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.