending to be something you’re not. And, frankly, it can be draining enough to deal with the things you can’t hide.
Back when you started writing, mostly the things you couldn’t hide were “You don’t get to exist, stop trying to take our chair at the table.” At the moment, it’s more along the lines of “Your very existence is fascist because real queer people are horny.” They’re things you can’t take out of your work. One of your first attempts at novel-length fiction prominently featured what would, by today’s readers, be immediately clocked as a sex-repulsed aroace character. You didn’t know, didn’t have words for that when you wrote it. Romance largely takes a back seat to other relationships in your works and, on the chance that it does star, tends to… focus on the non-romantic elements of the relationship, and the concept that two people in a dedicated relationship may sleep together has not crossed your mind in all the 500k words you’ve written with them. There are even smaller notes. The way attraction catches people’s attention, the focus on specific details to convey a sense of physical and sexual attraction, are both things you have to actively, consciously, add in revision because you never remember on your own.
You can’t change those. But you can choose whether to build on a language you know, write about an ecosystem you’re familiar with and isn’t one common in SFF, include moments of community or other elements that matter to you, build on parts of your history that you want to share. And so, you choose not to over and over again.
And then, one day, for some reason, you dip into a little bit of the stories you normally avoid. It can be any reason, really. It may not even be consciously done. You don’t remember now. It’s just a short story, a small little fairy tale retelling so faintly set in an environment you know well that readers will just blithely assume it’s set in a British heathland or a moor. But you like it. It feels comforting to put that tiny bit of yourself in a story. So you do it again. This time you pick a somewhat more well-known tale, don’t fiddle with the setting as much because the whole point is showcasing “Look, we have folktales like this too.” People seem to like it well enough.
You remember that, at one point, you played around with languages, mashing the rules and words together into something distinct and linguistically complex and never got around to finishing the story. It was, quite possibly, the first time you genuinely, truly, sat down to draw on something non-English on purpose. It might be why you never finished it. Who’d publish something like that, after all?
In other stories, you draw a little less on linguistics and a little more on the experience with your languages, and the emotions of working out how you feel about the potential imminent loss of something that, despite your childhood experiences, you cherish and find something precious in. You get to worry whether people will, in honest good faith, argue that you don’t get to write it just because they don’t understand all the ways it covers your own experience.
In your first published novel, you write a dyscalculic protagonist. You’ve never seen dyscalculia in fiction before. It takes until your adult life to figure out it exists, never mind that you have it. Interestingly, that one isn’t scary or painful to include. You also include childhood depression and suicide ideation, and you worry whether people will tell you that the book is unrealistic, despite the fact that you included those because, as a child, you needed to see and hear that children had such feelings. To know that you were not alone, or bad, or wrong.
There are many reasons, oh so many, why the question “Can I include that spelling?” or, more broadly, “Can I include [this aspect of my culture/identity/experience that has hurt me in the past and that I know will ask the majority of readers to do more work than they’re willing to do]?” ends with someone choosing not to. People should choose what works best for them and their story both. There are a few exceptions, but by and large the answer is “Yes, you get do that.”
And so, when I got stuck on a short story earlier this year, I took a chance to shake things up. I changed the spelling from Ysalwin to Ieësalwin. I don’t remember Nieëske’s original name anymore. I do remember worrying whether readers, after asking them to be on board with three vowels and a diacritic in a row, would be okay with the same being used in a different prominent name. It’s not the first time I’ve gone for a three-vowel construction. It’s the first time I drew deliberately, purposefully, on one of the languages I speak, though.
It felt nice, small a thing though it is, to write something and purposefully, deliberately say that this mattered. That this aspect of what makes me me gets to be seen. That I, and all the things I consider important, get to exist. I’m used to hiding away. This isn’t a big step into the spotlight. But these stories, and the fact that I’m talking about them this way, are steps all the same. Part of me is scared of being open and vulnerable with these inclusions. A paper cut doesn’t hurt less because it’s small and a broken foot isn’t less broken just because the person who stepped on it didn’t realise it was there. Most of me is excited to embrace something I have spent much of my childhood hearing was unwanted, useless, bad, stupid… Probably not the worst of the racist words people could use because I am, still, white. I’m excited to see what I can learn about myself and the world around me by allowing that aspect of me to exist, full stop.
So. To answer the question: Yes, you get to include that element you wanted in your book. You don’t need my permission—you only need your own, really—but sometimes it’s good to hear from someone else anyway.
