Tag Archives: fantasy novel

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Dragon biology

Fig. A

Figure A.

Instead of focusing on getting those last few chapters of my book done, I’ve been finding anything and everything I can to avoid working on it. Given there’s no deadline, it’s not essential to I finish until I’m ready, and so it doesn’t really matter. That said, I was musing the other day that my blog has the title of On Writing Dragons, and I haven’t ONCE written about dragons. When I started the blog, I decided I would limit the actual discussion of my story to a minimum. With that in mind, I’m not going to talk much about the dragons in my story, at least not until the first book is published (see that -I’m being optimistic today!) Anyhow, I figured now is as good a time as any to broach the subject. Some time ago I saw a blog, not the first and probably not the last, discussing considerations of the biology of magical creatures, like dragons. I’ve supplied a figure (figure A) for discussion on the biology of dragons.

Now, there are a ton of problems with dragons, what do they eat? How do they fly? How do they breathe fire without combusting?

First, consider that the wings are entirely too small to lift a 25 ton animal. The question of how much thrust is needed and the required surface area of the wings is the sort of thing to ask on ‘what if?’ Over at xkcd -Someone should do this, because it would be awesome reading in his next book, which I will buy, even without an answer. I suspect dragons would require jet engines.

It turns out that dragons have some features that make it work out. I’ll draw your attention to the super-light bones and internal organs (Fig. A) Even then, they’ll likely to be too heavy to take off. Good thing their tiny wings are also magical!

What about the fire-breathing? Again, I draw your attention to Fig A. Note the magical internal organs. Somewhere in there is a magical gizzard that makes the fire -probably. These magical organs also provide far more nutrition from any meal than would be ordinary. Thus, a sheep or cow every now and then is satisfactory.

In conclusion, dragons are magical, fictional creatures, well accepted in all varieties of fantasy. Their biology is magical, and irrelevant to the story you’re telling, unless your protagonist is studying dragon biology. Even then, trying to explain it removes the magic from the story, so don’t bother worrying about it.

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Fantasy research #4 – constructed languages

Languages

When I first set out to write my current project, I had an idea that involved at least one other culture. It was a key element that has always remained a part of my idea. Early on, I decided to focus on building the culture to make sure it was clearly foreign. Part of the reason for this is my terrible attempt at a sci-fi novel. One of the very many things wrong with that story is that it was from the perspective of an alien civilization, and it was not alien. There was no culture established and I hadn’t done enough to make them seem alien. When I started developing the story I have now, that stuck in my mind, so I set out to ensure that different people did have a different culture and voice. The starting point of this was, for me, language, as I have often heard that language defines a culture.

So, there it was, a starting point. To add to this, at around the same time my boss had suggested I read the Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkein. I had tried it before, but gave it another go, and fell in love with it. This launched me into a lot of reading about elvish as a language (languages really), and also the various writing systems developed for it. So, in developing my own language system, I looked at Elvish and Klingon, and also looked into oddities and elements of other languages. Currently, I have two con-langs that I use for naming places and also to add a bit of flavor into the text, though sparingly. Now, I still don’t have the grammar all the way nailed down for either, but I’m closer with Lotath than Swaerem. After all, these were intended for developing phrases, and naming places. It wasn’t so much intended for translation, although I find that to be a fun exercise. I would point to a vast array of different sources for all of this information, but it was all collected some 3 computers ago, and I no longer have most of the source material. In any case, it’s not a journal article or anything, so citations are more of a nicety than a requirement.

That said, here are some things I learned along the way.

Language really should define your culture. So, if you are creating language for a foreign culture, it should contain words that are ideas relevant to that culture. These words shouldn’t necessarily be directly translatable to English. If you find that you don’t have any of these sorts of words, it might be best not to bother with the effort of constructing a language.

It is my firm believe that constructed languages for an English audience should be English readable, or damn close. There are several guidelines I’d place around this one, but to pick on one for the purpose of illustration, is the use of the glottal stop. Avoid it as much as you can. Don’t eliminate it, just reduce it’s use. This IS present in English, but rarely -uh-oh is the most common American English occurrence. If not done well, this adds nothing to the foreignness of the language and makes it somewhat confusing to read. Not only that, this is one of THE MOST common things included in fantasy and Sci-fi, and often rendered as an apostrophe rather than hyphen or en-dash. If you insist, use it sparingly and not in names. That said, there is precedent for this, so you can get away with it if you want. I am largely (not completely) avoiding it though. The Dragon Riders of Pern uses the glottal in names: F’lar.

Another thing to consider is that English is odd when it comes to how vowels are written vs. how they’re actually pronounced. Before you get started, do a LOT OF RESEARCH ON VOWELS. If you take nothing away from this blog post, take that with you. Please. Also, define the vowels your language uses ahead of time and mostly stick to them. It would be a good idea to keep to those vowels familiar to English. I settled on the following set for Lotath:

ä – pronounced as ‘ah’
ë – you will find this in the English word bet,
é – You see this in the word resumé, though phonetically the same as the a found in rate.
i – As in the word bit
í – as in the double e found in beet.
o – pronounced the same as the letter o.
ú – pronounced the same as the double o in too.
ai – as in the i in mine.
oi – exactly the same as the oi in oil.

There are others I use, but these are the main ones, and I decided on them almost before I started building the language.

After looking at the list of vowels I chose as the primaries, you will notice a few things. First off. There is no ‘uh’ sound, or the schwa ‘ǝ’. This is the most common English vowel, and it doesn’t have its own character. It’s often given the u, but any letter will suffice (banana is often pronounced with schwa, for example). I concluded that because I couldn’t represent it in a manner that would be intuitive, I’d just avoid it. Western American English also often gets squishy on the short e and short i sounds, and so in cases where I think this will happen, I employ diacritic marks. I also use the diacritic mark when there would be an English tendency to actually drop the vowel sound, as in the ‘er’ found in diaper. There is some debate on whether or not the ‘er’ actually drops the vowel, but I’m in the camp that it’s phonetically not present.

Other things that make it impossible to read? Well, for starters, unless you’re writing a screenplay (if you are, ignore all of this – talk to a linguist instead), don’t try to use inflection, tone, or emphasis for meaning (If you are a screen writer, you SHOULD do this, because it would be awesome). I had started my first language like this, using an underline to indicate emphasis, but concluded it was not intuitive and dropped it. I also started thinking about a third language using a tonal system, but again had to conclude the English alphabet had no mechanism for representing this so it would be a waste of time.

The next bit of obvious advice is to avoid impossible stacks of letters like xmeqrdreg or zhredrgt. These just aren’t worth putting to paper. Perhaps it’s not that bad, but if it has no sound in English, just don’t bother, you’re wasting your effort. Every time the reader sees this it’s another opportunity to pause with the possibly of breaking the suspension of disbelief. On the opposite side of the coin, there are English sounds that are hard to get at because we don’t have a good alphabetic representation, like the ‘th’ in this, versus the ‘th’ in thing. Old English used Þ and ð to make this difference clear, but we don’t have those any more. You could use th and dh (as the voiced version of th), it’s what I do for my second language, but really it’s better to just not go there.

Pronunciation aside, be consistent. Select a handful of consonants that are preferred. It will help you build words that give your language a consistent feel. Another way to facilitate this is to use word endings or prefixes with some meaning. For example, you could choose ‘mes’ as short-hand for the word for county in your language, thus you could end up with Velmes and Nallames for two county names. Feels a lot more natural than Velamin and Nelmark. Not that the second choice wouldn’t work, but the first example provides the consistency you often see in a language. I might use the second in a case where I wasn’t trying to build a language.

Languages also often have a variety of features like case endings and declensions. There really isn’t any advice I could give to say what to use or not for this except that you need to look at these things and make a decision as to whether or not your language includes them – it probably should include some of this sort of thing.

The final consideration I’ll bring to your attention is that you are going to inadvertently break the rules just by not paying attention. This is perfect. Languages change and they adopt words from other sources. Having oddities in your language adds some authenticity that is hard to manufacture otherwise. If you screw up. Keep it.

So, after that less than complete discussion, research language before trying to assemble a constructed language. It’s a lot harder than just slamming letters together.

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Thinking about the information dump (#3)

This is the last of my thoughts on the information dump, at least for a while. There is a third kind of info dump that you can land yourself in, again not bad or wrong, but it can be difficult to manage properly. This example tends to be strongly associated with fantasy, and has prevented me from being able to really get into a number of different books. Some of which came to me highly recommended and are, in fact, quite good. As a reader though, I just couldn’t get past the issue.

What I’m talking about I’ll call the ‘family’ info dump. There’s more to it than that, but that seems to be a common way you see the problem. What I’m talking about is in the beginning of a story, right off the bat, the author introduces half a dozen characters and tries to explain how their all related or not. There’s one example spinning through my head, but I can’t seem to dig up the reference, so instead I pulled a book off the shelf. Lo-and-behold, it’s got an example of what I’m talking about. Once again, I want to point out that having an information dump isn’t a deal killer, it can be done well, but it can also be done horribly. The sample I pulled is from a book called The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay. I never made it past the first chapter. As a reader, I actually need to be hooked by a main character in addition to the conflict, it’s just a quirk of mine, so books that start out with an ensemble generally don’t hold my interest long enough to get past the first chapter or two. That said, I have it on good authority this is an excellent book. My example starts on page 9 of the paperback copy I have, here is a quote:

“Dave Martyniuk stood like a tall tree in the midst of the crowd that was swirling like leaves through the lobby. He was looking for his brother, and he was increasingly uncomfortable. It didn’t make him feel any better when he saw the stylish figure of Kevin Laine coming through the door with Paul Schafer and two women. Dave was in the process of turning away- he didn’t feel like being patronized just then- when he realized that Laine had seen him.
“Martyniuk! What are you doing here?”
“Hello Laine. My brother’s on the panel.”
“Vince Martyniuk. Of course,” Kevin said. “He’s a bright man.”
“One in every family,” Dave cracked, somewhat sourly. He saw Paul Schaefer give a crooked grin.
Kevin Laine laughed. “At least one. But I’m being rude. You know Paul. This is Jennifer Lowell, and Kim Ford, my favorite doctor.”

The first thing I want to say about this is that it’s well written, packed with examples of good approaches to stuff, and if you must do an info-dump like this, it’s a good example of how to do it pretty well. That said, Guy Gavriel Kay is an excellent writer, and for folks like me, who are still trying to become excellent writers, introducing six characters in the span of less than 150 words is probably not going to go well. In the interest of full disclosure, I did have a difficult time with this.
First off, we’re introduced to Dave Martyniuk, which is a difficult name to pronounce in my head. I am stumbling on it right now. This made it hard for me to follow to begin with. Then we’re immediately introduced to Kevin Laine, interchangeably called Kevin, Kevin Laine, and Laine. That may be a neat trick in helping the reader to remember Kevin Laine, but it’s a lot of information when taken in context. So, I’ve been introduced to six characters and I’ve already forgotten three of them. When I get on to the next few pages, I’m not going to remember which one of the women are doctors, and whether or not it was Laine or Paul who had the crooked smile. So, if I’m not going to remember it all, then why give it all at once?
For me, personally, I approach my stories in such a way as to avoid the hell out of stuff like this. Maybe someday when my writing is a tight as this author’s, I might try to pull off an ensemble from the beginning of chapter one. For now, I pretend the reader is like Beorn in the Hobbit. I try to introduce no more than 1 or 2 characters at a time. In a single scene, this might get me up to six, but it’s spread across a chapter to give the reader time to digest the introduction. Ironically, in the Hobbit, Tolkien introduces thirteen characters all at once. Same end result though, you never get to know most of those Dwarves.