Why Nouns Matter, part 2: objects and labels

Here I am, back to tackle common nouns. I'm going to take two angles on this (though they are hard to extricate from each other): first, to talk about choosing objects that will appear in a story, and second, to talk about labels for objects.

When people talk about putting "details" in your story, a lot of it has to do with nouns. (Adjectives are also implicated, but we'll hit the nouns first.) What do you put in the room with your protagonists when they are speaking together? Each noun you pick makes a large statement - first, a declaration that the object you've chosen is worth paying attention to (and is therefore important) and then possibly several more statements depending on what you pick. The choice of a high-technology object will imply that other objects of similar technological level are in use in the society you're working with, and that the society has economic mechanisms in place to produce such an item. The choice of a toothbrush or other personal hygiene item can imply things about the society or about the character (perhaps cleanliness and personal hygiene are important to them). The choice of a natural object, such as a tree or an animal, can imply the role of nature to your society and the personality of your point of view character. The choice of an object associated with witchcraft (black cat, for example?) will evoke a very different, specific type of atmosphere. The more time you spend on any given object, the greater its perceived importance, so think through why you have it there and what it's doing for you (see my previous post, Focus your worldbuilding efforts). Also, the more you support any given object with others that evoke the same thing, the stronger will be the power of the impression you make on the reader.

Objects don't exist in our minds in isolation. They are like mental webs of all the contexts and emotional responses in which we've ever seen them. Thus, they can potentially bring any or all of those contexts with them into a reader's mind. As writers, we can choose to include an object as a way of guiding the way our readers think - which brings me to the topic of labeling.

It's not only the objects you include in your story that are important, it's what you choose to call them. Think about the mental web that I mentioned in the last paragraph. What you call an object will allow your reader to enter that mental web at one location or another, to very different effect.

For example, say your character carries with him/her an object that allows him to talk with other characters at a distance. Is it a walkie-talkie? Is it a cell phone? Is it a mobile? Is it a communicator? Is it an ansible? All of these are names for (very) roughly the same kind of object, but each one says extremely different things about the surrounding context of the world, and even the genre of the story (I'll remark in case I have non-sff readers that communicator and ansible are both science fictional terms). Even the two that are most alike, cell phone and mobile, imply that the story takes place in very different areas of the world, or at least in the point of view of a person from these different areas.

Labels are also very important socially. If I chose to discuss labels for people here, I could go on all day (which I'd better not). The example I immediately think of for that is the American high school model where the kids are divided into groups labeled things like "jocks" "geeks" "stoners" or any other selection of labels you recall from your own experience. Objects can also have this kind of diverse personality, because any object can be called totally different things by members of smaller sub-groups of the same society.

I have an example of this from my Varin novel. The servant caste uses a particular type of defensive weapon for bodyguarding purposes - small metal balls that they can throw like (slow) bullets to slow down an attacker, even one who is better armed. Defining these objects and their characteristics wasn't enough, though. They needed to be named. I knew that the Imbati servant caste would have their own name for them, an insider's name, and it would be short and familiar, relying on a lot of insider knowledge. The outsider's name for it would associate it with them, and would possibly be derogatory or slang-like. A scientific name for it would be more descriptive, as would the impression of them of someone who was not familiar with them. Thus I have the Imbati call them "rounder spheres." Other castes typically call them "Imbati shot." But when the noble character sees the servant use them, he doesn't know what they are, so he describes their effect: "Something too small to see hit the shop's front window with a sharp crack."

That's as much as I can do today, but let me just end by saying that if you have an object in your story that will be seen differently by different groups, it's worth putting some time into figuring out what those different groups will call it. That will imply as much about the social groups as it does about the object itself.

It's something to think about.

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.

Creating a "realistic" costume... and implications for the means to create in your world

The other day I checked out a post by my new friend Anders Hudson, here, where he discusses how to make your own realistic Battlestar Galactica flight suit. In fact, it's a fascinating post. I confess I am not ever going to be interested in making my own Battlestar Galactica flight suit, but it certainly got me thinking!

Here was my thought sequence.

• I got to thinking about the resources available for making costumes, and how the people who work for TV shows access them, and afford them...
• Then I considered how TV watchers with enough time and inspiration might accesss them, and afford them (which is somewhat different from the first group).
• I realized Anders' post really shows that you can do something very convincing, with materials that are pretty widely available, even if they aren't all very easy to work with.
• And you can do this on a budget.
• And this is very, very relevant to questions of worldbuilding.
  

People in your world are going to have belongings - clothes, tools, luxuries, necessities. And they will have to acquire them...and that means either they or someone else will have to make them. So it would be good to ask some or all of the following questions:

1. What is the process of creation like in your world?
2. Are there a lot of raw materials like paper, fabric, foam, or metal, etc. easily available?
3. Where would a character find the materials necessary to create something? At a sewing shop? An industrial shop? A general store? A specialty boutique? At the mine/factory?
   
4. How expensive are these materials, and where do people earn the money to buy them?
5. How much time and training does it take to create the objects that a reader would see on the page? Is this time and training a net financial loss for the creator? Or a means to better his/her financial situation? How much respect does the creator gain by being able to complete all this?
   
6. Of all the steps necessary to make a complex and valuable (useful) object, which are easy and which are hard? Which steps would form bottlenecks or create delays in the process?
7. How easy or difficult would it be for people of different financial means and social status to obtain similar objects? Is there more than one way to acquire the same thing? Are there any legal restrictions on materials or on finished products?
   

Thanks to Anders for the inspiration. I hope you find these questions useful in your worldbuilding process.

An artifact example: we're not just making up random stuff!

I had an epiphany yesterday, about a suit. Yes, a suit - one that my protagonist's mother gives him for his birthday. If you think about it, if you use those words alone, it's pretty generic. Could be the real world, or a fantasy world, or a science fiction world. The epiphany came to me because I found myself spending a lot of time describing the details of this suit, and wondering why I was doing so. After all, I'm not writing Regency romance where the fashions are much of the point. I don't want random stuff in my book that isn't relevant in some important way.

Let me tell you, it irks me when someone says, "But you're writing fantasy. You can make up anything you want."

Grrrr.

I'm not going to waste words describing a suit if it's not important. And it is - in much the same way that the sun armor was important in "Let the Word Take Me" (discussed in my post "Focus your Worldbuilding Efforts").

But wait, there's more to it even than worldbuilding. That's why I thought it would be worth breaking it down here. First, an excerpt:

"Inside the box [Tagret] found a cutaway coat of mottled blue and green with touches of white. Parts of it glimmered like spider-silk, while others seemed woven of more common fibers. Underneath were two glowing white silk shirts and a pair of trousers in matte slate-green. [...] The new shirts had long cuffs that buttoned with pearls up to the elbow, clearly intended to match the coat's short, flaring sleeves, and to echo the darker pearl buttons that fronted the trousers. This was a style the Pelismara society had never seen - a choice that said 'Mother' all over..."

Even though it occurs in two locations in the scene, this is a lot of words to spend on the details. I asked myself why all these details were important. There were lots of answers.

Worldbuilding
The idea of a cutaway coat is familiar from our world, and the term is important to suggest the shape of the coat, but other details like spider-silk, the long shirt cuffs and the short coat-sleeves are there to make clear this isn't your typical Earthly fashion. Furthermore, the coat is woven in an ocean pattern (ocean is also evoked by the pearls) - but in this world of underground cities, nobody sees the ocean unless they travel, and travel is very dangerous. Thus my protagonist has to describe the pattern as he understands it, one detail at a time. "A style the Pelismara society has never seen" also implies world, because it shows some of the social significance a fashion like this might have. In fact, the Pelismara society ladies and gentlemen are accustomed to wearing jewel colors or earth/stone colors, and the ocean design causes a minor fashion scandal later in the story!

Character
" - a choice that said 'Mother' all over..."
The presentation of the suit precedes Mother's entrance into the scene, and though she's been seen before in the story, this is the first time we see her through the eyes of someone who knows her well and cares about her (Tagret). Essentially, this is when we first see who she really is: a noblewoman of considerable intelligence, with a penchant for humor and subversion, who is trapped in an extremely restrictive social role. How do I get all that in, when the two of them will be talking mostly about the social issues that my protagonist is currently dealing with? Well, I can't tell readers about her (her son would never think about her that way), so I use the suit to imply it. The suit has been specially commissioned, so she's noblewoman with a great deal of money at her disposal. It's a very unusual fashion, so she doesn't follow trends. It also brings an image of the surface world down into the underground city where such things are never seen, suggesting that she doesn't think like everyone else. The rest of her outfits for herself are also going to use surface motifs, so once I had this piece in place I got inspired to expand its scope.

Theme
One of the major ideas that recurs in this novel is that of being trapped and wanting freedom, but having real freedom and the search for it be full of risks. The underground city/dangerous surface travel situation parallels Tagret's inability to escape from the political situation his father thrusts him into, and also the awful marriage situation that Mother suffers. When Mother brings images of the surface down into the city, in this suit and in her own clothing, it shows her struggling against her situation in the limited way she can - a struggle and a tendency for subversion that she's passing on to her son.

Foreshadowing
"Parts of it glimmered like spider-silk, while others seemed woven of more common fibers."
This was an artistic choice by the artisan who created the suit to try to represent light on the ocean water by mixing spider-silk and other fibers. It's also more than that, linking back to an earlier scene when the protagonist takes his friends (all dressed in silk) to a concert hall attended by members of Lower castes (who dress in matte fibers). Tagret remarks that "Tillik-spider silk might be an unregulated commodity, but evidently it was expensive enough to sift Higher from Lower all on its own." The mixing of the fibers in the coat given to him by his mother thus gains an extra meaning of subversion, and hints at Tagret's future, where he'll see that the separation of the castes is another kind of trap and work to break the barriers down.

That's why I described the suit - but I did it before I realized any of these connections. Sometimes you don't know precisely what you're doing - and you don't have to - but your subconscious says this is how it has to be. The exciting part for me about seeing these larger patterns was knowing that I could extend them further across the book. It gave me insight into Variner fashion, and into Mother's character as well. I didn't have to "make up" the rest of the clothes she wore, because I knew what kind of thought had gone into the design of Tagret's suit, and thus the same kind of thought could be applied to her choices for her own clothing. And I also knew that she'd be brave enough to be the only one wearing clothes like this, strong enough to set off a scandal and eventually a new fashion trend in the claustrophobic, decadent Pelismara society.

Because of a single suit, I know so much more about my novel now.

Yesterday was a good day.

Focus Your Worldbuilding Efforts

You're creating a world. You want to write a story in it, and you want it to feel real. How best do you go about that?

Well, you have to have all the underlying basic principles down. Climate, ecology, economy, etc, etc, etc. It all has to fit together and make sense. But a lot of that stuff isn't precisely relevant to your plot. The temptation might be to explain things - and that leads you into trouble. You want people to believe in you, yes. But don't tell them things and ask them to believe. If you show those things effectively, then they'll believe in spite of themselves.

I'm sure you've all heard this "show don't tell" advice before. I have a whole post on its different meanings, but I'm not trying to access all those meanings today. I just want to say that if you can bring your worldbuilding efforts into sharp focus, you can achieve that "show don't tell" feeling, and a little bit of worldbuilding can go a long way.

A good place to start explaining this is with a short story. Say your story is short, so you don't have room to try to explain the world - and yet, you want to make sure that the world feels large. One really good way of doing this is picking a single object to start with. This object has to be one that has high relevance to the character - but not necessarily to the plot. I recommend everyday objects. Not something like a fork which has become nearly generic, but something that is slightly off what in the real world we would consider normal. Maybe it's a ceremonial object, or an object of significance to the main character. Maybe it's this Roman "Swiss army knife" that Astrid Bear pointed out to me on Facebook this morning (thank you!).

The reason why I enjoyed the Roman knife-tool was that it was so detailed. So much to be learned from its discovery about the habits of the person who carried it. The fork and spoon. The blade. The spike which may have been used to remove the meat from snails. The toothpick; the spatula.

If you can pick one highly relevant, salient object, its nature can imply many things about the world around it. In my story, "Let the Word Take Me," (Analog July/Aug 2008) I gave my alien girl two objects like that - a ceremonial knife, and "sun armor." Here's a quote:

On top [in the artifact case] was a ceremonial knife in a scabbard of intricately worked grazer-leather, with a leaf-shaped blade and a hilt wound with stone beads. Underneath was a mass of white feathers. Lifting the top layer, he found himself unfolding a hooded coat of perforated leather densely clad with yorro plumage. ... David suspected it was an heirloom; the unblemished feathers were layered without gaps, but the leather inside showed that patches had been resewn, and two of the worn tie-thongs had been replaced.

I spent this many words describing the two objects because of what they said about the technology level and culture of the people who had made them. Find the right object, and its significance will radiate outward, accomplishing far more than general descriptions on a larger scale.

The fact of the matter is, while this technique is very convenient in short stories where you have fewer words to work with, it is equally effective for longer works. The objects don't have to be ceremonial or have special importance. They can be small things that the characters consider quite mundane. A lot of large-scale principles become evident in the tiny details of the everyday. Focus your worldbuilding efforts and you can get a lot of power out of a very few words.

It's something to think about.

Defining a Scale of Details

One of the things that my worldbuilding workshop has got me thinking about is defining objects. I think objects generally fall into a sort of scale that ranges from the ultra-specific to the generic. A specific object is something where the mention of its name brings to mind only one thing. "Mr. Spock's ears," for example. A generic object is one that comes in so many different types that simple mention of its name brings up only a prototype image. "House," "wall," "window," and "dog" are examples of this category. In between is a large range of different kinds of objects. The word "pulley" is pretty specific; if we want additional information it will probably be what the pulley is being used for, or what it's made of. The word "fan" is in the middle - heavily informed by context, but depending on whether it's included in a description of a Japanese woman, or of kids in a house without air conditioning in modern-day California, it need not necessarily be explained.

When I talk about explaining a word, that doesn't mean explaining it in depth. It only means making sure its meaning is specific rather than general. A "brick wall" is very different from a "steel wall," which is very different from a "stone wall" (and fortunately all of these are very different from "a wall"). If you want to get more specific, you can say "a crumbling brick wall" or "a used-brick wall." If you want a Japanese wall with a foundation of granite blocks the size of cars and an upper storey of white plaster topped with gray tiles, you have to go so far as to say that, because you can't rely on all your readers to pull that image up from context.

Explanations like these can help to adjust the knowledge sets you establish in your world. A reader entering an unknown world for the first time is going to be looking for cues to the world, and hoping for enough specificity to establish a unique world sense. When I introduce my Varin world, I like to specify that this is a world where wood is scarce, so I'll often describe a room and specify that the bed frame is made of brass, or that though there's a heavy mirror framed in wrought silver, the most expensive-looking object in the room (from the character's point of view, of course) is a wooden cabinet in the corner.

Gradually, as you enter your world further and further with the reader, the details you provide will build up into an overall impression of this world in all its uniqueness. And if you've done your job well, you may discover that by the time you're halfway through, you've actually redefined common words like "table" or "wall," so that the objects that your reader imagines are generated world-appropriately. You will have trained your reader to know that tables aren't made of wood, or to know that they must expect walls to be made of light, or to know that it means something special when this character uses the word "friend," because it wasn't a natural concept within his world.

In effect, world details aren't just details. They're not just stuff sitting in the room because otherwise the room would be empty. They are tools by which you draw your reader so far into your world that they judge the objects they read about as though they lived there.

As a reader, that's what I always loved - feeling like I was part of that world on paper. And as a writer, I can hardly imagine anything more exciting than being able to bring others into my world with me.

It's something to think about.

More about Technology

After my post yesterday about technology, fotsgreg and Bill Moonroe made some very interesting comments. Fotsgreg talked about how computers might develop in the future - and how their development might interact with human cultural development. Bill Moonroe mentioned how Hawaiians had developed quite deadly weapons made of wood and shark teeth when they had no metal of their own. These comments put me onto some other technology-related thoughts: specifically, the question of mature versus developing technologies, and the question of how cultures make use of existing technology and materials.

fotsgreg brought up the example of a plow to talk about mature technologies, the kind that have been developed to such an extent that their function can't be further enhanced. I agree with the plow example, inasmuch as the plowshare itself hasn't changed (though the vehicle propulsion connected to it has gone from horse to motor). The other example that leaps to my mind is eating utensils: knives and forks and spoons. We have shellfish forks and salad forks and dinner forks; forks made of wood, metal and plastic, but the basic shape of the fork hasn't changed in a long while. Similarly with knives and spoons - and with chopsticks. Again, lots of styles and materials, but the objects and their function are very mature.

That is a huge contrast with things like computers, for which the function keeps developing along with the form. Computers are a lot more complex than forks, of course. I'd say that makes complex things more likely to continue developing, because more different elements of them can be changed and improved. But with most technologies, there will come a point of slowdown in development - and probably, this point of slowdown will have a lot to do with people's perception of the role of that object in their lives. As fotsgreg mentioned, there's a point in the development of computers where it gets Frankensteinian, the interface of the computer with the organism/brain. Is this where the development stops? Maybe - but it depends on the resilience of the technology and its potential benefits, and how people perceive those in contrast to its ethical disadvantages.

In terms of worldbuilding, I think technology is a lot freer than people think. Take Bill Moonroe's example of the shark-tooth weapon, or the weapons of the Aztecs that my friend T.L. Morganfield uses in her work - wooden swords with cutting blades made of obsidian. Of course, if you are starting with technology as it exists today and extrapolating into the future, that does place some constraints on what you can do. On the other hand, even the technology that we use today is not fixed in its significance or its utility.

When I first visited Japan, I had the naive idea that Japanese technology involved lots of cool black boxes for audio and video - natural, I guess, since I'd seen a lot of such things that were made in Japan. But when I got there, it took me more than four months before I met anyone who had a sophisticated audio system. Technology in Japan has different areas of slow and fast advance because of the nature of the environment. Here are some examples.

1. Ovens

Very few people have ovens in Japan, because the cuisine there doesn't call for them. Only someone interested in making Western-style food would own an oven. My first host family didn't have one at all; my second family had one, but never used it. Ovens are also prohibitively big for most Japanese homes. When I lived in my own apartment I had an oven, but it was the smallest oven I had ever seen - you could just fit a whole chicken in it. A countertop toaster oven would be far more practical for most people.

2. Dishwashers

The lovely couple who lived upstairs from our apartment in Tokyo had a dishwasher. It sat on their countertop, and looked almost like a toaster oven, but larger - literally, the thing was just large enough in height and depth to hold a single large dinner plate. Theoretically, it could contain eight or twelve dinner plates in a row. You would of course have to run it for those and then for the glasses separately. And then the pots and anything else particularly large would be cleaned the normal way, in the sink.

3. Audio equipment

As I mentioned above, not everyone in Japan has audio equipment. The fact that I was surprised by this is probably a testament to my naivete more than anything else, because of course not everyone can afford an expensive sound system. On the other hand, Japan has a culture of frugality that might make people less likely to spend precious money (and space!!) in this area. I'd be interested to hear about sales of iPod-like technology there.

4. Mobile/Cell phones

When I was living in Japan in 2000-2001, already everyone had cell phones. They were unbelievably tiny, and you could type into them in Japanese characters by using combinations of keystrokes. (They called texters the "oyayubizoku" or "thumb tribe.") And you could use cell phones to go on the internet, at a cost of 3 yen per click. Super-advanced! Here in the US we're only seeing quite recently what I was seeing in Japan back then - because cell phones are extremely well-suited to the Japanese environment. High density living, no space for a large computer (home desktop computers are much less common there), and to top it all off, no street names! All of these factors combine to make internet-ready cell phones an ideal technology. Before we left, it was possible to take a cell phone, go onto the internet, and ask it to tell you the location of the nearest 7-11 convenience store, with directions on how to get there.

So, what about if you're worldbuilding? I guess my first thought would be as follows: when you pick technologies, make them fit together in an ecologically and culturally natural set - but don't get bogged down in the assumptions that are natural to our own ecology and culture. Considerations like space and money can make big changes in the use of an existing technology set, and some environments will encourage the fast development of specialized technologies, like the cell phone in Tokyo. Free your mind a little bit, just for fun, and play around with the basic parameters of the environment, asking yourself exactly how such considerations might influence the use of technology. Then you'll be in for a lot of fun.