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!

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.

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, and 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 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 those underdogs so much, I was in the very small group of people who could suspend their disbelief enough to enjoy the Ewoks in Star Wars, Return of the Jedi. Of course, I was eight at the time, but…

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 require 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…).

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 population will have had centuries to improve, advance, strengthen, and increase their longevity.

In such a battle against more recognizably “human” opponents (which would likely be the “good guys”, because nobody enjoys rooting for the overdog), 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. 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 they might believe 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 at the center (provided the fringes have sufficient communications to stay “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 the antagonists vulnerabilities (an example of this would be in Larry Niven’s Ringworld, in which 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.