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Are my characters digging latrines?

Once I was reading a book where, after a chapter or two, the characters were forced to go on the run from some evil thing. The intensity of the chase was high, they were constantly on the move, separated from their defenders without a friendly soul to ask for help. However, during this bit of story, the writer went into what I considered a lot of unnecessary detail about what they were up to during this chase. I can’t remember exactly what the scene was, but it put me in mind of reading, in some detail, about how the characters were digging latrines along the way. It was as if the author had to account for all of their various actions and bodily functions. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t really how it went, but it felt that way. The small section of the book covered by this turned me off of the whole story. Loads of people loved this story, so maybe it’s just me, but I’ve read other stories with seemingly similar chase situations and liked them just fine. Either way, I spent quite a bit of time thinking about what it was that I didn’t like, you know to avoid it for myself. In the end I came to the conclusion what I really didn’t like was the pacing. The intensity of the action seemed completely at odds with the pace of the writing. Perhaps the author achieved what he set out to do, but I didn’t like it.

Back to my project: I’ve buttoned up a section of sub-plot, at least for the moment, and I’m back to the main character again. Before launching into that sub-plot, with a secondary character, I left the main character sitting in the middle of the woods. Now, I’m asking myself about pacing and action. I’m well over half-way into the book, and the main character is still lolly-gagging in the forest. I feel like at this point there should be some rising action or pressing problem bearing down on the him, and I even worked an additional, short chapter in to try and get there, yet it still feels flat. Things will pick back up as the chapter progresses, but I don’t want the beginning of it to seem boring or pointless. I guess the rubber-duck question of the day is: At what point does detail become latrine digging? The rubber duck’s answer for now: The main plot isn’t going to change for the details I’m working on and I’m already going to have to revise it to suck less later anyhow, so keep going and don’t get hung up on this.

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Made up names

On my first project, not a fantasy, now long dead – and good riddance, I wanted the names of people and places to be foreign. I mean, it’s not necessary for them to be, plenty of fantasies use regular or regular-like English names, and those work just fine. But that’s not how I wanted to approach it, and maybe that’s stupid, but it’s the writer’s prerogative right? So, for that first project I slammed together a bunch of letters and called them names. The result was a bit of text that was unreadable to anybody and had no consistency nor did it make the world feel like the world was full of unique cultures, which is what I wanted. I feel like I’ve read fantasies where the approach was to just put together some random letters until a name was achieved, and in those cases, I wish they’d just used regular English names.

When I started my current project, I still wanted to use names that weren’t like English. So, I started researching, with two goals in mind 1: Develop a language with just enough depth to let me name things. 2: Make sure that language follows conventions easily recognizable and readable to an English speaker. I spent hours, well weeks and weeks really, learning about language. Naturally, I also spent a lot of time studying the famousest of constructed languages, trying to learn what Tolkien did and how. Since I’m not a linguist, I recognize whatever I attempt will still fall rather short of the mark, but it’s a zillion times better than what I had before. Anyhow, in the process I learned a lot and managed to come up with a pair of nearly passable con-langs that gave me enough to name everything on the map and people.

As with anything I work on though, it didn’t stop there. I kept going, building alphabets (check this place out: www.omniglot.com) and complex rules for speaking the language. Between the case endings and made-up words in the second language, there are around 3500 words to pull from. The first of the two languages has considerably fewer words, but provides enough to translate short quotes, which is a fun thing to add into a story. I’m still working on them here and there, mostly when I’m trying to procrastinate. In retrospect, the best thing to have done would have been to learn a second language, and take that experience into the development of a con-lang. You learn loads about ways to deal with conjugation and sentence construction very rapidly. Of course, six or seven years ago when I started this, there wasn’t such a thing as duolingo on your phone, and so it would have been a lot harder than it is now. In the end, the only reason to have these is to rarely interject them into the story, and give some consistency to names, so perhaps it’s all wasted time, but I enjoy it as a creative outlet nonetheless.