Speaking and Swearing in Alien Tongues: Reprise

For those of you with little time to go poking through the archives here, and in keeping with Jacqueline's posts on dialogue, here are the two posts I did eons ago on speaking and swearing in (intergalactic) alien tongues:

PART UNO: SPEAKING IN [ALIEN] TONGUES


There's an old-- and somewhat disparaging-- anecdote in which Mr. Average American travels to Paris, France and complains to his wife, "Know what's wrong with this place? Too many durned furrinners who can't speak English!"

The problem with some of speculative fiction and science fiction/fantasy romance is the opposite one. For some unknown reason, everyone in the universe speaks English. American, Canadian or British version, but they all speak English.

Maybe this is a reaction to too many visits to Paris (can there be too many visits to Paris?). More likely, it reflects an author's fear of not understanding how to build a realistic language or of confusing the reader with alien phrases or terms.

Fears well founded. On the other side of the intergalactic literary coin, there are those spec fic and SFR novels in which the use of an alien language is a jarring distraction. It's overdone, comically done (and the intention is not to be comical) or snobbishly done (what, you mean you haven't memorized the Klingon dictionary?).

One of the necessary parts of world building, one of the necessary parts of crafting a believable spec fic novel, is the inclusion of alien concepts, religions, cultures and terms. Words.

“I want you. Yav chera.” His hoarse whisper filled her ear. “Yav chera, Trilby-chenka. Tell me you want me.”

She turned her face slightly to look at him. There was a softness in the lines of his face she’d never seen before. An openness. A vulnerability. It tugged at her heart.

“Yav chera,” she replied softly.

His thumb covered her lips. “Yav cheron. If you want me, it is yav cheron. When I want you, which is all the time, it is yav chera.”
He moved his thumb and brushed his lips against hers.

“Yav cheron,” she told him. She laced her fingers through his hair and pulled his face back to hers. (from Finders Keepers by Linnea Sinclair)

The trick is to make the inclusion of the words, the phrases, the names, the terms as natural and effortless as possible for the reader. The reader will be reading/hearing this language for the first time. But that's not a unique situation in spec fic. The reader is also encountering sickbays and starship bridges for the first time, or alien city streets, or space station corridors. Or forests thick with flora and fauna heretofore unknown and unimagined.

If you can make a reader see those things-- those station corridors, those lofty forests-- you can make them hear and understand your alien language.

One of the easiest ways I used above: make one person explain the language to the other. “I want you. Yav chera,” Rhis says to Trilby, thereby informing the reader of the meaning of the words 'yav chera'. He goes further by correcting her: Yav cheron is what she should say to him. So the reader begins-- consciously or unconsciously-- to see a pattern: chera/cheron. Female/male.

I use this same template for Rhis's language Z'fharish, through the rest of Finders Keepers. But it's not a template I invented. I gleefully filched it from two workbooks I have on my bookshelf: Italian Made Simple and Vamos Apprender Portuguese.

And I've just taught you something else: you may not speak a word of Portuguese, but by comparison, by equivalency, you're going to at least figure that Vamos Apprender Portuguese is a book with the same function as Italian Made Simple.


“Ground forces. Like your marines,” he said, plucking at the insignia of crossed swords on his chest, “but we call ourselves Stegzarda. ‘Stegzarda’ means perhaps ‘strength command’ in your language. We assist the Imperial Fleet when it comes to border outposts.”

Farra nodded. “Especially with recent jhavedzga—”

“Aggression.” Mitkanos corrected her. (from Finders Keepers by Linnea Sinclair.)


Farra says the word in Z'fharish (Trilby's at the table listening to all this). Mitkanos, her uncle, corrects her. He also, conversationally, defines another term for Trilby.

Just as a good writer weaves in essentials elements and clues through dialogue (never, never using an info dump!), so a good spec fic writer can weave bits and pieces of a language into conversation.

But let's get back to using Vamos Apprender Portuguese as a template. You don't have to use 'We're Going to Learn Portuguese' (which is what that title says). You can use Russian or Japanese or Swahili as a template. Or you can combine templates of several languages. The point is, start with a basic linguistic template and it'll make your language-world building go so much smoother.

In Vamos, we learn o amigo and a amiga both mean 'friend'. We also see that our amigos are male and our amigas are female. (And yes, this is the same as Spanish and Italian - which is another point to keep in mind). We also see that the subject pronoun is often dropped (I, she, we) and the ending of the verb denotes the subject pronoun: Eu falo (I speak) is the same as Falo (I speak). Falamos is We speak. Same as Nos falamos.

Bear with me. I'm not trying to prep you for a trip to Rio de Janeiro, nice as that would be. I'm trying to show you that if it's done on this planet, you can do it on your planet.

Find a language template and use it. In Finders Keepers, I used Portuguese, Polish/Russian and un petite peu of French. Not the words - but the structure and conjugations. The sequence of words. And obviously, the sound of words.

Which brings me to another point about language-world building: not everyone sounds the same, even if they speak the same language.

Drogue’s bright-eyed gaze ran up and down my length, or lack of. “Captain Chasidah Bergren. Yes.” He stuck out his hand.

I accepted it.

“You are well?” he asked.

I tried to place his accent. South system, Dafir? Possibly. “All things considered, yes.” Some of my wariness returned. The Englarians were invariably cooperative with the government. I still had visions of a firing squad as a reception committee, Sully’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. (from Gabriel's Ghost by Linnea Sinclair.)

When I was a wee kidling, my parents gave me this enormous dictionary that contained a number of appendices, including 'Regional Variations In American Pronunciation' by Charles K. Thomas, PhD. Of course, even at 11 years old, I knew not everyone sounded alike. My grandmother, from Poland, spoke nothing like my teachers at school. And my neighbor Patty's parents, who were from Tennessee, sounded very different from anyone in my small town in New Jersey. But I'd never before seen those differences in writing. Dr. Thomas delineated ten different speech regions in the US of A. Ten! Eastern New England, North Central, New York City, Middle Atlantic, Western Pennsylvania, Southern Mountain, Southern, Central Midland, Northwest and Southwest.

And yet we have spec fic novels that while, yes, they include an alien language, all the aliens in the entire galaxy sound the same. No, they won't. They may read the same to the reader but they won't sound the same to your characters. Someone-- like Chasidah, above-- will notice the difference. You want your character to notice the difference. Different languages are as essential to world building as different religions, customs and even climate.

And just as with the weaving in of your alien culture or climate, use of an alien language must be done with a delicate touch. You're still writing for an English-speaking audience (or whatever other language your novel is written in). You must provide your reader with enough of a story they can understand or they won't slip into your fictional world.

Pick five or six key phrases; eight or ten key words, sprinkle your dialogue with them just enough times for the words to feel familiar. You don't jump when you walk into a French restaurant and are greeted with "Bon soir". The words, the sound, the accent belong in the setting. Your alien language should work the same way. Make the language flow easily with the scene any time you use it. Don't force your reader to stop and puzzle over it, or it might draw him out of the story. And then he'll put your novel down, grumbling… "Too many durned aliens in that book!"

REFERENCE:
Conceiving The Heavens by Melissa Scott
How to Writer Science Fiction & Fantasy by Orson Scott Card

ONLINE:
The Language Construction Kit - http://www.zompist.com/kit.html
Pegasus Nest // games // languages in role-playing games - http://pegasus.cityofveils.com/rpglang.phtml
Patricia C. Wrede's Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions - http://www.sfwa.org/writing/worldbuilding5.htm#Lang

PART DEUX: SWEARING IN ALIEN TONGUES

Is everything okay?

An innocuous question; one posed daily, if not hourly in our society. Yet several years ago, answering that question almost put a friend of mine in the midst of a full-blown melee.

You see, he was in a restaurant in a foreign country and was asked by the restaurant owner (via an interpreter) if “…everything (meal, wine, service) was okay.”

Not being fluent in the local language, my friend responded by making the good ol' American 'okay' sign: his thumb and index finger forming a circle, the other three fingers extended.

As the proprietor bellowed and tables almost overturned, my friend realized he'd evidently made a big mistake. He had. In his present locale, that hand gesture was synonymous for a lower body orifice, and not a pleasant orifice at that.

For all intents and purposes, he'd just called his host an… well, you know what he'd called him.

When I write my science fiction romance novels, I think about things like that. Not lower body orifices, mind you. I think about what we in this country, on the planet, deem as insulting. And how that might translate to the culture I've built for my novels.

The first lesson I've learned from the above example is that profanity is not planet-wide. What's okay in America may well be a reason to riot in Rio. Though admittedly, it was what the gesture stood for, and not the gesture itself, that was found so offensive.

Which brings me to the question I always ask myself when I'm world building: Self, what would this alien culture find offensive, and why?

It's rather a nice question to ask yourself as well, as you embark on your SF&F world building. Because answering it will make your worlds and your characters that much more complete, that much more alive to your readers.

In general, those that reside on this planet we call Earth find the following categories offensive and fertile fodder for foul language: blaspheming a revered deity, excrement, sexual acts, illegitimacy, body parts relating to excrement and sexual activity, and sexual activity with culturally unacceptable participants, including oneself.

All fairly obvious and self-explanatory to us here on Earth (and if you want to explore the matter further, the tome most oft cited is Geoffrey Hughes' Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English, (Penguin USA). But we're not writing about here on Earth. We're writing about Rigel-V and Tatooine and the Skolian Empire and Moabar. Or maybe the Vash Nadah or the Khalar.

So we need to understand what those people in those places value, or don't, in order to understand how they swear.

Couldn't they value the same things we do? Sure. But why stop there? Moreover, why would they value exactly the same things we do? If the fictional culture you're creating is a carbon copy of Freehold, New Jersey set but set on the planet Gryck-2, then, in my humble opinion, you're cheating your readers. People don't read SF because they want to be immersed in the common. They read it to explore the uncommon.

If you read C.J. Cherryh's Chanur series, you'll see that one of the most common insults the feline race known as the Hani has is to call another Hani “an earless bastard.” And it isn't the bastardy that's the serious part of the insult—it’s the earless-ness. Ears, and the adornment of ears, are symbolic of success. (Being owned by cats myself, I can confirm that ears and tails are sources of great pride.)

So what does your fantasy or sci fi culture hold dear, and what do they disdain?

If parentage is taken lightly, then calling someone a bastard will most likely not be effective (this is true of some aboriginal cultures here on this planet). If there are no restrictions on sexual practices or partners, then perhaps your character could start a fistfight by calling the bad guy a monogamist.

How would those who spend their lives in the space lanes—perhaps are even born in space—view those who've never left the planet? “Dirtsuckers” is a term I've used derisively in my books, showing a prejudice by the space-born against the planet-born.

The entire issue of prejudice fueled the culture, and many of the insults, in my Gabriel's Ghost. The Taka are a furred race that, for the most part, work only in the lowest-paying and demeaning jobs. Prejudice against them, by humanoids, is common in the world of Captain Chasidah Bergren and Gabriel Ross Sullivan:


Sully stepped up to the worker. “Pardon, brother. We seek a Takan brother with urgent family news.”

The man barely glanced at Sully as he ran his hand through his thinning hair in an exasperated motion. Chatter still came from the podium speaker.

“What’s that? Hang on, I got some religious guy here needs to find a furry.”

The term 'furry', inoffensive to us, is a slur here.

But the Takas aren't the only species looked down upon in Gabriel's Ghost, as Chaz knows when she's speaking to Captain Philip Guthrie:

[Guthrie]: “No. The Farosians. With a Stolorth Ragkiril. We know that. How you would get involved with them, how you would get involved with that I cannot understand.”

‘That’ meant a Stolorth. A Fleet-issue sentiment of disgust.

As readers of Gabriel's Ghost learn, Stolorths are feared. Takas are simply dismissed as lesser beings. But both are recipients of prejudice, and often out of prejudice are insults born.

Blasphemy is born out of devotion. What gods or goddesses do your characters revere? What edicts has their religion placed on them? Is there a place, like hell, that your characters long to send their enemies? Or, if your characters are star-travelers, is it sufficient simply to sneer, "Oh, go suck dirt!" in order to be insulting?

A caution on using invented words: Oh, grzzbft! tends to sound more comical than threatening to English-acclimated ears. That doesn't mean you can't utilize your alien language in order to create alien profanity. Just try to anchor it to something the reader can identify with—an alien word or concept already used in the story, for example. Or use the 'comparative' method I noted in my previous article on constructing alien languages.

I used both methods in my Games of Command— which is, by the way, considerably lighter in tone than Gabriel's Ghost—so I wasn't quite as worried about the giggle factor:


She heard the smart click of the cabin door lock recycling. She dove under the desk, fitting her small form into the kneehole, and shoved her com badge down the front of her shirt. If it beeped now, she was toast.

Cabin lights flicked on. Heavy footsteps moved across the carpeted floor as the door swooshed closed.

Damn! Shit! Sonofabitch! Sass ran through every swearword she knew in five languages. Frack! Grenzar! Antz-k’ran! Trock!

And


“I’d love to launch a raftwide mullytrock, but then we’d have every other damned jockey in straps burning bulkheads. ’Course, that would work too. RaftTraff wouldn’t know which one of us to send the sec tugs after first.”

Mullytrock. Definitely Lady Sass. He remembered Ralland at fourteen getting his mouth washed out with soap for saying that.


Don't ignore the foul-language factor when creating your world. Take some time to see how and why and when we on this planet swear (references below cited to assist you with that), and integrate that knowledge with your alien or fantasy culture. Your readers-- and your characters-- will thank you. After all, your heroine does need something appropriate to say when she drops a sonic-wrench on her toe.


For Further Study:

Four-Letter Folk Etymology and the “Bald Anglo-Saxon Epithet" by Lauren Mahon
http://students.washington.edu/laurenem/fourletter.html

Constructed Human Languages
http://www.quetzal.com/conlang.html

Maledicta Press - Uncensored Language Research
http://www.sonic.net/maledicta/index.html

Elizabethean Insult Generator
http://www.sonic.net/maledicta/quickies.4.html


~Linnea
HOPE’S FOLLY, Book 3 in the Gabriel’s Ghost universe, coming Feb. 24, 2009 from RITA award-winning author, Linnea Sinclair, and Bantam Books: www.linneasinclair.com

“If we can’t do the impossible, then we need to at least be able to do the unexpected.” —Admiral Philip Guthrie

Intelligent Design and Science Fiction

"Start with the sun," is great world-building advice. I think Jacqueline Lichtenberg told me that.

I'd like to say that my reaction was, "Oh, deadly wicked! A short cut!!!" but it wasn't. I'm not that quick on the draw.

I like to think that I'd start with a Big Bang or some equally scientifically plausible explanation for the galaxy or universe in which that star came into being, but it's inevitable that someone, somewhere has already had every thought imaginable. Including every permutation of "which came first: the egg, or the egg-layer?"

Terry Pratchett's Discworld reminds me of a Hindu story, which has been referenced by various great philosophers including John Locke, Hawking, spaceturtle.com, and Russell (not in that order!)

I studied Philosophy at Cambridge (flimsily, along with Sociology and Psychology as part of my combined Honours Education degree). I remember reading Russell's 1927 lecture Why I Am Not a Christian. In it, while discounting the First Cause argument intended to be a proof of God's existence, Russell comments:

“If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject."

Elephants and tortoises and turtles don't make much sense to me. Nor do questions about what the tortoise was standing on, because loggerheads and leatherbacks swim.

But, where did the turtle come from? Are there other turtles? Other hitchhiking elephants?

And, if our world is the result of "Intelligent Design", why would an intelligent designer locate something as precious and beautiful as our planet (and everything on it) in a cosmic bowling alley or petanque terrain?

Was the Permian extinction an unintended consequence? Or deliberate? Were dinosaurs the prototype, but turned out TSTL?

Is our world a marble? A jack? A cush? A boule?



I recently learned to play petanque. There are a lot of games around the world that involve heavy orbs being rolled, bowled, thrown, tossed, or bowled at smaller, brighter spherical objects with the goal of getting as close as possible.

I realize that our star --Sol, the Sun-- is bigger, not smaller, than the planets around it. So the analogy doesn't hold up. Thank goodness. Or should that be, "Thank Goodness!"?

The premise behind The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was fanciful, too. Earth was bulldozed to make way for an intergalactic bypass.

Thinking of intergalactic super highways... a few years ago, the science channel had a fabulous documentary in which they imaginatively visited the eight or nine or ten planets or approximately habitable worlds in our solar system. At the time, we were thought to have nine, but I think Europa and IO were part of the tour. One planet was suggested to have seas of liquid petroleum.

I can imagine. We flew back from the UK over Greenland. Unusually, the cloud cover was sparse, and we could see the lakes and rivers between the mountains. The sun was low, and all the bodies of water looked orange. It was an incredible sight.

In the grander scale of things, I don't think any one school of thought or belief necessarily rules out any other.

Anyway, we write fiction. What makes a good story doesn't have to be what we believe, or limited to that of which we have empirical, demonstrable knowledge.


And... for intelligent design of another sort entirely, here's how to design a killer press release

Is Literacy Doomed?

The latest CEMETERY DANCE (No. 59) contains an interview with distinguished British horror anthologist Stephen Jones. He views with alarm the state of literacy in general and the condition of mass market horror fiction (while remaining hopeful about the future of the genre, the demise of which has been predicted many times in the past). He says, “Most kids are leaving school sub-literate,” and, “Almost nobody reads these days.” He mourns the passing of the time when we used to “get our information from words.” He doesn’t count the information (and fiction) readers find on the Internet as worthy of notice. (While many newspapers and websites are part of the “dumbing down” process, as he says, surely not ALL are?) Jones considers blogs and personal websites a waste of an author’s time and lumps together all e-published and POD books with unedited, shoddily produced self-published releases.

Coincidentally, Thomas Monteleone’s column in the same issue laments declining standards of literacy among would-be writers, as demonstrated by the low quality of slush pile submissions. He points out an alarming frequency of misspellings that make it evident the writers are trying to write words they have never seen in print. In other words, even many aspiring authors aren’t necessarily readers—and I agree that trend IS alarming, if true. As Garrison Keillor says in today’s column, “Writing is an act of paying attention.” Disdain for the niceties of spelling, punctuation, and usage implies a distressing lack of care for one’s own work as well as the material one reads. Monteleone connects this plight with what he considers the disastrous state of education and general cultural literacy.

My overall reaction to the two CEMETERY DANCE articles is along the line of, “Calm down, get a grip, it’s not THAT bad.” Viewers-with-alarm seem to forget how novel the ideal of universal literacy is. In the “good old days” when people supposedly read lots of books and were well acquainted with literature and history, those who attended high school, let alone graduated, were in the minority. Even in my youth (when dinosaurs roamed the Earth) I suspect the “bad” kids were either expelled long before graduation or at least not discouraged from dropping out. Nowadays, schools pursue the goal of having all students complete a secondary education. So of course the average gets pulled down, now that high school students represent the entire population rather than a select group (the group those people nostalgic for the good old days are actually thinking of when they compare yesterday's level of public education with today's). Meanwhile, a college degree has become the entry-level employment qualification that a high school diploma used to be. So of course everybody is urged to go to college, even if not well prepared, because they may find themselves jobless otherwise.

As Isaac Asimov pointed out in one of his essays, people who voluntarily read for pleasure have always been a minority. Only the competing leisure activities have changed. As for the legitimate causes for alarm that do exist, in my opinion it doesn’t help a bit to dismiss wholesale all instances of new formats, e.g. e-publishing and POD, as substandard and inauthentic. Does anyone seriously believe the comparatively few books for which mass market publishers have room on their lists exhaust the number of good submissions they’ve received? Small presses and other alternative publication venues give those worthy-but-rejected books a chance to find a home. The widening and varying of the fiction delivery system, to me, is something to be celebrated. Yes, Sturgeon’s Law holds true; 90 percent of everything is junk, and maybe the ease of online publication makes the 90 percent more visible. The other 10 percent, however, should have fresh opportunities find its audience in this “brave new world” reading environment.

Expletive-Deleted & Tender Romance

But First! -- Linnea stole my thunder by quoting me and the point I'm making in this post in her post that comes right before this one.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/you-dont-understand-she-shouted-angrily.html

Linnea said:
Real people ramble on with loads of 'umms' and 'yunnos' and 'dudes' and 'uhs.' Characters should keep those kinds of things to a bare minimum. Good dialogue goes for the vital organs, which in this case should be the reader's heart and brain. In that way, it's not unlike poetry or song writing. Good dialogue has impact ...

Linnea goes on to point out how handy a good argument is for sprinkling in crushed-expository-lumps so the reader doesn't notice them.

Anger is a good special case of the general key to great DIALOGUE.

ALL DIALOGUE IS CONFLICT.

That's a principle. Dialogue is generated by PLOT, and the basis is conflict. Every scene must have "rising action" (the tension, anticipation of plot-movement, and the movement of the plot must graph from a low to end on a HIGH NOTE). That's a stageplay writing principle that works on TV and in books.

Even sex scene dialogue is generated by conflict that is resolved at the climax.

If the scene does not encapsulate this principle -- conflict/ resolution -- then cut it. All dialogue must carry the conflict. Anything characters say to each other that isn't CONFLICT gets cut, summarized, happens off stage, is overheard in fragments, or referred to in another confrontation.

One thing people revert to when inarticulate with rage (angry enough to let you insert backstory) is invective, and other words that don't say anything but take up precious space in your story.

So today I want to discuss the interjection and expletive in dialogue, whereas in my post --
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/verisimilitude-vs-reality.html
-- I was addressing the general problem of creating the illusion of reality, using dialogue as an example because I assumed everyone reading this blog had mastered dialogue.

The principles I discussed in "Versimilitude vs Reality" actually apply neatly to Kimber An's comment (on Linnea's post on dialogue) that Kimber An sees IMAGES and can't do the description well, but has no trouble with dialogue. And I answered in the comments section that when you can't write the description, the problem is in the dialogue. When the dialogue FAILS, the description can't materialize.

That's extremely hard for anyone to grasp who hasn't taught writing, hands-on, with beginner's manuscripts. Most editors can't do this either. But when a story falls off the conflict line at the half-way point, the problem is not at the half-way point, but probably on PAGE ONE -- or possibly PAGE 5. When an ENDING fails to meld properly with the final climax, the problem is very likely at the 1/4 point, or possibly the 1/2 point.

It's kind of like chiropractic medicine. The patient comes in and says "My knee hurts." -- and the doctor pokes and says, "Ah, your neck is out."

A body is an organic whole, a thing of a single piece. The location of the cause and the symptom may not coincide.

Likewise a story is also a work of art (humans are G-d's artwork), and an organic WHOLE, much greater than the sum of the parts we've been discussing. Thus if a problem surfaces at one point, the cause is likely at some other point -- or in some other technique that's not in the writer's tool box.

EXERCISE: Write a radio script -- or a vignette to play out on a limbo set (against total blackness). Or two prisoners in adjacent dungeon cells. Absolutely not one word of anything but dialogue. If you want my analysis of this exercise, post it to
http://editingcircle.blogspot.com/ Readers should read this dialogue and post on editingcircle.blogspot.com what the dialogue MADE THEM VISUALIZE.

I've posted the above prolog to Editing Circle, so just click to add your exercise as a comment.

So for now, let's meditate on the idea that in storytelling, description is not description at all - but the ILLUSION OF DESCRIPTION. It is a bare suggestion that the reader then paints by the numbers in their own mind's eye. Part of that suggestion lies within dialogue. When description fails, dialogue is the problem. The illusion of speech has failed, somehow.

The kinds of writers who have the most trouble with this "illusion of" principle are the sort who did well in school, or maybe became teachers (especially HS or College!). They've spent too much time reading and writing the actual thing and can't convert themselves to manipulating the illusion of the thing.

Learning to cast that illusion without limiting what the reader sees (or hears, tastes, smells, etc), learning to get your own visualization of what the location looks like out of the story, is hard.

So practice for the moment on something much easier -- the illusion of speech. Dialogue. And then I have to remember to connect dialogue back to description and show you how they interact. All the individual components of story we've been discussing all interact. In math, you call that "cross-terms."

The principle is the same with all the techniques of fiction writing. Learn this principle and it will affect how you handle description, dialogue, narrative, action, and (gasp!) exposition.

Yes, you do need SOME exposition. To keep exposition from "lumping" -- you learn how to create the illusion of exposition, not exposition itself (such as you'd read in a textbook).

So, now to today's discussion of interjections, expletives, and specifically invective. I recently put aside a review book because a huge percentage of it was cuss words (those usually acceptable in polite company, too) and that book was published by a big publisher. So I had to analyze what went wrong with it -- and here below is the result.

----------------------
Expletive Deleted & Tender Romance


On this Alien Romance blog, we've discussed the use of racey word choices in sex scenes, and many other vocabulary issues writers face. Let's take a closer look at characterization and vocabulary.

Can you write a SAVE THE CAT! moment (see Blake Snyder's books series on screenwriting titled SAVE THE CAT! and SAVE THE CAT! GOES TO THE MOVIES) just using vocabulary?

I think so, but it'll take some study of vocabulary and characterization.

Most beginning books on writing emphasize vocabulary building, though it's not such a focus topic in grammar school and High School any more.

But it's still true that in Business, politics, and even war, people judge you and your character -- your abilities and deficiencies -- on your word choices.

Syntax counts, too.

Today we acknowledge more English dialects as being legitimate expressions, and so we see more novels and films made with characters who speak with an accent or in dialect.

The advice given all beginning writers is NOT to tweek your spelling to indicate a character's dialect or accent. It makes it very hard to read, and in today's express-lane lifestyle, people scan fast. I would follow that advice, far into advanced skill levels. Robert A. Heinlein did one book in heavy dialect spelled out (MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS) and did it well, but never again. Take a lesson there.

You can use word-choice to delineate character without getting into pronunciation.

Even in screenwriting, it isn't wise to put in twisted spelling to indicate a character's pronunciation. Actors will create accent as they create the character.

And you know what? Readers create accents in their minds when they want to.

So let the reader create, and thus become invested in your characters.

However, you as writer, must provide the outline for the reader to flesh out -- as a coloring book provides only B&W line drawings for kids to color in.

One way many beginning writers grab immediately to delineate a character's class, education level, strength of will, and general attitude is to pepper the character's dialogue with normal-sounding, ordinary-seeming invective.

As I noted in my post Verisimilitude-vs-Reality
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/verisimilitude-vs-reality.html

dialogue is not REAL SPEECH.

Real people of a certain social stripe will insert the F-word before almost every noun. Or vary it only with the D-word, or H-word. (I don't want this post scrapped by the censors.)

Characters who use these insertions come off sounding (in the reader's mind) like talk show guests who say "um" and "you-know" before imparting any information. Frustrating, untrustworthy, and not comprehensible.

Of course we don't know! That's why we asked! So why say "you know" four times in every sentence?

It's a speech rhythm habit you hear all the time in normal speech. What you hear, you imitate. That's how people pick up the F, D and H word inserts and blurt them out even when the word adds no meaning and expresses no actual emotional content.

Public speakers are trained (or mostly trained) to suppress that "You know" and "um" interjection.

"You know" is not invective, but if you listen with a writer's ear to real speech you will find it fills the same void in an utterance that invective often does.

It's what you say when you don't know what you're going to say.

Even mild invective (or perhaps especially mild invective) performs the same function.

If you study Linguistics and anthropology together, you will find long discourses and detailed studies showing how those of various societies communicate the old Two-Way-Radio command "Over". It's still used in Ham Radio. It's a clear verbal signal that you're giving up your turn to talk.

In normal speech the signal can be a pause, an eyeblink, an inflection in tone, or some combination of all that plus something else. But we do have, in every social millieu, an "I'm done; it's your turn to say something" signal that is very formalized and very necessary to keep interactions from becoming combat.

With English, the usual rule is that if the other person is making a sound with their voice, then it is rude to start talking. So we learn to fill in the necessary pauses in speech (when you're making up what you say as you go) with um, uh, you-know, and other temporizing interjections or invective that don't mean anything except "it's still my turn to talk."

With cold text, however, putting those interjections or invective into dialogue tends to shut the reader out of participating in what the character is saying, and of being the character who is saying it.

The cold-text reader who is caught up in the emotions of the scene will slow down and read the dialogue at an out-loud pace, creating the tense silences, the awkward pauses, the blank moments, listening with their own inner ear.

If you fill the pauses with placeholders, you shut the reader out of entering into the character's mind and emotions.

Now, sometimes, artistically, you want to do that.

Sometimes you want to show how nervous a character is, or how uneducated. Sometimes the speech pattern is part of a disguise of a deep cover agent talking just like the people being spied on.

There are times you must do it, so you must study how it's done.

And remember dialogue is NOT real speech but the illusion of real speech. Illusion.

Also storytelling is an art. The secret of great art lies with discipline. It is what you do not put on the page that powers your art.

Consider the artistic impact of a clean-mouthed Hero -- right at the climactic moment -- using a blazing hot curse. If he's been cursing every third word all the way through the story, it has no impact. If it's the only time he uses such language, it carries searingly hot emotion to the reader.

Shock value. You get it not by ladling on tons of extra colorful expletives, but by inserting one, just one, in the exactly correct place, and choosing that exact word to mean precisely what has to be said at that point.

Most often, in real speech, when people use the D word for example, they really are not referring to the Creator of the Universe and commanding Him to do their bidding.

What they really mean is something more like, "My will has been thwarted" or "I didn't expect that and I should have" or "I dislike this thing" or "I have no respect for this thing."

Alien Romance Writers who are doing from-scratch worldbuilding have an opportunity to build into the scientific basis of their world a function or process that does not exist in our world. Such an alien process can generate unique invective.

I did that with Sime~Gen -- and the vocabulary that is never used in polite Sime company is based on the experience of a transfer interruption. Shen. Shen comes in various levels of severity, shen, shenshi, shenshay, shenshid etc. (for Sime vocabulary see:
http://www.simegen.com/jl/nivetsoundfiles/ )

"Adult" filters won't block this post for containing those Sime words -- but they would in Sime society!

What is it about invective such as the F-word that makes it be rejected by "polite society?"

The D-word, the F-word, and the Sh-word, and all their derivatives, refer to an intimate act.
Your relationship with your deity; your relationship with necessary but despised partners; your relationship with your body's demands.

These are almost as intimate and personal as what Shen refers to.

It is that dimension of personal, spiritual, individual, deep psychological relevance that gives invective its power when used out-of-context.

The deeply intimate used in public.

The deeply religious used in the profane context.

The utterly profane used in a religious context.

Take the vocabulary or jargon of one process and splatter it over a situation belonging to a different process, and you can create your own invective, alien invective, that won't be censored but will make readers memorize your byline.

So then how do you use invective to characterize if you can't copy real speech where interjections form the bulk of the utterance?

That depends on your readership or audience. People judge other people on their speech patterns, accent, rhythms, choice of words -- but most of all upon their ability (or inability) to express themselves with precision.

Characters you want the reader to respect must speak with the kind of precision used normally by the reader -- even if the word is banned-in-polite-company and the dialogue is taking place in polite company.

Characters you want the reader to understand as uneducated or uneducable may use words to express emotions even if the words are imprecise and inappropriate.

An admirable character reduced by events (such as the kind of argument Linnea Sinclair's characters get into) to a gibbering idiot might stomp out of the room spewing an inarticulate string of D-words.

As a rule of thumb, emotion wipes out the higher intellect's ability to phrase meaning, or even to think. (yeah, the S-x scene, and talking dirty on purpose -- it has a fiery effect when an articulate and erudite character chooses to talk dirty in PRIVATE with a willing partner, especially if it's been established he/she doesn't have that kind of colorful vocabulary.)

So a given character's ability to express meaning should change with the emotional intensity of the scene. How the character's articulateness shifts with emotion characterizes him/her more than any given level of articulateness could.

And that, I think, is the key to the Alien Romance "Save The Cat!" moment -- the moment when the reader is sucked into sympathy with or into identifying with the character because the character displays a trait that bespeaks a "good soul."

The real character inside the shell shows through the coarse crust and you see the intellect, self-respect, and integrity that makes a person a candidate for a life-long relationship rather than a one-night-stand.

That is you can establish your characters' mental acuity and even morality by their speech patterns, but if a character uses the same speech pattern in every scene he/she is in -- you aren't being effective in using dialogue to characterize.

Anthropology also studies the differences in vocabulary and speech patterns in public, private and among all women, and among all men. Vocabulary is often gender-specific to the company.

A character who displays a lack of that flexibility (Star Trek's Spock for example) betrays an element of character that readers/viewers will interpret according to their own culture.

Spock was considered repressed and up-tight by many American viewers because of that inflexibility in public and private manner.

My own Star Trek alternate universe, the Kraith Universe, points out that human anthropological rules don't apply to Vulcans and Spock's speech patterns are Vulcan. His inflexibility actually implies something very alien indeed, not repression. Many readers were unable to grasp this point.

See my Kraith Universe stories here:
http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/

We all know what a sex object Spock became, the alure enhanced mightily by his half-alien ancestry. And we know how - um - well, you know, uh, logically - he expressed himself most of the time.

Then there's Hans Solo. Also hot stuff, but very human. Luke Skywalker was no slouch in that department either.

To acquire a facility with writing dialogue for non-human hot-stuff, do a contrast/compare between Spock, Hans Solo, and some icon of your own choosing.

Ask yourself what sort of woman would be attracted to a man she heard spouting filth (whatever she thought filth was, but the reader might not hear it that way) then turning to her and cooing tender language at her.

What would she think of another man who spoke to her the blistering way he spoke to a foul mouthed guy?

What do we tell the world by the kind of mouth we run?

But more important -- what do your readers and your editors think about foul mouthed characters as icons? (puts one in mind of some Oscar nominees, I think).

The most important thing to do to learn to handle vocabulary in dialogue is to listen to both dialogue and real speech and become sensitive to vocabulary choices.

But that's easier said than done. Here is a handy rule of thumb that works to solve most writing problems:

RULE:
Less Is More.

APPLICATION TO TEXT CRAFTING:
Delete ALL adjectives and adverbs from your text. Replace the Noun or Verb they modify with another vocabulary choice with the combined meaning.

Expletives are a "modifyer" in the same category as adjectives and adverbs -- delete the modifyer, change the word modified to mean precisely what the combination would mean.

Above all, always keep your targeted reader in mind. Use words found only in the OED when addressing a readership that would be thrilled to discover a rare but perfect word. Always aim to stretch your reader's vocabulary - being sure to explain the meaning of the word by the context.

I can imagine a really hot romance between an anthropologist and a linguist assigned to study and map the languages of Earth today. What beautiful arguments they could have over the OED - to make up after.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://www.slantedconcept.com

PS: if you're having a hard time finding these scattered posts by Jacqueline Lichtenberg on writing craft, you may want to "subscribe" so you get notified when and where they turn up. Here's how.
ABOUT SUBSCRIBING to BLOGS
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/i-love-web-20.html

"You don't understand!" she shouted angrily...

Yeah, I spend a lot of time thinking about silly titles for my blogs...

Be that as it may, I'm again using Jacqueline's blog last week on dialogue as the theme for my blog on dialogue in commercial genre fiction. Fictional dialogue is not a verbatim recording, not a play-by-play or blow-by-blow. Its purpose in a novel is not veracity but excitement. If, as Swain said, readers read to experience tension, there is nothing less tense than actual conversation.

Character dialogue, like every other part of the story, needs to move the plot along and ramp up the emotions. Without sounding silly, false, strained or trite.

Daunting?

Less so than you think, if for no other reason than good dialogue is out there. You're not being asked, in writing dialogue, to do something no writer has ever done. You're being asked to do what's been done and do it as well, if not better. You have role models. You have templates. You have a plethora of writing-how-to books and blogs like this.

The trick is applying what you learn.

Here's my favorite dialogue writing tip: get your characters angry (hence the title of this blog).

I'll explain why this works in a moment. But first, let's revisit what Jacqueline said: fiction is an illusion and fictional dialogue is an illusion of speech. That means word choice is essential. Placement and cadence is a must. Real people ramble on with loads of 'umms' and 'yunnos' and 'dudes' and 'uhs.' Characters should keep those kinds of things to a bare minimum. Good dialogue goes for the vital organs, which in this case should be the reader's heart and brain. In that way, it's not unlike poetry or song writing. Good dialogue has impact

But dialogue is also very often the writer's tool to impart needed information because (good) dialogue moves more quickly than narrative.

So what's the writer to do if she has a good chunk of information that--gasp!--might even have a tinge of backstory, and she needs somehow to get that before the reader without having it seem like an info dump

Get the characters angry. Why

Listen to any angry conversation between friends, lovers, strangers. I know. I said fictional dialogue isn't real dialogue but there are some similarities. The one time it feels "natural" for people to explain something in detail, or for people to recount the past, is when they're having an argument. It's a defensive thing: I'm angry with you because... and then the laundry list of past foibles comes out

Anger is a really good way to sneak some back story in.

In Shades of Dark, tensions are building between Captain Chaz Bergren and her lover, Gabriel "Sully" Sullivan, due in part to a new crewmember on their ship: a Stolorth Ragkiril named Del. Del is self-assured, flirtations, confident, aggressive and sexy as all get out. He's also supremely dangerous--something Chaz senses more than Sully does.

In this little snippet of dialogue, Chaz "dumps" her reasons on Sully in a telepathic conversation. But it also serves to bring the reader up to speed with some of the basics in the conflict and reminds them of things they may have forgotten:

I was standing under the steamy streams of the ship’s recycled water when the lavatory door nudged open. Sully, dressed in his usual black, leaned against the edge of the sink, sipped from the cup in his right hand, and held another for me in his left.

“I told Dorsie they were both for you so she wouldn’t try to poison me.”

“Find Burke’s lab ship, unmask Tage, and she’ll love you again,” I said, tapping off the water and turning on the dryer cycle. I circled slowly, ignoring Sully because nothing could be heard over the noise anyway.

Except this way, he reminded me. Then: Chaz, Del is not the problem you perceive him to be.

Let’s see. He ambushes me on Narfial, blocks you, wanted to neutralize Marsh, and then locks you away from me in some mystical woo-woo place that used to be a shuttle bay. In between all that, he has an annoying habit of calling me “angel” and “lover,” walks a very thin line between harmless flirtation and practiced seduction, and then has the balls to say I’m touchy. I have no idea why I think he’s a problem.

Because the scene is tinged with anger, it's tinged with emotion. And as Swain teaches, it's the author's job to manipulate the emotions of the reader. So it makes sense, then, that dialogue laced with emotions is one of the ways to do that.

When characters are angry, characters--like real people--tend to say things to justify the anger, to bolster their argument. That justification is a sly way of sneaking information in.

So instead of an info dump where Mortimer fumes over the fact that Gladys is late--again--for their lunch date:

Mortimer drummed his fingers on the tabletop, anger rising with each tap. It was twelve-thirty. Gladys should have been here an hour ago. He hated the way she was always late. He wondered if she was playing some kind of control game with him. He'd known her for twelve years--ever since that fateful day in Mrs.
Chelligump's English class at Beachside High School. That's when he first fell in love with her but now that he thought about it, she was late coming to class. So late that he ended up talking to Gertrude instead. Dating Gertrude. And marrying Gertrude. He shuddered...

You can do it in dialogue when Gladys arrives:

The drumming of Mortimer's fingers halted abruptly as Gladys approached.

She smiled as she slid into the empty seat at the table. "Hey, Morty,
I--"

"You're late, Gladys. Late! I've been waiting an hour."

"There was a long line at the grocery store. What did you want, I should leave without paying?" She shrugged. "I'm not a thief like your ex-wife."

Mortimer felt his eyes narrow. Why did she always bring up Gertrude? "Don't start that old argument."

"It's not old! I know you saw her last week and I know you loaned her money again. And yes," she continued, waving one hand to stop whatever was about to come out of his mouth in protest, "I know we're all supposed to be friends now. For the sake of good old Beachside High. But I'm tired of--"

"She helped me out then. I owe her now."

"She wrote your senior year term paper for you, Morty. Twelve years ago. Twelve years! I think you owe her nothing!"

and so on and so forth...

The next time you have backstory or information you need in the novel yet cringe because it feels like an info dump, turn the information into confrontation. Interlace the information with emotions. Have your characters rake up bits and pieces of the past that will, instead of boring the reader, intrigue him.

It's also a handy way of doing a little on-the-fly characterization.

~Linnea

HOPE’S FOLLY, Book 3 in the Gabriel’s Ghost universe, coming Feb. 2009 from RITA award-winning author, Linnea Sinclair, and Bantam Books: http://www.linneasinclair.com/

“Your life is at risk fighting for the Alliance,” he said finally.

“I’m aware of that, sir.”

“We’re underfunded, understaffed. You’ll be serving—quite possibly fighting—under conditions you’ve never faced before. Being a rebel is not the glamour and glory the vids make it out to be.”

“I’m aware of that too, sir.”

“The danger doesn’t concern you?”

“Danger concerns any good officer. But I’m ImpSec, sir. Special Protection Service.”

“Polite, professional, and prepared to kill?”

“Yes, sir.”

He nodded slowly. “And if I put you in the same room with the man responsible for the death of your father, and handed you a Carver-Twelve, would you be able to press the trigger?”

Did he really doubt that? “Absolutely, sir.”

He pulled his Carver out of the right side of his shoulder holster and held it up toward her. The grip of a second Carver—another 12, she thought—curved out of the left side.

She took it, not understanding. Did he mean for her to carry his weapon? A small thrill raced through her. Okay, it wasn’t that small. A Carver-12, and his as well. It was still warm from the heat of his body.

“Why haven’t you pressed the trigger?” he asked quietly.

Where Fantasy Meets Science Fiction (Does it ever?)

My brain is a blender.

I've just bought a new Osterizer (TM) to turn nuts and flax/sesame/sunflower/pumpkin seeds into powder, hence the metaphor. The whirling sharp blades are, of course, my incisive analytical skills.

This week, I have several disparate issues on my mind. Also an agenda. I always have an agenda.

1. Goodreads discussions on which GoodReads authors' books are fantasy, which are science fiction, which can be dismissed as merely romance --or alien romance--, and whether the same book(s) can legitimately be nominated reading in both groups.

Obviously, I think so. So do friends and fans of Stacey Klemstein.


2. Crazy Tuesday, February 3rd. Last month, Linnea Sinclair and Catherine Asaro took over the two-hour, Tuesday morning show for me. My guests this coming Tuesday are a truly eclectic mix. Possibly, all we have in common are the fact that each book has a hero (!!) but, we're all thinking of Valentine's Day, and a good book is a much healthier and long-lasting gift than roses or chocolates.


By the way, on Facebook, I posted that Mark Terence Chapman, Kellyann Zuzulo, Emily Bryan, paranormal YA author Lillian Cauldwell, Brenna Lyons, Sara Taney Humphreys and yours truly Rowena Cherry will be talking about Holding Out For a Fantasy Hero.

Lesli Richardson, author of "The Reluctant Dom" suggested a question:
"What do you least like about your heroes, what makes them "human?"

Interesting juxtaposition, that!
Is being "human" the same as being unlikeable?

I can see one of my less-than-likeable aliens, such as Thor-quentin, having some fun with that premise.


3. How marvelous it is that a myth or legend (or half-lost historical truth) can be taken in different directions and become the stuff of different paranormal genres.

The first Djinn romances that I read, after I'd written Forced Mate) were Kathleen Nance's Much More Than Magic and Wishes Come True. Kathleen judged Forced Mate in a contest, and mentioned in a kind note that her plural for Djinns was djinni in her romances.

I wrote back that I preferred to follow Rudyard Kipling.

Kathleen's djinni are hunks with magical powers who shift between dimensions from the magical world of Kaf to the human plane.

Kellyann Zuzulo has just popped up on my radar. Her site www.zubisrises.com has a very cool research page about Djinni.

I've snagged it with Kellyann's permission:

Djinn — The term means "the hidden." And, indeed, these mythological figures have been hidden in human consciousness since ancient, pre-Islamic times, revealing themselves through stories and superstition, but also through fervent belief. While there are countless stories about djinn, most famously those in The Thousand and One Nights (also known as The Arabian Nights), existence of the djinn is documented as real and substantial in the Koran, by some Islamic scholars, and in folktales passed from generation to generation.

In the written records of legend and of belief, God created humans from the clay of the earth, angels from celestial light, and the djinn from the smokeless fire. Known variously as jinn, genie, and jnun, the djinn are subject to the same laws of creation as man. And when they sin, they are cursed; considered to be followers of Iblis, a powerful genie who defied God's will and is considered by many to be a manifestation of Satan.

Not all djinn are evil. Like humans, they are born, marry, bear children and interact in the world. The Prophet Mohammed was sent to both djinn and humans, with an entire book of the Koran, the Al-Jinn, devoted to dictates for living and behavior of both species.

As a community, the djinn can be massless, occupying what would seem to be small physical spaces. Yet, they can also expand and assume a physical dimension, travel the world in a flash, or inhabit animals, like cats, dogs,20snakes, and scorpions. For the most part, they are invisible to humans. When they have revealed themselves, djinn are described as being similar to the human form, though more imposing and fearsome. If they choose, they can mingle unnoticed among men. Alternately, some stories and tales have described intercourse between a djinni and a human. There is no prohibition against such co-mingling, although there are not many accounts of it.

Western lore interprets the existence of djinn primarily as Middle Eastern fable. Yet, some aspect of the djinn has been incorporated into European and American tales of fairies and evil spirits. Most cultures describe their own pantheon of spirits that bear startling similarities to the three types of djinn: marid are wicked and malicious spirits, like devils and demons; ifrit are strong and powerful spirits that are not necessarily evil; ghuls are lesser phantoms who can fly, much like ghosts and ghouls.

Supposed remnants of djinn civilizations litter the world’s archaeological digs. From the forgotten city of Ubar in the Rub al Khali, a trackless expanse of desert in southern Arabia, to the mystical and long-abandoned stronghold of Meda'in Saleh in northeastern Saudi Arabia, and its sister city, Petra, in southern Iraq. Across Afghanistan, Iran, and Egypt, ruins of ancient sites are still believed by many to harbor realms of the djinn. It is in Ubar that the primordial dwelling place of the djinn purportedly originated — a city once known as Irem of the Pilla rs and which has carried forward in time as the supernatural djinn kingdom of Jinnistan.

Whether djinn truly exist ultimately is a matter of personal belief. Millions of people in the world today are aware of djinn as creatures of myth; of those, easily thousands accept the presence of djinn as real, unseen wards of a parallel realm.

Where you can read more about genies...

NON-FICTION

* Essential Koran: The Heart of Islam, by Thomas Cleary HarperSanFrancisco
* From the Ashes of Angels: The Forbidden Legacy of a Fallen Race, by Andrew Collins; Bear & Company
* The Jinn In the Qur'an and the Sunna, by Mustafa Ashour; Dar Al Taqwa, Ltd., London, 3rd edition, 1993
* Secrets of Angels, Demons, Satan, and Jinns Decoding their Nature through Koran and Science, by Mahmood Jawaid; InstantPublisher.com, 2006
* The World of the Jinn and Devils, by Dr. Umar Sulaiman al-Ashqar; Al Basheer Company, Boulder, CO 1998

Screams of the Vegetables

You've probably read about the computerized collars that translate a dog's vocalizations into words, basically general phrases indicating whether the pet is happy, angry, scared, or whatever. Well, a company called Botanicalls has invented a system for enabling house plants to talk. Admittedly, their vocabulary is limited; we can't carry on conversations with them yet. Sensor probes in the soil keep track of the moisture content. An embedded ethernet connection sends the data over the Internet to a Twitter account. From there, the message is transmitted to the customer's cell phone. Plants apparently have a one-track mind, since all communications fall into categories such as "Water me, please" (with escalating degrees of urgency as applicable) and "Thank you for watering me." I can imagine a more complex system, however, that also measures fertilizer, sunlight, etc. This one costs $99. The device reminds me of the filk song in which carrot juice is condemned as murder and peeling potatoes as torture, with the refrain, "I've heard the screams of the vegetables." If your tomato vines talked to you, might you feel qualms about eating their offspring? :) People do tend to anthropomorphize the nonhuman on very slight provocation.

The plant-monitoring concept was invented by three telecommunications students at NYU. One of them, Kate Hartman, suggests that Botanicalls illustrates "people's growing comfort level with technology" and offers "a way to think about technology and its role in our lives." The system can be programmed by the user to expand its vocabulary or make it speak in other languages. Dialogue with inanimate objects such as the refrigerator can't be far behind. Some cars talk to their drivers already. We're moving closer all the time to Ray Bradbury's self-maintaining house in "There Will Come Soft Rains" or even the intelligent house with a personality and emphatic opinions on the TV series EUREKA. In fact, I've read other articles in the past that imply the technology to build a dwelling like the one in the Bradbury story already exists, for anyone who could afford to expend the cost and wanted such a living environment.

Margaret L. Carter (www.margaretlcarter.com)

Verisimilitude VS Reality

Before we start, let me point you to the comments on Linnea Sinclair's post just before this one.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/heading-into-danger-choosing-point-of.html

A comment on Linnea's post raises the question of how to avoid the abrupt and reader-losing Point of View Shift which I discussed in:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/shifting-pov.html

Here below in Verisimilitude Vs. Reality is one of the information feed techniques I referred to in my answer to that question on Linnea's entry. Clever concatenation of information feed techniques is how you get the reader to know something without telling them, and here is how you get them to believe it.

This below is one information feed technique used to avoid commiting the Expository Lump. So here are links to my discussions of Lumps.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/sexy-information-feed.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/08/source-of-expository-lump.html

---------------
Early in my writing career, I learned how dialogue differs from real speech.

Dialogue is the ILLUSION of speech, not the transcription of speech.

Before you grasp that distinction, you have no hope of creating dialogue that enchants the reader, moves the story forward, characterizes and informs the reader all in one single reposte, retort, dig, jibe, offhand comment.

The best one-liners that make it into common usage, (i.e. "Make my day.") capture common moments of life with an original sound-byte an actor can elevate to pure art. Other examples: Hannibal on the A-Team: "I love it when a plan comes together." Quantum Leap: "Oh, boy." Or the myriad Buffyisms we all loved so much -- smart-alec comments during a fight to the death.

A real person in a real situation just doesn't think that fast. So when Art supplies the right comment for the type of situation, it enters common usage.

Note we can quote the Television show's name, or the film, the actor and the line. In Television, for example, those lines are created by committee which can include the actor playing the character out based on a previous episode's line ("Logical, Mr. Spock.") ("He's dead, Jim.") ("Oh, one more thing.")

How many of you know the writer's name who came up with that marvelous line for that spot in the action? Think about that.

If you want fame and glory, find something to do other than be a writer. It's hard work, requires an enormous amount of education, and over a lifetime rarely amounts to more than minimum wage per hour invested.

So here's another long installment on that education in writing. It'll take a while to read this and apply it with practice.

Characters don't say what people would say -- because characters aren't people.

Characters are the illusion of people. So they say the illusion of what people say.

And the difference between fiction and reality is the same for most all elements in a story, not just dialogue. In worldbuilding, we build the illusion of a world, not an actual world; the illusion of a culture, not a real culture; the illusion of war or combat, not actual combat; the illusion of a government, not a real government; the illusion of mansions and hovels, not real mansions and hovels. So how do we make that illusion "work" for the reader?

How do we get readers to believe our illusions are real, so real they adopt our character's one-liners? (there are Sime~Gen fans who regularly conjugate the Simelan word SHEN when they experience the Ancient version.)

As story tellers, we are spinning illusions, not imparting information.

Yet the power and ultimate usefulness of our illusions depends on our crafting a foundation of correct information underneath our illusion.

Verisimilitude requires something to be truly similar to. And that's "information" that we build our illusions upon.

It may not be "correct" information that we need, but information matching that which readers already "know." Even if the readers "know" something that isn't actually true, the writer must start crafting the story based on what the reader believes to be so and gradually, step by step, work in the illusion of a new truth.

If that process is done well, it will end up making the reader so curious that he/she will go research the topic on their own, maybe dedicate their lives to it. Many Star Trek fans discovered Science Fiction via Star Trek when they were in college, and went on to change their majors to one or another science. Today, a new generation in college grew up on Buffy The Vampire Slayer.



I have fan letters from readers of Molt Brother and it's sequel City of a Million Legends (both available in e-book on Fictionwise, and on amazon.com in paper) indicating that the books inspired people to choose Archeology as their major in college.


Fiction speaks. Fiction influences. Fiction is illusion. But Fiction is sometimes more real than reality. How can that be?

Because a particular work of Art can reach into the subconscious and activate something within a person that we have no name for other than Soul, fictioneers have real power. Awesome power.

That's why so many books on writing craft emphasize knowing your audience, choosing to write to a particular, defined sub-set of all humanity so that your book will be marketable. But not just marketable! Memorable.

You have to choose "who" you are writing to in order to make the illusion of reality work for those people. Even in America, various sub-cultures harbor different convictions about the nature of reality, so writing with "verisimilitude" for each one means starting with different assumptions about the facts you have in common.

Only about 35 million in the USA watched Obama's Inaugeration. In the 1970's you needed a TV audience of 20 million just to stay on the air and there were only 200 million people in the USA. Today there are well over 300 million in the USA. The percentage watching television is shrinking.

In fact, the percentage of us in the USA that do or know any particular thing -- have anything at all in common -- is vanishingly small and still shrinking. So it gets harder and harder for a writer to identify a cohesive "Market" large enough for a product that would have costly production and distribution.

The business of fiction is in massive flux as is the business of news distribution.

The more your fantasy world diverges from the reader's everyday reality, the more careful you must be to craft on a platform of reality based facts familiar to your reader/viewer.

For your characters to become real people to a readership, the characters must be presented via details from that readership's experience. That's not necessarily "real life" experience. What readers have read in other stories is just as "real" to them and something a readership has in common.

So how do you cast your illusion of people? How do you create a character that seems real? Do you tell the reader everything about this character's biography and behavior tendencies in a 2 paragraph "character sketch" when you first bring them on stage? Do you even need to write a "character sketch" for yourself, as almost all writing textbooks recommend?

No. You don't tell the reader -- in fact, the less you tell the reader (or let the reader know via other techniques) the more realistic the character will seem.

Why is that?

Because in a text based narrative, you SHOW NOT TELL who the characters are.

Why does SHOW DON'T TELL create the most powerful illusion of reality?

Show Don't Tell works because the reader becomes actively engaged in fleshing out the details of every scene, every room you walk the character into, and every thought in the character's head. In fact, the character's internal monologue is much more powerful when you don't let the reader hear everything the character is thinking or especially feeling.

How can that be?

An engaged reader is garbed in the character, becoming the character and looking at the surroundings through the character's eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.

So you INDICATE a tiny (artistically chosen) detail derived from the THEME of the story -- like the strokes of a Japanese Brush Painting -- and the reader uses your details to make a fully dimensional 256 toned picture of their own. The reader becomes enveloped in your world because it is not your world -- but their own.

That's one reason children must be taught to "read" (beyond sounding out words) -- there is a mental technique of translating cold text into full-dimensional pictures in the mind that must be learned. The most common way of learning the technique is to read a lot of books -- until you find one that engages you fully -- then follow that author or that genre, building a set of experiences and facts "in common with" the writers of that genre.

The writer's function is to trigger the native imagination of the reader, not to inject the writer's own story into the reader's mind.

Marion Zimmer Bradley taught me an old adage, and I can never remember the originator of it. "The story the reader reads is not the story the writer wrote."

No two readers "read" the same story, even when reading the same text.

Better yet, when a story is well written (well crafted to energize the reader's imagination) then the same reader can re-read the text and discover a totally new and different story -- because the reader has changed.

The writer's function is to evoke emotion, energize imagination, arouse anticipation and deliver satisfaction. The writer is an artist whose medium is the reader's emotion.

When a reader gets all that emotional satisfaction from a text, they will remember that text as having TAUGHT THEM something.

There are two main ways that a human being learns. From instruction and from experience. Instruction is hypothetical, requiring cognitive activity. Experience is concrete and practical, requiring engagement.

The fiction writer teaches via vicarious experience, not instruction.

People remember what they learn when it comes wrapped in a vivid emotion. ("A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go doowwwnnn!")

Now let's take a concrete example of facts upon which to build Verisimilitude.

Here is an actual, real-life biographical fact that could become such a hard foundation for a fictional or fantasy scene or incident that would ring bells for the readers.

If presented wrapped in a powerful enough emotional context, this little episode could engrave these (actual) facts on readers' minds in such a way that, should this ever happen to them or someone with them, they would recognize the experience and respond in such a way as to save a life.

Though not all readers know it, it is an established fact that women often experience heart attacks with a totally different set of sensations than men do.

The challenge to you, as writers, is to use the facts below to create this scene within a story in such a way that a man reading it will recognize it happening to a woman he knows in reality. Convince husbands and brothers. Make the men understand what the woman feels.

This below came to me in one of those round-robin emails with "pass it to ten people" -- which is a real bad idea, because once it infects a circle of friends, you'll get 200 copies back.

-------------------

> FEMALE HEART ATTACKS
>
> I was aware that female heart attacks are different, but this is the best description I've ever read.
>
> Women and heart attacks (Myocardial infarction). Did you know that women rarely have the same dramatic symptoms that men have when experiencing heart attack you know, the sudden stabbing pain in the chest, the cold sweat, grabbing the chest & dropping to the floor that we see in the movies. Here is the story of one woman's experience with a heart attack.
>
> 'I had a heart attack at about 10 :30 PM with NO prior exertion, NO prior emotional trauma that one would suspect might've brought it on.
>
> I was sitting all snugly & warm on a cold evening, with my purring cat in my lap, reading an interesting story my friend had sent me, and actually thinking, 'A-A-h, this is the life, all cozy and warm in my soft, cushy Lazy Boy with my feet propped up.
>
> A moment later, I felt that awful sensation of indigestion, when you've been in a hurry and grabbed a bite of sandwich and washed it down with a d ash of water, and that hurried bite seems to feel like you've swallowed a golf ball going down the esophagus in slow motion and it is most uncomfortable. You realize you shouldn't have gulped it down so fast and needed to chew it more thoroughly and this time drink a glass of water to hasten its progress down to the stomach. This was my initial sensation---the only trouble was that I hadn't taken a bite of anything since about 5:00 p.m.
>
> After it seemed to subside, the next sensation was like little squeezing motions that seemed to be racing up my SPINE (hind-sight, it was probably my aorta spasming), gaining speed as they continued racing up and under my sternum (breast bone, where one presses rhythmically when administering CPR).
>
This fascinating process continued on into my throat and branched out into both jaws. 'AHA!! NOW I stopped puzzling about what was happening -- we all have read and/or heard about pain in the jaws being one of the signals of an MI happening, haven't we? I said aloud to myself and the cat, Dear God, I think I'm having a heart attack!
>
> I lowered the footrest dumping the cat from my lap, started to take a step and fell on the floor instead. I thought to myself, If this is a heart attack, I shouldn't be walking into the next room where the phone is or anywhere else ... but, on the other hand, if I don't, nobody will know that I need help, and if I wait any longer I may not be able to get up in moment.
>
I pulled myself up with the arms of the chair, walked slowly into the next room and dialed the Paramedics .. I told her I thought I was having a heart attack due to the pressure building under the sternum and radiating into my jaws. I didn't feel hysterical or afraid, just stating the facts. She said she was sending the Paramedics over immediately, asked if the front door was near to me, and if so, to unbolt the door and then lie down on the floor where they could see me when they came in.
>
I unlocked the door and then laid down on the floor as instructed and lost consciousness, as I don't remember the medics coming in, their examination, lifting me onto a gurney or getting me into their ambulance, or hearing the call they made to St. Jude ER on the way, but I did briefly awaken when we arrived and saw that the Cardiologist was already there in his surgical blues and cap, helping the medics pull my stretcher out of the ambulance. He was bending over me asking questions (probably something like 'Have you taken any medications?') but I couldn't make my mind interpret what he was saying, or form an answer, and nodded off again, not waking up until the Cardiologist and partner had already threaded the teeny angiogram balloon up my femoral artery into the aorta and into my heart where they installed 2 side by side stents to hold open my right coronary artery.
>
> 'I know it sounds like all my thinking and actions at home must have taken at least 20-30 minutes before calling the Paramedics, but actually it took perhaps 4-5 minutes before the call, and both the fire station and St. Jude are only minutes away from my home, and my Cardiologist was already to go to the OR in his scrubs and get going on restarting my heart (which had stopped somewhere between my arrival and the procedure) and installing the stents.
>
> 'Why have I written all of this to you with so much detail? Because I want all of you who are so important in my life to know what I learned first hand.'

> 1. Be aware that something very different is happening in your body not the usual men's symptoms but inexplicable things happening (until my sternum and jaws got into the act). It is said that many more women than men die of their first (and last) MI because they didn't know they were having one and commonly mistake it as indigestion, take some Maalox or other anti-heartburn preparation and go to bed, hoping they'll feel better in the morning when they wake up ... which doesn't happen. My female friends, your symptoms might not be exactly like mine, so I advise you to call the Paramedics if ANYTHING is unpleasantly happening that you've not felt before. It is better to have a 'false alarm' visitation than to risk your life guessing what it might be!
>
> 2. Note that I said 'Call the Paramedics.' And if you can take an asprin. Ladies, TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE! Do NOT try to drive yourself to the ER - you are a hazard to others on the road. Do NOT have your panicked husband who will be speeding and looking anxiously at what's happening with you instead of the road. Do NOT call your doctor -- he doesn't know where you live and if it's at night you won't reach him anyway, and if it's daytime, his assistants (or answering service) will tell you to call the Paramedics. He doesn't carry the equipment in his car that you need to be saved! The Paramedics do, principally OXYGEN that you need ASAP. Your Dr. will be notified later.
>
> 3. Don't assume it couldn't be a heart attack because you have a normal cholesterol count. Research has discovered that a cholesterol elevated reading is rarely the cause of an MI (unless it's unbelievably high and/or accompanied by high blood pressure). MIs are usually caused by long-term stress and inflammation in the body, which dumps all sorts of deadly hormones into your system to sludge things up in there.
>
> Pain in the jaw can wake you from a sound sleep.
>
-------------------

Now try to use that factual foundation, keeping in mind that many readers in America don't believe it or have never heard it, and weave something emotionally powerful around it so that none of your readers will ever mistake this experience for heartburn.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.slantedconcept.com

PS: Romance genre news in publishing -- romance and sports.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090127/ap_on_re_eu/eu_britain_rugby_romance_1

Heading into Danger: Choosing Point of View

I’m glad Jacqueline brought up point-of-view. Annually, I judge the Golden Heart—the prestigious contest run by the Romance Writers of America for unpublished writers—and a number of local-to-regional writing contests. I’ve also just returned from the Florida Romance Writers Cruise With Your Muse conference (yes, on a cruise ship) where I sat in on other workshops, taught my own and in general, hobnobbed with authors and writers on various topics, but most often the art and craft of writing.

POV seems to be the proverbial sticky-wicket for a lot of writers. In fact, very often when I teach workshops, there’s more than a handful in the audience who appear surprised that there are rules, there are serious craft considerations relating to POV. The fact that a scene or a chapter—or the fact that even an entire book could be based on the wrong POV hasn’t occurred to a number of writers out there.

It’s not that writers aren’t aware of POV (though not all know the acronym). It’s that many writers don’t seem to be aware of the decisions that need to be made in crafting. Or why these decisions are important.

“But it’s my characters’ story. It’s Bill’s and Ted’s and Mary’s and Alice’s,” the writer explains. And then proceeds to write a scene about what Bill does, then one about Ted, one about Mary and one about Alice. (Or worse—a scene where all are prominent and we’ll get to why that’s problematic in a bit.)

But a novel—the story you’re writing—is not just a recounting of incidents in one or more characters’ lives. It’s not a dayplanner come to life or a diary entry unfolding. A novel, as Jacqueline has taught me, is fiction and fiction is entertainment.

And don’t you forget that for a minute.

Ever see the Rockettes? Or any large choreographed production? Looks easy, seamless, doesn’t it? It takes hours and hours and days of practice, of drilling, of planning, of rehearsing.

Novels are no different. You just have words—not feet—dancing in a deliberate rhythm on the stage.

Reading a commercial genre fiction novel is, for the reader, a vicarious experience. I don’t think that comes as a shock to anyone out there. Readers read to immerse themselves in another’s life, another’s quest, another’s strivings, another’s failures, another’s challenges. Safely. All the adventure, none of the risk.

Readers also read, Dwight V.Swain sagely noted in his Techniques of the Selling Writer, to experience tension. And it’s the author’s job, Swain further noted, to manipulate the emotions of the reader.

Which ostensibly doesn’t sound all that hard—given that readers are already poised and salivating for the vicarious experience. They expect it. They demand it. They’re waiting for the writer to give them that magic carpet ride…waiting so intently, in fact, they’re willing to accept and believe all sorts of nonsense just to get that magic carpet under their readerly patooties. (That willingness to accept is called, in literary terms, the suspension of disbelief. But that’s a topic for another blog.)

So if it’s so damned easy to bring readers in, why is it so damned hard to write the correct POV?

Because fiction is entertainment and because readers do read to experience tension. And the wrong POV choice—or worse, the mixing of too many POVs—makes the piece un-entertaining and without tension.

In her (excellent) World Crafter’s Guild on her Sime~Gen site, Jacqueline often pens, “Whose story is it?” This directly relates to something I learned as a private investigator: “Who’s the best witness?” I can tell you from working oodles of vehicular accident cases that what witness #1 recounts may not at all be what witness #2 saw, or witness #3. Physical presence does not always translate to knowledge, and rarely translates to agreement.

Further, physical presence at an accident scene doesn’t immediately ensure the correct recounting of facts. Distance from the accident as well as location (ie: blocked view) are two factors that affect what a witness can impart. But other factors that come into play can include cultural, educational, and emotional issues. Let’s consider Mrs. Magillicuddy who witnesses Junior Snerd, the driver, clip the curb in front of the Magillicuddy house and plow his car into Mr. Magillicuddy’s brand new Lincoln MKZ parked in the driveway. Mrs. M will have an emotional reaction because it’s her husband’s car. Her view—her point of view—will be different from the UPS delivery driver exiting his brown truck across the street, who doesn’t really know the Magillicuddy’s or Snerd. Like it or not, emotions color memory and there’s a not a private detective, cop, attorney or judge that doesn’t know that. To Mrs. M, the oncoming car will likely—in hindsight—be remembered as larger and faster. More threatening, more menacing.

What does this have to do with writing fiction and POV?

Bear with me. I’ll get to it.

Now, the group of teenagers hanging out at the corner will have a different recounting of what happened when Snerd’s car whizzed by, stereo blaring. They may—because of their age and their teen-culture—be able to identify the song pounding through Snerd’s speakers and as well, might recognize the object in Snerd’s left hand as a cell phone, because those are things important to their world. But if asked whether it appeared Snerd’s car exceeded the posted speed limit, they might not be able to answer because—again, based on their teen-culture—a car with music blaring whose driver is texting on his cell phone is a “cool thing” (or whatever the current jargon is.)

Junior might even be a friend. Conflict of interest, that.

And Snerd, I assure you, has a very different recounting of what happened. (Insurance company files are full of statements from drivers who swear “that tree just jumped out in the road and hit my car.”)

So it’s a detective’s job to gather not only the facts from the witnesses, but ascertain those items which affect the facts, like distance, lighting, obstructions, and subjective factors like education, culture, relationships and so on. A report is then created from all the information culled.

A novel is not a report. A novel, Swain says, is desire plus danger. A novel, Jacqueline Lichtenberg teaches, is entertainment; it is a story whose essence is conflict.

Danger, desire, tension, conflict.

What does this have to do with POV? It teaches you that when you choose POV, you must always work from the character in whose POV the reader will experience the most conflict. Tension. Desire. When you work from the POV of the character whose recounting, whose experience will permit the reader to experience the most conflict, you’re feeding the reader’s desire for vicarious experiences, and you’ll keep the reader turning pages to find out what happens next (“What can I experience next?”).

Now, problems arise when writers get hopped-up on this emotional thing and believe More Is Better. “So,” newbie writer says aloud, “if the emotional experiences of one character in the scene can be gripped, then the emotional experiences of four characters in the scene will be fantastic!” And she writes the next few pages allowing the reader into the heads and hearts of all four characters, so that the readers knows the thoughts and feelings of all four characters at the same time.

Uh, no. It doesn’t work that way.

POV is like being a sports fan. You like the Tampa Bay Bucs (though likely not this year). You like the Tampa Bay Lightning. You root for the Rays, another local team in the Tampa-St Pete area. So when the Lightning play the Philadelphia Flyers, your focus, your interest, your emotion, your dedication is to the Lightning players on the ice.

But what if the sports field contained the Bucs, the Lightning and the Rays? Your loyalties, attention and emotions would be divided.

That’s one of the reasons multiple points-of-view in the same scene or (heaven forefend) paragraph doesn’t work: it splits reader loyalties. Instead of a 100% vested interest in Character A, the reader has a 25% interest in Character A, 25% in Character B, 25% in Character C and 25% in Character D.

Which makes the scene weak and the reader will lose interest.

Remember: readers read to experience tension.
Remember: reading is a vicarious experience.

Let’s go back to tension, which is where head-hopping or multiple POVs in the same scene fails.

If the reader knows what every character is thinking and feeling, then there can be no surprises, no secrets. And if there are no surprises and no secrets, then there is a lot less tension. And if there’s a lot less tension, there are a lot less reasons for the reader (or editor or agent) to keep turning the pages.

If you have a novel in which the newly assigned captain of a military starship believes—no, fears that the admiral of the fleet—who is currently on board— doesn’t trust her, you can ramp up tension by having that fear be all the reader experiences during that chapter. Throw in a few secrets—the new captain has a bit of a shady past that, if the admiral found out, would certain land her in the brig—if she lives that long—and you have more tension. More danger. More desire (to live, to succeed, to not be unmasked and killed for past sins). You can show (because good writers show and don’t tell) the admiral watching her with suspicion (or so she believes). You will then keep the reader turning pages because all the reader know in this chapter is what the captain knows—fear, suspicion, trepidation.

If, in that chapter or scene or (heaven forefend) those very paragraphs, you include the admiral’s thoughts and the reader learns that the admiral is not watching the captain’s every move because he suspects her, but because he’s secretly been in love with her for years…you then weaken the captain’s fears. The reader knows then that the captain really has nothing to worry about. Her fears are invalid. Her suspicions are bogus. It’s all really just a big misunderstanding.

So why keep reading? Where’s the tension the reader wants to experience vicariously? It’s watered down now. Ineffective.

“But, but, Linnea!” you wail. “That’s Games of Command. And we did learn about Kel-Paten’s feelings for Tasha.”

Yes, you did. But not in the same paragraph or scene. I gave you time to get emotionally invested in Tasha’s paranoia before I let you in on Branden Kel-Paten’s little secret. And when in the chapter where you learned about Kel-Paten’s little secret, you also learned about the huge risks and threat to him because of it.

I manipulated your emotions and you loved it.

I also kept you solidly in one point of view until I’d wrung those emotions out of you. Then and only then could I switch you to another character’s point of view, emotions and problems.

Did I do it flawlessly? Hell no. As author Mary Jo Putney so wisely said in a recent radio interview, each novel has limited real estate. You have a finite landscape in which to create your book. There are times you must cut, you must fudge. You have deadlines. You have word count limits. But even given all that, character POV is one of the elements a writer must always keep as a top priority.

Point of View is the tool by which you manipulate the reader because point of view is what places the reader into the character’s heart and mind. It is the means of the vicarious experience. Therefore, the point of view you choose must be the one that is the most impactful, most fraught with emotions, laced with desire, infused with danger. And you stay in that point of view long enough to make sure the reader has become vested in that character. The reader must care deeply and the reader can’t do that in a setting of divided loyalties or a cacophony of thoughts and feelings.

Going back to the accident between Magillicuddy and Snerd, whose story on the witness stand would you think would be the most impactful? The teens on the corner? The UPS driver? Or Snerd’s behind the wheel of the car? Which would have more sensations that were immediate and grabbing? Which would hold your attention longer?

The story you want to listen to is the point of view of that character.

~Linnea

Linnea Sinclair
// Interstellar Adventure Infused with Romance//
Available Now from Bantam: Shades of Dark
2009: Hope's Follyhttp://www.linneasinclair.com/