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.
Showing posts with label symbolism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label symbolism. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Friday, July 8, 2011
Creating unexpected social interaction/Japanese empathy and business cards
Because I write stories with aliens, language and culture, I'm always looking for ways to give the same kinds of situations different value across cultures. This is something that has a rich history in science fiction! I remember the little sequence in Star Trek TNG where Counselor Troi was coaching Captain Picard about how to pronounce a greeting sequence - because if he got it wrong, it would have been a major diplomatic incident, not just an embarrassing moment.
Exaggeration, you say? Well, maybe, and maybe not.
The fact is that when you look at world cultures, there are all sorts of things that have one value here and one value there. In my left side bar I have a series called "A Different Value" which explores exactly this sort of thing - places where a particular object, idea or activity has dramatically different value across contexts.
Just a few weeks ago I was reminded how valuable this type of thinking is: we had Japanese guests staying with us for a couple of weeks, and there was a little activity my daughter was doing for her kindergarten homework that turned into a "major diplomatic incident." Well, in fact, no one got really upset, but it left both me and my husband shaking our heads and talking it over later in the day.
My daughter was asked to cut out five photos of animals from magazines, glue them on a page, and bring them into school. This turned into a major cultural lesson about teaching empathy and object-person symbolism in Japan.
She sat down at the table and we picked out the photos. When she started to cut them out, both of our Japanese guests were suddenly right on top of her (one from each side), verbally coaching in an extremely active way. If my daughter was cutting just the right shape the coaching was "good, good, okay" (sometimes in English, but mostly in Japanese as neither one of them spoke much). If she appeared to be turning her scissors in such a way that the borders of the animal in question would be cut, the comment was NOT "hey, turn your scissors" or "you're not doing this right" but this:
"Ow, ow, oh, ow!"
This did not happen one time, but over and over throughout the activity, with such intensity that my husband and I watched in amazement. Our two guests were both preschool/kindergarten teachers (the system is organized a bit differently there) so it wasn't as if we could write it off as the naiveté of our guests with children! We decided that several things were being deliberately taught.
1. How to cut out a photo correctly
2. How to imagine the feelings of others (empathy)
3. How objects are direct symbols of living entities
This fits in with our experience with Japanese business cards. A business card in Japan must be treated with respect, taken with two hands, placed in the shirt pocket and never the back pocket. It must not be left on a table in a spot where it might accidentally be wet by condensation from a nearby glass of water. My husband saw an instance when this happened and the entire roomful of Japanese businessmen went frantic.
Very often we hear people talk about how in Japan, people are sensitive to the feelings of others. We also hear that you have to be careful with business cards - but we rarely see the two in action together. The thing that makes this stand out to me is that this - and the photo-cutting activity - all grew naturally out of the same mindset in which objects can directly stand for people and animals and also be imbued with the emotional reactions of those people and animals.
When you're writing a world that's unfamiliar and new, think about the way your people think. In particular, if you're looking to have some kind of very important cultural trait play directly into your plot, spend some time thinking about how far that cultural trait extends across the behaviors of the people involved, and how it might be taught to the young. I've gotten multiple comments about the moment in "Let the Word Take Me" when I put in a child alien and showed his mother instructing him (here). It was the tiniest moment (in a short story, so it had to be), but it really resonated with some people. That kind of moment can really suggest the larger historical continuity of your society and give it a lot of depth. If you can place something like that picture-cutting activity incidentally early in your story (this will be easier with novels since you have room), then you can use it to set up a more plot-critical cultural surprise later in the story. The interaction will stand out in your story as feeling "real" and giving real insight, and the plot-relevant incident won't have to stand alone, so it will have less a feeling of being a cultural "twist" or sleight-of-hand and more a demonstration of the integrated qualities of the aliens or the fantasy race you've created.
It's something to think about.
Exaggeration, you say? Well, maybe, and maybe not.
The fact is that when you look at world cultures, there are all sorts of things that have one value here and one value there. In my left side bar I have a series called "A Different Value" which explores exactly this sort of thing - places where a particular object, idea or activity has dramatically different value across contexts.
Just a few weeks ago I was reminded how valuable this type of thinking is: we had Japanese guests staying with us for a couple of weeks, and there was a little activity my daughter was doing for her kindergarten homework that turned into a "major diplomatic incident." Well, in fact, no one got really upset, but it left both me and my husband shaking our heads and talking it over later in the day.
My daughter was asked to cut out five photos of animals from magazines, glue them on a page, and bring them into school. This turned into a major cultural lesson about teaching empathy and object-person symbolism in Japan.
She sat down at the table and we picked out the photos. When she started to cut them out, both of our Japanese guests were suddenly right on top of her (one from each side), verbally coaching in an extremely active way. If my daughter was cutting just the right shape the coaching was "good, good, okay" (sometimes in English, but mostly in Japanese as neither one of them spoke much). If she appeared to be turning her scissors in such a way that the borders of the animal in question would be cut, the comment was NOT "hey, turn your scissors" or "you're not doing this right" but this:
"Ow, ow, oh, ow!"
This did not happen one time, but over and over throughout the activity, with such intensity that my husband and I watched in amazement. Our two guests were both preschool/kindergarten teachers (the system is organized a bit differently there) so it wasn't as if we could write it off as the naiveté of our guests with children! We decided that several things were being deliberately taught.
1. How to cut out a photo correctly
2. How to imagine the feelings of others (empathy)
3. How objects are direct symbols of living entities
This fits in with our experience with Japanese business cards. A business card in Japan must be treated with respect, taken with two hands, placed in the shirt pocket and never the back pocket. It must not be left on a table in a spot where it might accidentally be wet by condensation from a nearby glass of water. My husband saw an instance when this happened and the entire roomful of Japanese businessmen went frantic.
Very often we hear people talk about how in Japan, people are sensitive to the feelings of others. We also hear that you have to be careful with business cards - but we rarely see the two in action together. The thing that makes this stand out to me is that this - and the photo-cutting activity - all grew naturally out of the same mindset in which objects can directly stand for people and animals and also be imbued with the emotional reactions of those people and animals.
When you're writing a world that's unfamiliar and new, think about the way your people think. In particular, if you're looking to have some kind of very important cultural trait play directly into your plot, spend some time thinking about how far that cultural trait extends across the behaviors of the people involved, and how it might be taught to the young. I've gotten multiple comments about the moment in "Let the Word Take Me" when I put in a child alien and showed his mother instructing him (here). It was the tiniest moment (in a short story, so it had to be), but it really resonated with some people. That kind of moment can really suggest the larger historical continuity of your society and give it a lot of depth. If you can place something like that picture-cutting activity incidentally early in your story (this will be easier with novels since you have room), then you can use it to set up a more plot-critical cultural surprise later in the story. The interaction will stand out in your story as feeling "real" and giving real insight, and the plot-relevant incident won't have to stand alone, so it will have less a feeling of being a cultural "twist" or sleight-of-hand and more a demonstration of the integrated qualities of the aliens or the fantasy race you've created.
It's something to think about.
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.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Weddings, speech acts and symbolism
My kids participated in a wedding over last weekend. It was great fun, we got dressed up, and they got the honor of walking down the aisle. They took it so seriously, and they did a lovely job.
Weddings are fascinating from an anthropological and linguistic point of view, too. They represent a complete change of state, but not one that can be physically measured. The change is entirely intangible, but changes everything about the way society treats the married couple. The way they are referred to by others, the way they speak to one another, the kinds of expectations that are held for them by family and friends, the kinds of rights granted to them by law, etc.
At the center of the ceremony is a sequence of speech acts. I may write more about them in another post, but for now if you're curious, you can go look them up, along with John Searle, a pragmaticist who worked with them quite a bit. Effectively, speech acts (also called illocutionary acts) are actions that are done by being said: requests, invitations, refusals. By saying it, you've done it. The speech acts of marrying include the vows: "I do," "I, XXX, take you, YYY...etc." and the pronouncement of the marriage by the celebrant. "I now pronounce you husband and wife."
The entire change of state, and all of the changes of behavior that follow, hinge upon this sequence of acts. As a result of this, there have been a good many story plots that depend for their suspense upon this sequence of speech acts, particularly upon the arrival of the good guy to save the girl before the critical sequence of speech acts is finished. A speech act of great import, like marrying, must also be associated with certain conditions of time, place, and person. The person making the pronouncement of marriage must be ordained with this power by the church and/or the state, or the whole act falls through (insert more story plots here). The bride and groom must meet certain requirements, such as not being currently married to anyone else, or not having anyone in the congregation object at the point in the ceremony where that is possible, or, depending on where you're getting married, being one male and one female (insert many more story plots here).
Of course, if you're working with a setting in the sf/f genre, then elements of this can be changed. If there is a wedding, ask who's involved and how they're qualified to be involved. What the requirements are for participation by a bride and groom, and by a celebrant. What kinds of speech acts might be involved, and whether they would be the same or different - and whether there would be more of them, or fewer. You can also reconsider the details of this change of state in terms of how society recognizes it, and what its impact is on the people involved. Is it a love marriage? Is it most important to the couple or to their families? Or to the society as a whole? What is considered natural and wholesome about it? Is there anything that might be considered unnatural or unwholesome yet not destroy the validity of the marriage speech acts themselves?
Weddings are also full of symbolism of all kinds. The order in which things are done suggests value placed on each participant. A little girl, if she becomes junior bridesmaid, would be first of the bridesmaids to come to the front of the church; but if she becomes the flower girl, she's the last of them, because her job is to strew the path of the bride with flower petals. The flower petals suggest freshness and beauty, and springtime, which is a time of fertility. There's color symbolism in the white dress of the bride. There are the rings, which have no beginning and no end and symbolize the connection between the two people being married.
In the wedding we attended, there were elements added from Filipino culture. The couple had "sponsors," or people they knew who were there to support the marriage. At a certain point in the ceremony, both bride and groom were covered with a veil, then encircled with a white cord symbolizing their connection, and once those had been removed, the celebrant poured a handful of coins into the groom's hands, and he poured them into the bride's (she thereafter handed them to one of the bridesmaids). The coins were to symbolize their good fortune in the future.
In our wedding, there was an Australian element - not in the ceremony, but at the reception where we had one fruitcake and one American style wedding cake. I've seen photos of Indian weddings, and the clothing and other parts of the ceremony are entirely different. Japanese weddings have lots of different parts, and each part has a particular appropriate costume. The Shinto tradition has the bride wearing a beautiful white kimono with a hood that goes over her immaculately styled hair. Japanese brides will often wear an American style wedding dress at a different point in the day as well.
There are the speeches, too. But the best man's humorous speech at the wedding reception in America or Australia isn't at all like the long series of formal speeches in a Japanese wedding, all of which are executed in front of a gold folding screen.
I'm not saying everyone should go out and write wedding stories. But memories of weddings can be relevant in some stories, and wedding symbolism can percolate outward through different cultural practices, and of course as I said above, the way married people are treated differs vastly from the way unmarried people are treated. I hope this post can give you some ideas not only for weddings themselves but for ways to diversify the symbolism in your stories.
I'll end this post by extending my heartiest congratulations to our lovely Sheryl and her new husband Robert. Many thanks for including us in your special day.
Weddings are fascinating from an anthropological and linguistic point of view, too. They represent a complete change of state, but not one that can be physically measured. The change is entirely intangible, but changes everything about the way society treats the married couple. The way they are referred to by others, the way they speak to one another, the kinds of expectations that are held for them by family and friends, the kinds of rights granted to them by law, etc.
At the center of the ceremony is a sequence of speech acts. I may write more about them in another post, but for now if you're curious, you can go look them up, along with John Searle, a pragmaticist who worked with them quite a bit. Effectively, speech acts (also called illocutionary acts) are actions that are done by being said: requests, invitations, refusals. By saying it, you've done it. The speech acts of marrying include the vows: "I do," "I, XXX, take you, YYY...etc." and the pronouncement of the marriage by the celebrant. "I now pronounce you husband and wife."
The entire change of state, and all of the changes of behavior that follow, hinge upon this sequence of acts. As a result of this, there have been a good many story plots that depend for their suspense upon this sequence of speech acts, particularly upon the arrival of the good guy to save the girl before the critical sequence of speech acts is finished. A speech act of great import, like marrying, must also be associated with certain conditions of time, place, and person. The person making the pronouncement of marriage must be ordained with this power by the church and/or the state, or the whole act falls through (insert more story plots here). The bride and groom must meet certain requirements, such as not being currently married to anyone else, or not having anyone in the congregation object at the point in the ceremony where that is possible, or, depending on where you're getting married, being one male and one female (insert many more story plots here).
Of course, if you're working with a setting in the sf/f genre, then elements of this can be changed. If there is a wedding, ask who's involved and how they're qualified to be involved. What the requirements are for participation by a bride and groom, and by a celebrant. What kinds of speech acts might be involved, and whether they would be the same or different - and whether there would be more of them, or fewer. You can also reconsider the details of this change of state in terms of how society recognizes it, and what its impact is on the people involved. Is it a love marriage? Is it most important to the couple or to their families? Or to the society as a whole? What is considered natural and wholesome about it? Is there anything that might be considered unnatural or unwholesome yet not destroy the validity of the marriage speech acts themselves?
Weddings are also full of symbolism of all kinds. The order in which things are done suggests value placed on each participant. A little girl, if she becomes junior bridesmaid, would be first of the bridesmaids to come to the front of the church; but if she becomes the flower girl, she's the last of them, because her job is to strew the path of the bride with flower petals. The flower petals suggest freshness and beauty, and springtime, which is a time of fertility. There's color symbolism in the white dress of the bride. There are the rings, which have no beginning and no end and symbolize the connection between the two people being married.
In the wedding we attended, there were elements added from Filipino culture. The couple had "sponsors," or people they knew who were there to support the marriage. At a certain point in the ceremony, both bride and groom were covered with a veil, then encircled with a white cord symbolizing their connection, and once those had been removed, the celebrant poured a handful of coins into the groom's hands, and he poured them into the bride's (she thereafter handed them to one of the bridesmaids). The coins were to symbolize their good fortune in the future.
In our wedding, there was an Australian element - not in the ceremony, but at the reception where we had one fruitcake and one American style wedding cake. I've seen photos of Indian weddings, and the clothing and other parts of the ceremony are entirely different. Japanese weddings have lots of different parts, and each part has a particular appropriate costume. The Shinto tradition has the bride wearing a beautiful white kimono with a hood that goes over her immaculately styled hair. Japanese brides will often wear an American style wedding dress at a different point in the day as well.
There are the speeches, too. But the best man's humorous speech at the wedding reception in America or Australia isn't at all like the long series of formal speeches in a Japanese wedding, all of which are executed in front of a gold folding screen.
I'm not saying everyone should go out and write wedding stories. But memories of weddings can be relevant in some stories, and wedding symbolism can percolate outward through different cultural practices, and of course as I said above, the way married people are treated differs vastly from the way unmarried people are treated. I hope this post can give you some ideas not only for weddings themselves but for ways to diversify the symbolism in your stories.
I'll end this post by extending my heartiest congratulations to our lovely Sheryl and her new husband Robert. Many thanks for including us in your special day.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)