wetranscripts | Entries tagged with language

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

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-36-a-close-reading-on-tension-narrative-vs-contexutal

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.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.21: Language as a Tool (A Close Reading on Worldbuilding)

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-21-language-as-a-tool-a-close-reading-on-worldbuilding

Key points: Using language as a tool. In Teixcalaan, planet, city, and Empire are all the same word. It's all ours. Outlanders, barbarians, foreigners, not us! Teixcalaanli naming. Aztec-ish. Arkady does not use the word meme. A bomb in the cafe? Make your worldbuilding do multiple different things.

[Season 19, Episode 21]

[Mary Robinette] Hey, listeners. We want your input on season 20. Which, I have to be honest, does not sound like a real number. What elements of the craft do you want us to talk about? What episode or core concept do you use or reference or recommend the most? Or, what are you just having trouble with? After 20 seasons, we've talked about a lot of things. What element of writing do you wish we'd revisit for a deeper dive on the podcast? Email your ideas to podcast@writingexcuses.com

[Season 19, Episode 21]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Worldbuilding: Language as a Tool

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette..

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[DongWon] So, this week, continuing our close reading series on Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire, I wanted to dig into three very specific sections over the course of this book. Last week, we focused heavily on the opening. Here, I want to talk about how Arkady uses language as a tool. Both how she phrases things, or word choices, but also the way in which she uses the language of this culture, and then… Well, the culture of this culture, the literature, the poetry, the pop-culture, to communicate certain really important concepts about the book. So, the first one I really want to drill down on is on page 19, as she approaches the city. We touched on this very briefly last time. But there's a moment where Yskandr, her imago in her head, says, <the world>, and he says it in Teixcalaanli. So the quote here is

He said it in the Teixcalaan language, which made it a tautology: the word for "world" and the word for the "city" were the same, as was the word for "Empire." It was impossible to specify, especially in the high imperial dialect. One had to note the context.

This is such a fascinating idea to me. This communicates so much about this culture. I found, when I read this book for the first time, that sentence was dripping with menace for me. That was one of the scariest sentences in this book. Because the idea that this culture sees themselves as so important that their city is a tautology for the entire empire is fascinating. This is all ours. Right? Going back to last episode, we talked about how they were looking at the star chart, and there's this moment where they're like, "All the tiny pinpricks of light. That's ours." Then we see this concept not just in how they think about it, but embedded into the language. Because of the way language works, they can not think about it another way. There's no way for them to linguistically communicate the difference between us and our Empire. They are the Empire, in the most fundamental hardwired ways into their culture.

[Howard] As an extension of this… I don't remember specific examples from the book, but there's this idea that words like human and people and other are defined in such a way that if you are not Teixcalaanli, you might not qualify as human. Just based on the word that gets used. You might not qualify as people. The inherent othering of everybody who is not a member of the Empire is also dripping with menace.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's one of the things that I marked, is that there… This happens with a lot of languages, that the word that they have for her, someone who is from outside the Empire, is barbarian. That's… Barbarian, alien. There's a point deeper in the book where someone corrects and says, "foreigner." It was like, "No, no, no. That's not the right… That's not the language that we use. We say foreigner." But it made me think of… In Icelandic, the word for foreigner is utlander, which is literally outlander. Someone who's not from here. My family will say, "us folks." To mean anyone who is connected to our family or friends. Like, us folks. This demarcation that she does in her worldbuilding with this… By identifying you're either part of the Empire or you are less than human, is like… The way that the language is structured is so… Such really yummy worldbuilding.

[Howard] There's an aspect of this we're going to touch on in an episode I'll be driving shortly, which is the line where she says, "What do you mean by us?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "What do you mean by we?"

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Howard] "What do you mean by me?" We come back to that all the time as we are having arguments about grouping and alliance and identity. And it is delicious to me. So delicious.

[DongWon] Well, there's that moment, also fairly early on in the book, where they end up playing a little game where they each have to tell a truth when asked about it, and Three Seagrass is forced to admit that she likes aliens.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And it is treated as this perversion, it's treated as this embarrassing fact, of like, "Oh, my God. I can't believe you like that." I don't know what the comparison is in our culture, but you can feel… When you establish culture in this way, when you establish language in this way, then, suddenly, the idea of liking on alien does suddenly feel perverse. You can suddenly see how inside this culture, if they don't even have a word that isn't exclusionary, that of course, it would be strange to want to be close to somebody that is not us.

[Dan] Yeah. You mentioned Three Seagrass. That's one of the really cool language things I want to get into, is the naming conventions that they use in this culture. Three Seagrass is kind of sort of a main character. But everyone has a name kind of like that. Arkady goes and explains, like, that they use a number and then they use a word. My favorite name, and I can't remember exactly, but it was Seventeen All Terrain Vehicle… Thirty-six?

[Howard] Thirty-Six! Thirty-six.

[Dan] Thirty-six. There it is.

[DongWon] All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle.

[Dan] Yeah.

[DongWon] This is one of my favorite parts of this book. It is a line that made me laugh so hard when I first read it.

[Dan] Yeah.

[DongWon] And it's also a very emotionally significant line for me, because one of the things this book is about is about the concept of assimilation. Right? Names are very fraught when you are a child of immigrants or when you are an immigrant to another culture. Names become a very difficult, fraught topic. Right?

[Dan] Yeah.

[DongWon] I'm unusual among my peers because I use a Korean name. I don't use an Americanized name. Most of the other Koreans I know, or other Asian Americans in general, have names that are very typical, usually very Judeo-Christian names, picked out of a baby book or picked from the Bible. I don't have that. Well, I do have one. I'm not telling you what it is, because I hate it more than anything. But I do have un-American name. My brother has an American name. We both used our Korean style names. That choice has been one that has been an ongoing challenge for me over the course of my life, because my name, unfortunately, also happens to sound like a famous character from literature. So I get one joke every single time I introduce myself to a new person. That is repeated over and over again. I also have a thing where I cannot quite pronounce my name correctly. You'll hear me say it in a mostly Americanized way on the show, which is DongWon, which is how I, for years and years, introduced myself to white Americans. I have recently been shifting a little bit to something closer to the Korean pronunciation, which is more like [done one]. That has been a shift I've been trying to make. It's kind of hard to do. Because I'm used to saying it in a certain way. But all of this is to say that names are so important, because they identify you in the culture. They can be exclusionary, and they can be an invitation in. So, this idea that this person came to this culture and named themselves Thirty-Six All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle, which is hilarious to us as the audience, but it is also hilarious to the people in the culture. The line that comes after that is:

A revelation that produced in Mahit and Three Seagrass a kind of stunned silence.

[Chuckles]

"No one would actually name a child that," Three Seagrass complained after a moment. He has no taste.

[DongWon] This idea of taste is so important, because this is clearly someone who wasn't born to this culture. They identify that immediately. This person has desperately reached for something that sounds right to them, and they're like, "Well, that's a number, and that's a noun." But it's an absurd noun.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Yeah.

[DongWon] And it's the wrong kind of number.

[Howard] For English speakers, there is an unwritten… Mostly… Rule about adjective order. We can tell when adjectives are in the wrong order. You will often see people string together adjectives in instruction manuals or whatever, and you realize, "Oh. Oh, you didn't get the memo about the way adjectives are supposed to work." The fake AP stylebook said, "Adjectives should be listed in increasing awesomeness. The blue Italian rocket-propelled monkey-piloted motorcycle." I've always laughed at that, because it follows both rules. I was reminded of that by Thirty-Six All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle. Three Seagrass is given pause because, oh, that's technically right, but you ran afoul…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Of a very different rule.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And another worldbuilding bit is communicated in this. Right? Because the names are one of the striking things. Soon as you meet Three Seagrass, soon as you meet Twelve Azalea, Six Direction, all these people, we get the sense of like, "Wow. What a weird way to name people." Right? Like, from our perspective, as the reader, it feels alien and cool. This joke is an opportunity for the author to say, "Okay. Here's what's going on. Here's how this works."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] "You pick a number, you pick a noun, these kinds of nouns are good, these kinds of numbers are good." Like, you get a sense… It's an opportunity for her to just stop and tell us. Going back to show, don't tell, this is her way of saying, "I'm going to take a break here. I'm going to explain what is going on with these. So that you experience the delight of running into them the first time. We're far enough into the book that I can slow down and tell you what's going on here."

[Mary Robinette] Just to talk about the specific mechanics of one of the things that Arkady is doing with this. She's… When she slows down and explains it, she is also making it about something else. She's making it about a bonding moment between these two characters, and she's also using… There's a flash… Brief flashback that Mahit has where she remembers vividly part of her early language training on Lsel when her entire class had been encouraged to make up Teixcalaanli names to call themselves while they were learning to speak. She picked Nine Orchid because it was the heroine of her favorite book. It… She… So she's having this moment where she's explaining it to us, and it's a tell moment. Because she's like, "This is how these lang… These words… These names work." But she's also masking it by having it be… Doing some loadbearing on character. Doing loadbearing on history. She's having this moment do multiple different things. So when you have something like this that you need to explain to your reader, look at the different things it can be doing, so that it's not just, week, let me stop the story.

[DongWon] Yep. Exactly.

[Howard] I… To me, this got a pass because I laughed at the name.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Any time you can make me laugh, that page had a reward. Thank you for making me read it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I will also say the other thing that happens for me is that because she slows down here, when… Much deeper in the book, when Six Helicopter…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Comes in, we know that his name is also absurd. So, we are in the joke…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] With everybody else who's having that moment.

[DongWon] Well, again, all of this speaks to the core thematics of the book. These… It's a funny moment, it's a character moment, it's all these things, but it's also a moment that is about Empire and how it works. The thing that she talks about in terms of the flashback is a thing that if you go to an Asian country there in a language school, they're all picking American names. Right? In South Asia, in Korea, in Japan, China, they're going to pick an American name so that they have that thing, in the same way that Mahit picks Nine Orchid.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] To be her Teixcalaanli name. She's reflecting all these real-world themes, routing it in things that are familiar to us, so that we understand what Empire means and how that works in our world. On that note, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to keep unpacking some of these very specific examples of language.

[Mary Robinette] The Gilded Age on Max is the latest offering from Julian Fellowes, best known for Downton Abbey. This is set in 1882 in New York City among the ultra-wealthy. It's got social battles between new money and the established social crowd. It looks at class and race, and also just straight up romance. I'll be honest, the plots are not surprising, but they are somehow still captivating and moving. Sometimes I get a little mad when I'm crying, because I could see it coming, but I was still excited to get there. It's a good example of why formulas can work. Also, the costumes… If you are at all into fashion and history, the costumes are exhaustively researched and are often replica of extant downs or paintings. Check out The Gilded Age for a lot of very pretty, pretty clothes.

[Dan] All right. So, one thing that I wanted to talk about here is another neat trick that Arkady is using. The culture is kind of sort of… Well, at least linguistically, has a lot of Aztec influence in it.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Dan] Teixcalaan is an overtly Aztec-ish word. One of the reasons that I suspect she may have made that decision is precisely because the words are hard to pronounce. Right? Teixcalaan, which would be [Taishkalan] in actual Aztec, I think it was an overt purposeful choice to pronounce it more westernized than that, just to kind of continue the theme of cross culture stuff. That's the name of the Empire, and the name of the city, and the name of the planet. Something that comes from Teixcalaan is Teixcalaanli. The word for a person who is from Teixcalaan or the people from there is Teixcalaanlitzlim. You get these words and you kind of stumble over them. I think that that's on purpose. As a way of really hitting home, this is different. This is outside of your realm of experience. This is outside of your comfort zone. You are trying to assimilate these very difficult linguistic concepts. It also signals to the reader that language matters. Like, I am going to make you figure out how to say Teixcalaanlitzlim, and you're going to do it and that is going to let you know to pay close attention to the language, because it is worth this effort.

[DongWon] She's doing a thing where she manages to make the reader feel the subjectivity of what it is to be an immigrant. Right? She forces the reader into the position of being a foreigner to a culture. Which, I think we talked about audience surrogates earlier. But this is such, like, a grounded way, and such a material way to make that felt. The way she does that is by introducing a con lang in some ways. Right? A constructed language in some ways. We don't get all of it, but we get some parts of it. And introducing culture. The poetry, the epic poems, the different refrains. Even when we get a couplet that is an epithet for a person. Right? When Nine Ads appears… Nineteen Ads? Or Nine Ads?

[Mary Robinette] Nineteen Ads.

[DongWon] Nineteen. There's that beautiful epithet that she has about the edge shine of a knife.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? What a remarkable striking moment, and, wow, did that establish a character…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Immediately. Like, to be referred to poetically as the edge shine of a knife.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] How terrifying that person has to be.

[Howard] One of the things that she never did, Arkady never did, was use the word meme. The Teixcalaan… Teixcalaanli culture is, especially with the poetry, is inherently memetic.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Howard] All the time, people will make references, will say things, and Mahit realizes, "Oh, that last thing is a line from this poem about the buildings, and so what you're saying is not just thing but also referencing a building." That idea comes back over and over. We see it in our own culture as people will make pop-culture references. Oh, I understand that joke.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Howard] And everybody is now on board. I loved that she did it and was frankly amazed that she did it without ever using the word meme.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think that's a great comparison. As someone who's chronically online, I'm capable of having a conversation with my friends that is impenetrable to an outsider, based on the number of memes and references that we're making.

[DongWon] I want to show how this is used in the text in a way that I found particularly fascinating. This is another one of my very favorite moments. It's from page 86, for those of you who have the print edition. This is when the bomb in the café goes off, which Howard mentioned a couple episodes ago. So…

She knew the Teixcalaanli word for explosions, a centerpiece of military poetry, usually adorned with adjectives like "shattering" or "fire-flowered," but now she learned, by extrapolation from the shouting, the one for "bomb." It was a short word. You could scream it very loudly. She figured it out because it was the word people were screaming when they weren't screaming help.

I am obsessed with this paragraph.

[Dan] Yeah.

[DongWon] It is so powerful, it is so upsetting. It communicates the true horror of what has just happened to her and the people around her, and it tells us so much about Mahit as well. Her first thing is to go to this cerebral abstraction…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] She retreats into academic thought and poetry before she returns to the word that they're screaming when they're not screaming help. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Also that there is a genre of military poetry.

[DongWon] Yes! Exactly. So in the way that Howard is talking about, this sort of memetic way of having culture, the word for explosion is part of that. Right? There are beautiful poems about fire-flowered explosions, but nobody talks about bombs.

[Dan] Well, it… That's another that goes back to our conversation about scale and the concept of how close are you to the subject that you're talking about. Because from far away, you can talk about a fire-flowered explosion and it sounds really cool. But when you're down there on the street, surrounded by rubble and smoke, it is a bomb. You need a word you can scream loudly.

[Howard] You are lying on the ground thinking, "Ah, I learned a new word."

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Also, who would teach you the word bomb to go on a diplomatic mission?

[Mary Robinette] No.

[DongWon] You don't need to know that.

[Mary Robinette] It reminds me briefly of when I was learning Icelandic, I initially was doing… Learn… Yes, I speak Icelandic a little bit. But there were two texts that I had a choice from. One of which taught me phrases like, "Where is the train station?" There are no train stations in Iceland.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] There is no circumstance under which you would need to be able to say, "Where is the train station?" in Icelandic because you would have to be someplace else, where… Like, there aren't Icelandic speakers outside of Iceland except in Minnesota.

[DongWon] This is that damn Duo Lingua owl trying to convince me that I just need to know how to say, "the cat is under the pizza tables."

[Mary Robinette] Yes. But one of the other books, one of the… In the first or second chapter, one of the words that you learned was decapitation.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I was like, "This person has read Icelandic epics."

[DongWon] Yes.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That, for me, is one of the things about these, is, like… The things that… The other thing that is in this is, like, what is valorized?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] What is valorized? A bomb is not valorized. Explosions, yes, but explosions from starships that are… And warheads that are coming down. But not a handmade bomb in a café.

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] That's not a valorous experience.

[Dan] Well, correct me if I'm misremembering, because it has been a few years since I have read this, other than skimming it for these episodes. The… Don't they come back later and propagandize this explosion a little bit, this bomb? And just the language that they use to talk about it changes. It isn't a bomb anymore. It's a fire-flowered explosion. They're using it for political purposes by changing the words they use to describe it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. They're taking it from being common to being elevated.

[Yeah. Right!]

[DongWon] So, again, this is one of the these moments where so many layers of the story and character and world are in this. Right? So, just to recap in some ways, she's again explaining culture, how the culture works by starting on this poetic way, explaining the stakes of the book, because, hey. Mahit could get blown up. Her life is at risk. Right? She's communicating a different kind of risk than we've seen before. Up until now it's been political, it's been words. Bombs are in play now. Right? She's lying trapped under rubble while the person she came to meet is… Her blood is dripping on her face. It's a visceral terrifying moment. But, more than anything else, she's using this moment to communicate such fear and helplessness and pain. The way this shifts into this such an emotional place by the end of it, with, that, like, the word people are screaming. Right? Like, it's so grounding, and it's so scary, and it's so upsetting to communicate what violence actually is. That establishes the themes of the book, of we can talk about it at this abstract level, but the reality is this, and don't forget that.

[Howard] One of the first things that I try to do when I'm in a new place with a new language is learn how humor works. So that I might reach that high bar of being able to tell a joke. The moment that I was hoping for in this book… Quietly, but hoping nonetheless, with all of Mahit's appreciation of poetry and Three Seagrass's standing as an actual poet, I thought, "Wow. If that was me, the real horror would be what if I have to write a poem?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The stand up and cheer moment for me in this book was Mahit and Three Seagrass have to write a poem upon which their life literally depends.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Howard] I love that so much, and the language aspect of the book supported it in a way…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] That… I stood up and cheered.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Worldbuilding is storytelling.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely. She does a really great job of… One of the things for you, reader, when you're thinking about this is how many different ways can you use a piece of worldbuilding? So she's using language to do multiple different things. Which is part of why when we talk about muscular writing, that's what we're talking about, is having it do more than one thing.

[Howard] This is such a big flex.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Such a big flex.

[DongWon] I think we'll leave it on that.

[DongWon] I have a little bit of homework for you. I would like for you to write a scene that describes a fictional piece of literature. Whether it's a poem, a song, a story, comic book, that means something to the people in the story that you are telling.

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

[Mary Robinette] Do you like stars? I do. Maybe you would like to put up a constellation of stars by rating us on Apple Podcasts. Hello. Yes, we're talking about ratings, not astronomy. But, a 5 star review can help us by creating a navigational beacon for new writers like you to find their way to Writing Excuses. So. Rate us on Apple Podcasts or your podcast platform of choice.

[Mary Robinette] Let's talk about Rude Tales of Magic. In this improvised narrative role-playing podcast, join artists, writers, and comedians from Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, Marvel Comics, and more as they fight and fumble their way across the madcap and exceedingly rude fantasy wasteland of Cordelia. Branson Reese and his jesters retinue, Christopher Hastings, Carlin Menardo, Tim Platt, Joe Laporte, and Ali Fisher, star is a group of unlikely survivors. Specifically, a talking crow, a Lich in a wig, a bubbly faun, a Sasquatch punk, and a [teefling?] hunk. This group must solve the mystery of Polaris University vanishment and return balance and higher education to their world. It's going to be very hard and very, very rude. Subscribe to Rude Tales of Magic on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Pocket Casts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes drop every Wednesday.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.41: Picture Books are Books, Too, with Special Guest Seth Fishman

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/10/09/17-41-picture-books-are-books-too-with-special-guest-seth-fishman/

Key points: Picture books are short! 500 words or less. Write a whole draft in one sitting. Submit with illustrations or not? If you have a really good artist, yes. It builds enthusiasm. Expect to go back and forth with the illustrator. Start with an outline and then make the words pretty. Page turns and spreads are important. Let the illustrator bring visual language and ideas to the project, too.

[Season 17, Episode 41]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Picture Books are Books, Too, with Special Guest Seth Fishman.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] And we have our special guest.

[Seth] Hi. I'm Seth Fishman. I am the author of seven picture books, some nonfiction and some fiction. And I am excited to be here.

[Mary Robinette] I am very happy that you're here with us.

[Mary Robinette] So, a couple of us on the podcast have written picture books or are in the process or have experimented with them. But you have gone… You've written a lot more than that. I also know that you write longform as well. What are some of the things that you think about when you are approaching a picture book?

[Seth] Well, that's a great question. I think a lot of people think that picture books are harder than they are. I don't think you hear that kind of sort of note very often. I think picture books are easier simply because of their length. I mean, I think of Nanowrimo, we could write 100 picture books in that period of time with that many words, with that much word count, probably way less. It doesn't mean they're necessarily going to be the best. But what I love about picture books and the differences is that you can write the whole draft in one sitting. If you're in a good mood. That is something that allows you to throw things out much more, to experience and experiment much more. In fact, that has actually messed up my writing longform because I get so impatient now when I sit and start writing. The first bump I hit, I'm like, "Um. Ah. You need to take a break."

[Chuckles]

[Seth] So it's a much different experience.

[Mary Robinette] I also know that you do… That you've done like nonfiction picture books, which require a ridiculous amount of research. Is that still writing a book in one go?

[Seth] Yeah, that's a different good question. You do, you can still get them rolled in there. My first book, A Hundred Billion Trillion Stars, or my first picture book, rather. I had the whole arc of the story came to me as soon as I had the title. I just asked the question, how many stars are there, and the answer was so beautiful, and I was thinking about my son. I was able to sort of have the outline… Basically the outline was the book. Then you just make the story prettier. Right? The words prettier. So that did work out. But then I had to go backwards and do the science behind it. The three others I did? That was much harder. But by then I had the rhythm of what I wanted to do. Because it was a series. When you write a certain set of series, and people are expecting a certain thing, you'll find, especially in picture books, there's a lot of very familiar tropes. Once you find your own rhythm, it's… It just sort of is about matching that. So I knew what I had to do in the beginning, the middle, and the end. But I didn't know what the special talents of the sperm whale was, which is that it can deflate its lungs to go really, really deep. You learn that stuff, ocean books, etc. so it's… Yeah.

[Howard] So, seven picture books. How many of these have you personally illustrated? How did finding illustrators work? Because that's… In our experience with Sandra and I and our picture books, that's a horse of several different colors.

[Seth] Yeah, that's a really great question. This is where I have to reveal for those that don't know that I am also a literary agent. So I do have some privilege, I suppose is the term, in that I know a lot of illustrators. I get this question quite a bit is should I submit with illustrations or should I not. My belief is quite firmly that you should, but only if (a) the artist is really good, and (b) there's a value add of the artist. That is not an easy thing to find. Certainly not to just hire someone, pay them money to be able to do. So the bonus that I had is that my first illustrator, Isabelle Greenberg, oddly… Well, she lives in the UK and she was my former client. Her primary agent in the UK went to [Double you me?]. They don't like American agents to not be at [Double you me?] as well. So I couldn't work with her. I said, "Okay. Well, when you come back to me, I'm excited about it, because they don't know how to do graphic novels. But until then, what about we work on this project together?" So I knew her, she was a best-selling graphic novelist. She had never done a picture book though, and I had her. The reason why I want that to happen… I believe it to happen is the best, is because when you submit a book with both together and there is a value add, some people will pass on the art and some people will pass on the writing. But when they see them both together, like them both, the enthusiasm is much greater than it would be for just the script. That said, traditionally, you still… Most people submit just the writing and then the agent takes you on and can either pair up with you, you can have… I had a stable of authors that I can pair with clients of mine or you can have the publishers do that. That is… There are some real advantages to that. You could have…

[Brandon] That's how we did it.

[Seth] Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah.

[Brandon] Is I submitted a text, said, "Hey, do you guys want this book?" We took it out on submission. We ended up at a publisher. Then counted on them… Because I wanted to learn this process. Right? I had never done a picture book. They came to me with eight illustrators that they wanted to ask. They hadn't asked them yet. They said, "Which of these fits best for you?" I picked one that I knew and was quite a big fan of. They approached this individual, which I can't announce yet, who said, "Yes." But it was kind of fun for me because each of these illustrators would have interpreted the story differently. It really helped me kind of get a feel for how do I want this story interpreted before we even went to the illustrators.

[Seth] Have you been able to interact with that illustrator?

[Brandon] Yep. Yes. So the illustrator sent sketches, and we went back and forth on some ideas for the sketches which are changing the story in interesting ways. Now they're working on going beyond that.

[Seth] Can I follow-up? Sorry, really quickly. Have you been emailing directly with that illustrator?

[Brandon] Ooo. No, I have not. I'm aware that this is going to be something we need to push for. It's no… So I don't know what everybody else's experience has been, but art directors at publishers tend to be very protective of their artists. They do not want some author coming in and ham-fistedly saying, "B...b...b...b..b..." We've had to work overtime at my other publishers to get them used to the idea that it's okay for Brandon to talk to the illustrator. Yeah.

[Howard] When Sandra wrote her Hold Onto Your Horses picture book, we submitted it and there wasn't a whole lot of interest. We decided to self publish, because we were already set up for that because of Schlock Mercenary. But we knew that I was the wrong artist. Absolutely the wrong artist. We auditioned artists. There were many, many, many very talented artists who submitted things and they knew how a horse looked. But the artist we chose drew pictures that told us how a horse felt. It's difficult to describe how wonderful that is. But when you land on the right artist, suddenly you become very protective of them. You want that relationship to just last forever because it's so beautiful.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I was an art major in college and technically could do my own illustrations. I've been an art director and would not illustrate my own books. Because it's a specific and special skill set. For people who don't know, Seth is also my agent. So when we sent it out, we did not send it out with an artist attached.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to go ahead and pause us for our book of the week. Which is Seth's.

[Seth] Yes. Hello. The book of the week is my forthcoming book, Bad Drawer. That actually is based on the accumulation of me sort of being jealous of the writer illustrators, which sort of bypasses that problem and allows you to do so many cool other things. So I pitched this book where there was a young kid whose… Who has an idea and is not a great drawer. You can argue about what's good or bad, but the idea is that they can't get across what's in their mind on the page. But some of their friends can do this and this and this and this, and they can work together to help illustrate that project. But I was supposed to illustrate it, and my illustrations really bad. They did pay me for it, and then they said, "Well, you're not…"

[Laughter]

[Seth] "You're actually so bad that we're going to hire someone to draw badly for you." I was actually quite devastated to be quite honest. But I did demand to have two trees in the final spread. So that's a pretty fun bonus. So I illustrated two trees in there. Ah...

[Laughter]

[Seth] But there's a lot of great illustrators like Tillie Walden's in there, Armand Baltazar, Anna Bond, Jessica Hische, there's six illustrators that are in there with me so it's really fun.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So. Thank you. I am excited about this book personally.

[Mary Robinette] But I'm also wanting to know, since we… I am the only person on the podcast without children. When you are the reader for a picture book, what are some of the things that make you pick it up and go, "Ah, this book. This book is good."

[Brandon] I let my kids do it. Just turn them loose and say, "What do you want?" Now, they're very cover and title influenced, as one might imagine. But I've noticed that the ones my kids like the most are the ones that their teachers have read to them. Which is very common for that age group. We'll go to the store and they'll be like, "This one! I love this one." I'm like, "How do you know this one?" "We read it in school." "And this one! I love this one." They read it in school. But I let them steer. I'm curious what they're interested in.

[Dan] The thing that makes me love a picture book goes back to what Seth said in the beginning, that you start with an outline and then your job is just to make it pretty. Make the words just really pretty. So, for me, it is clever turns of phrase. Often that comes in the form of some kind of repetitive structure. But just poetic simplicity of language. I have never written a line as good as "Good night, nobody. Good night, mush." From Good Night Moon. That's a perfect line. I love reading that book to my kids because I get to that point and I'm like, "Oh, this is my favorite line." So something like that just impresses me with the economy and beauty of the language itself.

[Brandon] One thing we should talk about, since it is a writing podcast, is picture books have a very different format from writing others. This is one of the things I had to beef up on before I wrote it, because a lot of picture books are 40 pages. There are some formats that are a little shorter, a little longer. But basically, when you're writing a picture book, unlike when I'm writing most of my other things, you are considering each page turn. That's a vital bit of important narrative that you're using, and you're considering are they spreads or are they not. Where are the words going? Howard's smiling because, yeah, this is…

[Howard] I was just going to ask, when I've written things for comics, I wrote a short story for David Kellett's Drive comic. Story's called History and Haberdashery. I had to ask him several times to make absolutely clear I knew the answer what page does this begin on, what page does this end on. I need to know where the spreads are and I need to know where the page turns are. Because in comics, you write to the page turn. In many cases, the person writing the script for the comic is doing preliminary art direction, where they are describing where the reveal is, so on and so forth. My question is how much of what I already know about writing graphic novels, writing comics, how much of that applies to writing picture books?

[Seth] That's a great question. I think it does quite a bit. I would actually venture to say that most picture books are 32 pages.

[Brandon] They really are.

[Seth] Some play to 40.

[Brandon] Yeah. I squeezed to 40 because I'm an epic fantasy writer.

[Laughter]

[Seth] Right. So they're 32. Then they're actually 28, because there are a number of other pages. You have your copyright page and whatnot. If you are an author illustrator, you can, like Mo Williams with Pigeons Drive the Bus, it actually starts in the endpapers. He sort of starts creating the story early. It's sort of cheating. But being able to look at the dummy of a book is incredibly important. I think you should just type into Google, "picture book dummy," and you'll be able to see the 32 pages spread in there, and you'll be able to write literally onto that. It's so curious to see how you'd be able to do that if you're just a normal fiction writer, how that affects you. But to be a comic book writer, the stage directions is helpful. Obviously you want your artist to experience it the way that they want, right? But there's some things that you have to say because it's part of the plot or a move you really needed to get across. I think it's incredibly important to do that. It seems like a translation is really good.

[Seth] Mary Robinette, I was very curious, though, because you write SF and then you wrote an SF picture book and the interplay with the artist was a little bit different. I was very fascinated watching not back and forth. Your notes were different. I was curious to know how you were feeling when you were seeing these notes pop up in terms of both the art, but then also the science behind what you were doing.

[Mary Robinette] Right. So one of the things that I have kind of as a brand at this point is that my stuff will be accurate. Picture books are supposed to be beautiful and stylized. So what I wanted was instead of stylizing off of an imaginary rocket, I wanted her to stylize off of an actual rocket. So I would send over notes like "Here are some rocket ships to look at." On the moon, the initial… The roughs that I got back were wooden crates. I'm like, "Well, this is what things would actually be packed in." She had a picture for pouring water, and I sent over juice packs. It was really great. But I didn't have a direct back and forth with my illustrator. But my editor was so good at passing that information on, and having the conversations with the illustrator. But then the illustrator also came back with ideas. Like, there's a pair of red buttons that float through in every single thing. We… Things don't just float float on the moon. There is gravity. But we had the conversation of "Well, it would probably way about as much as a feather, so it is realistic to assume that it might be kicked up at any given moment." She had this idea that these buttons would float all the way through and then be incorporated into the final image as kind of this beautiful emotional touchstone that was not at all anywhere in my ideas. So it was… I subscribe to the Jim Henson model of success which is that you hire someone who is better than you and let them do their job. That, for me, is a prime example of the visual language that she could bring to it. I brought the science. Like, okay, this is what an actual rocket looks like. I think she did just like a wonderful job with that.

[Howard] In late 2017, I got to illustrate a Munchkin deck for Steve Jackson Games for Munchkin Starfinder. One of the most challenging things was coming up with a syntax for taking the Paizo Starfinder spaceships on model and caricaturing a spaceship on a card so it looks silly. I know how to caricature a person because I know what pieces get exaggerated and what pieces get shrunk. But what are those pieces on a spaceship? The answer is I couldn't actually tell you without going back and looking at the cards and remembering what I did.

[Mary Robinette] Well, this has been a lovely conversation. I would love to give our listeners some homework.

[Seth] Yes. Well, because picture books are sort of so new to a number of the listeners, this is a little double part homework. First is to go to your local bookstore and just explore the picture book section. See how they are stacked, how they are promoted, and how it's different from a section you normally hang out in. Then, second of all, I encourage you to try and write one. 500 words or less. It's very simple. See how it feels. Try not to do rhyme. That's the other part of it. Just try that in the SF or the fantasy category. There's not enough of them. I would highly encourage writing that to fill that space.

[Mary Robinette] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.18: Poetry and the Fantastic

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/05/02/16-18-poetry-and-the-fantastic/

Key points (and angles?): If poetry breaks language into meaning, then fantasy breaks reality into truths. Take reality, and tip it on its side, so you can see the interconnective tissue. Puppetry, science fiction and fantasy, and poetry all do these. Consider the aesthetic, what things look like or what language is used, the mechanical, the structure and plot, or the personal, the idiosyncratic choices of a person, their narrative and message.

[Season 16, Episode 18]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Poetry and the Fantastic.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Amal] And we're all fantastic.

[Mary Robinette] Yes, we are.

[Mary Robinette] This is the final episode in our eight part poetry master class with Amal. She's going to bring us around to a coda, I believe.

[Amal] Yes. So, throughout the series, we have talked about ways to approach poetry, to make it less scary. We talked about differences between poetry and prose. We've talked about strategies and approaches for writing poetry, appreciating poetry, structuring poetry, and some of the failure modes that can come from those things. But what I'd really like to talk to you… Talk about, rather, in this last episode is just how inseparable to me poetry and the genre in which I love writing, science fiction and fantasy, are. I want to talk about the fantastic more broadly, to incorporate multiple elements and facets of our genre. But I also just want to say that these things are not separate in my head. They are so often absolutely married to each other. I wanted to just kind of dive into the why's and wherefore's of that a little bit. So there is a quote by T. S. Eliot that I often refer to. The quote specifically is that discussing poetry, the poet must become more and more comprehensive, more elusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. So, I like to take that quote and break it, essentially. Do unto it, as T. S. Eliott says, the poet does in general. I like to say, to recall it as that poetry breaks or dislocates if necessary language into its meaning. I think about this a lot, because of the way that I was raised with poetry. I… So, my family is from Lebanon and Syria. I was born in Canada, but my parents were born in Lebanon. When… I lived in Lebanon for a little bit when I was little for two years when I was seven. That was where I first wrote poetry. I wrote my first poem at the age of seven when we were living in Beirut. When I did that, my parents were very moved and they told me that I was part of a sort of lineage of writing poetry, essentially. That my grandfather, my father's father, had been a celebrated poet and that poetry was part of my inheritance, essentially, and that they were very happy to see me writing poetry. I cannot stress enough how, like, the poem that I wrote when I was seven, was not a work of staggering genius.

[Laughter]

[Amal] But it was a poem, and it was recognizable as such. I absolutely still remember it. It was… It involved like a lot of playing with language, with unfamiliar bits of it, and it was also addressed to the moon. My grandfather's poetry was political, was revolutionary, was part of this kind of lineage of speaking truth to power and being a voice for the voiceless and stuff like that. My address to the moon was not that.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] But it was, nevertheless, something that showed my parents that I wanted to use language in the ways that he did as something transformative, as something that made the world different than it was otherwise.

[Howard] My father had memorized a lot of poems, and would storytell with them. One of the ones that he told a lot, because us kids ask for it a lot, was The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service. Which I love. I love it because my dad… I can hear my dad saying it. My dad, when he read the poem, relied heavily on the rhyme and meter, he leaned way into it as he read it. My freshman year in college, one of my professors on an outing recited The Cremation of Sam McGee and was much more… Conversational is the wrong word, but more natural dialogue-y with the way things flowed. I remember the first couple of stanzas thinking, "Wait. Did he… Are those the right words? No, I've heard this enough, that those are the right words." Then, the whole rest of the poem, as I listened, I think poetry itself became unlocked for me. Because I realized, "Oh. The meter and the rhyme aren't the point. The story isn't necessarily the point." It's sort of this whole thing, and the poem has a life outside of what Robert Service gave it. The poem has a life that is experienced differently depending on the listener and depending on the person who says it out loud. Okay, this was 17-year-old, or maybe I was 18 at that time… 18-year-old Howard having what at that time passed for an epiphany.

[Laughter]

[Howard] But I still love that poem, and I still like sometimes reading it and hearing the different voices in my head as I scan through it.

[Amal] Do you feel like one of them has like superseded the other in your head, or that your own reading voice has sort of introduced a different natural cadence into it?

[Howard] My voice dominates all of those at this point. Because my dad passed away when I was 20, and the reading I heard from Prof. Lyons was when I was 18. I'm now 53. So the voice that's in my head at this point is my own. But I cherish… This… I think this comes back to poetry as meme. I cherish this memetic series of events because there's a whole bunch of information compressed into that poem that Robert Service didn't put in there.

[Amal] Hah! That's absolutely true. This is the way that... I feel like a lot of us talk about novels in this way, too, that you read a different novel when you come to it at a different age, or that you might have one version of this novel in your head that gains or loses elements as you grow up, and then revisit it as a different person, essentially. To me, there's a lot of fantasy in that as well. There's a lot of… Even though this is obviously a very natural and observed progress of mortality, the idea of departure and return, moving through time in these ways, or, like the kind of time travel that feels inherent in [garbled] to something that you first experienced at a different age. All of that, to me, partakes of these relationships, of this kind of sense of the fantastic. There is this beautiful, beautiful essay by Sophia Samatar called On the 13 Words That Made Me a Writer. I like all of Samatar's work. I return to her work on a bimonthly basis, basically. I just reread her essays all the time, because I always… They always speak to me in a way that I feel like I need at a given moment. What she does in this essay is she talks about how, for her, fantasy resides in language. That when she was a child… I'll say like… So the 13 words in question are

There was a library, and it is ashes. Let its long length assemble.

These words made me a writer. When I was in middle school, my mother brought home a used paperback copy of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast…

And so on. So she draws these comparisons between like… So, this was a fantasy novel. So she tried to then go and find other fantasy novels that would make her feel the way that this made her feel. It became very hit or miss. She would get that feeling from some books, but not from others. She came to realize that the thing that catalyzed this very specific feeling in her of wonder and awe and marvel was more to do with the language that was being used than the plots or characters or tropes in a given story that might market it as fantasy. So she found herself finding that experience of fantasy in books that were not marketed or labeled as such. That that spirit of wonder and stuff like that she could find in lots of different places. I feel that way about fantasy, because it brings me back to this idea about what poetry does to language. So if poetry breaks language into meaning, I feel like fantasy breaks reality into truths. That what poetry does to language, fantasy does to reality. That the experience that we get from it as writers of genre fiction in so many different ways is that we are always figuring out ways to break and hack reality into a specific experience for our readers, right? And that poetry is doing that too, but at the level of language in a way that you can foreground or background as much as you like. But I also want to say that literature has been poetry for a lot longer than it has been not poetry. That we have… The novel is actually a very recent technology in terms of literature. Poetry is ancient. Similarly, fantasy is ancient. We have had domestic realism for a lot less time than we have had fantasy and the fantastic in our literature. I want to just give people this similarity because I want people who love reading science fiction and fantasy to look at poetry as as much theirs to play with, to read, to be moved and transformed by as the stunning books that they read when they were 12.

[Mary Robinette] So, I have… You've given me a thought that I want to dive into, but first, let us pause for the book of the week, which is Monster Portrait.

[Amal] Yes. So, Monster Portrait by Sophia Samatar, whom I adore. It's by Sophia Samatar and her brother, Del Samatar. Del Samatar is an artist. So the book, Monster Portrait, is a very slender book of fictionalized autobiography, where Sophia Samatar is responding to these illustrations, these images that Del has made with snapshots that involve interrogations of what is a monster, like, thinking about monsters and monstrosity, and when those things are valued and when they are not valued. Thinking of those in relation to race, to borders, to belonging. It's just an absolutely luminous… I know luminous is like a massive cliché in terms of talking about [garbled]

[chuckles]

[Amal] I review books for a living, I am too keenly aware of this, but genuinely, reading this book gives me an experience of light that I just don't know how to talk about otherwise. It's deeply beautiful. I just cannot recommend it enough. If you wanted to read a book that kind of could be a bridge to you between prose and poetry, I cannot recommend this one enough for doing exactly that thing.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that sounds amazing. So, that was Monster Portrait by Sophia Samatar and Del Samatar.

[Mary Robinette] So, here's the thing that was running through my head as you were talking. There's a thing that longtime listeners will have heard me say before that one of the things that drew me to puppetry is the same thing that drew me to SF and fantasy, which is that it takes reality and it tips it to the side, so that you can see the interconnective tissue. As you were talking, I was like, "Oh. Okay. That's what poetry does, too."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But the other thing that went through my head as you were talking was about why a person picks a particular form. There's this other idea that I often talk about, usually when I'm trying to explain to people what voice means. It was in puppetry, we have these three ideas. There's the aesthetics, the mechanical, and the personal. The aesthetic is what something looks like. The mechanical is literally like what kind of puppet are you using. The personal is all of the idiosyncratic choices that you, as a person, make. The example that I use is that if you hand the same puppet to two different puppeteers, it will look like a different character. But what occurred to me as you were talking is that I can take that kind of model and think of it as the kind of thing that drives you as a writer. The story you were telling with Sophia that it was the language that called to her, it's like, "Oh, that she is drawn to aesthetic." Whereas I am… There are a lot of people who are drawn to the plot, the structural mechanics of a story. Then, other people are drawn to the kind of the personal story, the personal narrative, the message, so to speak, that's within it. That kind of knowing which thing drives you as a writer also tells you where your defaults are and where your weaknesses are.

[Amal] Yes. I completely agree with that. That's so helpful.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I was like, "Oh. That is part of why…" Like, Pat Rothfuss talks about the fact that he needs to get the next word right before he can move on. I've always been like, "What's the point of him polishing words if you're not going to use them?"

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Like, if I'm going to [garbled delete them?] later.

[Howard] How do I know if I'm going to use them if they're not polished?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Wait. Yeah. This is exactly that thing.

[Howard] That's the dialogue.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. So it strikes me as a… That, for listeners who are not naturally language driven, that one of the really arguably most powerful reasons to dive into this is because it gives you a different way to approach story. It gives you a different understanding of the ways we communicate. It basically tips your entire narrative form on its side to allow you to see the interconnected tissue.

[Amal] I think that is a beautiful, beautiful way of approaching that. I completely agree. I'm reminded… Gosh, who was saying this? Mmm… I'm not going to get this right. I think that Vonda Lee at some point was talking about… Possibly had an article on Tor.com or something that was about exactly this kind of thing, about how writing outside of your comfort zone being to learn… Actually, I'm not… I could be totally wrong, that it wasn't Vonda Lee, either. But mostly what I'm remembering is an article on figuring out where your facility is so that you can figure out in reverse, essentially, where your lack of facility is so that you can work on those things. I love that thought of approaching… Like, the thing that interconnected tissue and stuff. Because I think, too, of how many fantasy novels can… Like, are maybe not thought of as ones that are poetry forward and stuff, but, to me, absolutely are, because… I'm thinking of something like Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. Where, like it's written… It's not written in a way that is difficult to get into and stuff. It's very clear. But it's also very stylized. It's also very… And poetry is like a thematic plot-based concern. In the book, you need to know poetry in order to be able to read bureaucratic documents that end up on your desk as an ambassador and stuff like that. The crux of the novel, the climax of it, is the writing of a poem. Which is something that is unbelievably difficult to pull off. Like, this is where you absolutely do not want to miss the mark with a piece of rhyme that is not landing in a way that… Your whole plot depends on whether or not this is a good poem.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Amal] And she absolutely nails it. Like, I think that the phrase "I am a spear in the hands of the Sun," is like the last line of this, and on the back of that line, they build a revolution and it's this whole enormous thing… Sorry, spoilers for a book that came out two years ago.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] But, hey, it's just absolutely wonderful, and poetry is part of the texture of that book. But I… Like, I don't know if Arkady would talk about herself as having written it poetically, or of [garbled]. But, nevertheless, there's this sensibility, I guess, to that style, to that aesthetic, that is truly wonderful to me.

[Mary Robinette] This has been fantastic. We are, I'm afraid, at the time which we need to wrap things up with our time with poetry. Do you…

[Howard] I would love… Dan, you remember that thing that I read from Robert Service at the very beginning to you? The…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] That feels like closure. I'm just going to go.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. I have no idea what you're talking about. So you say that thing.

[Amal] Do you want to do it after the homework or before the homework?

[Howard] Have we done the homework yet?

[Amal, Mary Robinette] No.

[Howard] No. We did not do… Okay. Do the homework.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Thank you.

[Dan] Someone was looking up a poem instead of paying attention.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] So, as the… As sad as I am to leave things here, I… We have come to the homework part. Talking about novels and about prose and poetry, and to bring this all full-circle, the homework I want to leave you with is I want you to find a favorite line from a novel or a short story, one that moves you really, really deeply, one that you kind of keep in your head every now and then. I want you to take that line and use it as the epigraph for a poem. So, essentially, if you see a poem and there's like a single line in italics at the start, before the poem actually starts, that's what I mean. I want you to use that line from a novel or a short story, and I want you to write a poem following it, I want you to write a poem sparked by it. A kind of poetic tribute to whatever that line did to you.

[Howard] The reason I brought this up is that it feels like a poet's version of "you're out of excuses, now go write." It's from Robert Service.

Lone amid the café’s cheer,

Sad of heart am I to-night;

Dolefully I drink my beer,

But no single line I write.

There’s the wretched rent to pay,

Yet I glower at pen and ink:

Oh, inspire me, Muse, I pray,

It is later than you think!

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's lovely. Also, so painful and so true. I'm… As we send folks away, I'm going to also share my father's favorite poem by Ogden Nash. Further Reflections on Parsley.

Parsley is gharsley.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Dan, do you want to share a poem, too?

[Dan] That poem reminds me of the time that someone auditioned for our high school musical by singing Minimum-Wage by They Might Be Giants.

[Laughter]

[Dan] The only words in the song are minimum-wage. He just shouted it and left the room. It was great.

[Amal] Beautiful.

[Mary Robinette] That's the only thing you want to share before we wrap?

[Dan] Yes. I am going to share a poem with you. This is one of my all-time favorites. By Brian Turner, who was a medic in Afghanistan and wrote a lot of poetry, and then came home and he was, for a while, the poet laureate of the US. His most famous poem is called Here, Bullet.

If a body is what you want,

then here is bone and gristle and flesh.

Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,

the aorta’s opened valves, the leap

thought makes at the synaptic gap.

Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,

that inexorable flight, that insane puncture

into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish

what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,

here is where I complete the word you bring

hissing through the air, here is where I moan

the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering

my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have

inside of me, each twist of the round

spun deeper, because here, Bullet,

[Whoof]

here is where the world ends, every time.

[Amal] Wow.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, with all of that, my dear listeners, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.36: Languages and Naming

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/09/08/14-36-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.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.51: Constructed Languages, with Dirk Elszinga

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/12/17/12-51-constructed-languages-with-dirk-elzinga/

Key Points: [First, an apology from the transcriptionist -- this was a very difficult episode to transcribe. I did the best I could. But listen to the audio for vocal points!] Creating a language? Keep it realistic. Look at a language you know, and play around with ideas from there. Loanwords, and the interaction between culture and language. Problems in creating a language? The fear that I'm just covering up English with funny words. Be aware of the idiosyncrasies and biases of the language. Study another language? Well, at least look at a reference grammar. DuoLingo, Google Translate, other online resources. Pay attention to sounds, and how they go together. Names! Dialect or not? Yoda, he says, a point can make. Check out the bibliography in the liner notes!

( And the words that followed... )
[Howard] Let's have a writing prompt.
[Dirk] All right. So one of the funniest things about language is the way we use metaphor. One of the common metaphors for engaging in debate is combat. So when we talk about like a Presidential debate, candidates debate, where we talk about, "Yeah, he scored points," or "he knocked his opponent out." We frame it in terms of personal combat. Come up with a metaphor for a debate that does not involve personal combat. That talks about how the exchange of different ideas can be thought about in a different way.
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 7.7: Historical Fantasy

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/02/12/writing-excuses-7-7-historical-fantasy/

Key Points: alternate history changes a historical fact and extrapolates, while historical fantasy adds a magical element to history and goes on from there. Think through how it affects society, but don't push too hard. Mary said, "Jane Austen needs more rotary cannons." Historical fantasy mixes the familiar with the strange. Do your research! Historical fantasy and urban fantasy are the same thing, just in different times. Get familiar with the culture and society. Talk with experts. Beware language, for it doth shift, but you are writing for modern readers.

( Petticoats and parasols? )
[Brandon] You know, let's make that our writing prompt. Just to say, think about a story from the past, or a historical period that you have been particularly interested in at one point in time. Go ahead and try and write a story set in that time. Do a little bit of research. Don't go crazy overboard. Do a little bit. Write a story. Then start to fact check yourself. See if this is a process you enjoy.
[Howard] Figure out if you love it.
[Brandon] Yup. All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: wayback

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 5.36: Non-traditional Settings with Saladin Ahmed

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/05/08/writing-excuses-5-36-non-traditional-settings-with-saladin-ahmed/

Key points: Non-traditional settings raise the learning curve for the reader. Splice familiar elements with unfamiliar to provide a familiar hook. Nontraditional settings take research! Look for the grand sweep of history and the little daily details of everyday life. (My suggestion -- think what it would be like to live there!) Focus on a specific country, area, or time. "The past is a foreign country." Take that seriously. Blend the familiar and the strange. Think about the learning curve of your reader, and adjust it. Use familiar situations to ease readers in. Be judicious with strange language ("Don't call a rabbit a smeerp." From the Turkey City Lexicon at http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer-for-sf-workshops/) Consider using something that you know better than anyone else, and build a nontraditional setting around that.

( Open Sesame? )
[Howard] Well, Saladin, I think we may need to put you on the spot here to take us home. One of the things we do for our readers... our listeners, excuse me, is we give them a writing prompt. Often it's related to the cast. But sometimes when the guest has been put sufficiently on the spot, it's just nonsense syllables. So, Saladin, writing prompt?
[Saladin] Writing prompt. Describe a food that is familiar to you from the point of view of a character who has never encountered it or anything like it before.
[Brandon] Wow. That could be really good.
[Howard] That's way better than the nonsense syllables we sometimes get.
[Brandon] Mac and cheese from someone who's never eaten it. All right. You can find Saladin's work at his website. Saladinahmed.com. Ahmed is spelled A-H-M-E-D. Saladin is spelled S-A-L-A-D-I-N.
[Howard] Saladinahmed.com.
[Brandon] Dot com. There are some short stories up there that people can read for free. His book is coming out next year from DAW. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: unspelled

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with language

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

Writing Excuses 19.21: Language as a Tool (A Close Reading on Worldbuilding)

Writing Excuses 17.41: Picture Books are Books, Too, with Special Guest Seth Fishman

Writing Excuses 16.18: Poetry and the Fantastic

Writing Excuses 14.36: Languages and Naming

Writing Excuses 12.51: Constructed Languages, with Dirk Elszinga

Writing Excuses 7.7: Historical Fantasy

Writing Excuses 5.36: Non-traditional Settings with Saladin Ahmed

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