Inkless

establishing a setting for your story without making it seem dated

When Anthony Burgess created his masterwork A Clockwork Orange, he didn’t get his slang by simply transcribing ideas from high schoolers. He created a lexicon for his near-future hoodlum based on a reasonable assumption (in 1962, when it was written) that the Soviet Union would remain a powerful force far into the future, and that rebellious youth might integrate Russian into their slang as part of their rejection of the society around them. This makes the book tough to get into at first, but rewarding enough to earn a great deal of critical praise (I particularly like how they could put The New York Times followed by Roald Dahl on the back cover).

Used well, slang can not only add to your story, but become a major part of both plot and character.

However, if you do create your own slang, don’t cut corners. I recently finished the children’s book Dragon’s Milk by Susan Fletcher, and the author clearly tried to give the story a quickie fantasy makeover: all her characters talk with ploddingly normal diction, with the one exception that every time they use the word “not” they put it at the end of the sentence. Always “I know not” or “I like it not”, and never “I don’t know”, “I don’t like it”. Even worse is the naming convention: the main character’s two sisters are named Lyf and Mirym, step-mother Ryfenn, grandmother Granmyr, and three young dragons she takes care off named Synge, Embyr and Pyro before handing them over to a dragon named Byrn. Rather yrrytatyng.

Fletcher may have been able to get away with these sneaks—her primary audience in 1989 was made up of girls around eleven or twelve—but these ticks don’t add to the story.

So what principles could we follow to create work like Burgess’s? To me, it seems our goals should be very similar to those of the Do-It-Yourself movement.

Simple, Cheap

The materials DIYers work with are not exotic or expensive. A DIYer is, by definition, not a professional, and a DIY slangmaker is not a linguist (except if the slangmaker is Tolkien). When crafting slang, a DIYer should not get too fancy, at the risk of creating slang that detracts, rather than adds, to the meaning of the story (even Tolkien could probably have cut down on the number of times the elves busted out grandiloquent songs of mourning).

A few subtle and smooth changes to diction can sometimes produce a much greater effect than major grammatical changes: see my entry “Speaking in Tongues“. (logo done by me using a free gif from this site)

Repurposed, Recycled

If you have any foreign language knowledge, and Anthony Burgess had a lot, you can draw on a wealth of foreign ideas and usages in creating new jargon. Don’t create from scratch when you can borrow. For some of the fun words I’ve found in other languages, see my entry “No Direct Translation“.

Useful

One of the greatest strengths of the DIY movement is the emphasis on utility: eschewing flashy and wasteful features. This is the core value for DIY slang.

If you have read much speculative fiction, you have probably come across stories in which the warlike race has a language with way too many consonants. Well, Polish and Czech are pretty consonant-heavy languages, and the Poles and Czechs don’t seem any more warlike than the rest of us.

As an alternative to repeating the “harsh sounds-bad man” stereotype, try looking at language from a utility standpoint. Ask yourself this question: Would this word or this usage be of value to this character? Better yet, start from your character’s daily life, and find something for which there is no word in English and name it. But don’t stop there. Also create some set phrases and “translate” them: this allows you to produce alien ideas without adding too many italicized unpronounceables to your work.

For example, you could give the warlike people eight common words, twelve more slang words, ten euphemisms, and a couple dozen signature phrases all describing killing. Having different kinds of words, as well as phrase- and sentence-level constructions about killing will add more to your story than having one slang word you repeat over and over. If some of them even sound pleasant, all the more sinister.

Good luck with your DIYalog!

using language to give your story a foreign context

In writing, adopting the perspective of a foreigner can give you an angle on a story that may provide you with much more insight. Particularly in speculative fiction, but also in other fiction, alien or unworldly characters can be very satisfying. And if you want to create truly foreign characters, you need to be able to think in a foreign way sometimes, and that will require research.

Rich Words

If you’ve ever studied a foreign language, you may notice that every so often you run across a word in that language that requires a long cultural explanation to define, or that illustrates a funny difference in the way people think, or that sound just perfectly right for what they mean. I’ve run into words like this in Russian, and (to a lesser extent, reflecting my weaker speaking ability) in Ukrainian and Japanese. An equally fun discovery is when there is not really a good word in another language for something in English.

Here’s a few of the words and phrases and expressions I enjoy. I’ll be adding to them periodically, as I encounter or remember more. If you’ve got one in a language you know, feel free to drop it in the comments!

Russian

• Blatt (блат): It means a combination of corruption related ideas like “inside connections”, “pull”, and “under the table deals”.
• Krysha (крыша): literally “roof”: one’s connections in high places that protect one from being persecuted by government officials or gangsters.
• Tovarishch (товарищ): The word Russian Communists actually used that was translated as “comrade” in English. Funny enough, the word originally meant “business associate” and comes from a Turkish word for “businessman” or “merchant”. The Communists were insulting each other all this time!
• Khaltura (халтура): This can have the innocuous meaning “side-job” or the more derogatory meaning of poorly done work.
• Belaya Vorona (белая ворона): literally, a “white crow”. In English you have a “black sheep”—the one strange, out of place person in an otherwise OK family. In Russian you have a “white crow”—the one good person in a group of bad folks. Perhaps “diamond in the rough” would be a better comparison.
• Khomyachit’ (хомячить): Literally “to hamster”. In the US, we wolf down our food, in Russian-speaking areas, they’re more disdainful of the practice.
• Seroburomalinoviy (серобуромалиновый): literally grayish-brownish-raspberry colored. It means motley or of no particular color.
• Privacy: While there is a word уединение (Uyedineniye) that gets translated as “privacy”, the word is more closely translated as “solitude”. There are significant implications if a person can express the idea of being alone, which is the main meaning of “privacy”, but not the idea of a right to be alone that is often the implied when this term is used in English (for example: “This reception is great, but I feel like we really ought to give the newlyweds some privacy!”—it doesn’t quite work with “solitude”, particularly since there are two of them).

Ukrainian

• Rozsmakuvaty (розсмакувати): The word “smakuvaty” (смакувати) without the prefix means to eat with gusto (a word with resonance by itself). With the prefix it means to eat something enough to get a taste for it. For example, it often takes people a while to get a taste for alcoholic drinks, so new drinkers usually try flavored mixed drinks instead of straight liquor until they have rozsmakuvati-ed alcohol.
• Kumivstvo (кумівство): A “kum” is a parent of your godchild, or a godparent to your child. Therefore, this is literally something like “godparent-ition”. It means the same thing as blat does in Russian: the corrupt use of one’s connections to obtain advantage.

Japanese

Many of the most fun words in Japanese are from among the astounding collection of onomatopoeias in the language. Not only that, but they have lots of ideophones (gitaigo in Japanese: 擬態語）, what I call resonances, words that sound like the ideas they represent. Lots and lots and lots of resonances.

• TsuruTsuru (つるつる）: This word was described in my class as meaning “very smooth—smooth as the head of a Buddhist priest”.
• DabuDabu (だぶだぶ）: This means baggy.

What Makes a Good Time-Travel Story?

As a general rule, I dislike time-travel stories. On the thematic side, many wind up being blunt and bludgeoning “commentaries” about what’s wrong with the world today (similarly to zombie movies), or condescending and superficial cultural missions to the ignorant. On the technical side, science fiction stories can quickly become irritatingly unbelievable given that characters have the superpower ability to disrupt the chain of cause and effect: they can act on hindsight preemptively (to go back in time before problems develop and nip them in the bud), or create hordes of paradoxes (such as the killing-one’s-own-grandfather paradox and others).

I was thus rather bemused to find that (without intending to) I’d read three science fiction stories in May that all dealt with time-travel and liked two of them: To Say Nothing of The Dog by Connie Willis, The Door Into Summer by Robert Heinlein, and The Anubis Gate by Tim Powers.

A Little Light-Hearted Paradox

Austin Powers II is only an OK movie, but it has a great bit of handwaving about the problems with time-travel (image via: this site):

Austin: So, Basil, if I travel back to 1969 and I was frozen in 1967, I could go look at my frozen self. But, if I’m still frozen in 1967, how could I have been unthawed in the 90s and traveled back to the 60s? (crosses eyes) Oh, no, I’ve gone cross-eyed.

Basil Exposition: I suggest you don’t worry about those things and just enjoy yourself.
[turns to camera]
Basil: That goes for you all, too.
Austin: Yes.

Essentially, the movie deals with the paradoxes inherent in time-travel stories by not taking them seriously. Many of my favorite movies about time travel (and most famous time-travel movies) are comedies (Back to the Future, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure). If your goal, like Bill and Ted’s, is to bring actual famous historical figures to southern California for a high-school class presentation, I’m not going to be spending too much time looking for technical inconsistencies.

Restricted Travelers

Back to the Future was was also light-hearted, so one might expect the creators to have been breezy about the rules. But take a look at this list of answers posed to them, you can see they were not. One example:

Q: What happened to old Biff when he staggered out of the DeLorean in 2015?

A: Our intention regarding old Biff was that upon his return to 2015, he would be erased from existence because he had changed his entire destiny by giving his younger self the Sports Almanac. (Probably, Lorraine shot him sometime around 1996!). After old Biff clutches his chest and staggers (the same symptoms that Marty exhibited in Back to the Future when he was beginning to be “erased”), we actually filmed him falling onto the street and vanishing, and we previewed the movie this way (see The Secrets of the Back to the Future trilogy). However, the vast majority of the audience did not understand it, so we decided to cut it out, leaving the answer ambiguous, and subject to various interpretations—besides the above explanation, you can believe that Old Biff had a heart attack from the shock of time travel of from flying the car, or from something that happened to him in 1955. (image via: IMDb)

Even in this lighthearted comedy, the directors obviously felt it was worth their time to understand and account for the potential paradoxes of time travel. A novel writer is going to have a lot more audience time to work with than these directors, and so should be held to a higher standard.

The primary way to make a believable time-travel system is similar to that for creating a believable magical system: limit the ways in which powers can be used. In Back to the Future, they needed a massive amount of electricity, high speed, and bizarrely complex technology. In The Door Into Summer, Heinlein subjected time-travel to a variation of Newton’s third law of motion: in order to send something a certain amount of time into the past, a person must send an equal mass an equal amount of time into the future. Furthermore, one can never be certain which of the two items will go forward and which backwards, and there was a significant chance of miscalculation (whoops, you appeared eight feet underground). Add to that the good old standby of a government coverup, and you have a story world in which you can believe time-travel is nearly unheard of.

Self-Healing and Immutable Timelines

In To Say Nothing of the Dog (as well as The Doomsday Book, which is set in the same world), Willis uses an even more clever control mechanism—one I’d never seen before. She controls time travelers by giving the universe the ability to “heal” inconsistencies. Willis first draws a distinction between significant and insignificant events. While travelers are able to change minor events, the universe itself will prevent them from changing major events by blocking them from entering time portals, sending them to the wrong time or place, or when travelers think of clever ways to set off large chain reactions with small action, the universe will also set off a group of of events that cumulatively nullify the impact of the catalyzing action.

In the (exemplary) short story “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”, Ted Chiang takes this method even a step further: his narrator and the creator of his time portals are both devout Muslims in a unspecified time probably around the late Middle Ages. In it, the world has a strict timeline: travelers will never be able to change the past, even if they think they can. Unlike the movie Twelve Monkeys, which posits an unchangeable but impersonal timeline, in “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”, the immutability of the timeline is conceived of as being ensured by God.

Don’t Look at My Time-Travel System, Look at My Characters

Finally, since time-travel systems are often fraught, another way to deal with them is to shift the focus of the story away from being plot driven and towards being more character driven.

The Door Into Summer includes some of Heinlein’s prescient predictions about the future (the story was written in 1957 about a character who travels to 2000), but some extremely off predictions as well (the hero’s inventions are targeted at very 1950s housewives, presumed to still be the majority of women in 2000). Plot-wise it’s a basic, old-fashioned “triumph of the tough guy” story. In order to make it really carry, though, Heinlein needed a main character compelling enough to round out a standard plot with the difficulties of time-travel, and I thought he did.

In contrast, I never warmed to the main character of Tim Power’s The Anubis Gate enough to enjoy the story. With such a convoluted storyline it was always going to be more plot driven than character driven, but for me, the plot so overwhelmed the character that it seemed pushy: I couldn’t get into the story, because I always felt aware of Powers as he moved his characters around.

Though I liked The Door Into Summer, I liked Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog much more. The story’s base time (from which the time-traveling characters originally travel from) is 2057, but the majority of the story takes place in Victorian England. Willis’s insight was to give the entire story pacing and style modeled on that of Victorian writers, particularly Jerome K. Jerome (the book takes its title from the subtitle of Jerome’s Three Men In A Boat).

The flowery and anachronistic language, comedy of errors convolutions, and eccentric characters left me cross-eyed but amused. I don’t think the story was free of self-contradiction. (She sets a precedent that time-travelers will see the results of their actions when returning to the future, but at the end of the book Ned seems to see a woman at Coventry whose history he’d changed—who should no longer have been there. If you can explain this, please let me know!) However, her focus was on the characters and her tone was sufficiently lighthearted that I didn’t worry too much about the time travel. When I did, the work she’d done to create her self-healing timeline satisfied me.

Done as well as Willis did, a time travel story can become a marvelously contorted tale.

Some Microsoft Word Macros To Help You With Common Tasks

I’ve just added a new page to the site that will be a central area for ideas and macros to help you with common tasks in Microsoft Word.

I will try to think of others that are within my VB programming ability and time constraints. Of course I love suggestions, so if you’ve got one, please respond. Maybe I can come up with something.

One final word: since I’m on the subject of useful writing and editing macros, I should point you as well to the many detailed free macros offered on Roger J Carlson’s website.

rhythm is more important than spelling in imitating regional dialect

In Reading Like a Writer, a book on literary analysis for aspiring writers, Francine Prose quotes Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (pg 16). Part of the quote is this piece of dialog:

“Now look here, Bailey,” she said, “see here, read this,” and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed towards Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer my conscience if I did.”

As Prose points out, the word “aloose” alone goes along way towards conveying “the rhythm and flavor of a local dialect”. I’d add that the flow of the speaker’s voice, with run-ons and sentence-fragments and the little repetitions of casual speech (look here…see here… Here this fellow) is smooth enough and genuine enough that her unfamiliar word combination doesn’t throw us off. Like many of Flannery O’Connor’s characters, the speaker has a convincing regional accent because O’Connor does most of her work with diction and grammar, and gives us only occasional, well-chosen re-spelled or re-structured words to deal with.

Diction is the focus here. The word means “word choice”, but includes the sense of “enunciation” and “pleasing speaking ability”—word choice that is about words in context, not just words on their own. A character’s speech doesn’t just need to reflect their origins of the speaker, it also has to be smooth enough that readers can slip into the new context. If O’Connor had played too much with the spelling, even if her new words better reflected the proper pronunciation, readers would have to spend much more time sounding out the words and would be less able to get into the feel of the writing. As an analogy, think about how much harder it is to read a Shakespeare play than it is to listen to the play performed (after a couple minutes slipping into the context).

Avoid Being a Bad-Grammar Maven

Take another example of O’Connor’s regional dialect, from Wise Blood. The main character, Haze, a young man from the country, arrives in a city not really knowing where to go, copies down the address of a woman written on the door of a bathroom stall and takes a taxi there:

They had driven a few blocks before Haze noticed him squinting at him through the rear-view mirror. “You ain’t no friend of hers, are you?” the driver asked.

“I never saw her before,” Haze said.

“Where’d you hear about her, She don’t usually have no preachers for company.” He did not disturb the position of the cigar when he spoke; he was able to speak on either side of it.

“I ain’t any preacher,” Haze said, frowning. “I only seen her name in the toilet.”

“You look like a preacher,” the driver said. “That hat looks like a preacher’s hat.”

“It ain’t,” Haze said, and leaned forward and gripped the back of the front seat. “It’s just a hat.”

They stopped in front of a small one-story house between a filling station and a vacant lot. Haze got out and paid his fare through the window.

“It ain’t only the hat,” the driver said. “It’s a look in your face somewheres.”

“Listen,” Haze said, tilting the hat over one eye, “I’m not a preacher.”

The taxi driver says the woman “don’t usually have no preachers for company”, which is fine, many writers use double-negatives to give a feeling of uneducated southernness to a story. But Haze doesn’t say “I ain’t no preacher” he says “I ain’t any preacher”, which feels like the correct grammar for his response to the driver, in a cracked sort of way. He also uses the correct “I’m not a preacher” at the end instead of “I ain’t a preacher”. Both of these instances give the reader the sense that Haze is exerting extra effort to make sure he’s being clear and correct, and the southern context comes through even more clearly than if O’Connor had applied the “rules” of poor grammar more consistently.

Stoning Your Readers

In contrast: take a look at this bit of dialog between two gypsies in Tim Power’s The Anubis Gates:

Responding to the dog’s summons, a dark man in a striped corduroy coat stepped out of the tent and strode across the grass toward Fikee. Like the dogs, he halted well short of the old man. “Good evening, rya,” he said. “Will you eat some dinner? They’ve got a hotchewitchi on the fire, smells very kushto.”

“As kushto as hotchewitchi ever does smell, I suppose,” Fikee muttered absently. “But no, thank you. You all help yourselves.”

“Not I, rya—my Bessie always loved cooked hotchewitchi; so since she mullered I don’t eat it anymore.”

Does this convince you of anything except that Mr. Powers looked up at least four words of Romani language? Perhaps when you were reading it, your reaction was something like mine: “Ok, ‘rya’ means ’sir’, so ‘Sir, there’s hotchewitchi’, some food or another, doesn’t really matter, so ‘Sir there’s some food. It’s very kushto.’ ‘Tasty’, obviously. ‘Sir there’s some food, it’s very tasty.’ Then the other guy, ‘As kush–as tasty as h– as that food ever does smell, I suppose.’ What a waste of my time.”

In Snatch, the itinerant, indigent, “Pikers” use diction and a manner of speaking that clearly reflects who they are, and contributes to the natural flow of their speech (so well that it’s funny). In The Anubis Gate, the foreign words are tossed into the flow of speech like large rocks. The rest of what the gypsy characters say includes none of the peculiarities of grammar or diction that might convince us that these are non-native speakers from a culturally isolated community.

However, Power’ has not subjected us to the worst form of cheater’s dialect: apostrophication (doin’ nuthin’ but talkin’ and cussin’) .

Rule #1 for Dialect: Do not cut off bits of words and dress the wounds with apostrophes unless a madman forces you to do so at gunpoint. Should a madman do so, you are still obliged to try and talk him down first.

Cataloging Dialog

Fiction includes many great examples of dialog in dialect, but in preparing to write stories, we should also analyze our chosen dialects outside of fiction examples in order to increase our authenticity. In a later post, I will try to do something like this for Russian, based on my knowledge of the language and my native-Russian-speaking friends.

Highlighting Paragraph Length

Many of the writing books I’ve read recommend varying paragraph size. The goal is to establish a natural rhythm and flow to sections of text—avoiding both lulling readers into a stupor with enormous blocks of text, or pummeling them with punchy one-sentence paragraphs.

Here’s how Self-Editing for Fiction Writers words its advice (in a chapter called “Breaking Up Is Easy to Do”):

So be on the lookout for paragraphs that run more than, say, a half-page in length. Whether it’s because readers feel lectured to, or because they feel crowded, or simply because some white space on the page is visually inviting, lengthy unbroken chunks of written material are off-putting… paragraphing more frequently can make your writing much more engaging.

And in contrast:

…a page-turner beginning to end is more likely to leave its readers feeling weary—and manipulated—than satisfied. When you want to create a more relaxed mood, or give your readers a chance to breathe (or reflect), or simply lull them into complacency before you spring something on them, try paragraphing a little less frequently than usual.

Sculpting your paragraphs for variety and rhythm can greatly help the flow of your prose.

Black Box Paragraphs

One easy way to study paragraphs as shapes is to select all of the text in the story (or in a portion if you’ve divided the story up to avoid word processor glitches) and then highlight it in black or dark gray. In addition to making your story look as though it’s been reviewed by the world’s strictest censor, this will provide you with black blocks instead of text, allowing you to focus your attention on the shape of the text without being distracted by the content.

To avoid having your notes also highlighted, consider using Microsoft Word comments instead of simply writing notes in the body of the text. When you’re done looking at paragraph size, you can simply select everything again and get rid of the highlighting, then go back and make any changes you left notes about.

Hopefully in the non-too-distant future, I will be able to make the time to create a simple macro that will allow you to search for paragraphs or sequences of paragraphs you feel may be too long or too short.

Overly Leadable Characters in Speculative Fiction

I’ve just finished reading The Warrior’s Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold, quite a shift in gears after James Joyce’s Dubliners. Like much speculative fiction it was rather like a ride in a hovercar: the interesting technology was (mostly) able to carry the story, keep our belief suspended, across the plot holes.

While the book is enjoyable, there was one aspect of it busted my hovercar: Miles Vorkosigan’s followers are simply too easily lead (almost as easily led as Captain Phule’s legionnaires in Robert Asprin’s Phule’s Company). Many of Vorkosigan’s main associates seem to act like a single self-help seminar was all that stood between them and greatness: an out-of-work pilot and drunk not only stays sober after meeting Miles, but contributes both to strategy and to fighting, a thuggish commander learns restraint apparently by osmosis, a hermaphroditic mercenary becomes a great field commander (and manages to get a crush on Miles). One deserter becomes a brave war hero simply because Miles gives him the old “we’re all afraid; it’s not about losing your fear but about learning to control it” speech.

The climax of leadability is when when Miles’ crew of five, with only one fit and trained military person, overcomes two-dozen mercenaries and then manages to convince them that they (Miles’ five) are an inspection committee, rather than a bunch of smugglers. The reason we are given for why the the mercenaries believe the bluff (despite having one of their crew killed by the “inspectors”) is that doing so would make them feel less humiliated by their defeat. This is a level of psychological vulnerability almost as unbelievable as the physical vulnerability of the Star Wars stormtroopers to Fightin’ Ewoks.

Leaders Created by Followers

The plot of The Warrior’s Apprentice is dependent on the supernatural leadability of secondary characters in a way that brings to mind the the dependence of the Tarot character of The Fool on his luck. Phule’s Company can at least be defended as a book targeted at younger teenagers meant for simple pleasure reading (I loved it at 15, but couldn’t enjoy it nearly as much at 25). Since it doesn’t try too hard for seriousness, the supernatural leadability of supporting characters can be just part of the way the world works. Bujold gets into trouble because her book does try for more: such as seriously addressing political intrigue and war crimes. Because of this, each instance of Foolish leadability is an example of bathos—a fall in the story from the serious to the absurd.

Why did Bujold, like many other writers, make this mistake?

My best guess is that to become a writer, a person must have an exceptional ability to see other people’s points of view and value them as their own, as well as the time and the inclination to go off in a room alone to create for much of their lives. Good leaders need to pursue goals with single-minded determination and consistency (that’s vision), and must be constantly in the public eye, inspiring their followers to follow same these few goals. A fiction writer-leader is quite nearly an oxymoron.

Writers writing about leadership are describing people totally unlike themselves, so it is understandable that even good writers sometimes resort to propping up their weak leaders with unrealistically impressionable followers.

Real Leaders

Trying to create realistic leaders is central to a number of the stories I want to write. However, I am a typical writer with little experience myself with leadership to work from. That means a concomitant increase in research. I’ll add more on this topic as I come across it. Some of my ideas follow, but if you have any, please comment:

1. Don’t make a charismatic leader as reflective as you are. A person who interacts with a couple coworkers and meets about one friend per day for a couple hours is going to be able to do a lot more reflection, relative to talking, than someone who is leading and talking morning to night. Also, just because some leaders are successful does not mean their self images are free of major inaccuracies. Let your overworked leaders fall into misconceptions more easily than you do.
2. Give leaders slogans and core concepts to repeat. Good leaders often “read” their audience and adjust their messages, but they succeed most when the fundamental part of the messages remain unchanged. In Colleen Willis’s fabulous To Say Nothing of the Dog, “God is in the details” is the slogan used by Lady Schrapnell to push around an entire Oxford faculty, to the point where the main character flees through a time machine centuries into the past just to escape her attention. Giving your leaders ideas and slogans they hold on to relentlessly will help explain how they can guide large numbers of people, many of whom they may never meet directly.
3. Don’t make your followers abject worshippers. Another way that To Say Nothing of the Dog gets Lady Schrapnell right is by making many of the characters dislike her. By definition, a good leader is someone who can get other people to do more than they would without the leader. That often requires pressure, and few people respond well to pressure. Even if a leader is greatly admirable, lower-level officials may misinterpret the leader’s vision, and this will also compromise the leader. If follower reactions cover a range from bitterness through grudging respect, with only a select number admiring the leader, the leader will seem more real than one worshipped by otherwise not-overly-impressionable people.

Insurmountable Disadvantage in Science Fiction

Everybody loves to think that it’s the size of the fight in the dog, not the dog in the fight, that determines things. I like them so much so I was probably one of the only people who could really suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy the Ewoks in Star Wars, Return of the Jedi. Of course, I was eight at the time, and mostly I’m still able to enjoy them due to a combination of nostalgia and contrarianism against the Empire Strikes Back crowd…

The little two-foot teddy bears of Star Wars are the icons of Plucky Baseline characters: creatures or people that are hopelessly technologically backwards and yet still manage to overcome their hyper-advanced technologically- and sociologically-developed opponents (link is to the Orion’s Arm - a cooperative sci-fi universe project, a decent argument against the character type, though laced with the group’s own jargon).

Pluck in Action Movies and Fantasy Stories

For fiction set in our own world, plucky characters can usually get away with quite amazing upsets. Action heroes, especially, count on great indulgence from us in suspending our disbelief so they can win gunfights against dozens of opponents, jump vehicles over, around, and through bizarre obstacles, and generally act like one-man armies. Perhaps my favorite example of relatively believable pluck is when Sean Connery, playing Indiana Jones’ dad in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, manages to defeat a German WWII plane by scaring up a flock of geese to jam the plane’s propeller.

In fantasy stories as well, since the rules of the world are largely author-defined, writers can embed trade-offs in the rules of their universes that provide opportunities for Pluck. Usually the most powerful “technology” in a fantasy story will be magic, and thus the powers of wizards will need to be curtailed strongly in some way.

The default way to give non-wizards a chance is to make magic required extreme mental effort from wizards. I’ll mention I just finished Tim Power’s The Anubis Gate, and wizards in the story are limited both by the need to be close to “sources” of magic to perform greater feats, and the physical toll magic takes on them (pain and weakness, bleeding from the eyes, fatigue…). Role-playing games have even quantified the mental effort: a wizard has only a certain number of points of magical power which must be replenished after using magical abilities.

Other popular controls on magic are to make casting it involve inescapable vulnerabilities, or require devilish bargains, great sacrifices, virtuoso precision, vast amounts of time, or rare materials.

Moreover, at the heart of almost all magical stories are human or human-like characters with strengths and weaknesses recognizably similar to our own.

Inhuman Perfection

The major difference in space-age science fiction is that there will be inhumanly advanced characters. We are already able to greatly increase the toughness of human beings, and may soon be able to significantly increase human intelligence, and this is in the 21st century. A casually spacefaring future population will have centuries of improvement, advancement, and strengthing, and increasing of longevity behind it.

In such a battle against more recognizably “human” opponents (which would be the likely be the “good guys”, because empathizing with an inhumanly advanced group would be much more difficult), the advanced race would win every time. Not most every time—absolutely every time, regardless of pluck. The battle wouldn’t be conceptually like Drake vs. the Spanish Armada, it would be like a herd of sheep vs. Boston, Massachusetts.

If a military dictatorship has access to mass genetic modification and cloning technologies, energy weapons, and super-advanced alloys, it will not lose to Ewoks. The dictatorship would not make the soldiers’ strength or reflexes, armor or equipment, susceptible to the sticks of little savages any more than it would create them with exposed brains.

(images: walker, ewok)

Hitting Above Weight Class

Of course there are lots of tropes in science fiction that stretch believability: that’s part of the fun. So of course stories of pluck certainly can have a place in science fiction. But to really draw in readers (less credulous than I was at eight) a science fiction writer will need to put together a force better than Fightin’ Ewoks.

Readers are unlikely to believe your featherweight can take on a heavyweight in the ring, but a middleweight could do it.

Here are a few ideas for putting enough firepower in the hands of your overmatched heroes to make their upsets believable. If you can think of more, please respond with comments—I’m just improvising here.

1. if your advanced opponents are divided, a minority of them may either tip the balance by joining the heroes weakening the primary opponents
2. in a more sinister twist, a high-level third party may actually be found to have manipulated the heroes, carefully guiding them to victory for its own purposes
3. technology at the fringes of an advanced society may be sufficiently up-to-date to pose a reasonable challenge to superior opponent technology (provided you set the stage with sufficient communications to keep the fringes sufficiently “in the loop”)
4. since some technologies are so advanced and as-yet scientifically unproven to be indistinguishable from magic (according to Arthur C. Clarkes old adage), you can use the fantasy tools such as trade-offs and critical weaknesses to give them vulnerabilities (an example of this would be in Larry Niven’s Ringworld, when humans defeat more militarily capable opponents by improvising a weapon out of spaceship thrusters)
5. throttling back the technological advancement of your societies makes it easier for humans like us to compete—if you want less of a gap between us and frontrunners, set the story closer to the present
6. while it’s a recognizable sci-fi cliche, another way of making normal people important in the future is to have everyone live in the wake of the collapse of a superior civilization. Whatever destroyed that civilization or broke it up conveniently leaves some of the tools behind—allowing access to futuristic technologies without the insurmountable intellectual gulfs that would necessarily accompany them. As I said, though, this is a cliche and that means it would take more work to make a fresh story with this premise

After a bit of fighting with the table-creation program, my list of resonances and list of discordances are ready to go live. I use the term “resonance” to mean a word which is an idea onomatopoeia. Rather than “hiss” or “splat”, which are meant to sound like the phenomena they describe—the sound of one of these words evokes a feeling that is in harmony with the meaning of the word. Examples include pithy, bawd, and cacophony. A discordance, in contrast, is a word for which the sound and the meaning seem to clash. Examples of words I consider discordances are limerence, osculate, fisticuffs, and grok.

Before you catch me: I know of at least one term that already refers to this type of word: ideophone. But ideophone seems too cold and scholarly to itself be an ideophone, so that’s why I decided on resonance.

Please check out the resonances and discordances and let me know what you think.

Thank you for your interest!

Fiction as a String or Web of If-Then Statements

In addition to laboratory experiments on ideas, works of fiction can also be thought of as elaborate if-then statements, comparable to those in much clearer-defined fields such as mathematics and logic.

For fiction, the basic details and the elements of stories about which readers are meant to “suspend their disbelief” are the if side of the statement, and the implicit agreement is that the story will produce from those ifs a number of thens that are both logical and surprising.

Of course one of the goals of fiction is to make the story flow so naturally that readers do not even perceive they are making assumptions (accepting givens) on their way to the conclusion. For this reason it can be difficult to pick apart the bits that must be accepted from the bits we should analyze and examine. A relatively simple way of telling them apart is that when ifs are done wrong, readers think “Huh?” or “What the heck?” (like a thrice divorced main character who is presented as having the exuberant optimism and naivety of a fifteen-year-old), but when thens are done wrong, readers thinks “It wouldn’t happen like that!” (like a pudgy office worker who fights off a half-dozen trained assassins in scene three).

Ifs and Thens in Catcher in the Rye

Catcher in the Rye story is told from first person POV, so one of the ifs we must account for include situational characteristics, such as the death of Holden’s brother Allie, character characteristics, such as the personalities of major characters such as Holden’s former girlfriend and his favorite professor, and aspects of the writing itself, such as the implicit bias that the writing will evidence because it is supposed to be from the first-person point of view of Holden.

This story is a classic because Salinger does an excellent job of developing believable effects of the dynamic influences of these givens. It seems reasonable that Holden might care disproportionately about his sister, sneak back to visit her, that (with her character) she would anger at him, his response, and their whole back and forth throughout the story, with each then being part of the if in the next scene.

Speculative Fiction - Big Ifs

The same is true of speculative writing, it simply presents more extreme ifs and thens. Science fiction presents us with worlds, parts of which are meant to be taken as given and and part developed realistically from that given information. Fantasy includes even less reference to our current world, because it is not based on extrapolation of current elements of our world into the future and thus even fewer of the givens of our own world can be imported without question. But almost all such stories include humans or human-like characters, the basic psychological characteristics of which are meant to be like people we know, of those people were in their extreme situations. And with just as much certainty as any other fiction, a given presented early in the story cannot be blithely broken later in the story.

In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, we are made painfully aware that the main ring gives the wearer a connection to a being of pure and overpowering evil. Not one of the characters could wear the ring for long without being overcome by the evil, and many of them proved their goodness by not trying. If one character were immune, we would feel cheated or disappointed.

The Part We Care Most About is the Thens

Thinking of writing in this way is useful for me because it reminds me that the important, and enjoyable, part of writing is in seeing how the story develops (the thens), not the scene or situation (the ifs). I can (and do) spend enormous amounts of time on worldbuilding, so it is helpful to be reminded that the proof anything I write will still be in the way all those ifs crash together, and characters weave their own story ies through the crashing and jangling of those events in ways that are continually influenced by what has gone on before.

Fiction as Thought Experiment

From time to time, one hears from people who, for whatever reason, disdain fiction. Usually, they are the kinds of people who consider themselves non-fiction purists, and their most common jibe is that fiction is all just a pack of lies. Perhaps because writers are self-conscious lot, even great writers seem to have accepted this accusation (Hemmingway - Fiction is the truth inside a lie).

Balderdash.

Lying requires an intention to deceive, and a good fiction writer has no such intention. A good work of fiction does not convince us that the events it describes actually happened, but that they might have happened.

A Philosophical Laboratory

In great writing, each event in the story seems to flow naturally into the next, and the questions or hypotheses that are brought up along the way seem to be addressed (but not necessarily answered) in a satisfactory way. Like a laboratory scientist that formulates a hypothesis then tests that hypothesis in an isolated environment, a fiction writer takes a philosophical premise, a big idea or set of such ideas, and puts it in the isolated environment of a fiction story. The ability to isolate a story is essential because it allows fiction to address countless situations which could not, have not, or would be extremely difficult to find in our own world.

Non-fiction is certainly also worthy writing, but the purity of any truths discovered or ideas explored in works of non-fiction will always be contaminated by the infinite number of distracting and disruptive events of everyday life–because the ideas are being observed in the field, as it were. Disregarding fiction because it does not describe actual events (as imperfectly as we understand those) is like disregarding laboratory findings because they take place out of context.

In 1984, George Orwell attempted to analyze totalitarianism by creating a world in which it was triumphant. He explored how the state would behave itself, what effect it would have on peoples’ lives, how life within this state would feel, what it would smell like, how it would look. A situation of this extremity hasn’t happened (thank God), and if it did we would be unable to analyze it because of the very limitations the totalitarian state itself would impose. Yet even the word “1984″ has become a helpful corrective, a warning to the world to make extra effort to limit the powers of states.

Orwell’s fiction had something hugely meaningful to say about totalitarianism that no non-fiction story could ever have said.

Compromising Findings

What is the utmost limit on how much a person’s character be changed by a single very bad day? What if an aging hippie and young corporate executive were forced by some disaster to work together to survive? What if two young people fell in love whose families were irreparably at odds with one another? A non-fiction story could address these issues, but sometimes the findings would often be hard to assess.

Take the last example: What if two young people fell in love whose families were irreparably at odds with one another? That describes Romeo and Juliet. Now consider the plight of a non-fiction writer looking for a pure example that will address this issue in the same manner as the Shakespeare play. Think of all the possible complications

1. The Capulet’s hold a regular ball, instead of a costume ball—Romeo never sneaks in and sees Juliet
2. A guard outside Juliet’s window catches Romeo before he professed his love—she never hears it
3. Tybalt kills Romeo instead of Benvolio
4. Benvolio recovers or Romeo is able to control himself enough to refrain from killing Tybalt—Romeo isn’t banished

These and a thousand other changes would render a non-fiction analysis of near-Romeos and near-Juliets worthless. And they don’t even involve changes in the attitudes of the characters (What if the priest had felt they were merely infatuated and refused to marry them, or at least rejected his poison-plan as unethical?).

A non-fiction story writer might search for a real-life example of young love thwarted by family opposition, but the number of potential stories will be limited to those the author knows a great deal about. Sometimes it will be most intriguing for a writer to find such an event, research it, and tell that story. However, sometimes it must also be worthwhile for that writer to work from an idea that he or she cares deeply about and knows a great deal about, but explore it within an isolated fiction environment, where every detail can be salient, and contaminants can be strictly controlled.

Knowledge and Trust

Of course, since a fiction writer is controlling both the materials and results of a story, readers must trust that the writer is not manipulating events contrary to how “they would actually work out”. (And readers of fiction can certainly say such a thing of a bad story: see my entry on stories as if-then statements for more.) But non-fiction readers must trust the writers as well, and sometimes for more than they might think.

Consider the case of popular non-fiction biographies. The good titles will most certainly be based on a great deal of research, but they also often venture out into unknown territory based on the information available. For example, and author might spend some time in a close third-person POV, and occasionally give us the thoughts of one of the main figures at a certain time, based on educated guesswork from available first-hand sources. Even if, for example, the writer gives us a certain woman’s thoughts based on a letter that same woman wrote to an acquaintance, the inclusion of the thoughts is still, strictly speaking, an act of speculation. What if the writer thinks the woman is trying to deceive her acquaintance? What if the woman said something slightly different elsewhere? Even if she is being as truthful as she can, how much self-serving bias and other unconscious factors should the writer account for?

The need for trust in non-fiction certainly doesn’t spoil the writing. It simply means that readers of popular biographies must apply their own knowledge of the topic being discussed and analyze writer’s tone and assertions before deciding whether or not they find the book persuasive. For the most part, this kind of analysis is just as applicable to fiction.

A science fiction concerning space travel will fail miserably if any college physics student can find glaring errors in fundamental parts of its mechanics, just like a Middle Ages-style fantasy would be rejected if the author clearly did not know anything about how society functioned in the actual period between the 700s and 1500s.

Mark Haddon spent a great deal of time working with youth who had disabilities before writing The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time from the point of view of one of them. However, the time lag between when he spent the time and wrote the book (20 years) would be far too long to produce a good non-fiction story, regardless of his ability or salient memories, and no matter how important understanding of disability was to him (read his interview with Powell’s to learn about it) or how great his descriptive talent, he would never be able to put us in Jonathan’s shoes. A similar non-fiction book could be written (like Born on a Blue Day), but Haddon could not write it and we could not experience it as intimately.

Fiction, like non-fiction, is focused on revealing truths about human existence and exploring philosophical ideas. Untruthful authors will be found out in the same way as people who fudge historical information for biographies or falsify experimental results. Liars are not welcome.

One of the first mistakes beginning writers make is that they use too many adverbs. This is probably due to a number of misguided efforts aimed at making writing more vivid:

1) the beginning writer’s desire to cram as many detail words as possible into every sentence

2) the notion that adding adverbs makes writing more active

3) the new writer’s mistaken reliance on descriptive words instead of a combination of descriptive phrases and good detail selection

How can one avoid flabby writing? By going on a fatty word diet. Here’s a plan I recommend:

The words you provide to readers should be rich in nouns and verbs. They’re nutritious. Basic punctuation is, of course, necessary but only in smaller quantities. The same is true of adjectives. If you’re tossing in handfuls of commas and em-dashes, or layering multiple adjectives on a single noun, you’re writing will start to become unhealthy.

Finally, adverbs should be sprinkled only lightly throughout your work. If readers have ground through a page of solid nouns with only sparse use of adjectives and essential punctuation, then allow them to have an adverb for sweetening.

This is the eighth and final category in the Story Gamut, my way of classifying story elements on a scale from micro-elements to macro-elements.

The story elements at this level are the most broad, and often require the most out of story planning time to execute. Some of them are so broad they rarely apply in short stories, both because elements which receive only a few sentences of attention don’t need to be flushed out as much in the writer’s mind, and because writers simply don’t have the time and resources to exhaustively research a short (and not terribly lucrative) story.

Elements at this level include the creation of story maps and other larger visual diagrams to help make sure all the pieces of the story can and do go together they way then need to. It also includes world-building, an elements that speculative fiction writers are particularly enamored of but include the reoccuring props and backdrops in non-speculative writing as well.

Finally, this group also includes elements like series arc (into which novel-length arcs must fit), and the relentless need to find new challenges for old characters.

This is the seventh of the eight categories in the Story Gamut, my way of classifying story elements on a scale from micro-elements to macro-elements. A number of very big issues gain predominance at this level, mostly focused on story cohesion and creating a recognizable path through from beginning to end. This includes plot and story arch.

I’ve also included theme and focus here, though I’m not as decided on those elements. One or both of them may get migrated to the chapter section as I develop the Story Gamut.

This is the sixth of the eight categories in the Story Gamut, my way of classifying story elements on a scale from micro-elements to macro-elements. Though chapters are often shorter than short stories, since they require reference to larger book-length issues or themes, they are in a broader category than self-contained short stories. Issues that stand out at this level include the rationing of information and working to hold reader interest and draw them across those spaces between chapters.

This is the fifth of the eight categories in the Story Gamut, my way of classifying story elements on a scale from micro-elements to macro-elements. It will focus on the issues that come to the fore when writing on the level of short stories. Primary among these issues is characterization: the creation of vivid protagonists that readers will find compelling. Good characters tends to be more important than other story elements at this level, such as plot and theme, because even a shaky plot can carry a story for eight pages, but uninteresting characters can rarely take a story anywhere. Not coincidentally, many modern literary fiction writers, who often are short story writers first and novelists second, focus obsessively on character.

This category also includes other writing topics, though, such as “idea stories”, those strange little pieces that don’t fit into the usual story structure, but can hold reader interest for short periods of time. This includes literary magazine oddities, but also other types of writing, such as some picture books for children.

This is the fourth of the eight categories in the Story Gamut, my way of classifying story elements on a scale from micro-elements to macro-elements. Since it focuses on paragraph length, much of this section is devoted to the rhythm of writing: the painting of text against the white space of the page in a way that is visually appealing and understandable to readers. Since “natural” rhythm is such a big part of dialog (and since dialog conforms to different rules on the sentence, phrase, and word basis than much other writing), it will primarily be addressed here.

This is the third of the eight categories in the Story Gamut, my way of classifying story elements on a scale from micro-elements to macro-elements. It is concerned with the sentence-level organization of writing. As such, it covers many of the no-fun aspects of writing: proper grammar, punctuation, and the technical details that, when written well, dissolve into invisibility.

This is the second of the eight categories in the Story Gamut, my way of classifying story elements on a scale from micro-elements to macro-elements. It is concerned with those quick descriptions: the handful of words that can sum up an idea in a way that is immediately understandable by reader. The category includes such elements of writing as: simply descriptive metaphor (as opposed to more complex, story-wide metaphor, which is more of a thematic element), oxymoron, as well as turns and overturns of phrase.

This is the first and most minute level of detail of the eight levels in the Story Gamut, my way of classifying story elements on a scale from micro-elements to macro-elements. It is the most minute element: encompassing issues like word choice, the sounds of words and whether or not they resonate with their meanings or are at a discord with those meanings, and character naming. At this level, small details can have great effect: turning your antelope into cantaloupe.

Organized by Size

Welcome to the first post on Inkless Writing. I intend for this site to present all of the important aspects of writing, organized by the length of the material being written.

I freely admit that this is a fairly arbitrary way of organizing the various elements of writing. However, it’s helped me to distinguish between the micro-elements of writing (such as word usage and sentence structure) and the macro elements (such as novel planning and world-building). In addition, using this method of organization (even in its proto form) has helped me understand some of my strengths and weaknesses as a writer.

Hopefully, with the help of readers like yourself, I will be able to improve on this idea until it is becomes robust tool.