# Voices A small library of named writing styles for the games in this playground, so that "what should this sound like" is a decision made once and referred to, rather than re-improvised per project and drifted away from mid-project. Each project picks its styles in its own `docs/VOICE.md` and adds whatever is specific to it. This file is the shelf. --- ## The default: **SNES** Use this for anything the player has to understand: prologues, narration, tutorial lines, cards, notices. It is the register of a 1994 console RPG opening, and its one commitment is that **a ten-year-old follows every sentence and an adult is not bored.** Those are not in tension. The vocabulary is simple; the *situation* is not. A fifteen-year-old is responsible for whether six hundred people live. That is adult. "Six hundred and thirty-one people were not found" is a sentence a child can read and an adult has to sit with. **Rules** 1. **Say what happened.** Not what it was like, not what it meant. If something came up out of a hill, write "something came up out of the hill". 2. **Say the stakes out loud, once.** "If it is not rung, the hill opens." Withholding the stakes is not mystery, it is the reader not knowing why to care. 3. **One idea per sentence.** Sentences under about fifteen words. 4. **Short words.** If a shorter word means the same, it is the same. No "abroad", no "set down", no "account of". 5. **Name the thing the first time you use it.** "The frame" means nothing until you have written "the wooden frame the bell hangs in". 6. **A mystery must be stated as a mystery.** "Nobody knows what it was" tells the reader they are not being cheated. Silence tells them nothing. 7. **End pointing at the player.** "Today is the ninth. It is your turn, Tam." 8. **Numbers are your friend.** Nine, six hundred and forty, four hours, nineteen years. Children and adults both read numbers as true. **Sounds like** > A hundred and seventy-one years ago, something came up out of the hill at > night. Nobody knows what it was. It was out for four hours. > > In the morning, nine people were alive. The town was gone. --- ## **Town** Everyone the player can talk to. Ordinary modern speech: contractions, interruptions, jokes, people answering a different question from the one they were asked, and saying the wrong thing at the worst time. The town is where the personality goes. It is allowed to be funny, and it is the only place that is. The contrast with the SNES narration is the whole effect — a world where the notice board and the cider seller sound the same is a world with one person in it. > Cider. Two for a penny. It isn't good. I'm telling you that because you're > about to be famous and I'd rather you heard it now. --- ## **Chronicle** Formal, joined with *and*, no irony: the Tolkien register. It is beautiful and it is a trap, because it reads as meaning more than it says. **Use it for at most a handful of lines** — an inscription, a chapter card, one held moment — and never for anything the player needs in order to follow the story. A whole prologue in this voice is unreadable, which this playground found out the hard way. > Their names are in the book at Callow. They are read at every ringing, and > will be read at this. --- ## **Noir** (the-dead-hour) Present tense, second person, short. The narrator is inside the fight and has no distance from it. Kept here because it works and should be reusable, not because every game wants it. --- ## How to tell you have drifted Two ditches, in opposite directions. Both are things that *sound like writing*. **The aphorism.** An abstract noun as the subject, a reversal, a full stop. > No one grieved. Grief asks that someone have been. Three of those is a style. Twenty is a machine. Catch it with: *if a line would look good on a poster, cut it.* **The wry undercut.** Setup, clipped ironic snap, small knowing shrug. > Nobody wrote down what came out of it. They wrote down how long it took. > Four hours. This one is more dangerous because it sounds good. The tell is that **every paragraph ends on the joke** — cover the last sentence of each one and nothing is lost. Catch it with: *if a paragraph ends on its own punchline, cut the punchline.* Both ditches share a cause: writing to sound like something, rather than to be understood. The test for either is to read it aloud. If you sound like you are reciting, or like you are doing a bit, rewrite it. If you sound like you are telling somebody something that happened, keep it. --- ## It is measured, not eyeballed Style is a judgement, but two parts of it are not, and a project's smoke test should check them rather than trusting anybody's eye: - **It fits.** Every line is measured in the font it is drawn in, against the width it is drawn into — narration against the frame, dialogue against the inside of the box, menu text against the screen. Hand-wrapped text and generated art do not otherwise agree about anything. - **It reads young enough.** Flesch–Kincaid grade level over the narration and the dialogue, with a ceiling. It is a crude measure and it is still the difference between "this feels simple" and "this is grade 4.1, and the longest sentence in the game is seventeen words." See `the-ninth-bell/data/scripts/dev/smoke.lua` for both.