Just a couple days ago, I wrote a short story about Moses. Moses is one of my absolute favorite Biblical/historical characters--mainly because I really feel that I 'get' him. I've always felt a particular connection to him (actually, if I was a boy my parents were thinking of naming me 'Moses'), and whenever I find a work of fiction about him I always hope that they'll portray him how I picture him.
Because I have such a strong picture of Moses, I am always super disappointed in how he's portrayed in fiction. Take 'The Ten Commandments', an old movie with Charlton Heston as Moses. Actually, I love the first part, but it's the second part that irritates me. Moses, after he saw the burning bush, is portrayed as this completely aloof person who only says things profound and has absolutely no connection to the people around him. I think of him as an extremely emotional person. 'The Prince of Egypt', a more recent animated movie with an amazing soundtrack by the way, does a good job with that, actually.
However, the thing that gets me the most is Moses' voice. In the Bible, one of Moses' excuses for not going back to Egypt is that he speaks slowly. To be exact:
'O Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue'--Exodus 4:10 NIV
And what's irritating is this: in all the productions I have ever seen on Moses--from movies to little kid audio stories--Moses speaks absolutely fine until he gets to that one part. Then he slows down and has a slight stutter/speech delay...and then right after he goes back to speaking normally. And that is so annoying!
I have always thought of Moses as having a speech delay. So when I wrote the story about him (which I mentioned at the top of the post), I knew I wanted to convey that he has always had this slight disability.
In my story, Moses is talking to his wife, Zipporah, explaining how he saw the burning bush and how God told him to uproot and go back to Egypt. And that means that Moses is doing a lot of key speaking.
That gave me a problem. I wanted to portray Moses as a hesitant, emotional speaker, and yet I wanted him to be understandable. If he's constantly pausing and repeating, it becomes distracting from his actual words.
Example: [Moses is speaking to Zipporah]
"It was the voice of God. God...was in the bush. And He said that He has heard the Israelites...in Egypt. He's going to send someone. Someone to rescue them...and bring them to Abraham's land."
Here we're actually getting to the point of this post. If you've ever heard someone with speech delay talk, you'll know--depending on how their condition--they will actually have more stops and starts than what I have with Moses in my story. Actually, for someone with speech delay, I'd say that Moses talks fairly smoothly.
However, I realized very quickly that if I was going to put in accurate delays it would become disruptive. The constant '...'s would become very distracting when you read them. And with Moses having so many crucial lines, I knew that I was probably going to have to sacrifice realism for flow.
Flow is crucial to a story. Oftentimes, it means changing something not so that it's more realistic but so that it's easier on the eye.
Yours without wax,
Izori
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