I have just learned that the nominations for Hugo awards close on March 13th, so while it feels to me that I've just left Nebula season, let me remark that "Cold Words" (Analog, Oct. 2009) is eligible for Hugo consideration. Also, because my first professional story, "Let the Word Take Me," appeared in Analog magazine's July/August 2008 issue, I'm in my second year of eligibility for the Campbell Award for best new writer (here is my profile at the site). *Any member of the 2009 or 2010 Worldcon as of the end of January 2010 is eligible to make nominations for the 2010 Hugo Awards and John W. Campbell Award. You don't have to attend Worldcon; you just have to be a member of it. Less expensive Non-attending ("supporting") memberships, which come with all of the rights of membership except actually attending it, are available* (information between the asterisks helpfully provided by Kevin).
For the curious, here are a couple of quotes. I hope they'll inspire you to seek out copies of Analog...
from "Cold Words" (Oct. 2009):
"What is it? Still the problem of Cold words? Someone of Rank among your people must grasp the dominator's tongue, Parker, or Majesty will brand you Barbarians!"
Parker's fur-naked brown face shows embarrassed. "This new negotiator is a more gifted speaker than the last," he says. "Officer Jasmine Hada will speak Cold words well enough not to Warm Majesty's presence inadvertently."
"Then this is news of triumph. We shall have our spaceport!" And all that come with it - so close is the conclusion of my life's hunt!
"Yes, but Hada is too skilled. She even bears the authority to propose terms. Why should the Allied Systems grant Aurru spaceport such importance, if it's only meant to be a way-stop between star territories?" Parker frowns. "I fear some hidden intent of unfairness to the Aurrel people."
My hackles rise. I know much of unfairness, as the only one of Lowland race on the Cold Council - and also of hidden intent. My own is to use this spaceport to bring Human silver to the Lowlands, thus raising my nape-bitten race. If Parker scents true, this Officer Hada could ruin my hunt before its final pace. "When will she take foot in La-larrai City?"
Parker lowers his head. "She comes down by shuttle at the sunset hour. Your presence at her arrival would grant us Cold honor - and we might make sure of her."
from "Let the Word Take Me" (July/August, 2008):
At the border of the village, a hand emerged from the speckled darkness and jerked him off the path into deep shadows.
"David, what the hell do you think you're doing?"
David caught his breath. "Father!"
"If Monroe finds out you've been trespassing...!"
"I know, Father, I'm sorry, I –" How stupid would he sound if he said he'd risked the colony listening for bedtime stories? It wouldn't win him the respect due to a fellow linguist, that's for sure, and Father would say he should have shipped him offworld to college on Erimyno Treaty Colony instead of giving in to all his begging to stay. "I'm sorry."
"Well, never mind."
"So how did it go? Did you get the extension?"
"Damned Systems functionary," Father grunted. "She doesn't care about the years of work we've put in; all she thinks about is Systems resources being wasted on maintaining us here at Garini Base."
David shook his head. "How can anyone say we're wasting resources? We hardly import anything." He shuddered, realizing that 'resources' must mean something else entirely. "Does she mean our defense ships? But she can't take them away – it would be like handing the Garini rainforests over to be shredded by pirates!" And, since the Garini Provisional Colonists had been the first to inform the Systems about Garini's biochemical wealth, it would be their own fault.
#
"The sacred Word is life, or death," she told me. "It binds, it brings bliss or misery. It is the blood of the People, that flows freely in its heart, in the House of Leaves, and the Great Tales like flesh grow from it; outside, the blood and flesh are clothed in small images that give understanding without unleashing the full might of the Word, like scales over the skin."
Friday, February 26, 2010
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Different Minds, Different Voices
Recently, numerous friends have mentioned the name Temple Grandin to me, so finally yesterday I went and listened to this remarkable woman give a speech called, "The World Needs All Kinds of Minds." If any of you have heard her name and been wondering, she's definitely worth listening to. It's clear to me that she's correct: her special way of thinking (medically falling on the autistic spectrum) makes her uniquely qualified to perform excellently in her job (analyzing livestock facilities to make them more effectively usable by animals).
Not everyone thinks the same way. I've encountered this a lot, for a number of reasons. When I taught in the classroom, I was always trying to explain things multiple different ways because not everyone relates to pedagogic explanation in the same way. As I watch my own children grow, I notice that they're asked to perform many of the same tasks, but that they approach them in extremely different ways. Also, when I work with writers, I notice that people approach stories in different ways.
It shouldn't be surprising. I always think of the game of Boggle, and remark that if you're sitting on a different side of the board from everyone else, you see different words (and often, that's what helps you win).
If you're writing, what can the idea of different minds - what Temple Grandin calls neurodiversity - do for you and your stories? Well, it can do a lot, in fact.
It can inspire you to create a narrator who thinks differently. The classic non-genre example of this is the novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which features an autistic protagonist, thereby giving readers a very different - and very moving - viewpoint on the events of the story.
It might also inspire you to create aliens. C.S. Friedman's Novel, This Alien Shore, features a fascinating group of people (actually humans significantly mutated by a star drive, but they function very much as aliens do) whose society is based on dividing people up by their type of mind. Friedman bases a lot of these types on what we'd call mental illnesses (obsessive-compulsive disorder, megalomania, etc.), but in the society of the Guerans, they are legitimate ways of thinking that give these people advantages in their fields of specialty. Social relations in their society are eased somewhat because people draw patterns on their faces to indicate the nature of their inner thought, and thus allowances can be made for them.
If you're working with mental illness, or any condition which has been significantly examined by the medical community (including Asperger's Syndrome, autism, OCD, schizophrenia, etc.) I urge you to research it. The advantage of knowing the medical specifics - and personal specifics, if you can learn about them - of a condition is immense. Your portrayal of a person will be more principled and realistic, and you'll know which characteristics are safe to exaggerate and which should be kept under control. There's a big difference between a character who's an evil bastard, and one who's mentally ill.
But even if you're working with people we'd call "normal," remember that they don't all think the same way. As Alice Flaherty discusses in her book, "The Midnight Disease" - and Temple Grandin also notes - many mental "conditions" are genetically related to different ways of thinking that also show up in the normal population. The traits of mental disease persist because they are simply overconcentrated forms of creativity and other adaptively advantageous traits. I have a previous post you might be curious about which talks about Flaherty's fascinating book in more depth, here.
I think these issues are applicable to the question of character voice. When you're looking to write a unique character voice, think about how that person thinks. Temple Grandin says she thinks in pictures - and not just in pictures, but in a series of very specific pictures, without creating any overarching prototypical concept. If you were to create a point of view character who thought that way, it would be worth thinking through how they put together thoughts, and how they reasoned their conclusions, so that you could render that in the voice. Any change in categorization strategy, or metaphorical strategy, can have a deep influence on voice. This is one reason why someone who speaks a different language will have a very different voice. Something as simple as a different verbal strategy will greatly change the way that character's point of view appears on the page.
I love to do different - even wacky - voices for my characters. Some of these characters are human, and some are not. When I'm working on creating a character voice, typically what I'll do is come up with a list of things I want that person to do textually ("special effects"). I'll experiment with what a particular set of alterations does to how that person sounds, and once I've learned a bit about what the "special effects" do to the feel of the narrative, then I'll edit to achieve better overall readability and flow. Here are some examples of special effects I've used.
For Rulii in Cold Words (Analog, October 2009):
1. Never use the present progressive tense (use all actions and no ongoing states)
2. Use unexpected phrasings ("Parker shows embarrassed" instead of "Parker looks embarrassed")
3. Use hunt metaphors ("My life's hunt" "she could ruin my hunt before its final pace")
For the obsessive-compulsive, paranoid Nekantor in The Eminence's Match (forthcoming, Eight Against Reality, 2010)
1. Never use expressions of uncertainty (avoid "probably," or "must be" to express likelihood)
2. Use negative connotative words in description whenever possible
3. Use metaphors of games and control
4. Use textual repetition to convey obsessive thought patterns
A list like this is not a recipe. It's an experiment - an experiment that I encourage you to try, if you want to diversify your voices. As I said above, the list points are special effects, and like any effect (even the use of a cool word) they can be overused. But I still encourage you to come up with your own special effects to try.
This is all about thinking outside the box. The more we can be aware of other ways of thinking, the more we can learn about the world's diversity on both the linguistic and neurological levels, and all of these things can help us, as writers, achieve something different and exciting.
Not everyone thinks the same way. I've encountered this a lot, for a number of reasons. When I taught in the classroom, I was always trying to explain things multiple different ways because not everyone relates to pedagogic explanation in the same way. As I watch my own children grow, I notice that they're asked to perform many of the same tasks, but that they approach them in extremely different ways. Also, when I work with writers, I notice that people approach stories in different ways.
It shouldn't be surprising. I always think of the game of Boggle, and remark that if you're sitting on a different side of the board from everyone else, you see different words (and often, that's what helps you win).
If you're writing, what can the idea of different minds - what Temple Grandin calls neurodiversity - do for you and your stories? Well, it can do a lot, in fact.
It can inspire you to create a narrator who thinks differently. The classic non-genre example of this is the novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which features an autistic protagonist, thereby giving readers a very different - and very moving - viewpoint on the events of the story.
It might also inspire you to create aliens. C.S. Friedman's Novel, This Alien Shore, features a fascinating group of people (actually humans significantly mutated by a star drive, but they function very much as aliens do) whose society is based on dividing people up by their type of mind. Friedman bases a lot of these types on what we'd call mental illnesses (obsessive-compulsive disorder, megalomania, etc.), but in the society of the Guerans, they are legitimate ways of thinking that give these people advantages in their fields of specialty. Social relations in their society are eased somewhat because people draw patterns on their faces to indicate the nature of their inner thought, and thus allowances can be made for them.
If you're working with mental illness, or any condition which has been significantly examined by the medical community (including Asperger's Syndrome, autism, OCD, schizophrenia, etc.) I urge you to research it. The advantage of knowing the medical specifics - and personal specifics, if you can learn about them - of a condition is immense. Your portrayal of a person will be more principled and realistic, and you'll know which characteristics are safe to exaggerate and which should be kept under control. There's a big difference between a character who's an evil bastard, and one who's mentally ill.
But even if you're working with people we'd call "normal," remember that they don't all think the same way. As Alice Flaherty discusses in her book, "The Midnight Disease" - and Temple Grandin also notes - many mental "conditions" are genetically related to different ways of thinking that also show up in the normal population. The traits of mental disease persist because they are simply overconcentrated forms of creativity and other adaptively advantageous traits. I have a previous post you might be curious about which talks about Flaherty's fascinating book in more depth, here.
I think these issues are applicable to the question of character voice. When you're looking to write a unique character voice, think about how that person thinks. Temple Grandin says she thinks in pictures - and not just in pictures, but in a series of very specific pictures, without creating any overarching prototypical concept. If you were to create a point of view character who thought that way, it would be worth thinking through how they put together thoughts, and how they reasoned their conclusions, so that you could render that in the voice. Any change in categorization strategy, or metaphorical strategy, can have a deep influence on voice. This is one reason why someone who speaks a different language will have a very different voice. Something as simple as a different verbal strategy will greatly change the way that character's point of view appears on the page.
I love to do different - even wacky - voices for my characters. Some of these characters are human, and some are not. When I'm working on creating a character voice, typically what I'll do is come up with a list of things I want that person to do textually ("special effects"). I'll experiment with what a particular set of alterations does to how that person sounds, and once I've learned a bit about what the "special effects" do to the feel of the narrative, then I'll edit to achieve better overall readability and flow. Here are some examples of special effects I've used.
For Rulii in Cold Words (Analog, October 2009):
1. Never use the present progressive tense (use all actions and no ongoing states)
2. Use unexpected phrasings ("Parker shows embarrassed" instead of "Parker looks embarrassed")
3. Use hunt metaphors ("My life's hunt" "she could ruin my hunt before its final pace")
For the obsessive-compulsive, paranoid Nekantor in The Eminence's Match (forthcoming, Eight Against Reality, 2010)
1. Never use expressions of uncertainty (avoid "probably," or "must be" to express likelihood)
2. Use negative connotative words in description whenever possible
3. Use metaphors of games and control
4. Use textual repetition to convey obsessive thought patterns
A list like this is not a recipe. It's an experiment - an experiment that I encourage you to try, if you want to diversify your voices. As I said above, the list points are special effects, and like any effect (even the use of a cool word) they can be overused. But I still encourage you to come up with your own special effects to try.
This is all about thinking outside the box. The more we can be aware of other ways of thinking, the more we can learn about the world's diversity on both the linguistic and neurological levels, and all of these things can help us, as writers, achieve something different and exciting.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Language Pride/Language Control
If you're creating a nation - for fantasy or science fiction - I'll begin by encouraging you to give it a language. But even if you have already, don't stop there. One of the things you find all over the world is that people who speak a particular language have strong attitudes about it, both internally or relative to other languages of their world.
Today my husband and I were discussing France and the French reputation for being prickly toward Americans - something which I have never in my life experienced. Interesting, isn't it? Because I speak French well, I always get lots of credit for it. My theory is that Americans and French are very similar. The people of each of these two countries are very proud of their language, and because it is spoken in many countries of the world, they feel that others coming to visit should have the courtesy to learn some of it. This may or may not jive with the experience of some of you, but nevertheless, it's an example of manners which are closely linked to language pride.
In Japan, they have a different kind of language pride. Both my husband and I have encountered situations where we were told we spoke Japanese "too well." There's a strong cultural view of Japanese as a unique language that can't truly be captured by a foreign speaker.
Speakers of different languages can also have varying attitudes toward the use of dialect by people from different regions - some laugh at them, some think they're precious, and others disparage them. Some countries have a national institution whose job it is to maintain the "standard" language against the intrusion of dialectal usages or foreign borrowings (especially foreign borrowings).
I encountered a funny article recently about German train stations replacing signs written in English with ones written in German. The part that was surprising was that the English they were replacing wasn't the kind Americans would necessarily find easy to understand - it was very idiomatically appropriate to a German context. The article is here.
If your world has nations and languages, then considering language attitude on some level will help it feel a lot more real. Even if you've got one language that is the strongest across a whole world, consider that language use diversifies very quickly. English is very strong as an international language, but there are lots of different kinds of English. What is Standard English? How does it compare to the Queen's English? Is one more often learned, or more highly valued in a particular location? If you meet someone from Hong Kong, their English will probably sound British, but someone from the Philippines will probably sound American. If you want to teach English in Japan, it will be easier to get a job if you sound American or British than if you sound Australian.
War is another context in which language control can play a huge role. Take the example of World War II, when Japan occupied Korea and outlawed the use of Korean in public. Korean didn't disappear, but a whole generation of people learned Japanese as a conqueror's language. Imagine how that influenced attitudes about Korean and Japanese!
Think also of the language Hebrew, which was primarily used as a literary language and was then revived for active use starting in the end of the 19th century (source: Wikipedia entry on History of Hebrew). Now it's the native language of millions in Israel.
I hope all of these real world examples can help you extrapolate for situations in your fantasy and science fictional worlds. Language isn't just a tool for conveying messages, but also for conveying information about culture and identity. It can serve conquerors, or rally the oppressed. It can be a measure of refinement or lack thereof. It can be a symbol of national unity, or a symbol of national diversity, or yet again a symbol of deep national history.
It's something to think about.
Today my husband and I were discussing France and the French reputation for being prickly toward Americans - something which I have never in my life experienced. Interesting, isn't it? Because I speak French well, I always get lots of credit for it. My theory is that Americans and French are very similar. The people of each of these two countries are very proud of their language, and because it is spoken in many countries of the world, they feel that others coming to visit should have the courtesy to learn some of it. This may or may not jive with the experience of some of you, but nevertheless, it's an example of manners which are closely linked to language pride.
In Japan, they have a different kind of language pride. Both my husband and I have encountered situations where we were told we spoke Japanese "too well." There's a strong cultural view of Japanese as a unique language that can't truly be captured by a foreign speaker.
Speakers of different languages can also have varying attitudes toward the use of dialect by people from different regions - some laugh at them, some think they're precious, and others disparage them. Some countries have a national institution whose job it is to maintain the "standard" language against the intrusion of dialectal usages or foreign borrowings (especially foreign borrowings).
I encountered a funny article recently about German train stations replacing signs written in English with ones written in German. The part that was surprising was that the English they were replacing wasn't the kind Americans would necessarily find easy to understand - it was very idiomatically appropriate to a German context. The article is here.
If your world has nations and languages, then considering language attitude on some level will help it feel a lot more real. Even if you've got one language that is the strongest across a whole world, consider that language use diversifies very quickly. English is very strong as an international language, but there are lots of different kinds of English. What is Standard English? How does it compare to the Queen's English? Is one more often learned, or more highly valued in a particular location? If you meet someone from Hong Kong, their English will probably sound British, but someone from the Philippines will probably sound American. If you want to teach English in Japan, it will be easier to get a job if you sound American or British than if you sound Australian.
War is another context in which language control can play a huge role. Take the example of World War II, when Japan occupied Korea and outlawed the use of Korean in public. Korean didn't disappear, but a whole generation of people learned Japanese as a conqueror's language. Imagine how that influenced attitudes about Korean and Japanese!
Think also of the language Hebrew, which was primarily used as a literary language and was then revived for active use starting in the end of the 19th century (source: Wikipedia entry on History of Hebrew). Now it's the native language of millions in Israel.
I hope all of these real world examples can help you extrapolate for situations in your fantasy and science fictional worlds. Language isn't just a tool for conveying messages, but also for conveying information about culture and identity. It can serve conquerors, or rally the oppressed. It can be a measure of refinement or lack thereof. It can be a symbol of national unity, or a symbol of national diversity, or yet again a symbol of deep national history.
It's something to think about.
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