Tag Archives: fiction writing

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Thinking about the information dump #4

thinking

This post was actually a comment on a different thinking about the information dump, but I like it and it deserves it’s own post. So, to give proper credit, this post comes from Pontius Cominius. Visit Pontius’ site (if you don’t, I’ll know!):

https://pontiuscominius.wordpress.com/

This is an angle I hadn’t considered, but should have. It is an elementary kind of problem that gets at the root of other problems. This comment is also one of the reasons I blog on writing. Thank you, Pontius’, for sharing this thought.

 

Lemme throw in the fourth alternative. It’s sort of like Fog of War, which isn’t just a setting on many different war games that allows you to look at the enemy troop dispositions. Fog of War, or rather, Fog of Life, is that there are no pat explanations for most things that happen to you. If I’m driving on a freeway and then there’s a traffic jam, and I finally get to the end of the jam and there’s NOTHING THERE, it annoys me greatly. I want to know why we were slowing when there’s no apparent reason. It could be that there was a phantom accident there from 2 hours ago, and the traffic is still clearing, or a dog ran across the freeway 3 minutes ago and now is gone or squished, but regardless, as a normal enough human my curiosity has not been sated.

In the infodump world, I’d turn on the radio and they’d announce there had been an accident there and there was still slowing even though the accident cleared, or the know-it-all character in the passenger seat would announce, “I saw that accident there two hours ago, I should have warned you.” In real life, that very rarely happens. I go on with driving to my destination and I don’t know why I was in that traffic, but I can guess.

Likewise, in your fantasy story, to drive your narrative on, skip the infodumps and the know-it-all character. The KIAC is a pain in the keester, because the reader will say, “if KIAC knows it all, why doesn’t HE do the quest?” And the author mumbles something about KIAC not being suitable, not wanting to take it on, and so on.

Further, human nature leads most of us to avoid embarrassment by asking obvious questions. If I hear a conversation where some writers are talking about Kee-ack, if I have no skin in the game I may ask “what’s a Kee-ack?” And they’d say “Know-it-all character.” If I was worried about losing face or respect, I’d keep my mouth shut because I’m afraid the authors will mock me later or even right now for not knowing.

My seven year old frequently doesn’t know words I use. I have to prompt him to find out – “do you know what _________ means?” “No.” Explanation then follows. I know that his level of understanding isn’t high, he’s seven. Your character who is thrust into this old war with rules he does not understand is going to either have to be an extraordinary person who will ask the questions, or he will go through being ignorant and suffering for it. Which kind of character is he? People don’t usually volunteer helpful information to new people. You gotta be proactive.

There’s more conflict in the ignorance, if you think about it. Your characters only know what they each know, and it’s compartmentalized, and they don’t share important information with each other, they don’t always realize that something important is important, and you end up with confusion and ignorance and conflict.

An example is Pearl Harbor. There was a radar station set up on Oahu and it was manned when the Japanese air attack first came in. We know that it was a massive air attack. The radar operators thought it was a glitch of the new machinery. The higher ups either disregarded it or didn’t get the message. What if they’d scrambled the air assets to get armed and up in the air, and gotten the ships ready with ammo and men to man the AA guns and fought? Was there even time enough for that? It’s the hindsight we have to see the clumsy ignorance of people having pieces of the puzzle but not knowing there was a puzzle or that their piece was key.

Finally, your KIAC is flesh and blood and has opinions and thoughts and fuzzy, incomplete or just wrong information. He’s biased. And that bias is going to come out in the information he gives your protagonist. He may be well-meaning, or he may be envious of your protagonist and set him up with dangerous or bad information. That gives you more conflict and if you can’t trust the KIAC, it introduces a level of paranoia to things. Nothing is black or white.

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Writer’s improvement hell – repetition

Improvement

I thought I had a good post on this topic, but I’m not sure I do. There isn’t one specific improvement situation that I feel like I can speak to just now. Sure, there’s a lot of stuff I’m constantly working on, but nothing in particular is sicking out in my mind. So, instead of banging on about what I’m stuck on today, I think I’ll ramble on about a couple of things I’m constantly working on. The first is starting sentences. One of the things I try to do when I write is NOT start subsequent sentences, or even sentences in the same paragraph, with the same word. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, but most of the time it’s not. Even then, I still find myself being repetitive in this manner. Perhaps the first question one might ask is why bother? Well, it’s because it reads better that way. If I truly understood why this was, I wouldn’t be in writer’s improvement hell.

If you look at my last paragraph, you’ll notice that none of the sentences begin with the same word. The first draft had several repeats, but once it was revised to specifically eliminate these, the flow of the paragraph got better. I’m not going to try and claim it’s a golden example of how to write anything, but it does read reasonably well. Had multiple sentences started with the same word, it would feel repetitive, and that never reads well. Again, there are times when it just makes sense to repeat, so keep that in mind. An interesting side note here is when developing a presentation, I take the same approach. This tends to make the presentation seem more dynamic and less scripted. To make this work though, you need to kick in throw-away words. In the case of paragraph 1 of this blog post (for lack of a better example just now) The second sentence starts with ‘Sure’. This is absolutely unnecessary, the sentence could have just started with “there’s”. If I had done that though, it would have felt a little repetitive. Granted, not so repetitive that it would have sounded awful, but it seems better to me.

Having gone through that, there is a second writer’s improvement problem to be dealt with. That first paragraph still has a problem as far as readability is concerned. It’s the type of thing that drives my sister nuts (I’m not sure she reads these with any regularity, if so: Hello KDW and congratulations on your test!), the word ‘I’, in various incarnations, is repeated WAY too many times. This sort of repetition is probably not necessary. When writing in 3rd person, you get stuck using ‘him’, ‘his’, ‘he’, ‘her’, and ‘she’ a little more often than feels comfortable, but I couldn’t claim I’ve got an easy rule of thumb or remedy for that. There is, however, a remedy for paragraph #1. And here it is:

I sat down thinking there was a good topic for this post rolling around in my brain. Turns out, there wasn’t a specific situation I’m working through right now worth speaking to. Sure, there’s a lot of stuff I’m constantly trying to improve upon, but nothing in particular is sicking out in my mind. So, instead of banging on about today’s sticky points, I’ll ramble on about a couple of things constantly causing me heartburn. The first is starting sentences. One of the things I try to do when writing is to NOT start subsequent sentences, or even sentences in the same paragraph, with the same word. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, but most of the time it’s not. Even then, this sort of repetition creeps into my writing. Perhaps the first question one might ask is why bother? Well, it’s because it reads better that way. If the technical reason was clear to me, I wouldn’t be in writer’s improvement hell.

In the second incarnation of the first paragraph, the word ‘I’, in various incarnations, is repeated a total of six times. The first paragraph has it repeated that many times in the first two sentences. Holy crap! Is that strictly necessary? –Probably not. Now, the best part of this whole post is the fact that the issue illustrated here is something I’m constantly struggling with, and often get wrong. On the bright side, I do recognize the problem, and more than anything else, that will help me to fix 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.