Writing Excuses 19.36: A Close Reading on Tension: Narrative vs. Contextual

Sep. 12th, 2024 08:52 pm
mbarker: (Me typing?)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 19.36: A Close Reading on Tension: Narrative vs. Contextual
 
 
Key points: Narrative tension is tension happening in the story, on the page. Contextual tension is what the reader brings to the story. How much do you assume your readers are bringing context with them? Language and dialect. Narrative structure, tension, all that is a pitcher, and the writer puts whatever they want in that. The audience brings you their glass, and you don't know what kind of glass they will bring. It may not match the drink, but they can still enjoy it. There's always context. Use the characters having memories to bring context onto the page. Characters always carry their context with them.
 
[Season 19, Episode 36]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Howard] You're invited to the Writing Excuses Cruise, an annual event for writers who want dedicated time to focus on honing their craft, connecting with their peers, and getting away from the grind of daily life. Join the full cast of Writing Excuses as we sail from Los Angeles aboard the Navigator of the Seas from September 19th through 27th in 2024, with stops in Ensenada, Cabo San Lucas, and Mazatlán. The cruise offers seminars, exercises, and group sessions, an ideal blend of relaxation, learning, and writing, all while sailing the Mexican Riviera. For tickets and more information, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.
 
[Season 19, Episode 36]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Tension: Narrative vs. Contextual.
[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
 
[Erin] I'm obsessed with the topic that we're going to be talking about today...
[Laughter]
[Erin] Which is narrative and contextual tension. So, just to give a this is what I mean when I say that, to me, narrative tension is the tension that's actually happening in the story. It is when your characters are tense, when your... the setting is tense, anything that's actually happening on the page. Contextual tension is what the reader is bringing to the table. The example that I always use is if you write a story called Last Dinner in Pompeii, and it's just a normal story of people having dinner, we all know that Pompeii will be buried by ash the next day, so we will bring plenty of tension to the table, even if they're just talking about how next week they're going to go shopping. We're like, "Oh, you won't."
[Laughter]
[Erin] That brings [garbled]. That's contextual, but not narrative at all. I think this, Ring Shout, is a work that obviously lives in a place of contextual tension…
[DongWon] The context that I'm bringing to this is I've been so excited for this episode because I think three years ago on the Writing Excuses Cruise at like one in the morning, you explained this idea to me after a day of hanging out, and my jaw was on the floor. Because I'd never thought about it this way. It's such an important concept, and it is so useful. So, getting to finally talk about it on mic for the podcast is a resolution of the kind of tension for me. So.
[Erin] Love it.
[Mary Robinette] That's also one of the reasons that some works don't translate, because they bring a lot of contextual tension from their home locations that the audience in the new location doesn't have. It was one of the things that happen to me when I was reading Three Body Problem, that there was a lot of context that I was just missing. With Ring Shout, I had, because I am from the American South, there was a lot of contextual tension for me that was layered onto the book where I was anticipating things. I think that P. Djèlí Clark was using that very intentionally throughout the book.
 
[Erin] It's an interesting question, though, which is how much do you want to assume that your audience is bringing that context with them? I also… My family… I have family from the American South, family from slavery, family who experienced racism in the South. So, for me, I'm like, "Oh, this feels very tense on a lot of levels." But if you're from another country or you've never heard of the Klan, do you think that the story still works? Or do you think that there's something that is required in the context in order to make the tension happen?
[DongWon] I remember around the launch of the TV show Lovecraft Country, there was a lot of conversation. Because the opening scene of that show is an actual historical massacre of Black Americans in the American South. It's referenced also in Ring Shout. It's mentioned. I had never heard of this event. I didn't know about it. I also grew up part of it in the South. Racial politics is a personal interest, of things that I've read about and studied. But I just didn't know this particular event. So a lot of the press coverage was about what an incredible work it is, both that it's bringing in all this contextual elements, but also educating such a broad audience about it. Right? So I think it can do sort of both and it's one of the challenges of leaning on that contextual tension is you need to work with your audiences to some extent, but it's also not your responsibility to educate them about it in the moment. But if you sort of give them enough of the context clues to understand what kind of thing we're talking about and then they can go into doing the research about it on their own.
[Howard] It's worth pointing out here that the narrative versus contextual dichotomy is enormous. Absolutely enormous. I'm sure you've all had that experience where you're talking about a film with somebody and halfway through your like, "It's like we watched two different movies." It's because, yeah, about 80 percent of what you get out of a thing has to do with what you brought into the thing.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] I mean, there are things that I'll watch where the lead actor or one of the actors whose prominently featured is someone I just no longer like because of a me too or whatever, and that is a new context that didn't exist when it was created, but it's a real thing. Planning for it is fantastically difficult. My counsel to writers is don't assume that everybody has the same context that you do. But on your first draft, trust your context and write the story that you want to write. Then you're going to have to work with your beta readers, with your editor, to see if those narrative…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] Versus contextual bits are fighting.
[DongWon] Well, one of the things I like most about this was the confidence with which P. Djèlí Clark…
[Howard] Oh, my goodness, yes.
[DongWon] Approaches the historical context.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] We're dropped into a situation, we're dropped into a scene. Nothing's explained to us, other than the fantastical elements. Those are explained to us. But the political historical context, we are assumed to either know it or pick it up from atmospheric clues around what's being discussed. I found that to be very powerful and very useful.
[Erin] I think that one of the reasons that that works so well is in that opening scene, you're dropped into that sort of primal life versus death tension. You get a group of people who obviously know each other, and are… We sympathize with, who are immediately trying to kill some horrific monster. So it tells you, okay, I understand what the stakes are. I understand who I'm rooting for, and who I'm not. Now, as I get more context, I can use that to build out the world. But I think it grabs you so immediately that you're not worried about the context, because you're like, oh, if there's a giant monster in front of you, you should probably hack it to death. I totally get that. Now that I'm in, now you can tell me about why it's important and what's going on around it.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that that particular scene… That was the first scene where I had that layer of… That extra layer of tension. Because I was… What I was fully anticipating was going to happen is that they would defeat that monster, and then they would get… Have a bunch of angry white people running after them. That's not what happens in the book. What happens is worse and different. Maybe not worse. It's different. That's one of the things that I… When I say that I think that P. Djèlí Clark is doing it very intentionally. That a lot of what he's doing is setting up, here's this… Here's the context. Here's a thing that can go wrong. But I'm not going to do that one. I'm going to do a different one. That's… That, again, is that thing for me when you're playing with… When you're using historical work and you're playing with someone's knowledge of that time, where you can put some additional tension on the story by putting those two things in opposition, by moving directions you weren't necessarily expecting. But also, if you don't know that's a possibility, it still plays… Like, you don't need the contextual tension for it to be really terrifying.
[Howard] In the… In the previous episode, we talked about how this book uses a lot of horror techniques. But it's kind of a fantasy action adventure historical. That particular tool of setting up… Having our characters be aware of what could go wrong and prepare themselves as best they can for this worst-case scenario that they're imagining, and then discovering that the worst case scenario is actually 25 degrees to the left and is way worse. That's straight out of the horror playbook. So you are not wrong in feeling like this is a horror novel, because that's done so expertly and so often.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting, and one of the reasons this is such a great example of this is the contextual tension remains contextual. It doesn't really… It never fully finds its way into the narrative and into the in text tension. He kind of makes an agreement with us in that opening scene…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] And kind of sticks to that boundary in a way that I think is very savvy, but still leverages the awfulness of the actual history to increase… To add extra weight to a lot of the character [garbled], to a lot of the characters decisions and to the emotional intensity that we feel throughout.
[Erin] Yeah. I will now pause because of the context that we are on a podcast and we need to take a break.
 
[Howard] I write best when I got music to isolate me and my personal acoustic space from the rest of the world. Music with no words in it works best for me, and one of my very favorite playlists is Random Friday, the 2011 album from Solar Fields. It's through composed, each track flowing both thematically and seamlessly into the next. So I never get distracted by a gap telling me I might need to restart the music. Solar Fields really leaned into this, because there's an eleventh track which is a 78 minute continuous mix of the first 10 tracks. Just in case your player of choice doesn't do gap lists gaplessly. But what does it sound like? Well, it's upbeat ambience and electronic and I listened to it while I wrote this.
 
[Erin] And we're back. I want to take this moment to talk a little bit about in detail, because we love to get into the text in these close readings, and talk about the use of language in this. Because I think that some of that what do you have from context and what do you have on the page is really evident in the way that the text uses Gullah. Now Gullah is a real language, and it's used here occasionally, mostly in the Nana Jean character uses it, and that's the way that she speaks, and if you have the context to be able to understand Gullah, you'll understand what she's saying more readily. But what I love is that she actually, in text, warns, very drastically, that bad things are coming. So it's an important narrative tension moment, but it still lives within the context of being in Gullah. If you give up and sort of don't read that part or skim past it, you could, theoretically, miss that moment of tension. What I think that Clark does so well here is that it's repeated. So she says, "Bad weather's coming," essentially, and then it comes in at the end of the chapter in italics. So it's like, did you miss all of this? Because the context held you back? I'm going to bring it back on the page in a narrative way so that there's no way you can miss that bad things are coming. The word bad is there, even if you don't understand anything else. I just really love that. So I wanted to throw it out…
[Mary Robinette] It is one of the things that I enjoyed so much about this book, and why I wanted to listen to it in audio, because in audio, you get all… Because that's not the only language that's showing up in there, that's not the only dialect. So you… Getting all of that interplay is so much fun. The other thing that it does, besides that is that it brings in the contextual thing about different class perceptions that people have. That frequently when people hear someone… People will think Gullah is a dialect as opposed to a language. They will hear it and think that the person in modern day is like low class, uneducated. Whereas Nana Jean is a very powerful woman. I love the fact that he is using that, he is subverting some of the expectations that we often have from modern day, some of the contextual expectations. He's subverting those in the narrative tension that he's using. I think it's so much fun.
[Howard] Even without the Gullah, the narrator speaks and often omits definite or indefinite articles or conjunctions of to be. We up on the tower. Or no… Yeah. We up on the tower, rather than we are up on the tower. It took me five or six pages to realize, oop, no, this is just the voice of my POV character, and I'm all in. Had I… I'm not sure if there was a context that was expected of me or if the narrative taught me that. But it was definitely there, and it was a little while before I stopped noticing it is a linguistic thing in the book.
[DongWon] Well, I think the language does a really good job, I mean, both in the use of Gullah, and the use of [garbled] dialect things, and then overall, the general use of a particular voice of the narrator. I think this is such an important thing when it comes to a lot of fiction of communicating who this book is for. Right? It's being written for a specific audience, while still being accessible to everybody. Right? Like most of us here are not of the culture that this was written in the perspective of, but I got a ton out of it. I had a great time reading it, and I learned a lot reading it and all of that. But the idea of it is written for an in community reader, that is still accessible from a broader perspective, I think is really powerful.
 
[Mary Robinette] There's an analogy that I use sometimes when I'm talking about this, which is that you can think of narrative structure, tension, all of this, you can think of it as a pitcher. You can put anything you want to in that. Then, your audience comes to you with their glass. You don't know what glass they're coming to you with. So if I am… Say, if I've got a fine Pinot Noir in a beautiful crystal whatever, and I pour it into a Riedel glass, a Riedel wineglass which is the glass that it's intended for, it's like,, this is a perfect match. But if you come to me with a red Solo cup, you're still going to enjoy the wine, just maybe not the way I intended it. On the other hand, if that pitcher is filled with hot apple cider and you come to me with a wineglass, it's going to shatter. So, one of the things that… When you're talking about this in audience, writing it for a specific audience, you're writing it knowing some of the context they're going to bring to it, knowing that that's who you want to write it for, and that… Everybody else can enjoy it, but that's not the intended audience.
[Erin] Yet, sometimes…
[Howard] If I'm pouring whiskey and you're coming to me with a sippy cup…
[Mary Robinette] If you're pouring whiskey, I'm…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] You're coming to me with a sippy cup and a baby bottle? No! Stop that right now!
[Mary Robinette] No. That was when my parents actually dealt with…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Colds with me. But anyway…
[Laughter]
[Erin] I was going to say, also, sometimes you gotta shatter people's glasses.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly.
[Erin] Sometimes, that's okay. I think that's one of the things that I love about what publishing I think is doing these days, though probably not as much as it could be, is letting people tell a story…
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] Where they don't have to have the right context.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] Because the narrative tension is strong enough in this piece that if you have no idea what's going on, it is still a story of people killing monsters that are horrible and have…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Mouth eyes and just things that are not going to work for you. Like, no one's going to be like, oh, yeah, love those mouth eyes.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] So even if you don't understand what is happening and the context, you'll still get a great read out of it. I think that what has happened in the past is that sometimes people will see the context and shy away from it, and not see what's going on in the narrative beneath it, or how the two intersect. So that if you have both, I think you get the perfect glass...
[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] For the perfect drink. But, if not, you still enjoy it.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. With me, I was like, oh, okay, I'm going to go need to get an insulated thermos...
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] When I'm reading this right now.
 
[DongWon] To slip into the publishing conversation a little bit, one of my very favorite reads in the last several years is Torrey Peters Detransition Baby which is a novel about the trans experience. A very complicated aspect of the trans experience. But when Torrey Peters had that book published, she was very insistent to her publishers that it not be pitched and marketed as a quote unquote trans book or even a queer book, but as an upmarket women's fiction book. At every point, she was very insistent that, nope, you market this how you would market any book for the broadest female audience you would normally publish for in terms of, like, contemporary fiction. I think that was an incredibly effective way to get a book that was very much written for a specific in community audience… So much of that book was for me and other folks like me who live in New York and are trans and are queer and all of that, and that was a very powerful, but it was read and was so accessible to such a broad audience that I think it really reached hundreds of thousands of people.
[Mary Robinette] I think the same thing is very clearly true with Ring Shout when you look at the fact that in the year that it came out, it was nominated for all the big awards. It won the British Fantasy, it won the Locus Award, it won the Nebula Award. So this is a book that was written for a specific audience, but clearly resonates…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Because of its use of all sorts of narrative devices with a much larger audience. So…
[DongWon] I think we did a great job of packaging it to make it clear what the book is, but then it didn't feel tracked in a particular subcategory or only for a certain readership, which [garbled]
[Howard] Now when we talk about narrative versus contextual as a source of tension, there's a part of me that can't help but think that the greatest experience of that tension is on the part of the publisher, who's like, "Boy. I hope we split the difference between the narrative and the contextual correctly in how we positioned this book, because what shelf does it go on? Does it go in sci-fi/fantasy, does it go in horror, does it… Where does it go?" Maybe that's a little too meta-. But…
[DongWon] No. It's…
[Howard] I can't not think that.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Erin] I will say that I think for our listeners, who are like, "I'm not planning to write in a fraught historical era." There are still things to take away from it, even… Because there's always context.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] Readers always bring context, even if it is the smallest. Even if it is I'm reading a romance, and I expect the characters to end up together, even though it hasn't happened on the page yet, this is the type of experience that I'm bringing to the table. If it's the pattern recognition that you, DongWon, that you were talking about in a previous episode, where it's like, okay, things are happening and I know this tends to end this creepy way, so that's what I think is going to happen next. So, thinking a lot about what is your audience bringing to the table at that moment, both in terms of their life experiences and their belief about narrative, what are they used to, what are the patterns that you think they've walked through, so you can figure out how do I want to either stay with that and reinforce it, or how do I want to subvert it? When do I want to use it for good or ill? But if you're not thinking about it at all, then you can't be intentional about it.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] I think it's something that we often forget, because we bring our own context as writers, and we sometimes forget that readers will come from a completely different place.
[DongWon] I think this taps into Mary Robinette's metaphor in a certain way of you don't know what cup your audience is bringing to this particular fountain. Right? It… You can't control your reader. You have to make space for them in certain ways, but also be really true and honest to the story that you're trying to tell and what you're trying to accomplish with it. One thing that is very interesting about this book is it is in part about arts in the audience and reception of that art and the impact that art can have on how people think and behave in the world. Right? Because Birth of a Nation is such an important piece of how this story is told, and it's about how you can use art as propaganda to manipulate people in really extreme ways. So, I think it's really interesting that as we are talking about the contextual history of this story and the way that creates tension, it is itself engaging… I said earlier it doesn't really engage with like the contextual tension. It does in this one specific way, which is what was the role of that film in American history, what were the consequences of it, and it… Go ahead.
[Mary Robinette] To that point, because that's so important, not only is that a contextual thing, that's something that is brought into the narrative of the tension. In order to make sure that the audience has the right context to understand this, we get a lot of information about Birth of a Nation and how it's being used, both for the magical purposes of the book, but also the historical context of it. There is a… That's, I think, an important thing for you to understand and also that if you are… If you want the book that you are writing to survive outside of the context, even just to survive down history, two… Then you have to… You have to make sure that it's on the page.
[Erin] A great example of this is… I don't know exactly where it is in the text, but I think there is a reference where it says, "1919 was a bad year…"
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] "For all of us." For me, I know that that was in the red summer era of Klan rides and horrible numbers of lynchings in the South. But the fact that they all agreed, and then I think everybody had like a slight him bit of memory about why it was bad or what had happened brought it on the page in a way that.. I brought a lot more context to it probably as somebody who knows a lot about that era, but there was enough there that you understood that they all had this common experience in a little bit about what it was. It was on the page, but also, I was able to bring what was off the page onto it.
[Mary Robinette] I will also say that if you're writing secondary world fantasy, this is a tool that you can use, because your characters will have context that the readers will never have because they're living in a fantasy world. So this kind of tool is something that you can use to give context to something without having to have like, "And now, I shall tell you about the battle of the five red armies…"
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] "I'm going to pause this tavern brawl so that we all…" It's like you don't have to do that.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] You can just have these moments where the characters are all living memories and bringing it onto the page that way.
[DongWon] I think that's also why there is so many prologues in secondary world fantasy and epic fantasy in particular is they're trying to give you context so that you can have some of that contextual tension as you roll into the thing itself, but also, again, think about genre expectations. We read Lord of the Rings, so somebody's going on a journey. We're going to have some context and some expectations about what that means.
[Erin] I also think, and then we will give you homework and wrap up for the week. But I think it's also important that characters carry their context with them.
[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] I think that when you do historical, it's easier to see how that has happened, because we understand how it happened in history. But one thing that I do not like is when you have a prologue that will give you all the context, but it doesn't feel like it actually like it's being carried. If there was a war of the five red armies, and, like, everyone involved was part of it, how does that war shape them? How does it change the way they see things? When do they recognize somebody from one of the other armies and it changes the way that they deal with that character? So, thinking of the context that your own characters are bringing with them is a great way to add more tension to the page.
 
[Erin] With that, I have your homework, which is to take a scene that you're working on, one that has tension or could use more of it, and put a piece of information at the start that is only meant for the reader. Some piece of context. Could be historical, could be that you know that this is going to end in the death of a character. Anything that is extra context. Then think about revising the scene, believing that the reader has that information. How does it change the way that you actually write the scene and deliver the tension within that context?
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.49: Giving Your Story A Voice

Dec. 7th, 2023 05:24 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 18.49: Giving Your Story A Voice
 
 
Key points: Voice? Mechanical, aesthetic, and personal voice. Mechanical, 1st person, 3rd person, YA, genre? Aesthetic, what does it sound like, rhythms? Personal, idiosyncrasies. The telegraph operator's fist. Develop your personal voice, learn to trust your own taste. What makes one voice sound different? Pacing, sentence structure and punctuation. Accent, sentence structure and word choice. Attitude? Are you smiling, mad, or what? Character background. Accents? Go to original sources. Get an author/editor from that community to translate into dialect. Be wary of dialects. Remember that voice is not static. A hack - re-key a page of an author with a strong aesthetic voice before writing your own story to get their rhythm. Soundtracks may also help you get the right feel. 
 
[Season 18, Episode 49]
 
[DongWon] Hello writers. Whether you're doing NaNoWriMo, editing your newest project, or just desperately trying to keep up with your TBR pile, it's hard to find the time to plan and cook healthy and nutritious meals to keep you energized on these jam-packed days. So, I'm here to tell you about Factor, America's number one ready-to-eat meal delivery service. They can help you fuel up fast for breakfast, lunch, and dinner with chef-prepared, dietitian-approved, ready-to-eat meals delivered straight to your door. You'll save time, eat well, and stay on track with one less excuse to keep you from writing. This November, get Factor and enjoy eating well without the hassle. Simply choose your meals and enjoy fresh, flavor-packed deliveries right to your door. Ready in just two minutes, no prep and no mess. Head to factormeals.com/WX50 and use code WX50 to get 50% off. That's code WX50 at factormeals.com/WX50 to get 50% off.
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 18, Episode 49] 
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Giving Your Story a Voice.
[DongWon] 15 minutes long.
[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Erin] And we're back to the deep dives. We hope you had an amazing NaNoWriMo, that you one, if you even wrote one word, you're a writer in my eyes. But…
[Mary Robinette] Same.
[Erin] I hope you had a great, great time. Now we're going to come back. I think this is actually a really great time to come back to the deep dives, because we're going to be talking a little more about sort of craft on the page level. Before we left, we were talking big worldbuilding things. Now we're going to be getting into the nitty-gritty, starting with voice. The reason I picked this topic is because I have been accused, in addition to being accused of writing horror…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] I have also been accused of writing voice-y stories. Which I actually do agree with. And that the stories that I write have sort of strong character voices driving them. So I wanted to talk about what voice even means. I feel like it's one of these words that gets thrown around a lot, and, like, people say it and everyone nods, and then you go away and you're like, "Did I mean what they meant?" So I'm kind of curious, when we talk about a voice on the page, what does that mean to you all? Like, what is that… What is the absence of that?
[Mary Robinette] So, I have… I, likewise, have strong feelings about voice…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] And the fact that we use it so indiscriminately. But I think that we use it to mean three different things. Surprising no one, I'm going to use puppetry as an example. So, I think that voice means… That there are three things that we're talking about, the mechanical voice, the aesthetic voice, and the personal voice. So when you think about puppetry, mechanical… You say, what is the style of puppet, mechanical style is, is it a marionette, is it a hand puppet, what is it? With voice on the page, is it first-person, is it third person, are you writing for YA, like, what are the mechanics of that voice? The aesthetic is what does it… What does the puppet look like? Does it look like a Muppet, like a handcarved puppet from Appalachia? Voice on the page is what does it sound like? What are the rhythms of the voice, what are the… Does it sound like Jane Austen, does it sound like someone from the Bayou, does it sound transparent? Which basically just is a… Means fashionable. Because Jane Austen was writing transparent prose in her day, and the people writing transparent prose these days are people who are…
[DongWon] Just means mainstream.
[Mary Robinette] Mainstream. Yeah. Then you have the personal voice, which is the thing that you… Idiosyncrasies that you yourself bring to it. So when you hand the same puppet to two different puppeteers, it will look like a different character. Like when with Kermit the frog, when Jim Henson died, and Steve Whitmire took over, people freaked out. Because Kermit just looked like a different character. So I think what happens with when we're talking to writers, is that that all of the personal experience that you've got, all of your taste, is going to affect the way you're writing. What I see happen to a lot of early writers is that they fall in love with another writer and they try to match their aesthetic, not understanding that the aesthetic for that writer arises from their personal voice. So they will actually overwrite their own personal voice in trying to chase an aesthetic. Which isn't to say that you can't like do a pastiche that isn't… That also reflects your personal voice. But I think that you're not approaching them consciously to some degree, or if you're not aware of the differences, that it can be very easy to suppress what is important, why you yourself is the person who should be telling a story.
 
[Howard] Those first two, the mechanical and the aesthetic, are things that you can lean on craft and you can adjust. The third one is extremely difficult to adjust because that's the one that is the most embedded in who we are. In the age of telegraph and all through… All the way up through World War II, telegraph operators had what was called a fist. A recognizable… You could tell who the telegraph operator was just by the way they did the dots and dashes. That was something that code operators knew happened, and they would try to change it so that they couldn't be identified. They very rarely succeeded. I bring this up just because if someone tells you, "Oh, I can hear your voice," and you're uncomfortable with this… Get comfortable with it, because your voice is important, and changing it is hard.
[DongWon] Yeah. I think Howard's kind of hitting on something really important there. Which is… People ask me all the time what am I looking for in a project, what do I look for… When do I get excited about a submission, a query, whatever it is? For me, the thing I always say is I need to be able to read the thing that you're working on and see you in this. I want to know who the writer is. I want to feel like you are the only person who could tell this story in this way in this moment in time. That's not true for everybody. That is a very personal thing that I get most excited about. But I think Howard is absolutely right, that the first two things that Mary Robinette was laying out are craft things that you can adjust. Right? You can adjust sort of the mechanical thing to fit your audience. Right? Are you writing YA? Are you writing a mystery? Are you writing a thriller? These will require different kinds of beats and pacing and sentence structures, and also, the aesthetic voice is very much a personal thing, but you can shift that too. You can shift to certain dialects from story to story to story. You're often going to want to move that a little bit to match the setting, the type of story, whatever it is. The last one is the most interesting to me, and is the most [garbled setting] to me, because I think Howard's right that you can't change it. So what you need to do is change everything around it to reveal it in ways that are exciting to the reader. You… Bringing out what is important to you, what your point of view is, what your perspective is, into the fiction is the thing that almost, like, you're choosing how to reveal it and how to make it felt in the fiction. You're not trying to change who you are, you're trying to let me know who you are in a way that makes it legible to me and exciting to me and engaging to me, the reader.
[Erin] The funny thing is that I agree, but I disagree.
[Laughter]
[Erin] The reason that I slightly disagree is, for me, those last two things, the aesthetic voice and the personal voice, are a bit of a slider.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] So, when I write, I actually try very hard to get deep into the character voice, and you have less of a personal voice in the story, if that makes any sense. There are things that are… I think of them as like tells in a certain way, which are, like, I tend to like compound… Longer compound sentences, I love the word just which I probably shouldn't love as much as I do. But, that part of recognizing a story that's by me is in the subsuming of voice, of my voice inside the voice of the character.
[DongWon] But I think that's aesthetic voice. Right? In terms of the personal voice, I read all three of those stories and I say, "These are Erin Robert's stories because they are interested in certain topics. They have a certain perspective. The world is rendered in certain ways." Right? The connection between Sour Milk Girls and Snake Season… Aesthetically, they could not be more different. Right? Like, they're coming from different settings, different voices, different styles, different moods. But I look at both of these and like, "Oh, these are stories about people trying to survive in a world that is set against them. These are stories about empathizing with people who would be monstrous in other ways." That feels like something that you yourself are interested in. I know that's not how we normally think about voice, but it's so subtle and so woven through the story, that to me, I don't know where else to put it. Right? It could be themes, in some ways, but it's not that cold. It is more… It really is just kind of this metaphor of the telegraphers like fist and tapping things out. It's almost… It's an uncontrolled, unconscious thing in some ways that kind of can't be erased. In a way that's exciting and you lean into it in ways that make me like, "This is dope. I love this."
 
[Howard] Circling back to the I have been accused of being a horror writer, or accused of writing things that have…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] I… If it's good art, and you're accusing me of something, I want to be found guilty.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] I want to be demonstrably guilty of this. If my voice is something that is unique and has value, but people tell me they can hear it in multiple stories, I need to be okay with that.
[Mary Robinette] This is the thing for me about the personal voice. You'll hear people say, "You need to develop your voice," or, "Don't worry about your voice, it will develop on its own," or whatever. I think that you do need to develop your personal voice. But what that means is learning to trust your own taste. That, for me, is that slider that you're talking about, Erin, is that you have learned to trust your own personal taste. So your personal voice then affects the aesthetics of everything that you choose.
[DongWon] I will also say your personal voice does change over time.
[Mary Robinette] Absolutely.
[DongWon] It's not a fixed point. As you read things, as you write things, as you live in the world, you change as a person, and that can be felt in your fiction too, in ways that I think are exciting. That's why I love watching a career develop. I love reading through an author's career, like, what were they writing when they were starting out, what were they writing later. William Gibson's one of my favorite writers, but William Gibson writing Neuromancer versus William Gibson writing the Millennium trilogy versus writing the Jackpot series, just three wildly different people. I can see the thread of that person growing over time, but it has been so thrilling to watch his thought and perspectives develop over the decades. When you get to see that in a writer, I think that's tremendously exciting.
[Erin] Yeah. Agreed.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] We are about to take a break. When we come back, I want to dive a little bit into the aesthetic voice, and actually how do you make stories sound different and bring the character to life through voice. We'll be right back.
 
[Mary Robinette] I have another short story. This is Exhalation by Ted Chang. I was just completely captivated by this short story. It is one of those that is all aliens all the time. Where he really trusts the reader. He starts, and he does not explain what's going on. You have to put the pieces together as he goes, and it's deeply compelling. How it unfolds, the things that you learn about it, the many layers of worldbuilding that you get in this very, very tight space. Exhalation by Ted Chang.
 
[Erin] We are back, and we are still in our own voices.
[Laughter]
[Erin] But what makes our voices different from each other? I'm curious, like, what makes one voice… Not sort of the personal kind of… The fist voice, but, like, the voice of one character sound different from another. Mechanically.
[Mary Robinette] There's so many different things that can do that. It really depends on what you're looking at. But, there are 4 basic things. There's… This comes from me being an audiobook narrator. So, voice, for me, like, for you, comes really naturally, and I had to reverse engineer what I was doing. When I was being trained to do voice work, you've got pitch, placement, pacing, accent, and attitude. Pitch is how high or low, you cannot represent that on the page. Placement is where it resonates, again, can't really represent that on the page aside from reporting. But, accent, attitude, and pacing, you can. So, pacing is all about the sentence structure and punctuation. Punctuation exists on the page, as if for me as a narrator, to record the breaths and pauses. That's where… That includes paragraph breaks, that includes italics, all of that is to describe the non-pronunciation parts of language. Then you've got… So you've got pacing, you've got accent. Accent is about sentence structure and word choice. Like, coming from the south, when I'm talking to you all, I will say you all, when I'm talking to my parents, I'll say y'all. I'm often throwing an extra just like weird flourishes to the language that it doesn't need, like, instead of "I'm going to the grocery store," "I'm going to go on over to the grocery store." What the extra words are doing, I have no idea. So you don't… This is not to say that you need to like put phonetic representations on the page. But, you do think about the sentence structure and word choice. Then, attitude, when you're talking to someone on the phone, you can tell whether or not they're smiling. You get the email that you're like, "Oo, they are really mad." That changes the way we approach language. So you can think about these things and adjust them in a very mechanical way, or you can just think about trying to replicate something that you're hearing.
 
[Howard] On one level further up from that… Fair listener, you probably absent the total differences between my voice and Mary Robinette's voice, Mary Robinette will lean into puppetry metaphor. I will lean into audio engineering and music metaphor. Because we have different backgrounds. That is an aspect of character voice that you should delight in. Knowing a character's back story and knowing that the way they were raised, the career that they followed, the parents they had, the culture they had, will affect the way they narrate their point of view to the reader.
 
[Erin] One thing… Getting back to accent specifically, which is a really interesting one.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] How do you make it work, and especially, you may be thinking I'm writing a secondary world where accents are completely different than the way that we think about them. I did a lot of thinking about this for Wolfy Things, which has, I would say, a flavor of Appalachian English to it. But I actually went and did a bunch of reading, I listen to recordings of folktales being told by some folks in the mountains.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] I tried to figure out, and I think this is something, Mary Robinette, you said before, the difference between sort of the essence of what they were doing and how they were expressing it. I was, like, I'm not going to attempt to write in a full accent and actually like do exactly the way that they would do it. But as I was listening, I started saying, what are some commonalities that I'm hearing in the way… What are words that people are using, like y'all and ain't. Our sentences shorter or longer? Where are people putting the emphasis? Then said, "Well, I can take that and put it in my story." That way, it's not like I'm trying to, like, it can feel like a mockery I think when you try to exactly copy someone's accent from a group that you don't belong to, because there are rules going on beneath the surface that are hard to understand.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Dialect is superhard and dangerous. Yes.
[Erin] Exactly.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, with dialect, one of the things… Yes, I'm 100% with you on this. I did a thing with Of Noble Family, where it was set in Antigua and I wanted to represent the dialect and also knew that there was no possible way I could get it. Because it's… I'm not from there, there's so many layers of that. So I wrote it with the rhythms that were natural to me, and then I hired an Antiguan author and editor to translate it into the dialect. She would periodically be like, "What is this?" I'm like, "Well, uhm…" I would have to translate my dialect back into standard English so that… It was this whole fascinating process because their… Dialects are so widely varied. I think that one of the things that people will do is they often have a media representation of dialect in their brain. So I think what you're talking about is like going to listen to primary sources. So important.
[DongWon] Yup. I mean, southern accents on TV, you'll get for different regions in the same town that apparently… That supposedly, no one's left in their whole life. You're like…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] "I don't know. This is a lot…"
[Mary Robinette] Uhm, no. That is actually… That is a thing that absolutely happens.
[DongWon] It can, but…
[Mary Robinette] No. Okay, I know what you're talking about.
[DongWon] You know what I mean, though?
[Mary Robinette] Sorry. My favorite thing that will happen to me as a narrator is that I will narrate a book, set… I just narrated House of Good Bones by Ursula Vernon, set in North Carolina, which is where I grew up. The number of reviews that say they should have gotten a real Southerner…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Because they have a very specific idea of what a southern accent is.
[DongWon] Exactly. I mean, this might be opening a little bit of a can of worms, so I don't want to go too deep on this. But one of the reasons, just to make it very explicit, that you need to be careful of dialects is that when you come from a lot of populations, sometimes it's southern populations, but, for me, coming from a family of immigrants, accent, language choice, all of these things are tools that are used against us in very explicit ways. Right? The pronunciation of my name, the way my parents talk, certain things are… I was trained to speak in a very specific way, to not have an accent, and all of these things because my parents believed that it was very important for us to be able to fit into American society. I have complicated feelings about that at this point, but I understand where they were coming from, because they felt it was very difficult for them to have a place in the world, to get ahead in business, or things like that, talking the way they did. So, when you are thinking about wanting to represent a community, a particular people, on a page, I think there's a natural instinct to be like, "Oh, well, they sound like that, they should look like that on the page." But when you're not from that community, you… There are subtleties and nuances that you will stumble into by accident that will end up being very hurtful to people from that community. So that's just things you need to be aware of when you're looking at dialect. So, going back to the list of things that Mary Robinette had in terms of, like, those aspects of voice, there's a lot of things you can do with cadence and pacing and rhythm that will give a gesture towards it. It can be a very subtle thing that will make things feel very different on the page without flipping into caricature, without being in that Mickey Rooney breakfast at Tiffany's space that you don't want to end up in.
[Erin] We definitely don't want to end up there…
[Laughter]
[Erin] In that space.
[DongWon] I see it more often than you would think.
[Mary Robinette] Well. No.
 
[Erin] What you were saying about sort of how language changes and how accent changes made me think also that one of the things that I think is really fun to do with voice is that voice is not static.
[Mary Robinette, DongWon chorus] Yeah.
[Erin] You know what I mean? As you move through the world, my favorite, like, way to think about this example is, like, your boss says something really annoying or your coworker, and you're like, "Okay. My gosh, this is so… That so-and-so…" You're upset and you're talking about it with your coworker, then you clear your throat and go, "Per my last email…"
[Laughter]
[Erin] You know what I mean? As you translate the way you're really thinking into the way that is appropriate…
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] Supposedly, or appropriate for that situation…
[Howard] Code switching.
[Erin] Code switching. That kind of code switching happens all the time. I think one thing that's interesting is when characters speak out loud versus what they are thinking…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] So, the thought voice, like, the voice of the perspective is usually consistent, but then you might have them speak one way in one conversation, and a different way in another. That shows, like, how familiar they are with that person, their comfort level… There's so much that you can do in that, that's a really fun thing in playing with voice.
 
[DongWon] You can do a lot with voice, especially if you're writing in close third. I think people think, it's like, oh, if you're in first person all the time, then you can do this. But if you're in close third, you can switch your narration to mirror the internal dialect or the voice of that character a little bit more closely. I mean, I wouldn't be extreme about it, but you maybe just nudge it a little bit in a direction to be like, oh, this person's hanging out with their friends. They're code switching a bit more to be like this. They're in a professional environment or they are at their job, they're going to code switch a little bit in this direction. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] You can push voice in like… You have all these little meters and dials with voice that you can do so much with that can be really exciting and really enrich your text. That, to me, is when I start to see, "Oh, this is an author who's very confident, who's in control of the text." There walking me through their story in a very, like, deliberate way that I love to see.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of… I'm going to give you a hack that you can use that I've used for a couple of different stories to get a different aesthetic voice into your rhythm. Which is to take someone who has a very strong aesthetic, like, I've done this with Austen, I've done this with Richard Kipling. I re-key in a text of the page before I start… Sorry, a page of their text before I start writing my own thing to get that rhythm into my head and hands.
[Erin] I think there's also… This is why some people will have soundtracks that they write to.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] If there's a specific feel that you're going for, a specific rhythm, and you put on that song that, like, get you into the beat and the feel of it. I think that can be a great way to, like, remind yourself what the aesthetic is and what you're going for. I'll also say, like, voice is tricky. I've said this before…
[DongWon] It's hard.
[Erin] For me, because I tend to really try to live very deeply in the voice. It takes a long time. For me, a lot of it's writing a paragraph, reading it out loud, and just thinking something about this does not sound right.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Let me try again, until it gets… Like, the mood or the feel that I think I'm going for. But once, for me, I've captured that in one paragraph, then I can go ahead and like replicate it in the next. I can do it again.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] I actually think that, as we're talking about these specific tools, is a perfect time to go to the homework.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, your homework assignment is that you're going to listen to someone's voice. This can be a person in a coffee shop, someone on a podcast, anywhere that you are captured by someone's voice. Then, write a scene from your current work in progress, rewrite it trying to approximate the essence of that voice.
 
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[Mary Robinette] Hey, writer. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Let us know. We love hearing about how you've applied the stuff we've been talking about to craft your own success stories. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.36: Languages and Naming

Sep. 11th, 2019 03:29 pm
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
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Writing Excuses 14.36: Languages and Naming

 
 

Key points: How do you name things? How do you come up with names? Baby name websites! Sanskrit or foreign languages. Read the credits on movies. Internally consistent, and different. Borrow names from other countries. How do you approach constructed languages, dialect, or jargon in stories? A few words go a long way. Read it out loud. Make sure readers can tell your names apart! Consider using the language as a source of conflicts, either because people don't speak the same language, or because of the way their language makes them see the world. Misunderstandings and cultural expectations can lead to conflicts. What does this do in your story? What's the role it plays in the plot? Can you use dialect or wording to help with setting?
 

[Transcriber's note: Apologies to the Ursumari, Hindi, and Korean for any mistakes in the transcription of names and words in those languages.]
 

[Mary Robinette] Season 13, Episode 36.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Languages and Naming.
[Dan] 15 minutes long.
[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.
[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] [pause] I'm… Okay, I'll tell you my name. I'm Howard.
[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] She won't make you work for it. Like Howard does.
 

[Brandon] Languages and naming. So. I would say the number one question I get, usually from younger writers who come through my line is, "How do you name things?" So, I'm going to actually point this at you first, Mahtab, because I think they've probably heard us answer this question. How do you come up with names for your stories?
[Mahtab] Well, I consult a lot of websites. Especially, I start with baby names. But Sanskrit is also a really good source, because… Really, I mean, writing for a North American audience… And since most of my books are published in English, even if I threw in a few Hindi words, it would seem, like, exotic. But, for example, in The Third Eye, I used the word Zarku, which is… It means, in Sanskrit, it means evil. Which is… So I would do Google translate and take keywords off… Which personify the character that I'm naming and try and find the right word. Play around with it. Just, as I said, Google some interesting names and see… And and say it out loud to see what sounds good.
[Howard] Reading… For starters, you should all be staying through the end of the credits of all of the movies you see. But reading the names on the credits is a great way to read a bunch of names that you're probably unfamiliar with. It's also a great way to realize that wow, portions of this film were produced or managed in, I think that's Southeast Asia, or I see a lot of Indian names. I like that. I like seeing that in the films, but seeing that variety opens me up to naming things, because… I mean, just the way we name other human people is hugely diverse.
[Brandon] Now, you were talking about one of the naming conventions you came up with for one of the races in Schlock Mercenary.
[Howard] Yeah, I… The role-playing book, the Planet Mercenary role-playing book, one of the things that we realized is that if people are going to role-play, they're going to want to be able to name their characters. What are the naming conventions for these different species of alien? The first thing that I did was panic, because, how am I going to come up with seven different naming conventions? The second thing I did was, well, I'm going to start subtractively. So I looked at my own language and said, all right, they will never have some of these sounds in their names. I used a different set of subtractions for each of them. One of the groups, one of the races, all names are 10 syllables long. They are all 10 syllables long, and this is how the construction works, and this is where the accenting works, and this is where the pieces of the names come from. It was still familial, which is something we're all familiar with, but it created these names that just looked incredibly alien. But after I knew how to build them, I could suddenly rattle off 10 syllable names very quickly. It made them start to seem real. I think that's, for me, the most important aspect of naming and language stuff in worldbuilding, is that once you have some of the words that your aliens are your monsters or your whatevers use, they become different than you, and they begin to develop their own voice.
[Dan] I think a key part of that, that a lot of as you said especially young writers are overwhelmed by, is making a lot of those decisions. They can be meaningless or random at the point where you're establishing those rules, as long as you come up with something that is con… Internally consistent and that is different, it's going to feel cool. The readers don't necessarily need to know, oh, he just pulled those letters out of the alphabet at random and disallowed them, or however it is that you're building these. You don't need to overthink that initial process. There doesn't need to be some kind of divine foundation for where these names come from, as long as you come up with consistent rules that sound cool and unique.
[Howard] The uplifted polar bears in Planet Mercenary. What I said was the first two generations of uplifted polar bears, it was very common to give them Inuit names, Siberian names, those were very common. Then the polar bears realized you're just naming us after the humans who live near us. That's awful. So for two generations, all of their names are a little more blended. The whole reason for that was so that I could tell the joke of oh, some common Ursumari names are Jones, [Ketchikan, Ggrrnnkk!]
[Laughter)
[Howard] But as I was writing it, I realized that's probably exactly how the bears would do it.
 
 
[Mahtab] It's also a very good idea to borrow names from other countries. To point out an example, Avatar. It still sounds weird in my mouth, because it is basically avataar in Hindi, which is just a version of… Most gods and goddesses in the Indian… Hindu mythology have various forms are various versions which are avataars. So when I say avatar, it's like, that is not the correct pronunciation.
[Chuckles]
[Mahtab] The other thing that I also remembered was tsehelyu [sa-hey-loo?] which is the bonding of the horse and the person. It's… I thought it was spelled differently, but I looked it up, it spelled t-s-e-h-e-l-y-u. But it sounds so close to [sahelee?] which is friend in Hindi. It's just a friend bonding. So you can use existing words. Change the spelling, change the pronunciation, and you have a totally different word.
[Brandon] [garbled] This is how language works. It really does. Like my son was assigned… They're doing a Christmas thing at school, and they said all the kids are going to say Merry Christmas in different languages. He came to me and said, "I chose Korean. How do you say Merry Christmas in Korean?" I'm like, "Merry Christmas. That's what they say."
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Now I… There is actually a way to say it in Korean, but I had to go look it up, because when Christmas time was around, everyone just said Merry Christmas because even though it's not in Korean…
[Howard] It's Western…
[Brandon] It's a Western holiday. They just use the English words.
[Dan] We borrow stuff from each other all the time. I will say, following from what Mahtab said about kind of borrowing words and names from other cultures, use a really wide variety of them. I made a world map for a fantasy series that I wanted to put together. I realized, after I had kind of named 15 or so nations on this map, that most of them were kind of the obvious this is based on German or Welsh or maybe some Russian if I was feeling saucy. Why did I not have some more Southeast Asian? Some Chinese? A lot of these other completely different sounds that are not as European and not as obvious that we tend to skip over?
[Brandon] One of my favorite things… We're on a side tangent here, but with making maps, is to think about who's making the map. Because if you make the map, that country's names for all the countries in the world, are going to be that country-ized, that country-ize. Like, we call Korea Korea, right? In Korea, it's Hangug. It's… The Koryo dynasty was years and years ago, but that's the name that stuck for us. All countries do this, right? They don't call us America, they call us migug. That's just how… When whoever's making the map is going to use their biases to create all of the names for all the countries. That is a lot of fun for me, for worldbuilding aspects.
[Dan] Because a lot of those names will come from the first person that they encountered from that region, or, like with Korea, whoever was in charge at the time we decided to codify the name.
 

[Howard] It is important to be careful with this. The apocryphal possibly story of a games workshop sending their materials to be translated in German, and the Germans coming back and saying, "Okay. We need to work on naming with you, because you've literally named the villain villain.
[Laughter]
[Howard] You've named the hero hero. You've just…
[Dan] Yes.
[Howard] Taking these words from German and naming them as your characters in English, because you think it sounds exotic, is not going to work well because it spoils the surprise for everybody here…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Who can read German.
[Dan] Yeah, which is why I liked, again, what Mahtab said about changing the spelling, changing the pronunciation. Use it as a base and then make it your own.
 
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week.
[Mahtab] Yes. I would love to recommend Binti by Nnedi Okorofor. I hope I'm not butchering her name. But it's a novella. An excellent mix of African culture and science fiction. It centers around Binti, who is from the Himsa [Himba?] tribe. She has been offered this place in this university. It's called the Oomza University. Which is a place of higher learning in the galaxy. But to accept this, she has to leave her people. So when she does, and against everyone's wishes, against the family's wishes, she decides to go. But the one thing that she takes with her as something to remind her of home is this earth, which the Himsa people tend to apply on their hair and their skin. It turns out that this is something that helps her when there is a war that the University is with, with the Meduse people which is an alien race. I'm not going to, again, give away the ending. It's a short novella, but it's beautifully written. It's, as I said, a very good mix of an African culture, science-fiction, and a must read.
[Brandon] It won the Hugo and the Nebula. It's free to read on Tor.com, I believe. Maybe it's not free.
[Mahtab] I don't think so.
[Brandon] Yeah, it's actually one of the Tor.com novella programs. But it is a novella that you can get very cheaply online, and well worth a read.
[Mahtab] Excellent. Excellent book.
 

[Brandon] Let's stray a little bit from naming towards language conventions. So let's talk about conlangs, which is kind of the word for constructed languages that you use in your books, or your own kind of feel on how to use dialect or jargon in your stories to kind of enhance the authenticity or the worldbuilding of your story. So how do you approach coming up with languages and things like this?
[Dan] Let's start by saying that we did an entire episode on conlangs with a linguistic professor last year. So, for a much more full discussion, look that up.
[Brandon] Excellent.
[Dan] But now I got nothing.
[Laughter]
[Mahtab] I can start, because I was very taken up with Dothraki, which was invented by David J. Peterson. I was listening to a TED talk of his in terms of how he came up with it. So what he said is he used the text George R. R. Martin wrote and he used certain words. He kind of broke them apart. So words like cow and ruck and hudge, cuss, which is consonant vowel consonant. He kind of used that as a base and then he developed a language. Of course, there is a lot between using those words and what he came up with. But just writing for younger readers, I think one has to be very careful because large paragraphs or large texts in a very weird language could actually pull the reader out. Which is why I appreciated just a few words of parsel tongue in the Harry Potter movies, or just a couple of words here and there, because you do not want to trip up young readers. If you do come up with interesting words or made-up words, I would read it out loud. Just to see if you're tripping up, which is what would happen with the… With your readers.
[Howard] Or if phonetically you're saying something you don't want to say.
[Mahtab] Yeah.
[Chuckles]
 

[Howard] One of the tricks that I look at is… Primarily for naming things, but if you're making up a language, English readers… I don't know if this is a problem in other languages, but I know it's a problem in English. English readers will tend to conflate foreign looking words that all begin with the same letter for each other. You have three six letter names that all begin with F. They're all going to be kind of read as the same person. So you may want to find a set of rules for your language that allows you to have different first letters. That's a… It's a silly sort of constraint, because you may have a language where all of the first letters are the same. Every word begins with F.
[Brandon] Orson Scott Card has a really great essay on his website about naming, where he talks about this sort of concept. Varying the length of the names, varying the… Some of them being… Sounding like a word, like calling someone Bean as opposed to calling someone Ender which will… Ways that different names stick in people's heads. It is well worth reading.
[Howard] But with regard to language, specifically, if you are going to be dropping snippets of your alien foreign whatever made-up language in your book, having the words… Let us be able to tell the difference between the words. So that if one of those words shows up later, in a chapter heading, maybe we'll recognize it as a word we've seen before. Maybe that's a plot point. Maybe it's a significant touchstone for us as readers. There needs to be a reason for you to have gone to all this trouble to construct your own language.
[Brandon] I, when I'm building books, I'll use a couple of different styles. It's going to depend, for me, on how much time I want to spend with the language being a source of conflicts. Last month we talked about this idea of cultural setting as conflict. In some of my books, the fact that people don't speak the same language, or the ways that their linguistics work informs the way they see the world becomes a conflict in the story or at least a way that characters are not quite understanding each other or the cultural expectations are being expressed. In those worlds, I spend a lot more time on my worldbuilding and my language. I am not a linguist. Fortunately, my editorial director, Peter, is a linguist. I've taken enough classes that I can be dangerous in this field, so to speak. But you don't need to be a linguist to be able to do this. I really do approach it results-oriented. Why am I doing this? Like Howard said, what is the function of this in my story? Why am I having this happen? In the Stormlight Archive, I have one character who uses a lot of words in a different language. It is to reinforce that his culture is really important to him, and the way that he sees the world involves giving people nicknames from his language. Which really changes the way that the reader and the other characters interact with this character, and has been wonderful for using those linguistics. But the actual linguistics don't matter as much to me as what the role… The role they're taking in the plot.
[Mahtab] Dialect or using certain words can also help you… Help give you a setting, a time. Like, for example, Feed by M. T. Anderson. They use words like unit, which is wow. Or "This is really meg." Words like this. Which was… Although the book was written in 2002, it was an indication that this is a society in the future. I was just reading To Kill a Mockingbird. One of the lines that Miss Maudie says is, "Mockingbirds don't do one thing except make music for us to enjoy." People don't normally speak that way. So if you use a dialect, or if you use a certain way of putting words, and the order in which you put them could also help you describe whether it's southern US that you're talking about or even India. There are so many dialects. By using it, you can say so much more without saying it. Because that's the way the people in that area talk.
 

[Brandon] Excellent. We are out of time on this episode. Howard, you have our homework.
[Howard] Yes. You are probably familiar, fair listener, with the way human beings name each other. We name each other after our progenitors. We have first names, we have last names. They all sort of run in families. Come up with a naming convention for aliens or fantasy races, whatever. Come up with a naming convention that has nothing to do with family and is completely, completely different.
[Brandon] Completely removed from the way that we do our naming.
[Howard] Completely removed from the way that we name each other.
[Brandon] Awesome. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 5.17: Dialogue Exercises

Mar. 1st, 2011 12:56 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 5.17: Dialogue Exercises

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/12/27/writing-excuses-5-17-dialog-exercises/

Key Points: Make your characters identifiable from their dialogue alone. Make sure there's a sense of the world, the setting, and action. If you use dialect, do it sparingly, but be consistent. Word choice, sentence length, verbal quirks, social position -- any and all of these can be used to differentiate your characters. And don't forget the interplay of the characters, too.
( talk, talk, talk... )
[Brandon] So we'll go ahead and do a writing prompt. Dan?
[Howard] Ha, ha!
[Dan] Oh, man. Okay. You are walking down a back alley and you meet Jason from Dragonmount and he's getting all uppity about how he had a great writing sample. What do you do to him?
[Brandon] Okay. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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