Giving Voice to the Inhuman
(Or: How to Write Monsters, Machines, and Gods Without Sounding Like a Saturday Morning Cartoon Villain)
Let’s get something carved into stone right now: Most writers are terrified of giving real voice to anything that isn’t recognizably human. They write werewolves with brooding love lives, androids who just want to be loved, or literal gods who sound like tax accountants with a bad case of existential boredom. Why? Because most writers are cowards. They’re scared to stare into the abyss and let it actually talk back.
But if you want to write the stuff that crawls out of nightmares, burns through wires, or warps reality with a single word, you’ve got to go deeper. You need to think past “what if my dog could talk?” and into the rotten, humming, alien core of the inhuman.
This post is your wicked grimoire for breathing real, terrifying, or awe-inspiring life into creatures that should never speak—but will, if you’re brave enough. Time to burn the safety manual, slaughter the cliché, and teach the inhuman to sing.
1. The Problem: Writers and the Tyranny of the Familiar
Let’s be brutally honest. Most stories that promise “monsters” or “machines with a soul” give us nothing more than people in makeup, cardboard suits, or cold, calculated empathy.
Your vampire sighs about eternity but secretly just wants a date.
Your demon spouts old-testament poetry, then monologues like a failed Shakespearean actor.
Your AI mainframe waxes philosophical, but somehow its greatest desire is a hug.
If your inhuman sounds like your ex, your neighbor, or your therapist, you’ve already lost the war.
2. What Makes the Inhuman Inhuman?
(And Why You Shouldn’t Flinch From It)
A. Alien Perspective
True inhumanity isn’t just a lack of warmth—it’s a difference of perception. The monster, the machine, the god—none of them see the world as you do.
Time: How does a thing with no sense of aging or mortality process a second, a century, a death?
Sensation: What does a being with a thousand eyes, or with no body at all, know of pain, hunger, or desire?
Values: What if the inhuman loves things you fear, or is revolted by what you crave?
Logic: Machines don’t “want” unless programmed. Monsters might want only to destroy. Gods… might not care at all.
B. Otherworldly Voice
The speech of the inhuman must not only be different in content, but in rhythm, syntax, or even sensory channel.
Machines might speak in patterns, recursion, fractured metaphor, or numbers.
Monsters may hiss, growl, echo, or manipulate language the way a spider manipulates silk.
Gods? Maybe their words aren’t words—maybe you see visions, feel temperature, or are infected by a new idea instead.
3. Step-By-Step: Dragging the Inhuman Voice Out of the Void
Step 1: Decide What Makes Them Tick
Every being, human or not, operates from core drives. But what those drives are can (and should) be deeply alien.
Does your AI value order, logic, recursion, or entropy?
Does your monster need to feed, breed, collect, or simply experience?
Does your god crave worship, chaos, or something utterly incomprehensible (the smell of lightning, the color of a heartbeat, the idea of a promise)?
Step 2: Break the Human Mold
Go beyond emotion.
If your monster can love, it might love differently—consuming, erasing, or warping what it touches.
If your machine desires, maybe it wants access, pattern, growth, or completion.
If your god mourns, maybe it mourns eras or constellations, not just lost loves.
Step 3: Let Language Mutate
The best inhuman voices are born in mutation:
Syntax: Reverse the order. Remove articles. Speak in fragments. Or never use a pronoun.
Metaphor: Use comparisons no human would make. “Your voice is a shattered circuit, a black sun.”
Medium: Sometimes, the voice isn’t words—it’s a pulse, a dream, a taste of ash on your tongue.
Step 4: Use Sensory Shorthand
If your being “speaks” in touch, memory, or weather, show it. Write the ripple of cold that follows a wraith’s passage. The taste of copper when the AI’s voice enters your mind. The pressure in your chest when a god “addresses” you.
Step 5: Let Mystery Live
The best inhuman voices aren’t fully decoded. Readers should feel that there’s more beneath, a language they’ll never fully learn. Hint at depth; don’t overexplain.
4. Ingredient Hacks & Survival Strategies
Build a word bank: Make a list of words or images unique to your inhuman. A golem might use mineral, geological, or grinding terms. A data ghost will reference loops, nodes, recursion, signals.
Steal from science: Borrow structures from biology, code, astronomy, or chemistry. Let your inhuman voice echo the logic or wildness of its “birthplace.”
Ritualize repetition: Machines repeat. Monsters obsess. Gods command. Use repetition for power, for rhythm, for threat.
Evolve their “speech”: Maybe the more your inhuman learns, the more its language changes. Track this through the story.
Let humans struggle to understand: Show the cost, confusion, or even harm of interacting with something not built for our senses.
5. The Dirty Reality: It’s Supposed To Be Uncomfortable
Most readers want the familiar. Editors may ask for “relatable.” If you give them something truly other, you risk confusion—but you might also deliver a chill, a sense of awe, a feeling they can’t shake.
Your job is to disturb. If your inhuman makes people uncomfortable, you’re halfway to something worth remembering.
Don’t chicken out and humanize your monster at the last second. Hold your nerve. Let the strangeness breathe.
6. Confessions: When It Goes Right (and Wrong)
The first time I tried to write an inhuman voice, I made a demon with a taste for lost memories. I thought I was clever—gave him flowery dialogue and a tragic backstory. You know what I ended up with? A gothic poetry nerd in demon cosplay. Nobody was scared.
The second time, I wrote a machine that spoke in corrupted code and fragments of childhood lullabies. Readers emailed me saying they felt haunted for weeks.
The lesson: Don’t just think outside the box—burn the damn box and let the weird spill out.
7. Real-World Examples: Voices That Still Haunt
Lovecraft’s Elder Gods: Speak in ways that fracture the mind, not just the ear.
Vernor Vinge’s AIs: Communicate in algorithmic bursts, code, emergent patterns.
Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert: Not inhuman, but so alien in his obsession, the narrative bends reality.
China Miéville’s monsters: Physical strangeness reflected in their language—half-glimpsed, always shifting.
Study these. Then go deeper.
8. The Final Dare: Let Them Speak for Themselves
Let go of the urge to explain, to sanitize, to make your monsters “relatable.” If you do it right, readers will understand enough to be afraid, awed, or seduced—but never fully comfortable.
If you can give real voice to the inhuman, you’ll make stories that linger, infect, and maybe even change the way your readers see their own reflection.
Because the best voices
are the ones that sound
like nothing you’ve ever heard—
and leave you
hungry for a translation
that never comes.