"Show, Don't Tell" - Exposed!

I've been warning you this was coming... The whole idea of "show, don't tell" was something that had been bothering me for a while, as many of you probably saw on the forums. Well, after asking the question and hearing all kinds of interesting answers, I thought I'd just put this all into one super-mega-post. You all contributed. Take your time - I think it should be worth it.

Show Don't Tell, Exposed

"Show, Don't Tell" is clearly a phrase that a lot of people have heard, and I'd guess most of those have done some work on trying to apply it usefully to their own writing. This is not always easy, however, and (like me) not everybody considers the phrase helpful, because it takes a lot of complex, rend-my-paragraphs information and extrapolates it into a beautifully phrased general principle.

This may be harder to apply to one's writing.

Greg Ellis of the Analog forum wrote,
I can hear Yoda in the back of my mind right now.
Try? Try? Do, or do not.
There is no try.

And then there was Josh, from Backspace:
It's like telling someone how to ride a bike: a person needs to try to do it if they want to learn.

So it's a beautiful principle that I need to figure out by doing it rather than hearing about it?
How do I know if I'm doing this right? Okay, let's try the ultimate source of knowledge and wisdom...

WIKIPEDIA
(excerpted)

"Show, don't tell" is an admonition to fiction writers to write in a manner that allows the reader to experience the story through a character's action, words, thoughts, senses, and feelings rather than through the narrator's exposition, summarization, and description.
...
Janet Evanovich: ". . . instead of stating a situation flat out, you want to let the reader discover what you're trying to say by watching a character in action and by listening to his dialogue. Showing brings your characters to life." [1]
...
Orson Scott Card: ...objective is to get the right balance of telling versus showing, action versus summarization. Either could be right; either could be wrong. Factors like rhythm, pace, and tone come into play. [4]

Showing can be done by:

* writing scenes
* describing the actions of the characters
* revealing character through dialogue
* using the five senses when possible

James Scott Bell: "Showing is essentially about making scenes vivid. If you try to do it constantly, the parts that are supposed to stand out won't, and your readers will get exhausted."[7].

The experts have spoken, and they've said first, that telling is basically giving narrative summary, and second, that showing is dramatizing a scene with action, dialog, and sensory information. They have also said that you can't show all the time, that you have to know when to do it and when not to do it.

Clearly, "Show, Don't Tell" is to be taken with several grains of salt, and applied when it's needed, and not when it's not. Here's what I heard about it on the forums:

RALovett of Analog Forum wrote:
I just read a mainstream novel in which the author rigorously showed everything, and the result was a whole book in which precious little of import actually happened.

damiengwalter of Asimov's forum wrote:
I've noticed a lot of writers, particularly those who write novels over short stories, refer to 'show don't tell' as using scene and dialogue instead of narrative voice. IMHO that advice is not very helpful. Narrative voice is pretty essential in a good story, and trying to stick to this idea of 'show don't tell' is a mistake.

Okay, now I have a problem. Because obviously I have to "show, don't tell," but at the same time I have to know when to show, and when to tell, and I bet you any money that readers will be able to tell if I haven't figured it out naturally! Before my head explodes, I think I'll take a step back.

One thing to do is to go and read a pile of books, to look at how others have done it. But as you may already have guessed, I've done that two or three or ten times... The good news is, I think at this point I've figured out "show, don't tell" - but what I haven't figured out is why it stays alive, and is used so often - and more importantly, how to give helpful critique about these issues without using a phrase that so often seems meaningless.

So this whole forum exploration was intended to take all the advice I've heard in a different direction. I asked in four different online forums frequented by writers: Analog Forum, Asimov's Forum, Backspace Writers' Forum, and SFF Chronicles forum (links provided at the end!), to see what people had to say about what "show, don't tell" meant to them. [Note: two Backspace writers asked me to take down their quoted comments. Sorry for the error.]

I came up with four (four!) different meanings.
1. Showing is dramatization, and telling is descriptive summary
2. Showing is story action, and telling is backstory or worldbuilding infodump
3. Showing is using a limited or internal point of view, and telling is using an omniscient or
external point of view
4. Showing is making the reader think, and telling is not making the reader think

Now, let's break 'em down, one at a time.


1. SHOWING = DRAMATIZATION vs. TELLING = DESCRIPTIVE SUMMARY

This is the primary opinion of Wikipedia, and a lot of people at the forums agreed.

Sam Wilson of Asimov's forum wrote:
I think showing happens in realtime and telling is a sort of narrative summary. Both are effective in their place. I got some good advice from a pro once: ration author commentary.

Marian of Analog forum wrote:
In my critique group, I usually say that this paragraph could be a scene (or should be a scene) instead of a description.

Okay, so it seems to me that advice is pretty clear. Instead of saying "John got even with Mary," send him into a scene that shows him achieving this comeuppance. Of course, there are potential hazards involved in showing of this nature, because dramatizing a scene requires the author to pin down a lot of factual and setting details about what happens in it.

As Marian of Asimov's forum wrote,
...that's why novices tell instead of showing. If they just say "One night Harry sneaked into George's house and murdered him" they don't run the risk of getting dinged on errors. Of course they do risk getting dinged on being very boring.

Mike Flynn of Analog forum gave an interesting example:
"Father and brother had a terrible row, and many terrible things were said that could not be unsaid, and in the end brother stormed out and I have not seen him since." This is probably more effective than if the author had tried to show the argument in process. What terrible things could he show being said? No matter what, it runs the risk of not being terrible enough to support the consequences.

I guess what that means is that you can go both ways on this piece of advice. Sometimes taking the reader into a scene is going to make for a better experience, but sometimes it isn't. I guess I have to come back later (below!) to figure out when one might be better than the other. For now, let's look at the second meaning for "show don't tell."


2. SHOWING = STORY ACTION vs. TELLING = BACKSTORY/WORLDBUILDING INFODUMPS

Any of us who have been exploring the world of science fiction and fantasy writing are familiar with the concept of the infodump. The author has some really vital information they have to get across about how the world works, or about a principle of physics which will be vital to a final understanding of the story, or about the main character's childhood which establishes the motivation that will carry him or her through the story, etc., etc. So they put it in. Maybe they write a paragraph about it, or worse, an entire page or more, losing track of the main storyline in the process.

Bill Gleason of the Analog forum described it beautifully:
I think with regard to SF, there's a particular kind of "stuff getting conflated" in the show-don't-tell advice, because in SF there is often the need to convey highly technical information. As has been noted elsewhere, this is why so much SF involves scientists as characters, since it is far more plausible when they drift into discussions of esoteric science than when, say, a couple of professional athletes do it. ... So there does seem to be an inherent challenge that is perhaps unique to SF writers in terms of fiction.

Yes, I can easily see how this one has gotten incorporated into "show don't tell." Here's what some other people were saying on the forums:

Zubi-Ondo of SFF Chronicles wrote:
I personally find myself falling into the "tell" mode when I'm still fleshing out some part of the story or action.

Well, all right. But is it really so bad to write down the things that people really need to know about a world? Here's why Tom Ligon of Analog forum says it's all right:

Telling is fine in a first draft. Go ahead and get the ideas down.

I've seen this a lot in my critiquing experience. The writer starts writing down tons and tons of stuff that's really really important to understanding the story - if you're the writer. Sure. Of course the writer has to understand this! But the reader doesn't necessarily need it. So get it down, learn what you need to, and then write the story as it needs to be written, which is a separate job. About "telling" in that context, Tom Ligon says,

"Telling" can be done well. ... The trouble is, it can be awfully dry and uninteresting if you're just laying out facts or some history. If people are involved, why not incorporate the facts into a personal experience?

Maybe in some sense this is a subset of number one, where we talked about dramatizing instead of summarizing. But dramatizing information isn't the best road, and it often turns into a situation where two people are talking and one is "telling" the other what he needs to know.

Greg Ellis of Analog forum wrote:
Conveying information in science fiction is sometimes, I think, critical to science fiction and sometimes there's just no other way to convey it other than in a "telling" manner (in my case it was a very descriptive scene between 2 scientists looking at the pathways involved - one a specialist in photosynthesis and plant biology, the other an experienced biologist in another field, several years away from his photosynthesis classes).

Zubi-Ondo of SFF Chronicles wrote:
One way to get away with "telling" is to have one of the characters explain something in dialogue. Again, if you do too much of that it will become transparent to the reader, and they will catch on.

And here was RALovett of the Analog forum:
There's also a huge amount of borderline in this whole show/tell arena, that most folks dismiss by stating an overly simple rule. Dialog, for example, is often cited as the epitome of "showing." But the words of the dialog themselves can also be the character "telling" something.

Infodumping is definitely something to watch out for, and I've talked about it in other places on the blog, so I'm not going to be offering lengthy suggestions here. I'm sure it will come up again.

On to the next meaning of "show don't tell":


3. SHOWING = USING A LIMITED OR INTERNAL NARRATOR vs. TELLING = USING AN OMNISCIENT OR EXTERNAL NARRATOR

This one really took me by surprise, I'm not sure why. Maybe I should have realized that "show don't tell" would be linked to the literal idea of "telling" a story. Here's how Mike Flynn of Analog forum put it:

When you can get away with telling[:] I think when the narrator is first person you can get away with this more than when the POV is third person. It may be that omniscient can get away with it, too, because the telling is part of the ambiance of the omniscient voice.
Okay, this is intriguing. When the narrator is first person, it's possible that this person can be cast as a person telling a story about past experiences, in which case that person is literally "telling" the story. In third person omniscient, it's similar - you've got a narrator "telling" a story, even though that story is about other people and not him/herself.

Tom Ligon of Analog forum takes the idea further:
American Indian legends are frequently "told". Just reading them can sometimes be a bit dry. But many of you will remember the opening to a SF TV series years ago which uses a tribal storyteller, and I have a print of a painting called "Buffalo Tales" hanging beside my writing desk that illustrates a storyteller and seven kids around a campfire. ... he is no doubt "telling" with great flare and expression, and the kids are digging it (each affected in a unique way). If you must "tell", try to tell it with a bit of flare.

Bill Moonroe of Asimov's forum added,
I suppose that sort of leaves each storyteller to make their mark via delivery; it's the difference between a gifted preacher telling the Christmas story, and, well, my Shakespearean teacher giving the sermon; one would bring tears to a moai's eyes while the other could put a tiger to sleep. But the use of show vs tell can be the difference between a new look, a new use of the power of myth in a new way and an academic's faithful yet lifeless transcription of ethnic folktales.

Surely, though, there's more to this than just oral delivery of the story in question. Storyteller narrators can be effective or ineffective. Why should that be? This question brings me to the last meaning I found for "show don't tell":


4. SHOWING = MAKING THE READER THINK vs. TELLING = NOT MAKING THE READER THINK

Vague from the Analog forum summed up this definition most succinctly, as follows:
If you 'tell' the reader too much you risk setting them at a distance; because you're interpreting things for them they don't need to think about what they're reading, coasting along, attention drifting.

RALovett from the Analog forum took it further, though, with a terrific example from "A River Runs Through It" by Norman Maclean:

The first few pages of that, available by google on the publisher's website are a classic example of how you can indeed get away with "telling" a story. The first paragraph:

"In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman."

Now, I would bet dollars to donuts (not as strong odds today as when I was a kid, admittedly) that a lot of writing groups would flag that as "telling," and advise the writer to show his father talking about the disciples. And I would also be quick to add that this is a book that you either love or can't get into at all. That's because what it's truly about is voice: Maclean's crotchety old-man voice looking back on his Montana childhood. So ultimately, it is showing, not telling, but it's showing the narrator, via the way he tells about Montana, and fishing, and etc.

Really what we're looking at here is a case of "telling" a story - but this kind of "telling" is actually "showing" something else at the same time. So while the reader is engaged in hearing about the narrator's father and his love of fly fishing, he's also learning about who the narrator is and how he thinks - critical information, as I noted above in the section about backstory and infodumping. So in a sense, here's one great way to incorporate backstory - telling a small piece of the backstory that is highly relevant to our understanding of the narratory himself.

Zubi-Ondo of SFF Chronicles wrote:
I consider the rule of show don't tell as part of a bigger rule which is "keep the reader engaged".

And here's one way of doing it: offer the reader more than just the "flat" story being told. Offer the reader a chance to engage in the narrative by constructing information about the narrator while listening to his story.

All of this reminds me of a class I took in college. It was a class about doing qualitative research, and in particular, about the principles behind anthropological field notes. I've heard people who are familiar with large-scale statistical studies say unkind things about anthropologists who go into situations and study them from the inside, but in fact, I found the entire process fascinating - and empirically solid.

The idea behind writing field notes is this. Don't say "there's tension in the room." If you do that, you'll be drawing conclusions from what you see, and writing them down, and people who read your notes will have to choose whether to believe you or not. On the other hand, if you write down what you see, the evidence for the sense of tension in the room (people pacing, wringing hands, sitting awkwardly etc.), then when a reader looks at your notes, that reader will be able to see what you saw and draw conclusions along with you.

I think that is in fact a lot of what's going on in "showing."

Okay, so we've got four different meanings. What can we get out of the whole process, to take forward into our writing in meaningful ways? After all, the rule of "show don't tell" still stands, but it still stands as something we should do sometimes, but not others, or we should do in one way, but not another.

Are we back where we started? No, I don't really think so.

RALovett of the Analog forum wrote:
... the core word to what I'm talking about is "priorities." Otherwise, you'll never get your character out the door.

Forgive me for being a linguistics geek (but it's what I am!) - all this sends me back to H.P. Grice's Cooperative principle, which I discussed in an earlier post. Today I'm going to take it and turn it into:

THE COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE OF STORYTELLING
"Make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged."

This is actually a direct quote from Grice 1975, via Wikipedia. If it seems obvious, then let me explain.

What we've been seeing up here is a situation where "telling" (of types 1 and 2 at least) is summary material that does not engage the reader's attention and effort as much as "showing." Excellent. But if as readers we're constantly required to engage at the same level of effort, then we'll become exhausted (and with some authors, we do!). So in a sense, dramatizing and "showing" is a way of indicating that a particular part of the story is important.

The more words you put on something, the more attention it requires from the reader. So the question then becomes, "is this where I want the reader to be placing their effort?"

If all the people in a room are wearing hoods to show their social status, for example - here I've got two pieces of information. I could "show" one person, then another, wearing hoods or doing things with them, so that the reader can conclude that everyone is wearing them. But why should I do that, when the fact of the hoods is less important to the story than what the hoods mean? This is a place where I would simply tell a reader about the hoods, and spend more time exploring their social status and what it means to them using various types of information including the hoods.

My friend Janice Hardy would probably say, "focus on the story." Identifying exactly what the story is can be tricky - it's that elusive thing that hooks us and draws us through, following characters through settings and situations of all sizes and shapes, because we CARE about them. So in the end the process of writing isn't much easier, because we still have to figure out which parts of what we write are vital to the story, so we know where we want to have people engaging, expending effort and attention.

But I hope this discussion has shed light on the topic of "show don't tell," and given you some useful approaches to the question in your own work, or the books you're reading.


Links:
Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Readers Forum: http://www.analogsf.com/aspnet_forum/
Asimov's Science Fiction, Readers Forum: http://www.asimovs.com/aspnet_forum/
SFF Chronicles forum: http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/
Backspace, the Writers Place (paid registration): http://www.bksp.org/

Bow-wow, boom, smash: onomatopoeia

Today's entry will be a quick one, because I'm planning my entry for tomorrow on "show not tell" (also called "show don't tell"), and it's a complex one because I'm basing it on several forum discussions I've been having over the last few days. Hearing about others' experiences has shown me there are a lot more dimensions to the topic than I imagined.

Today I'm talking about sounds, written down.

Every so often there comes a time in a story when something happens - like a glass breaking on the floor, or a door slamming, or something like that, where it's so instantaneous the best way I can think to put it in is in a single line of onomatopoeia:

crashhhh

(often I'll alter the spelling for a more sound-effect-like feel)
Maybe you could call it the manga effect - I've always loved how comics write out their sound effects. Any of you who read manga might already realize that Japanese sound words aren't the same as ours. Each language has its own way of interpreting and transcribing natural sounds.

Take dog and cat sounds, for example:

English = woof
French = ouah
Japanese = wan-wan

English = meow
French = miaou
Japanese = nyaa-nyaa

Japanese actually has tons and tons of sounds that are onomatopoetic, and they aren't always used for the obvious animal sounds, crash and smash sounds, etc. Some are used for "a slippery feeling" or even for silence (which I always found amusing. How can silence "say" anything?).

Even English has more onomatopoeia than you might think. If you look at words that have the "a" sound of hat, then you see they have a feeling in common. Splat, crash, bash, smack, crack... Some of them are sounds, but others are halfway between sound and word.

Looking across languages, you can actually see common trends in onomatopoeia. Some vowels, like "a" and "ee" are associated with some types of action, while others like "o" and "oo" are connected with others. Voiced sounds, like "b" "d" "g" etc. tend to occur in actions or sounds with greater intensity or lower pitch, while their unvoiced equivalents "p" "t" "k" tend to occur in actions with lesser intensity. Japanese illustrates this really well:

hyoro-hyoro = dripping tears
poro-poro = dripping of light rain
boro-boro = dripping of heavier rain

So just in case any of you are thinking of creating local-language onomatopoeia, you might want to think about the human associations of sound with intensity, brightness, etc. while you do it!

"In-group" does not equal "in-crowd"

This post is mostly about Japan and Japanese, but I hope it will be useful to people looking for ways to expand their ideas on social organization - maybe it can open up some new possibilities for the concepts of self and other in someone's alien group or fantasy society.

The social concept of the "in-group" is quintessentially Japanese, and built into the language in many ways. All their forms of "this" and "that" are based on it. So are their verbs for giving. For example, consider the two non-honorific verbs of giving (used quite commonly to talk about doing favors as well as giving things):

kureru = give to someone in the in-group
ageru = give to anyone not in the in-group

By the way, "kureru" still means "give," because there's an entirely different word for "receive" (morau).

In-group is a concept that has been translated into English quite a bit, so people I talk to have sometimes heard of it, but often they take it to mean the same thing as "in crowd," i.e. a group of socially accepted people. The tough part is, people in an "in crowd" can be part of an "in-group" - but they aren't always.

In-group basically means the people who are members of a social group. Any social group, regardless of its popularity or size. The important part is, the in-group is whatever group the speaker feels associated with at the time that they are speaking. It can change depending on context.

If Mr. Tanaka from Kobe is talking to a non-Japanese person, then he may refer to all Japanese people as the in-group.

If he's in a work-related conversation with someone outside his home company, then all members of his home company become the in-group.

If he's in a work-related conversation inside his home company, but with someone outside his department, then the members of his department become the in-group.

If he's in a conversation at work that concerns his family, then his family is the in-group.

If he's in a conversation within his family, then he himself, alone, is the in-group.

As you may imagine, this can give Japanese language students nightmares. On the other hand, it's a very robust concept in Japan, and on one level, it makes a lot of sense. The in-group is essentially the humbled group in situations where status language is used.

Whenever it's socially appropriate to humble yourself, it's also appropriate to humble all the people that co-occupy your group with you: to humble members of your own company relative to a client company, or to humble members of your department relative to another, or to humble your own family relative to people who don't belong to it.

It's like concentric circles, ripples that can move out from or in toward the individual dropped in the middle.

I hope this can send a few ripples through your ideas of social organization. :-)

Worldbuilding: foreground or background?

Say you've got this gorgeous world - you've slaved over it, crafted its tiniest details with care, placed characters in it, and now you're ready to tell a story about it. How do you get the world to appear in the background without overwhelming the story?

Let's start with geography.

Some authors can get away with having a page or more of scenery or setting description, while for others it can seem like needless information. Well, if your characters should happen to be on a quest (for example!), traveling through this scenery, then that gives you some opportunities to describe it, but those descriptions can stick out, or be set into the foreground, as digressions.

On the other hand, if the scenery is active in the plot and the inner lives of the characters, it will suddenly be extremely relevant. This can be done with plot events, like in Tolkien's The Hobbit when a thunderstorm leads the characters to take cover in a cave, and they end up getting kidnapped by goblins.

Or when a character-internal deeper point of view is involved, that person's observations of a scene can be colored by, and demonstrate, the emotional state that is about to drive him or her onto the next section of the plot. I'm reminded of agent Donald Maass at the Surrey International Writers' Conference, talking about a lengthy scene description from Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson. It was a description of a boat dock after a severe storm, and it was long. Some of the details were even wrong - but it was riveting, in part for its acute observation of detail, but also because it said so much about the character who was walking through it.

In a sense, maybe "background" is the wrong word, because it implies that something should fade or disappear. In a case like this, the scenery is highly obvious, but it has a purpose other than being scenery. It is serving the larger purposes of the story.

When a piece of world information is at its most relevant, that's when you want it to appear. Maybe you've designed this great alphabet for your language - but since you're writing in English, you don't get to use it to write the story! My instincts would tell me that such information shouldn't be explained, as such, but subordinated to other things. When might people have an opportunity to look at text? And when would its form be important to the story?

In The Lord of the Rings, when Frodo sees letters on the ring, he says "It's some form of Elvish - I can't read it" and Gandalf replies, "The language is that of Mordor, which I shall not utter here." Even if we couldn't see the writing itself, we would still know not only that it's in a foreign language, but that the language is related to Elvish! Sure, Tolkien's having Gandalf explain to Frodo instead of explaining to us, but he's also managed to sneak in the fact that he's designed his world with language families. And that Mordor is bad, and that it will loom large in Frodo's future.

Last - but not least, for me anyway - is social status. The downtrodden are popular subjects for stories, in science fiction as well as fantasy. Support the underdog, because revolutions are fun!
The difficulty is expressing people's low status without having an oppressed character step forth and announce, "The Madugans are an oppressed minority and everybody mistreats them."

That's not how people talk about their own status, because it's too distant and external. Where would a member of this oppressed minority learn the words "oppressed minority"? Maybe from a social worker, if this world has them - but even then, he or she would probably say "We Madugans are an oppressed minority and everybody mistreats us." And who would this person be saying it to? Not to anybody in the oppressed group, because their status is such a normal part of their existence that the statement would be ludicrous in its obviousness.

So switch the announcement into plot form for a minute. To demonstrate that the Madugans are oppressed, take one of them and put them in a social situation where someone trips or hits them, and then insults them. It's better - but not necessarily optimal. The question is, is this a normal experience for a Madugan? And how does the character react?

If the experience is not usual or normal, then think about adding the extra dimension of avoidance. Have the Madugan see the incident coming (they would recognize the signs) and try to get out of it. Then have them try to suppress their own indignation in order to keep out of worse trouble.

If the experience is normal, the Madugan may still see the incident coming - may even expend effort trying to avoid it - but will probably not go into a full-blown rage. Full-blown rage, or even suppressed anger, is stressful and indicative of something that becomes too much, but can have dire consequences.

So what's the result? If you want to portray an oppressed person in a way that suggests they are mistreated constantly, don't actually have them get mad. Have them brush it off compared to what happened last week, or what happened to their friend, or just go "There goes Baron Rompert doing his thing again. Oh, well, better get to work." It will have a very different effect on the reader.

Upcoming posts at TTYU: metaphor, "Show not tell" exposed

Diseases, and the lack thereof

People don't tend to get colds a lot in SF/F. Unless you count that story of the man waking up in a future that has eliminated all disease, only to be euthanized when he says he has a cold. (It's been so long since I read it that I can't remember the author. Help me out, anyone?)

Probably colds seldom appear because the turning point of a plot doesn't tend to rest on whether Captain Whoever has the sniffles at the time. Most often in my reading I see plagues - serious ones - like the one in Anne McCaffrey's Moreta where the entire Pernese population comes under threat. Now that's a disease worthy of attention in a story!

This is not a bad thing. I've only read one series where people got colds, and were hurt every time they were hit by a rock or had a bad fall, a serious battle, etc. By the time I was 100 pages in it was so appalling that I was ready to laugh (or put the book down).

On the other hand, I do get concerned when I see people portrayed in abject poverty, having no visible means of health care or benefits of plumbing in their lives of squalor, yet who seem to have no illnesses. Parasites, anyone? Fevers, or malnutrition? And if not, why not?

I've actually spent a good deal of time agonizing over whether the poor in my Varin world should have good teeth. Cosmetic dentistry? Absolutely not. Orthodontia? Another no. But what about cavities and decay? Varin isn't a possible future earth, so tooth decay isn't exactly required. On the other hand, I don't think of Varin as a fantasy world, where it would be somewhat easier to imagine that mouth bacteria don't exist. And if it's science fiction, well... The jury's still out, but my current thought is that their technological level is high enough - the repressive government has probably fluoridated the water. Plausible, yet unobtrusive. With a high enough level of general societal technology, it's not too far out to imagine their medical profession is up to the task of getting that done.

As far as medical technology goes, there is a lot of room for flexibility. For low technology, you can look at the history of medicine in our world and vary it according to your needs. For high technology, you can extrapolate, which is always fun. Personalized medicine based on DNA is something people are already aiming at now, so I like to think it would be possible in the future.

Then there's medical culture. Who is the doctor? Is his or her role spiritual, scientific, both, neither? What of bedside manners? Is the doctor or the patient considered to know more about the nature of the complaint?

The last thing I want to mention is something I've been working with in a recent novel revision: How do you portray a population with weak immune systems, high incidence of mental illness, and high rate of infant mortality if none of your protagonists are currently sick? Yes, of course you can always say, "this population is inbred and has weak immune systems etc., etc." ...

How to describe the feeling I get from an explanation like that? Clunky, I could say. Or I could brandish my "show not tell" sword. But I think the best word for me is "external," or perhaps "distant." The explanation is something the author knows, but people living inside such a society would probably not be inclined to step back and talk about themselves that way (unless they were doctors making reports to the government, or something).

So instead I try to create a culture of health in the group I'm working with. I have them place labels on the sufferers - people "closeted" with deformities or chronic illness, or spoken of in whispers as "weak in the head." I make an increase in birth rate and infant health the stuff of public propaganda announcements. And I lace every slightest sign of ill health with a sense of fear in those who witness it. I have people make defensive statements about illness, always knowing internally that the diseases that cause minor affliction in others would likely kill them.

This actually forms a nice lead into my next topic, "worldbuilding in foreground vs. background." It's essentially "show not tell" - but I'm hoping to make it somewhat easier to think through, and to implement...

Upcoming posts at TTYU: worldbuilding in foreground vs. background; metaphor

Nicknames (shortening names)

Did you ever hear of a character named Ikiolaraldian Var Orkesh mis Anok'rand?

Of course not, because I made him up - but there are plenty of books out there where the character names are so complex I have difficulty pronouncing them, remembering them, etc. One of my friends typically takes any name over a certain length and remembers it by shortening it to the first syllable, just to simplify things.

My friend T.L. Morganfield works with the Aztec world, so she has to name her characters the way the Aztecs used to do it, leading to names like Acatl-tzin, etc. This is a challenge, and I've seen her take two primary approaches to it: using the names as written, when they're shorter, or translating them into their meanings, when they're so long that they become hard to parse.

Some names are not directly translatable. In English this is typically the case with first names. We've got a number of strategies for nicknaming people.

1. adding an "ee" sound to make a diminutive, which actually can make the name longer, like James (1 syllable) to Jamie (2 syllables).

2. shortening a name, like taking down Robert to Rob, or Elizabeth to Liz, Beth, Betty (two strategies there), etc.

Australia has some interesting nicknaming strategies. My favorite is the Barry->Bazza, Harry/Harold->Hazza, Larry -> Lazza pattern, which I'm less sure how to analyze, but I'm thinking it's a type of diminutive or at least an indicator of solidarity with the person in question.

Japanese also has a name-shortening strategy, which takes a name and reduces it to the first two syllables (or single long syllable), then adds a diminutive suffix. So for Mariko it would be Mari-chan, and for Michiko it's Mi'-chan (double consonant to start the chan). For males you could have Haruki becoming Haru-kun, etc.

If you're dealing with naming in a fantasy or science fiction world, you might want to ask yourself whether your population has a tendency to nickname. Depending on how your names are designed, this could be done in different ways - based on the English, Australian, Japanese
or other Earth-language pattern, or based on a pattern that fits the culture in question.

The example I'm thinking of comes from Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness. The Karhidish character who befriends Genly Ai has rather a long name: Therem Harth rem ir Estraven. Fortunately, and fascinatingly, the pieces of the name have meaning, and this influences who calls him what. Therem Harth most closely matches our first and last name pattern, while rem ir Estraven is an indicator of his geographical affiliation , the land from which he comes. At first, when their relationship is entirely diplomatic, Genly Ai calls him Estraven, but after they become close, he invites Genly to call him Harth, i.e. by his last name. Difficulty arises when they attempt to communicate telepathically and discover that Genly can only refer to him as Therem in this form of communication - in part because using the first name indicates intimacy.

What is so awesome about LeGuin's approach is how each name choice means something different, and culturally specific, because of the way she's put the names together in the first place. I should also note that the names of people from Orgoreyn don't work this way, because the language and culture are different.

Naming and nicknaming don't have to be just for fun and convenience. They can also reveal a lot about the world your characters live in.

Upcoming posts at TTYU: health, worldbuilding in foreground vs. background

Education...

Today will be my son's first day of Kindergarten. All around me are moms with five-year olds preparing their kids to go, many having attended preschool, many without. Some have tears gathering in their hearts at losing their little babies, others (like me) are grinning and excited about the new world that's about to open up.

Education is central to our society. It provides us with meaningful transition events of all kinds. Going to kindergarten for the first time, or graduating from high school, or going off to college and adult independence, and everything in between.

It also informs the way in which we expect to communicate. We get trained in this society to sit in groups and listen to another (usually single) person talk. This is not new; this is OLD. I'm imagining Plato sitting down with his pupils in the agora. And before him was Socrates, and before him...?

The content of what we learn has changed a lot. Or maybe not so much in its fundamentals - still trying to prepare young people to enter society in a meaningful way. Just that the society itself is not the same everywhere, all the time. US education values (or tries to value) critical thinking, exploration and innovation. Japanese education does an amazing job of providing literacy (in a very tough literacy system!), and high levels of performance on many tasks. Do they innovate? Sure - they've been growing and changing for thousands of years, even when they had no contact with the outside world. But the model of educational communication is slightly different.

American teachers value creativity, but they do have to value actually grasping the fundamentals of the topic, also. Too much free thinking and you can start dropping basic parameters of physics or mathematics. I'm only kind of kidding.

Japanese teachers come from a slightly different model, in which the expert (say, an artist or musician) didn't have to take students at all, but those who wanted to learn from him (her?) would have to sneak around, pick up what they could from listening or watching around corners until they could prove their dedication, whereupon they might be taken on as students. It's called "stealing the art." Thereafter the ideal is to duplicate exactly, with all skill and artistry, what the teacher does - and then to innovate. The innovation is still there, but subject to a few more stringent prerequisites.

The master/apprentice model is very common in fantasy and science fiction (and Star Wars, whichever side that falls on!). There are also schools of magic (Hogwarts being quite a standout!). It's important to consider how your characters come about the things they know, and if you think about how they consider their knowledge philosophically, that can really deepen your characters. Someone with super-ninja skills isn't going to get them by falling off a log. And I always wondered how the heck Jason Bourne learned all the stuff he knew before he turned into a doddering old man - but maybe it was the, um, intensity of the education he received!

I'll write more about this later, but for now it's time to go and get my kids started on a very big day.

I'm smiling.