I don't think a lot of people realize how wonderfully helpful - and powerful - metaphors are. Yes, I'm sure we're all aware that they are artful, but they are more pervasive than we generally imagine, and I find them incredibly useful for two things: conciseness, and worldbuilding.
Conciseness may not be the first thing that leaps to mind when you consider metaphors, but believe me, it works. The example that leaps to mind from my own work comes from "At Cross Purposes." I'd gone to a lot of trouble to design the bridge of my otter-aliens' ship, and I found myself describing the quality of the light, the fact that there was soft music, the room full of fish (snack bar), the pairs of otters moving and jumping, the whirling bits of light, the this, the that... It got longer and longer and I was despairing a little, because the story was already pretty long. Then I walked away from it for a while, and after a few minutes it suddenly hit me that every detail but one fit into a single metaphor:
"It's an otter nightclub!"
Once I put this thought into Lynn's mind, the whole place resolved itself into an image instantaneously. I had to do a lot less describing of pieces, and I could provide just a few details to ground my use of the metaphor, plus add the one detail (the volume of the music) which constituted the exception. I didn't have to use nearly as many words (I think I cut out at least fifty!).
One intriguing side benefit of using a single metaphor, with supporting details, instead of just a lot of piece by piece description, is the way that you can often achieve a huge leap in clarity. The metaphor becomes the unifying element for details that follow, much in the way that a topic sentence provides the thesis for a paragraph (another reason why it's important not just to throw metaphors at a story, but to have the metaphor and its supporting details match one another). With only details you can end up with a sort of intense close-up effect where the reader never gets the sense of seeing the whole object/person/place, but of seeing only the parts and struggling to put them together. In the case of describing characters, this can mean an unfortunate Frankenstinian effect!
The other thing I wanted to mention is the power of metaphors in worldbuilding. I have mentioned this before on the blog, but I was actually able to mention it at WorldCon in a panel about worldbuilding featuring Greg Bear, among others. The panel was discussing how description of the point of view character's sensory perceptions could be an important tool for worldbuilding, and I commented how important I felt judgment was as a worldbuilding tool.
The judgment of a point of view character is actually quite complex. The most basic part of this is his/her sense that something has value or not. But when we judge things, we seldom talk just about whether is something is good or bad. We talk about what it is good for. We compare it to other things in our experience. And we talk about it in terms of familiar imagery.
This is precisely where the worldbuilding comes in. Whenever we talk about what something is good for, we speak of it in terms of the activities it may be useful for - activities which are a part of our daily social lives, and which can differ greatly depending on the society in which they occur. Whenever we compare it to things in our experience, we are also revealing the nature of our past experiences in our physical and social world. And whenever we use familiar imagery, we reveal which images are the most familiar and resonant in our world.
Is my love like a red red rose, as Robert Burns once sang? Well, we can certainly guess that his world had roses in it. Does your character dream of the day when his ship will come in? That'll be a world with oceans and a nautical history. Does he feel that another character will help him land the quarry he's never taken down in a lifetime of hunting alone? Then it's highly likely his species defines itself and its life goals in terms of hunting on land (that was Rulii, so he does).
Notice that in the paragraph above, there are no alien words. Only the word "rose" is specific to a flower species in our own world. Metaphors are an excellent tool for providing worldbuilding that does not depend on the use of alien language - and since alien language is unfamiliar to (and alienates) readers, I tend to rely heavily on this type of metaphor when I'm creating alien worlds that I want readers to feel at home in.
This technique may not be a magic bullet (metaphor!) but it's certainly worth thinking about.
Showing posts with label metaphor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label metaphor. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Creating the *Feel* of a World
Let's say you have a really excellent world, and you've figured out a ton of things about it. The next step in story terms is to translate that world into the story and make it come alive. I've talked before about being careful not to info-dump - about managing and dispensing information in various ways (including Hiding Information in Plain Sight). But a lot of what makes a world come alive is not the information you know about it, but the feel of the place.
What creates the feel of a world?
Well, that information you've created will be useful. It's not going to be enough on its own to create a really intense feel. Here are some things that are useful for creating a world feel:
1. Objects that imply activities
I've mentioned this before, but objects can be extremely useful for creating world feel. What you need to look for is an object that is idiosyncratic. It could be an object designed for an activity unique to your world. It may be an object common to our own lives, but should take a form uniquely suited to the world you're creating. Like this Roman "Swiss Army Knife," for example. These objects will imply the activities and social circumstances they are designed to fit into.
2. Symbols that imply attitudes/judgment
Symbols can be found in lots of places. Real world cultures are full of them. In Japan, the moon is associated with autumn, and therefore can symbolize it. Colors can be symbolic, as when we associate blue with boys and pink with girls (don't get me started on that, but it is a symbolic color system). In your world, any of these things can be symbolic, and if they symbolize unexpected things, the feel of your world will be enhanced. Better still if those symbols can mean one thing to one social group, and another to another. In Varin, the nobility see the manservant's tattoo as a symbol of skill and subservience; other servants see it as a sign of elite education, pride and adulthood; and Lowers see it as a sign of danger (as do nobles who might be in danger of encountering their bodyguard skills!).
3. Metaphors that imply value categories
I can't overestimate the importance of metaphors in creating a feel for your world. We don't think consciously about a lot of the metaphors we use, but using them evokes all kinds of imagery that we associate with what is important and basic in our world. "Life is a journey" evokes all kinds of things, including old fairy tales ("off to seek his fortune"), the voyages of early explorers, the frontier, etc. If "life is a game" then you can go into all kinds of games that life might be like - poker will give you one feel, chess another, power and assassination yet another. In fact, I highly encourage you to create games unique to your world circumstances; they can be enormously important in creating feel!
4. Voices that imply, well, everything
Pay attention to your character voices. Because they are constantly present, they do an enormous amount of work in creating the feel of your world. They can help delineate social groups and world categories all over the map, and by casting judgment (as I've mentioned before in Subjective Point of View: expressing judgment with adverbs and verbs), they create an enormous amount of "world feel" while at the same time working for you in the areas of plot and character.
It's something to think about.
What creates the feel of a world?
Well, that information you've created will be useful. It's not going to be enough on its own to create a really intense feel. Here are some things that are useful for creating a world feel:
1. Objects that imply activities
I've mentioned this before, but objects can be extremely useful for creating world feel. What you need to look for is an object that is idiosyncratic. It could be an object designed for an activity unique to your world. It may be an object common to our own lives, but should take a form uniquely suited to the world you're creating. Like this Roman "Swiss Army Knife," for example. These objects will imply the activities and social circumstances they are designed to fit into.
2. Symbols that imply attitudes/judgment
Symbols can be found in lots of places. Real world cultures are full of them. In Japan, the moon is associated with autumn, and therefore can symbolize it. Colors can be symbolic, as when we associate blue with boys and pink with girls (don't get me started on that, but it is a symbolic color system). In your world, any of these things can be symbolic, and if they symbolize unexpected things, the feel of your world will be enhanced. Better still if those symbols can mean one thing to one social group, and another to another. In Varin, the nobility see the manservant's tattoo as a symbol of skill and subservience; other servants see it as a sign of elite education, pride and adulthood; and Lowers see it as a sign of danger (as do nobles who might be in danger of encountering their bodyguard skills!).
3. Metaphors that imply value categories
I can't overestimate the importance of metaphors in creating a feel for your world. We don't think consciously about a lot of the metaphors we use, but using them evokes all kinds of imagery that we associate with what is important and basic in our world. "Life is a journey" evokes all kinds of things, including old fairy tales ("off to seek his fortune"), the voyages of early explorers, the frontier, etc. If "life is a game" then you can go into all kinds of games that life might be like - poker will give you one feel, chess another, power and assassination yet another. In fact, I highly encourage you to create games unique to your world circumstances; they can be enormously important in creating feel!
4. Voices that imply, well, everything
Pay attention to your character voices. Because they are constantly present, they do an enormous amount of work in creating the feel of your world. They can help delineate social groups and world categories all over the map, and by casting judgment (as I've mentioned before in Subjective Point of View: expressing judgment with adverbs and verbs), they create an enormous amount of "world feel" while at the same time working for you in the areas of plot and character.
It's something to think about.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
"Foot Assignments" - how idioms and metaphors bring your world to life
I've written about idioms before. I've explained them to my kids plenty of times. "That's an expression," I'll say. "It means this..."
English is full of little expressions that aren't literal, and a lot of these make reference to metaphors. I have a list of English examples in the post linked above and I'm not going to do a lot here, but take for example "I'm off to the rat race." That expression is all about metaphor. A person is a rat. Life, or at least work, is a race for rats. The metaphor then comes along with a whole set of implications about how the person feels about heading off to "the rat race," that it's pointless, exhausting, demeaning, etc. Depending on the character of the person who uses them, and how that person feels about work, for example, the implications of the expression may be interpreted somewhat differently.
This is an enormous opportunity for worldbuilders.
Some idioms might be cute, and some might be serious, but any way you approach them, they are incredibly illuminating of a culture and characters who belong to it. I personally feel that idioms are so closely linked to the culture of which they are a part that, if they are used outside their original cultural context, they stick out of a story when I'm reading it. If you're creating a world, you should be giving serious attention to idiomatic expressions.
One type of idiomatic expression is the aphorism - a phrase intended to give people behavioral guidance. "The early bird gets the worm" is used constantly in English, but this set of words, in this order, is so recognizable as belonging to our culture that I would hope I'd never run across it in a story world not directly linked to our own. If there are no birds, or there are no worms, you're in serious trouble. And even if there are, and your people place value on rising early or acting early, don't use it just as is. Change it. What are the primary motivators for your people to be getting up early, or acting fast? Create something that makes reference to that. Off the top of my head I'll give you this: "First arrow names the kill." This would be a society in which people hunt with arrows and whoever has their arrow hit first gets to receive some kind of honor. I'd work out the details with naming as I went. Story cultures can also have their own special values that will be honored with aphorisms. In Varin, the servant caste is guided by the expression, "Imbati, love where you serve." This is a big deal for members of the caste who have to struggle with their own identity and with cruel masters, etc.
Another type of special phrase arises around extremely common activities. In this context I think instantly of the phrases "log on" and "log off"... I mean, seriously. "Log"? I'm thinking this use of "log" goes back to the idea of a captain's log, but what you've got now is something where the expression is used so often that we don't really think about what the individual words mean, only what the phrase as a whole refers to. Because of the underlying connection to idiosyncratic activities of our own world history, this kind of phrase can't always be imported wholesale into a story world (hey, there's another expression!). Whenever you have a really common activity in your world (and it may not be common or have an associated idiom in ours), see if there's a special way people would refer to it, and how that might be connected to cultural details or cultural metaphors. I have used two different phrases involving the word "foot" in this context. In "Cold Words" (Analog Oct 2009) I had Rulii use the phrase "take foot" instead of "arrive." In my Varin world the servants don't "run errands" but "take foot assignments." This kind of tiny alteration can really help your world feel like it doesn't have to owe anything to ours, and can also create a wonderfully unique atmosphere.
I found myself listening in the other day on a forum conversation about a world that was using Chinese culture as its basis, and the writer was very concerned about whether to use Chinese idioms. Here's another very fascinating question. My own bias would be to say this: if your culture isn't actually a version of a culture, don't use actual idioms from that culture. Those idioms are going to broadcast the fact that this culture is at very least a fantasy or science fictional analog of Chinese culture (to use this example). Then if other aspects of the culture are non-Chinese, or if the language they use is not Chinese-derivative, the idioms will stick out by a mile. You can always alter or "translate" idioms. If you want to retain a Chinese flavor, one thing you can always do is have idioms play the same cultural role in your story world as they do in China. This is a link on the meta-level that won't actually require you to link your story world directly to China, but will give it some flavor that people will link with China. After all, one of the parameters of idioms is how often they are used and what they are used for.
I'll let you all think about this while I go off and take some foot assignments.
Note for Wednesday Worldbuilding fans: I have a couple of new entries that have come in, and I am planning to take them on, I hope within the next couple of weeks. Thanks for submitting!
English is full of little expressions that aren't literal, and a lot of these make reference to metaphors. I have a list of English examples in the post linked above and I'm not going to do a lot here, but take for example "I'm off to the rat race." That expression is all about metaphor. A person is a rat. Life, or at least work, is a race for rats. The metaphor then comes along with a whole set of implications about how the person feels about heading off to "the rat race," that it's pointless, exhausting, demeaning, etc. Depending on the character of the person who uses them, and how that person feels about work, for example, the implications of the expression may be interpreted somewhat differently.
This is an enormous opportunity for worldbuilders.
Some idioms might be cute, and some might be serious, but any way you approach them, they are incredibly illuminating of a culture and characters who belong to it. I personally feel that idioms are so closely linked to the culture of which they are a part that, if they are used outside their original cultural context, they stick out of a story when I'm reading it. If you're creating a world, you should be giving serious attention to idiomatic expressions.
One type of idiomatic expression is the aphorism - a phrase intended to give people behavioral guidance. "The early bird gets the worm" is used constantly in English, but this set of words, in this order, is so recognizable as belonging to our culture that I would hope I'd never run across it in a story world not directly linked to our own. If there are no birds, or there are no worms, you're in serious trouble. And even if there are, and your people place value on rising early or acting early, don't use it just as is. Change it. What are the primary motivators for your people to be getting up early, or acting fast? Create something that makes reference to that. Off the top of my head I'll give you this: "First arrow names the kill." This would be a society in which people hunt with arrows and whoever has their arrow hit first gets to receive some kind of honor. I'd work out the details with naming as I went. Story cultures can also have their own special values that will be honored with aphorisms. In Varin, the servant caste is guided by the expression, "Imbati, love where you serve." This is a big deal for members of the caste who have to struggle with their own identity and with cruel masters, etc.
Another type of special phrase arises around extremely common activities. In this context I think instantly of the phrases "log on" and "log off"... I mean, seriously. "Log"? I'm thinking this use of "log" goes back to the idea of a captain's log, but what you've got now is something where the expression is used so often that we don't really think about what the individual words mean, only what the phrase as a whole refers to. Because of the underlying connection to idiosyncratic activities of our own world history, this kind of phrase can't always be imported wholesale into a story world (hey, there's another expression!). Whenever you have a really common activity in your world (and it may not be common or have an associated idiom in ours), see if there's a special way people would refer to it, and how that might be connected to cultural details or cultural metaphors. I have used two different phrases involving the word "foot" in this context. In "Cold Words" (Analog Oct 2009) I had Rulii use the phrase "take foot" instead of "arrive." In my Varin world the servants don't "run errands" but "take foot assignments." This kind of tiny alteration can really help your world feel like it doesn't have to owe anything to ours, and can also create a wonderfully unique atmosphere.
I found myself listening in the other day on a forum conversation about a world that was using Chinese culture as its basis, and the writer was very concerned about whether to use Chinese idioms. Here's another very fascinating question. My own bias would be to say this: if your culture isn't actually a version of a culture, don't use actual idioms from that culture. Those idioms are going to broadcast the fact that this culture is at very least a fantasy or science fictional analog of Chinese culture (to use this example). Then if other aspects of the culture are non-Chinese, or if the language they use is not Chinese-derivative, the idioms will stick out by a mile. You can always alter or "translate" idioms. If you want to retain a Chinese flavor, one thing you can always do is have idioms play the same cultural role in your story world as they do in China. This is a link on the meta-level that won't actually require you to link your story world directly to China, but will give it some flavor that people will link with China. After all, one of the parameters of idioms is how often they are used and what they are used for.
I'll let you all think about this while I go off and take some foot assignments.
Note for Wednesday Worldbuilding fans: I have a couple of new entries that have come in, and I am planning to take them on, I hope within the next couple of weeks. Thanks for submitting!
Friday, February 25, 2011
The life cycle of Twitter (or should I call it Flutter?)
I have a lot of friends who are on Twitter, and also quite a number who are not. When you hear people talk about Twitter, they talk about how amazing it is with its instant connectivity, all of the cool people you meet, etc., etc. What they're really talking about is the mature stage of Twitter. It's not what you see when you first get there, unless you're being invited by a friend who will begin by introducing you to a large number of pre-existing Twitterfolk. So for those who are less familiar with Twitter, I thought I'd describe the stages of its development for me, by comparing them to the life cycle of a butterfly.
1. Egg stage
You have a Twitter account. You don't follow anybody so the Twitterverse looks like an empty room. You try to find things to say and feel like you're talking to yourself, so you hardly say anything. If you try to invite people to see something you've done online, you're met with resounding silence. Maybe a person or two notices you and gives you a follow but there's little interaction.
How to move to the next stage: Ask your friends if they're on Twitter, and follow them. Take Twitter's follow suggestions if necessary. Find the Twitter accounts of groups you may be associated with. Whenever someone follows you, swing over to their profile and see what they're talking about. They might be a spambot (block!) but if they're human and interesting, follow them.
2. Caterpillar stage
You follow enough people that you're getting some interesting tweets coming in. You're also tweeting a bit more yourself, both socially and with content. You know how to use @ signs to contact particular Twitterfolk. The Twitterverse looks bigger and starts to have people in it: you have an incoming stream of information, and maybe you also have a friend or three, or have made acquaintances who care about your tweets. You get really hungry and start following people, and it becomes more and more likely that these are people you discover through tweets that come indirectly to your Twitter stream, via re-tweet. If you announce something to your followers, a few people click through; if one of your tweets hits a really well-connected person, you may see a wave.
How to get to the next stage: Keep doing what you're doing. Keep your eye out at the edges of your leaf. If you see interesting content, engage with it. Especially if you run across a highly-connected person, interact and engage with them. Follow them, because they will be passing on lots of cool information and new people to get to know. Don't underestimate the importance of simple greetings and expressions of solidarity, like sympathizing with people or cheering for them when they need it. You would do it for your friends, and this is important: These are your friends.
3. Butterfly (Flutter) stage
You're really in the wind now. There are no more walls, and butterflies are in flocks all around you. You've figured out the hashtags marked with # (though you may still be learning how some existing ones work). You're still doing social and content tweets, but you can contribute to hashtags. Sometimes your post will reach a few people, and sometimes it will reach waves of people you never imagined. You can also use hashtags as guideposts to help you know where to fly. Everything is connected, and you can see a tiny connection path when it shows itself, follow it and discover an entirely new "region" of interconnected people. You might attend a hashtag chat or follow a hashtag you're interested in to see what you can discover. You start seeing people you know sending messages with @ signs to other people you know. You might rediscover someone you met twenty years ago because they happen to be on Twitter and the wind blows them your way (this happened to me).
How to handle this stage: read what you want to read. Don't be afraid to unfollow if you're feeling overloaded, but don't feel obliged to read everything everyone posts, either - just read the wind when you stop in and see where it takes you. Tweet what you want to tweet, considering that you're speaking into a crowd; don't feel obliged to report every part of your day, because that's not necessary and it may exhaust you. Realize that there's more out there than you could ever process on your own. Explore and have fun.
I'm sure there are meta-levels of Twitter expertise which I haven't touched on. That's just because I haven't been there yet. Maybe when I get there I'll be able to find myself a new metaphor... Until then, I hope you like butterflies.
You can find me on Twitter here: @JulietteWade
1. Egg stage
You have a Twitter account. You don't follow anybody so the Twitterverse looks like an empty room. You try to find things to say and feel like you're talking to yourself, so you hardly say anything. If you try to invite people to see something you've done online, you're met with resounding silence. Maybe a person or two notices you and gives you a follow but there's little interaction.
How to move to the next stage: Ask your friends if they're on Twitter, and follow them. Take Twitter's follow suggestions if necessary. Find the Twitter accounts of groups you may be associated with. Whenever someone follows you, swing over to their profile and see what they're talking about. They might be a spambot (block!) but if they're human and interesting, follow them.
2. Caterpillar stage
You follow enough people that you're getting some interesting tweets coming in. You're also tweeting a bit more yourself, both socially and with content. You know how to use @ signs to contact particular Twitterfolk. The Twitterverse looks bigger and starts to have people in it: you have an incoming stream of information, and maybe you also have a friend or three, or have made acquaintances who care about your tweets. You get really hungry and start following people, and it becomes more and more likely that these are people you discover through tweets that come indirectly to your Twitter stream, via re-tweet. If you announce something to your followers, a few people click through; if one of your tweets hits a really well-connected person, you may see a wave.
How to get to the next stage: Keep doing what you're doing. Keep your eye out at the edges of your leaf. If you see interesting content, engage with it. Especially if you run across a highly-connected person, interact and engage with them. Follow them, because they will be passing on lots of cool information and new people to get to know. Don't underestimate the importance of simple greetings and expressions of solidarity, like sympathizing with people or cheering for them when they need it. You would do it for your friends, and this is important: These are your friends.
3. Butterfly (Flutter) stage
You're really in the wind now. There are no more walls, and butterflies are in flocks all around you. You've figured out the hashtags marked with # (though you may still be learning how some existing ones work). You're still doing social and content tweets, but you can contribute to hashtags. Sometimes your post will reach a few people, and sometimes it will reach waves of people you never imagined. You can also use hashtags as guideposts to help you know where to fly. Everything is connected, and you can see a tiny connection path when it shows itself, follow it and discover an entirely new "region" of interconnected people. You might attend a hashtag chat or follow a hashtag you're interested in to see what you can discover. You start seeing people you know sending messages with @ signs to other people you know. You might rediscover someone you met twenty years ago because they happen to be on Twitter and the wind blows them your way (this happened to me).
How to handle this stage: read what you want to read. Don't be afraid to unfollow if you're feeling overloaded, but don't feel obliged to read everything everyone posts, either - just read the wind when you stop in and see where it takes you. Tweet what you want to tweet, considering that you're speaking into a crowd; don't feel obliged to report every part of your day, because that's not necessary and it may exhaust you. Realize that there's more out there than you could ever process on your own. Explore and have fun.
I'm sure there are meta-levels of Twitter expertise which I haven't touched on. That's just because I haven't been there yet. Maybe when I get there I'll be able to find myself a new metaphor... Until then, I hope you like butterflies.
You can find me on Twitter here: @JulietteWade
Monday, April 5, 2010
Body Models and Metaphors
I was talking recently with a friend about illness - we both have kids, so we do this quite a lot. We were discussing how to "read" a cold, to tell when we should take one of the kids to the doctor rather than just waiting for them to get better. During this discussion I realized that though she and I were trying to do the same thing, we were using different metrics for how to decide when we needed to worry.
My friend's model of assessing whether to go to the doctor was based on the passage of time. A cold that needed attention was one that had been going on for a long time. My model of assessing whether to go to the doctor was based on trends of change. If the cold had been slowly improving and then appeared suddenly to get worse, I figured it was time to get attention.
I think if you were to ask around, you'd discover that almost everyone has a slightly different model of assessment that they're using. In fact, I'd be curious to discover whether medical practitioners are taught to use precisely the same models, and whether that results in them applying the same models and metaphors to what they see, or different ones.
One of my kids' books talks about early health beliefs. These are things like the belief in the existence of miasmas - evil drafts of air that carry disease - or an understanding of the body based on the influence of the liver, or the influence of the spleen, etc. I think we're all familiar with the idea that the heart is the source of love in the body, but I didn't know, for example, that some people believed that function was performed by the liver. Or that the gall bladder was seen by some as the seat of courage. Or that others believed that Saturn rules the right ear and Jupiter rules the feet.
Different levels of technology have some influence on body models, because they give people the ability to observe how the body operates. On the other hand, it's good to remember that people have an enormously strong tendency to create metaphors for the operation of aspects of life and the universe. Rulii in "Cold Words" used his hunt metaphors and had quite accurate knowledge of body parts and their operation (as a result of his hunting experience), but couldn't conceive of the idea that it would be possible to look into blood and see things.
The aliens we create can similarly have different models and metaphors for the body and its operation, and if you use those things to your advantage, they can influence characters' behavior and judgments, and possibly even the plot of a story. If a character were injured for example, why would or wouldn't he/she decide to get treatment? How would that influence the course of the story? Would two people from different countries in a fantasy world have different ideas of how the body worked and what kind of treatment would be good for it? Might one believe that washing with soap was dangerous (as we used to), while the other believed it was necessary for sanitary treatment?
Actually, it occurs to me that a wonderful example of an elaborated health concept is in Janice Hardy's book The Shifter. Given that it centers on a form of magical healing, that shouldn't perhaps come as a surprise - but it makes for a very interesting example. The healers have precise terms for talking about injuries - "breaks," "bleeds," etc. and a very extensive sense of the body and its parts. But when they heal they literally pull the pain out of the person and into themselves, and then have to get rid of it into a type of magical metal that is a finite resource. You can imagine this changes everything about the healing process... and what Janice does with it is create an entire society with a pain economy alongside (and linked to) its monetary economy. She's taking the concept to a fully elaborated extreme that influences everything about her story - worldbuilding, characters, plot, etc. And while I'm not suggesting that every author do the same, I think it's worth taking the time to consider how the people in your story think about health and the body. The example of me and my friend should make it clear that this is true even if you aren't working with fantasy and science fiction.
It's something to think about.
My friend's model of assessing whether to go to the doctor was based on the passage of time. A cold that needed attention was one that had been going on for a long time. My model of assessing whether to go to the doctor was based on trends of change. If the cold had been slowly improving and then appeared suddenly to get worse, I figured it was time to get attention.
I think if you were to ask around, you'd discover that almost everyone has a slightly different model of assessment that they're using. In fact, I'd be curious to discover whether medical practitioners are taught to use precisely the same models, and whether that results in them applying the same models and metaphors to what they see, or different ones.
One of my kids' books talks about early health beliefs. These are things like the belief in the existence of miasmas - evil drafts of air that carry disease - or an understanding of the body based on the influence of the liver, or the influence of the spleen, etc. I think we're all familiar with the idea that the heart is the source of love in the body, but I didn't know, for example, that some people believed that function was performed by the liver. Or that the gall bladder was seen by some as the seat of courage. Or that others believed that Saturn rules the right ear and Jupiter rules the feet.
Different levels of technology have some influence on body models, because they give people the ability to observe how the body operates. On the other hand, it's good to remember that people have an enormously strong tendency to create metaphors for the operation of aspects of life and the universe. Rulii in "Cold Words" used his hunt metaphors and had quite accurate knowledge of body parts and their operation (as a result of his hunting experience), but couldn't conceive of the idea that it would be possible to look into blood and see things.
The aliens we create can similarly have different models and metaphors for the body and its operation, and if you use those things to your advantage, they can influence characters' behavior and judgments, and possibly even the plot of a story. If a character were injured for example, why would or wouldn't he/she decide to get treatment? How would that influence the course of the story? Would two people from different countries in a fantasy world have different ideas of how the body worked and what kind of treatment would be good for it? Might one believe that washing with soap was dangerous (as we used to), while the other believed it was necessary for sanitary treatment?
Actually, it occurs to me that a wonderful example of an elaborated health concept is in Janice Hardy's book The Shifter. Given that it centers on a form of magical healing, that shouldn't perhaps come as a surprise - but it makes for a very interesting example. The healers have precise terms for talking about injuries - "breaks," "bleeds," etc. and a very extensive sense of the body and its parts. But when they heal they literally pull the pain out of the person and into themselves, and then have to get rid of it into a type of magical metal that is a finite resource. You can imagine this changes everything about the healing process... and what Janice does with it is create an entire society with a pain economy alongside (and linked to) its monetary economy. She's taking the concept to a fully elaborated extreme that influences everything about her story - worldbuilding, characters, plot, etc. And while I'm not suggesting that every author do the same, I think it's worth taking the time to consider how the people in your story think about health and the body. The example of me and my friend should make it clear that this is true even if you aren't working with fantasy and science fiction.
It's something to think about.
Friday, February 5, 2010
Folklore, Parable and Metaphor
I'd like to thank Hayley Lavik for suggesting the topic of folklore and its resonance within culture. She said:
I don't have anything too specific in mind, but I really love delving into cultural folklore (such as England's black dog myth, which became incorporated right into the identity of the town of Bungay, Suffolk) and how it resonates, becomes an influence on a culture as a whole (working into customs, rituals, etc), and the like. I'm hoping to work in more informed folklore research on my blog in the coming year, and I would love to hear your take on it from an anthropological standpoint (or heck, if you have any suggestions for good reading).
I've tried a couple of avenues of research, but I think the best approach here is to point you at the resources I considered, since they contain way too much information for me to share in this post. If you're interested in specific folk tales and their significance over time, you should check out the "Folkways" series published in Realms of Fantasy magazine. Each of these articles picks a different classic story and looks at its roots, its international history, its local significance at different points in history, its literary influence, and other such things. A lot of these would be available in back copies of RoF (of which I have a few, but not that many).
I remember going to Chicago a few years ago when there was a exhibition on at the Field museum about Mythical Creatures. This was a great exhibition, because it talked a lot about both localized and internationally known mythical creatures - and when they were internationally known, it spoke about how the stories had traveled. I wrote a post about the exhibition not long after I visited; it's here.
Also, for those of you who may be interested in the history and folklore behind Japanese mythical creatures, I highly recommend the Obakemono Project, a constantly developing website that has illustrations of creatures and citations from stories in which they've appeared, tells you which regions of Japan they're from, etc. As time goes by, people have also been adding to the website illustrations from classic texts of the ghost tales.
Now, a few thoughts, inspired by my own experience and by a discussion I had with a friend recently. This friend of mine is working on a really wonderful academic project, trying to understand how people interpret literature and why, and how it is that this process has become so difficult to teach to those who need to learn it. Her topic turns out to be relevant here in an interesting way.
We were talking about metaphors, and what they do. Generally speaking, a metaphor is a comparison of sorts: it draws two things into a relationship that weren't in that relationship before. I'll include similes here, because I'm not interested in the technical distinction of "this is that" versus "this is like that." A metaphor has two parts. Those parts play different roles. If we say "I could get lost in the midnight of her hair," we're relating hair, and midnight. One of these is concrete, an object in the story we know basic parameters of but are looking to learn the quality of. The other is more abstract - midnight has lots of qualities. But when the two are in relation, we search for ways that they might be the same. For that phrase, I get that her hair is black (no question), but the addition of "lost" particularly brings in some more connotations of midnight - a sense of space that makes me think she has lots of hair, but also hints something to me about the relation between people.
A metaphor makes new meaning. It puts two things in juxtaposition and challenges us to create a meaningful relation between them. It can act like a bridge for us to understand more about something familiar than we did before, or to reach for new meanings that we haven't yet seen.
A parable, then, is a metaphor on a larger scale. It creates relations between people and challenges us to see the relation between it and our own lives. This is where the folklore angle comes in for me, because folklore to me is a fundamental activity of creating meaning.
The activities we engage in when we understand metaphor and parables are very basic to human minds and to how we understand the world. They aren't flowery extras that you learn in English class. They are forces of meaning much greater than that, which have existed throughout human history and even earlier - imagine how flat and dimensionless life would be without them! And imagine also how difficult it would be to reach for significance amidst unfamiliar things and experiences, without the tools of understanding that metaphor and parable provide. Metaphor is one of the driving engines behind proverbs, for example - and proverbs are I think intended to influence behavior. Janice Hardy uses them wonderfully in her book "The Shifter."
Before I go, I need to talk about the role of metaphor and parable in fantasy and science fiction writing. I read an interesting article here about moss trolls - it talks about the problem that arises when you are letting people in a fantasy environment use metaphors willy-nilly and then have to make up all kinds of world details to back it up.
Metaphors are your friends, but not just in the way you think (I'll let this extend to parable, but I don't use parable as much as metaphor). People use metaphors on all kinds of levels, not just to describe objects or places but also to describe life situations and to understand interactions, etc. So by all means, let your characters in your fantasy or science fiction scenario do this as well. Watch out for moss trolls - make sure that the metaphors you use aren't cosmetic, but are really integrated into your world. And that means you can't assume your characters are going to use the same metaphors that you do. They'll use the ones that make sense to them. How do they conceptualize life and struggle? They'll put it into a metaphor that is grounded in their world.
Rulii in my story "Cold Words" understood his whole life and goals in terms of hunting. Where do their stories come from? Nya in The Shifter has a background of proverbs and stories about the Saints that she draws on constantly. I have a character who lives in an underground city and has never gone to the surface of her planet. So when I send her up there for the first time, I have her describe what she sees in terms of what she knows. Human beings on Earth have a tendency to describe mundane things and compare them to objects in nature. She doesn't know nature, so I turn the metaphors backwards. A field of grass billows like bedsheets. A lake gleams like a clean plate. It feels totally different from the metaphors we'd use because it's been turned around.
A great example of folklore/parable being used to this effect comes from Ursula K. LeGuin's classic novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. She interweaves stories of the local people into her main narrative, to marvelous effect. The stories she relates give dimension to these people, helping to establish the subtleties of their morality and the grounding of their behavior in a way that simple description never could - and since this aspect of the people is central to the main conflict, the stories contribute beautifully to her purpose.
Metaphor and parable are integral to all stories, on more than one level - indeed, the stories we write are in one sense parables themselves. It's cool if you can look at your story in that light, and see the kinds of layered meanings you're creating. I hope that in some small way, this post helps you to do that.
Hayley, thanks again for suggesting this topic, and I'm sorry you had to wait so long for me to get to it. Josephine, thank you for all the illuminating discussions of your work.
I don't have anything too specific in mind, but I really love delving into cultural folklore (such as England's black dog myth, which became incorporated right into the identity of the town of Bungay, Suffolk) and how it resonates, becomes an influence on a culture as a whole (working into customs, rituals, etc), and the like. I'm hoping to work in more informed folklore research on my blog in the coming year, and I would love to hear your take on it from an anthropological standpoint (or heck, if you have any suggestions for good reading).
I've tried a couple of avenues of research, but I think the best approach here is to point you at the resources I considered, since they contain way too much information for me to share in this post. If you're interested in specific folk tales and their significance over time, you should check out the "Folkways" series published in Realms of Fantasy magazine. Each of these articles picks a different classic story and looks at its roots, its international history, its local significance at different points in history, its literary influence, and other such things. A lot of these would be available in back copies of RoF (of which I have a few, but not that many).
I remember going to Chicago a few years ago when there was a exhibition on at the Field museum about Mythical Creatures. This was a great exhibition, because it talked a lot about both localized and internationally known mythical creatures - and when they were internationally known, it spoke about how the stories had traveled. I wrote a post about the exhibition not long after I visited; it's here.
Also, for those of you who may be interested in the history and folklore behind Japanese mythical creatures, I highly recommend the Obakemono Project, a constantly developing website that has illustrations of creatures and citations from stories in which they've appeared, tells you which regions of Japan they're from, etc. As time goes by, people have also been adding to the website illustrations from classic texts of the ghost tales.
Now, a few thoughts, inspired by my own experience and by a discussion I had with a friend recently. This friend of mine is working on a really wonderful academic project, trying to understand how people interpret literature and why, and how it is that this process has become so difficult to teach to those who need to learn it. Her topic turns out to be relevant here in an interesting way.
We were talking about metaphors, and what they do. Generally speaking, a metaphor is a comparison of sorts: it draws two things into a relationship that weren't in that relationship before. I'll include similes here, because I'm not interested in the technical distinction of "this is that" versus "this is like that." A metaphor has two parts. Those parts play different roles. If we say "I could get lost in the midnight of her hair," we're relating hair, and midnight. One of these is concrete, an object in the story we know basic parameters of but are looking to learn the quality of. The other is more abstract - midnight has lots of qualities. But when the two are in relation, we search for ways that they might be the same. For that phrase, I get that her hair is black (no question), but the addition of "lost" particularly brings in some more connotations of midnight - a sense of space that makes me think she has lots of hair, but also hints something to me about the relation between people.
A metaphor makes new meaning. It puts two things in juxtaposition and challenges us to create a meaningful relation between them. It can act like a bridge for us to understand more about something familiar than we did before, or to reach for new meanings that we haven't yet seen.
A parable, then, is a metaphor on a larger scale. It creates relations between people and challenges us to see the relation between it and our own lives. This is where the folklore angle comes in for me, because folklore to me is a fundamental activity of creating meaning.
The activities we engage in when we understand metaphor and parables are very basic to human minds and to how we understand the world. They aren't flowery extras that you learn in English class. They are forces of meaning much greater than that, which have existed throughout human history and even earlier - imagine how flat and dimensionless life would be without them! And imagine also how difficult it would be to reach for significance amidst unfamiliar things and experiences, without the tools of understanding that metaphor and parable provide. Metaphor is one of the driving engines behind proverbs, for example - and proverbs are I think intended to influence behavior. Janice Hardy uses them wonderfully in her book "The Shifter."
Before I go, I need to talk about the role of metaphor and parable in fantasy and science fiction writing. I read an interesting article here about moss trolls - it talks about the problem that arises when you are letting people in a fantasy environment use metaphors willy-nilly and then have to make up all kinds of world details to back it up.
Metaphors are your friends, but not just in the way you think (I'll let this extend to parable, but I don't use parable as much as metaphor). People use metaphors on all kinds of levels, not just to describe objects or places but also to describe life situations and to understand interactions, etc. So by all means, let your characters in your fantasy or science fiction scenario do this as well. Watch out for moss trolls - make sure that the metaphors you use aren't cosmetic, but are really integrated into your world. And that means you can't assume your characters are going to use the same metaphors that you do. They'll use the ones that make sense to them. How do they conceptualize life and struggle? They'll put it into a metaphor that is grounded in their world.
Rulii in my story "Cold Words" understood his whole life and goals in terms of hunting. Where do their stories come from? Nya in The Shifter has a background of proverbs and stories about the Saints that she draws on constantly. I have a character who lives in an underground city and has never gone to the surface of her planet. So when I send her up there for the first time, I have her describe what she sees in terms of what she knows. Human beings on Earth have a tendency to describe mundane things and compare them to objects in nature. She doesn't know nature, so I turn the metaphors backwards. A field of grass billows like bedsheets. A lake gleams like a clean plate. It feels totally different from the metaphors we'd use because it's been turned around.
A great example of folklore/parable being used to this effect comes from Ursula K. LeGuin's classic novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. She interweaves stories of the local people into her main narrative, to marvelous effect. The stories she relates give dimension to these people, helping to establish the subtleties of their morality and the grounding of their behavior in a way that simple description never could - and since this aspect of the people is central to the main conflict, the stories contribute beautifully to her purpose.
Metaphor and parable are integral to all stories, on more than one level - indeed, the stories we write are in one sense parables themselves. It's cool if you can look at your story in that light, and see the kinds of layered meanings you're creating. I hope that in some small way, this post helps you to do that.
Hayley, thanks again for suggesting this topic, and I'm sorry you had to wait so long for me to get to it. Josephine, thank you for all the illuminating discussions of your work.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Animal Metaphors
I'm always amazed how important animals are to us. From Aesop's fables, to gods in the form of cats or snakes, to Brer Rabbit tales - the list goes on and on.
One of the first things children learn is how to make the onomatopoetic sounds that animals make. They learn to sing Old MacDonald and list out animals on the farm. They learn about lions and tigers and bears and elephants. Children in Japan do this also, as do children in France - and I'm sure in many other places also.
As an adult when I was learning foreign languages, I often wondered why it was so terribly important to learn the names of animals. After all, when you're an adult, and you're not likely to meet a lion in the street, why do you need to know what it's called or what sound it makes?
But animals are the basis of metaphors in every language I know.
We know not only what a snake is, and the names of different types of snakes, but also what kind of behavior is associated with snakes and their ilk. We toss off comparisons of people to animals - pigs, dogs, birds, etc. - constantly. Animals also are associated with emotional states like fear, or with personality attributes like slyness.
This is a resource that is often underused in science fiction and fantasy worlds. I have a hard time imagining a population that did not take inspiration in its animals, simply because those animals are resources, by virtue of their interconnectedness in the food chain of any land. I can think of two ways to approach this (off the top of my head).
One, create an animal that is specially relevant to your population for some reason, give it a name, and then start exploring how it could be used expressively in the people's language. In my forthcoming story Cold Words (Analog), for example, the protagonist Rulii compares a human's eyes to those of "the cornered gharralli."
Two, take an existing animal that you are using in your fantasy or science fictional setting, and look for a new twist on its significance. In my Varin world, cats are symbols of selfishness, and I've also designed a species of dog called the tunnel-hound, which is associated with dirtiness.
Take an opportunity to look around for places you can make these connections, and it will help your world take on new dimension.
One of the first things children learn is how to make the onomatopoetic sounds that animals make. They learn to sing Old MacDonald and list out animals on the farm. They learn about lions and tigers and bears and elephants. Children in Japan do this also, as do children in France - and I'm sure in many other places also.
As an adult when I was learning foreign languages, I often wondered why it was so terribly important to learn the names of animals. After all, when you're an adult, and you're not likely to meet a lion in the street, why do you need to know what it's called or what sound it makes?
But animals are the basis of metaphors in every language I know.
We know not only what a snake is, and the names of different types of snakes, but also what kind of behavior is associated with snakes and their ilk. We toss off comparisons of people to animals - pigs, dogs, birds, etc. - constantly. Animals also are associated with emotional states like fear, or with personality attributes like slyness.
This is a resource that is often underused in science fiction and fantasy worlds. I have a hard time imagining a population that did not take inspiration in its animals, simply because those animals are resources, by virtue of their interconnectedness in the food chain of any land. I can think of two ways to approach this (off the top of my head).
One, create an animal that is specially relevant to your population for some reason, give it a name, and then start exploring how it could be used expressively in the people's language. In my forthcoming story Cold Words (Analog), for example, the protagonist Rulii compares a human's eyes to those of "the cornered gharralli."
Two, take an existing animal that you are using in your fantasy or science fictional setting, and look for a new twist on its significance. In my Varin world, cats are symbols of selfishness, and I've also designed a species of dog called the tunnel-hound, which is associated with dirtiness.
Take an opportunity to look around for places you can make these connections, and it will help your world take on new dimension.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Politics, Religion, and Pets
My friend Ann Wilkes was telling me recently that she never blogs about three topics if she can help it: politics, religion, and pets. I agreed with her, and then realized when you're doing a blog like this one, the topics are fair game - the only trick is not to localize them. So today for fun I'm going to share a couple of my thoughts on politics, religion, and pets (thanks, Ann!).
Politics:
Why are there so many dictatorships in SF/F? Maybe it has to do with the prevalence of medieval cultural models. I'm certainly not immune - I've come up with some of these types of societies. But the ones I think are more interesting are ones where the authors have really delved into what a monarchy means and how it influences society, or ones where monarchy is only one of the options in the world. I like Jacqueline Carey's fantasy Europe, for example, because she maintains differences in governments that parallel the those of the nations she's fantasizing. And of course I like Ursula LeGuin's approach. The Left Hand of Darkness has two major models, one a monarchy and the other a "commensality" that feels a lot like a communist state. In her Earthsea books she has multiple different types of governments depending on their location in the archipelago. If you're designing a society yourself, I encourage you to ask yourself why the rich are rich, and how they get their money. There are a lot more options out there than one.
Religion:
I usually think of religion in created worlds as a tool. A really, really useful one too. It helps you figure out how people swear (or not). It helps you figure out what kind of activities are taboo. It also helps to link people with their local climate and means of feeding themselves. Even more importantly, I think, it helps you figure out some really basic metaphors that people use to understand their world - because religion is full of symbols. Unity. Duality. Trinity. Multiplicity - it all depends on where you look. You can have a group of gods who bicker like family. Or two groups of warring gods. Or an omnipotent God who is tyrannical, or one who is merciful, and that difference will completely change how his/her/its followers think. Does life end with going to heaven? What do you have to do to get there? Are you looking forward to being sacrificed on the altar? My friend Aliette de Bodard had a great moment in one of her pieces where a person headed off to be sacrificed (rather gruesomely, I might add) was impatient with the protagonists for blocking his way. That is one of the kinds of moments that you always remember. Be it fantasy or science fiction, the more people act in accordance with their localized world view, the more I love it.
Pets:
I actually had a funny moment recently where I had to figure out if members of an alien society I was designing kept pets. The part that made it hard was, these guys are carnivores. I thought at first, why would they keep pets and not eat them? But on the other hand, they're social creatures; they might well keep pets to combat loneliness, for example. People do keep pet rabbits even in places where they are regularly eaten. So the final result was, I decided that some of them might keep pets.
Then there was yesterday, when my kids got their National Geographic Kids magazine and we were reading snippets about amazing cats (part of their Halloween themed issue). My daughter loved it, and so did my son - different cats, for different reasons. Animals are so much a part of our consciousness, even if they're not a part of our daily lives, that the first words we learn in children's books are things like "cow," "horse," "bear," "lion," etc. The list goes on and on, though we may never see these creatures in the wild in our entire lives. What, then, would be the significance of animals to a fantasy or alien group? What kind of behavior would be associated with each? Would fantasy people automatically say that foxes are crafty and snakes loathsome and sneaky, just as we do? I'm not sure.
It's something to think about.
Politics:
Why are there so many dictatorships in SF/F? Maybe it has to do with the prevalence of medieval cultural models. I'm certainly not immune - I've come up with some of these types of societies. But the ones I think are more interesting are ones where the authors have really delved into what a monarchy means and how it influences society, or ones where monarchy is only one of the options in the world. I like Jacqueline Carey's fantasy Europe, for example, because she maintains differences in governments that parallel the those of the nations she's fantasizing. And of course I like Ursula LeGuin's approach. The Left Hand of Darkness has two major models, one a monarchy and the other a "commensality" that feels a lot like a communist state. In her Earthsea books she has multiple different types of governments depending on their location in the archipelago. If you're designing a society yourself, I encourage you to ask yourself why the rich are rich, and how they get their money. There are a lot more options out there than one.
Religion:
I usually think of religion in created worlds as a tool. A really, really useful one too. It helps you figure out how people swear (or not). It helps you figure out what kind of activities are taboo. It also helps to link people with their local climate and means of feeding themselves. Even more importantly, I think, it helps you figure out some really basic metaphors that people use to understand their world - because religion is full of symbols. Unity. Duality. Trinity. Multiplicity - it all depends on where you look. You can have a group of gods who bicker like family. Or two groups of warring gods. Or an omnipotent God who is tyrannical, or one who is merciful, and that difference will completely change how his/her/its followers think. Does life end with going to heaven? What do you have to do to get there? Are you looking forward to being sacrificed on the altar? My friend Aliette de Bodard had a great moment in one of her pieces where a person headed off to be sacrificed (rather gruesomely, I might add) was impatient with the protagonists for blocking his way. That is one of the kinds of moments that you always remember. Be it fantasy or science fiction, the more people act in accordance with their localized world view, the more I love it.
Pets:
I actually had a funny moment recently where I had to figure out if members of an alien society I was designing kept pets. The part that made it hard was, these guys are carnivores. I thought at first, why would they keep pets and not eat them? But on the other hand, they're social creatures; they might well keep pets to combat loneliness, for example. People do keep pet rabbits even in places where they are regularly eaten. So the final result was, I decided that some of them might keep pets.
Then there was yesterday, when my kids got their National Geographic Kids magazine and we were reading snippets about amazing cats (part of their Halloween themed issue). My daughter loved it, and so did my son - different cats, for different reasons. Animals are so much a part of our consciousness, even if they're not a part of our daily lives, that the first words we learn in children's books are things like "cow," "horse," "bear," "lion," etc. The list goes on and on, though we may never see these creatures in the wild in our entire lives. What, then, would be the significance of animals to a fantasy or alien group? What kind of behavior would be associated with each? Would fantasy people automatically say that foxes are crafty and snakes loathsome and sneaky, just as we do? I'm not sure.
It's something to think about.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Worldbuilding is more than just World
Worldbuilding is an enormous topic. As huge as the world, really - and tonight I'm picking a place to start, a little like the way writers pick an entry point into the worlds they create. But since a lot of you out there have done quite a bit of worldbuilding already, and certainly all of you have experienced worlds created by other people, I'll skip the nuts and bolts part and begin with a language-and-culture observation:
People are inextricable from their worlds.
Yes (no big surprise), characters in stories behave as if they are from the places that they're from. And when we hear or read them, we can tell. Automatically, subconsciously, the little hints add up.
So what does this mean?
It means a lot of things. One, which links back to my entry about point of view earlier, is that a writer should be careful to consider the observer's background experience in the world whenever writing descriptions. For me personally, this is the primary reason why I try to avoid third person omniscient point of view; I find it hard to decide whose point of view to use for the narration. Should I hop from head to head, like Frank Herbert did in Dune, or Mary Doria Russell did in The Sparrow? Should I try to imagine an independent storyteller telling the story, like C.S. Lewis did in the Narnia books? Should I stay mostly in one head but bring in regular glimpses of alternate points of view, like J.K. Rowling did in the Harry Potter series? Just thinking about that stuff makes me crazy! So my usual solution is to try to keep the narrative point of view as close to the character's point of view as possible, even when I'm using third person. The last thing I want is for my readers to be able to tell that part of the description was written from my own, the author's, point of view.
For me, close point of view is a fantastic way to keep a really gigantic and detailed world under control, because the limits on one person's perception and experience give you a great way to limit the kinds of information you're trying to dispense to the reader. It cuts down on the infodumping, big time. There are always things that characters don't understand about their own worlds - and that's okay. As long as your character knows what's going on, and lets people know when they're confused, that helps the reader figure things out.
Let me get down to some concrete details. My Varin world consists of eight cities, all of them built underground. They have good quality lighting to distinguish day and night, but it is provided by high-tech lamps all over the ceiling. So they don't talk about dawn, dusk, or twilight. They have dayrise and nightfall, and they have daylights instead of daylight. If somebody brings up a topic unexpectedly, they say that it "came out of the dark" instead of "came out of the blue." So vocabulary surrounding unique aspects of the setting should reflect that setting, as should expressions people use in conversation. So far so good.
The other thing I like to do with Varin is play with the fact that people who grow up in the Eight Cities aren't afraid of or bothered by being underground. It's totally normal to them - so of course when they go up to the surface, that's when things get weird. And by the way, they don't generally say "up to" the surface, but "up the surface" and "out the surface" - a dialect-like alteration to reflect their sense of place. I'm sure none of you are surprised that the idea that Varin citizens would find the lack of a roof scary, or outside daylight very bright. But as I've spent time developing my world and the characters in it, I've tried to push it further than that. When we describe things, we often say what they're like, and we generally compare them to things we know. So I'll have a character compare a waving field of grass to billowing bedsheets, or a rock face gleaming with sunshine to a clean plate. A sort of reversal, where daylight could be "as bright as fire" but not vice-versa.
The huge temptation for me, and I'm sure for many others who really love the worlds they've created, is to try to give too much, or to fall into infodumping. This to me means taking attention away from the story - the central drive of the narrative - and putting it instead into lots of explanatory details that are intended to flesh out how the world works. The single principle I've found most helpful for controlling my tendency to go crazy infodumping is that of relevance to point of view.
People do not talk or think about things that they don't notice, things that aren't important to them, or things that are so normal that they don't stand out.
Take for example an alien. That alien thinks that everything about his world is totally normal, and so he will generally not explain it. He has no reason to! But change the context - put that alien in a conversation with a human being - and suddenly everything changes. The presence of contrast will cause the alien to notice things about his own world, people, language etc. - but still, those things he notices will depend on surrounding circumstances. The alien's state of mind (calm and reflective? anxious and aggressive? in a state of shock?) will affect the kinds of things that he notices.
And don't forget to ask yourself: would this alien really refer to his people as "the Gegogians"? Or would they be "my people"? Under what circumstances?
I'd like to add one final note on using invented words for elements of a world. Invented words are wonderful fun, and they demonstrate the language of a region. Wonderful. They also make for a sense of alienness, of not being in the world we're used to. But to be used most effectively, they need to have a lot of supportive surrounding context. I don't remember who it was that said "if your world has rabbits, then call them rabbits," but they had a really good point. When too many things have foreign names, the reader can be distracted, and start to dissociate from the setting instead of staying absorbed in it. In Varin stories, a sense of familiarity is more important to me than a sense of alienness, so I tend to use names like "kelo mushroom" or "river lettuce," or even just "apples." In my linguistics universe I want to go a bit more alien, so I'll talk about "white-spotted gharralli furs," (who knows how big a gharralli is?) or "grazers" (it might eat like a cow, but I'm betting it doesn't look like one!).
I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of this topic, so I'd really love to have some questions or comments, so I can return to it in the coming days.
A final thanks goes out to my awesome friend Janice Hardy, who put me onto the word "daylights" just a few weeks ago (after I've been working with Varin for more than ten years!). I'll shout out for her a little, too - she's got a great fantasy novel she just sold, called The Pain Merchants, and yes, it is as amazing as it sounds. Watch for it!
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