Edible Babies?

This post is NOT about Jonathan Swift's classic satire, "A Modest Proposal," though if you have never read it I highly recommend you do.

I'm thinking about how we use nicknames related to food.

This is most common with babies, and in particular with girl babies. There are a few words, like "honey" and "sugar" and "sweetie pie" (focus on the "pie") that can apply to both boys and girls. However, nicknames like "cupcake" and "peach" do not apply to boys at all, and it's nearly impossible to find food nicknames that are used exclusively for boys. The older the boys get, the less likely it is that they'll be cast in this food-related light. "Beefcake" after all is an unnatural word, invented as a response to the use of "cheesecake" for females.

What does it mean? Well, I'm not about to claim that food nicknames have any literal cannibalistic meaning. However, as a mom who very often threatens playfully to eat her children up, I have some thoughts. This metaphorical "eating" usually has to do with kissing, and I think there is a parallel between the use of eating nicknames and the appropriateness of affectionate kissing with children (usually within the family, but not always). Boys learn to disapprove of it much earlier, and to expect a kind of physical autonomy that makes rough play okay, but snuggly intimacy not okay (I personally think this is a shame). There's also an element of permission involved in being the one "eaten" that can be interpreted as submissiveness - more grist for the feminist mill, and I'm sure that could potentially generate some story ideas.

I think it would be useful to consider what form this sort of intimacy might take in a fantasy or alien society. One could explore an alternate avenue for the nicknaming - different foods might be an obvious direction to go. Another alternative might be to consider physical expressions of intimacy that don't involve the mouth (for cultural or physiological reasons), and see what directions your nicknames might take as a result.

It's something to think about.

When the set piece has to be UNBELIEVABLY AWESOME...

A couple of days ago, I got to a point in the scene of my latest story, and had to stop. Why? Because I knew I was on the verge of writing the climactic set piece of the story, and whatever I wrote had to be unbelievably awesome.

Living up to my own expectations can be enough to shut me down for days (I suppose it's a variety of writer's block).

Just in case this has ever happened to you, I thought I'd share a few of the things I do when I get blocked by my own expectations.

1. Review your plans.
I look back at what I've sketched out. Usually I have a basic sense of the events required by the plot. "She kills him," for example. Of course, it's important to keep in mind that events alone are not enough. Even the most exciting-sounding events can fall flat if done badly.

2. Back up and look for clues to how you should approach the next piece.
If you work with themes or consistent imagery, see if there's a way to incorporate the theme or the ongoing imagery into the piece that's coming up. In my case, I realized I should try to work typhoons into the scene as it progressed. Even if you don't typically work with themes, you may be able to find little hints that your subconscious has seeded throughout the early sections of your story - places where an image or a connection can be repeated or enhanced.

3. Try getting as close to the ground as possible.
Immerse yourself in your events, your characters, your text. Get as deep into the point of view as you can so that you can be inside your main character's impressions and reactions, and forget everything else. After all, what's looming ahead (the set piece) is primarily looming for you, the author/drafter/editor. For the characters, it typically won't loom as much. Your character may be aware that they have to kill the bad guy - but even if they are, they may not realize it's about to happen now. If you do happen to be in a Percy Jackson situation where you know your time is short, you know the big bad guy's coming right now, etc., then see if you can rely on the supporting characters.

4. Forget about the magnitude of the task, and about trying to make it awesome.
The strength of set pieces comes from two different sources. You might expect that the words you use in a set piece are key to its success. This is true - but those words by themselves aren't what's going to lift this piece into the realm of true awesomeness. If you work too hard to make the words of your set piece awesome, they won't be awesome - they'll be strenuous. The other place you'll be able to build strength for your set pieces is in the material that leads up to them. For example, if the action of the set piece is going to have a huge impact on your point of view character, set up the needs and sensitivities of your character early on and let readers know that certain things will have particular impact for him/her. That way, when you get there, the words you use will gain the additional resonance of all the places where you placed supporting material.

To use a wacky metaphor, imagine that your main character's plot arc is like a boulder rolling down a hill. To make it more exciting, you can decorate the boulder, or you can stick something in the place where it's supposed to land - but how much more exciting would it be to have a whole bunch of boulders (of different sizes?) rolling in from different directions to converge on that one spot? The impact would be much bigger, and its consequences would be much trickier to anticipate.

So after a couple of days and after talking all these elements through with my best writing buddy, I managed to sit down last night and write the piece. Of course it needs work - but it's out there now. The fear is gone.

I hope these suggestions can help you with your set pieces too.

Announcements

Sorry to have to do this to my wonderful commenters, but I've just enabled comments moderation, because I've been targeted by spammers. I guess any mention of shoes invites the attention of the shoe-hawking community! Imagine.

It ends up being somewhat appropriate, though, because I have a big trip coming up. I'm taking my family to France, and rather than stress myself out trying to blog, I'm going to take a short hiatus from August 4th until September 1st. I'm trying to arrange some guest posts to appear during that time, and I hope I can find someone to moderate comments for me, because I certainly don't want to be comment-spammed when I'm traveling and not able to clean it up. In any case, I'll be keeping the comments moderation on until September 1st.

I do have a couple more posts to share with you before my departure, and and while I'm here I'll try to approve comments as quickly as possible. For those of you who may have been wondering, I don't sell shoes!

I hope you like my pretty Analog covers that I just added to the left bar, showing the magazines in which I've appeared.

Thank you for your patience.


Juliette

The language you speak influences how you think!

I'd been looking for a good way to introduce the work of Stanford Psychology professor Lera Boroditsky to my readers, and today I found it in this fantastic article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

Yes, the language you speak does influence how you think.

I think the first people to put forward the idea that a link existed between culture and language were the anthropologists Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Lee Whorf. The last two of those are associated with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that differences in the way language encodes categories etc. affect the way speakers of that language think. There's been a lot of argument about this idea since it came out, and certainly one can argue against a strong form that says language restricts thought. However, Professor Boroditsky has been exploring exactly what the consequences of certain languages are for thought - and in fact, she's finding there is a huge influence between the two. Russian speakers who have more words for blue than English speakers are in fact better able to distinguish between colors of blue. Speakers of different languages conceptualize the "direction" of time differently: left to right vs. right to left vs. below to above. And those who use absolute direction instead of relative direction (N/S/E/W instead of Left/Right) use those directions to organize things chronologically as well as to think about spatial positioning.

I encourage you not only to read this article, but to think about how this affects your writing. What kind of society have you created? What language do they speak, and how does it frame its categories? Once you've figured that out, ask yourself how that categorization system might be further generalized into the society, its beliefs and its behavior. Language does affect thought - so something that shows up in the language should be evident in basic concepts of reality like how many different colors of blue there are, or whether something hanging on a wall is actually "on" it or "up" it. What kinds of distinctions might your people draw that we might not be familiar with?

When I create my societies, I like to see how far I can push these categories and the judgments surrounding them. In doing so, I hope not only to tell a great story, but to show my readers a new way of imagining and conceptualizing the reality that we all share.

I hope you find this article as inspiring as I did.

Feet and Shoes across cultures

What do you know about feet?

I suppose the most recent thing I've heard about feet comes from runner friends who have been talking about a book, Born to Run, that advocates running without shoes. The argument basically goes, "You've been taught all your life to wear shoes, and have probably shelled out a lot for those specially designed running shoes, but they might actually cause you more injuries."

Well, it's interesting. I haven't researched the science behind the book, but it does go to show that science can always learn something new, and attitudes change, even about something as constantly present as our feet. There are also a lot of different attitudes about feet across cultures, and across history.

One poignant example of this was brought to my attention when I visited the Field Museum in Chicago, where they had a display of shoes from different countries and eras. The collection included beautiful embroidered shoes about two inches long, intended for Chinese women's bound feet. The very sight of them gives me the shivers, yet before the revolution in China they were seen as necessary for the refined beauty of women in the aristocracy. I remember reading Spring Moon by Bette Bao Lord in high school and being fascinated by the way she portrayed changing attitudes surrounding bound feet - in particular the way the older generation regarded the younger generation whose feet had not been bound.

I could spend a lot of time trying to list all the things we saw in the display, but I'll just do a few here. Fishing boots from Hokkaido made out of fish skin - with scales! Sandals from Hungary that looked like little tables - they had two wooden supports underneath and were inlaid with mother of pearl. Moccasins from American Indian nations. It even included modern shoes from Chicago.

One of the things I particularly remarked on in the display was a pair of snow boots from Japan, made out of rice straw. They dated from the 1970's - a lot later than I expected. Historically, sandals, rain/snow coats and boots were made of rice straw in Japan (if you have a lot of it, it makes sense to put it to use!). Then there were the construction shoes from Japan and the dockwork shoes from the US, both of which had a big toe that was separated from the smaller toes (almost as if it could wear a flip-flop over it). I've actually seen Japanese workers climbing around on scaffolding wearing these shoes - they look like blue canvas boots with rubber soles and the separated big toe. The wooden sandal-clogs from Japan called geta usually have two wooden "teeth" underneath on which you walk, but we saw a pair in the display that were made for wearing in the rain. These had very very tall wooden teeth and a leather cover to go over and protect the wearer's toes.

So here's a question: how different from each other are the shoes we wear now, and how does their form reflect their function? Sports shoes take all kinds of forms, high ankles or low, with all kinds of decorative patterns. Women's shoes come in all kinds of heel heights (though men in the era of Louis XIV in France were the first to wear high heels). When I shopped for shoes recently, I noticed that the sleek look I like in a shoe tends to come with a high heel, and not with a flat. Tough for me, because I can't wear high heels without hurting myself. The other thing I always have to look out for when shopping is the sole of the shoe. Women's shoes in particular tend to have very flimsy soles and not stand up to much walking.

I couldn't help asking myself whether this reflected the low value Americans appear to put on walking from place to place. Why walk when we could take our cars? Why walk when it would take so long (though it probably would take far less long than you'd think)? Why would we need strong soles for our shoes if we're not doing sports and we're not "rugged"?

The last thing I'd like to mention is the question of whether feet are inherently "dirty." Yes, certainly we know to be concerned with tracking mud in the house, and we don't want to put dirty feet in a clean bed. But running around barefoot in America is romanticized as a sign of freedom and maybe being in touch with one's inner child. Running around barefoot in Japan isn't done. If I were ever to step outside my door in bare feet when I lived there, people would look at me in complete shock. Shoes are worn outside, and then taken off in the entry hall (genkan) so they will not bring dirt into the house. Still, inside people wear slippers - and there's a special pair of slippers that must only be worn while in the bathroom (actually I should specify: the slippers are to be worn in the toilet room, not the room with the bathtub). Also, it's seen as inappropriate to use your feet to open or close doors or accomplish anything that is rightly done with the hands.

The point of this entire discussion is to bring attention to the way that different cultures perceive feet, shoes, how they are used, and what is beautiful or ugly about them. When you're putting together a fantasy or science fictional society, be aware that you can include differences in the value of common things, like feet and shoes, to add interest to your alien or fantasy culture. So long as the value of feet and shoes is consistent with other beliefs in the culture, it won't even necessarily stand out as bizarre, but will give a new level of depth to the culture you're trying to portray.

It's something to think about.

Why read your work aloud?

It's always a good idea to read your stories aloud. I know many people who do it. For years, I read every word I wrote to my husband (bless him!) on a nightly basis. I still read aloud to him occasionally (though kids and life make a nightly session impossible), and I've practiced for readings with him, too.

To my mind, reading aloud is an important test for any story - and it works on several levels.

The first thing that reading aloud can do is give you some distance on what you've written. Sometimes you spend so much time going over and over the words on the screen that you know them by heart, and you stop being able to see problems that might be there. Reading aloud is one way to push that text away, and put it into a context where you can be more aware of what's actually there, rather than what you think/know is there from the million times you've run your eyes over it. Printing out the story and looking at it that way can have a similar effect, but does require more paper and ink!

The second thing that reading aloud can do for you is give you a sense of the rhythmic feel of your prose. As you go through, awkward spots will give you pause, or even cause your tongue to stumble. When this happens, it's a good idea to change what you've written - because if it makes you pause or stumble, chances are your readers will have the same problem.

Those two aspects of reading aloud are helpful from the very beginning of the writing process. Once you've gotten a bit further in, you may be interested in designing character voices - and reading aloud can help you here, too.

If you've never had the experience of "reading in voices," I encourage you to try it - either with your own work or with the stories of others. You don't need to alter your voice in any extreme way; nobody needs to morph into Frank Oz to experience how this can help. Put yourself into the character's mindset as you do when writing his/her point of view, and see how your voice comes out. A strong character voice will give a distinct feel to the sound of your reading.

This can help you in two ways. First, if your writing is falling out of the voice into a more generic mode, you'll hear it. The sensation of that voice will change and you'll start sounding more like a generic narrator. Second, you should notice that your voice needs to change when you change points of view. If this doesn't happen, it's a red flag that maybe the voices aren't distinct enough. I actually surprised myself when I practiced reading The Eminence's Match aloud, and I stumbled when I first changed scenes. Suddenly I wasn't in Nekantor's voice any more, I was in Household Director Samira's - and I had to stop and think through what she should sound like when I read. That prepared me for how I might have to change my reading voice again when I hit another character point of view. Fortunately, the voice differences were already present in the manuscript (I just hadn't read it aloud in quite a while!). It was really fun to think about what to do with my reading tone in the various scenes, and the reading at BayCon turned out to be gleeful fun for me.

In any case, it's always a good idea to read your work aloud. You can learn a lot about it (and about reading it to others, a useful skill), and even help to push your work to the next level in revisions.

It's something to think about.

Creating the next great alien language... why?

A couple of days ago I read and linked to an interesting article over on io9, called How to write the next great alien language. The article compares the Elvish languages (Sindarin and Quenya) and the Klingon language, and opens as follows:

Constructing an entire alien language is the most challenging task in all of speculative fiction, and there are two examples that tower above the rest: J.R.R. Tolkien's Elvish and Marc Okrand's Klingon. We'll show you how to outdo even them.

When it comes to world-building, there's no finer way to capture an alien culture than to give it a language that seems utterly strange to human ears. It's obviously a challenging task, and one that requires a decent working knowledge of linguistics. So while we have to leave the nitty-gritty of language construction to a textbook, what we can do is examine the very different overarching approaches used in constructing the two most iconic alien languages - Elvish and Klingon - and then explain how you could create a language that combines the best of both.

When they talk about overarching approaches, they are effectively referring to the fact that Tolkien based his Elvish tongues in part on a pair of human languages (Finnish and Welsh) and extensively developed the history of changes these languages, while Marc Okrand used existing names and a couple of lines of dialogue as a basis for creating a Klingon language system with an extensive vocabulary that could cover all kinds of topics (Klingon Hamlet, anyone?) but didn't delve into history of Klingon at all.

Let me start by saying that I'm terribly impressed with both Tolkien and Okrand for their achievements. The io9 article didn't mention Paul Frommer or Na'vi, but as I've understood it from independent research, Frommer designed the Na'vi language of Avatar in a somewhat similar way to Klingon (i.e. by approach from a contemporary linguistic perspective, though without the snippets of previous language use as a basis).

I wondered about a couple of things in this article. First, there's a general idea that one should give an alien culture a language that sounds "utterly strange" to human ears. How do you define "utterly strange?" I suppose I'd say that an alien language must have two major features: it must be unintelligible by speakers of any existing human language, and it must have no etymological connection with any existing human language. If it did have such connections, it wouldn't be "alien" by definition. Beyond that it's a matter of personal taste.

Marc Okrand had to work with an existing description of Klingon as "guttural," which affected his choice of the language's sounds. He also tried to have patterns of sounds in the sound system that didn't occur in existing world languages - his example was having a sound for V without having one for F. In the area of grammar he chose to use object-verb-subject word order, which is the most unusual in world languages. Overall, I would summarize by concluding that he was trying to defeat the human language "universals" in order to make the language very alien.

Paul Frommer was freer in his choice of sounds because he got to start from scratch, and in articles about his creation of Na'vi he has said he deliberately chose language sounds for his sound system that came from rare Earth languages and thus would be hard for most humans to recognize. Na'vi is in some sense the opposite of Klingon, in that it has no V - instead it has P and an ejective, written "px". Verb conjugation is by infixes rather than prefixes or suffixes - another deliberate choice to make the language unusual. You can read more about it at Wikipedia or at Learn Na'vi.

One of the key features of both Klingon and Na'vi, though, was that they had to be pronounceable by humans so that they could be used in a movie - and as it turns out, Sindarin Elvish is also pronounceable by humans; its vocabulary has been developed for use in the Lord of the Rings films.

That brings me to the question of how one might "outdo" Tolkien and Okrand - one of the proposals of the io9 article. They imply that the next great alien language should involve both an extensive contemporary vocabulary and a sense of historical development. Seems logical, at least inasmuch as that would "fill in the blanks" of what the developers of these existing languages didn't cover.

But my commenter Megs had a different point of view: "I think one of the most fundamental things about creating an ALIEN language isn't so much to use things that are rare in human languages, but to not BASE them on human languages. Just use logic to create a system that communicates. But maybe that's just me."

Okay, so Megs would want to create a system of communication that's not based on human languages, just on logic. One could argue that the logic required has some human basis too, but I see her point. What about extremely different alien physiology? What about scent language, or visual language? Alien is alien, right?

In order to understand the parameters here, I think we have to ask one critical question:

Why am I creating this language?

The answer to that question will determine everything about the language you create. Tolkien set out to create a history of mythology, and thus spent a lot of time on the history of his languages; that was a natural consequence. Okrand and Frommer set out to create languages that could be used by human actors on film, which required extensive vocabulary and contemporary usage, but did not require that they trace the history of the languages - and heavens forbid they should create something that was unpronounceable!

So let's get back to basics. The purpose of most science fiction and fantasy languages is to function in a story. The nature of that story is what determines the features and qualities of the language.

Here are some examples of languages that I've created, what parts of them I've created, and why:

Gariniya
Gariniya was based on the idea of a canon-based language - a language that consisted primarily of oblique references to a set of stories that all speakers of the language knew. To my knowledge, this language concept originated with Star Trek: The Next Generation's episode Darmok. My own contribution was to the culture surrounding it, in particular to finding ways for the language to have evolved and ways that the language would be learned and passed on (which I had felt were missing in the Star Trek episode; see my entry Darmok and Me). I also needed culture surrounding it, dictating the conditions of its use. For the purposes of the story I did NOT need it to have either an extensive vocabulary or a fully realized grammar. I designed phonology pretty thoroughly, constructed a few words to use in the story, and that was sufficient for my purposes.

Aurrel & Khachee
Both Aurrel, from "Cold Words," and Khachee, from my forthcoming story "At Cross Purposes," are entirely original in concept and execution. Similarly to Gariniya, though, they have well-developed phonology but don't have a big vocabulary because I only needed to use a few names and concepts in the stories. As I've said before, the more of an alien language you use, the more you alienate the reader, so if you're working from an insider perspective, it's good to use as little of the alien language as possible. Both of these languages differ from Gariniya in that I did much more design of their grammar. I started with one single key feature that was going to cause the most trouble in the story - status dialects in Aurrel and discourse/turn-taking structure in Khachee - and then developed from there. Another reason that grammar knowledge was important was because I tried to alter my use of English so I could sound like a native-speaker-of-alien-language-speaking-English when in the alien point of view. Aurrel also had a language evolutionary angle, and a historical angle, because these were directly relevant to the plot.

Varinn
The Varinn language (from Varin, as you've probably guessed) is the most extensive language I've created. I did intend it to be pronounceable - and relatively easily pronounceable - by humans, since the Varini (people of Varin) themselves are humans. It has phonology and syntax and morphology, and I've delved far into cultural issues surrounding its use by various social groups. It also has a rudimentary history as a language, including sound changes and changes in verb conjugations. This is because I have other stories that I've designed in which this history becomes important. I've also developed more vocabulary for this one because I wanted to have a Varinn translation of certain songs and oaths that appear in the story. However, I hardly ever use it in the stories themselves. All of the stories are told from an insider perspective, and thus need to be effectively "in translation" whenever possible so the language won't distract from the story.

So when it comes right down to it, what makes a really great invented language?

The io9 article, and some comments that have followed it, seem to suggest that it would be better to include both concurrent vocabulary and language history - an additive sort of solution based on their analysis of Elvish and Klingon. Even if you had both, though, the language wouldn't have all the richness, irregularity, cultural grounding, manners, etc. of a natural language.

I'm going to argue, though, that the next "great alien language" is not going to be much like a natural language, for one single reason: without a great story to rest upon and guide its form, a language would have no reason to exist. It might be quite comprehensive and possibly quite alien (if that's what its creators were after), but nobody would care about it. A language needs a world, and characters, and a story, to make it compelling and worthwhile. Once it's in the hands of dedicated fans and learners, anything is possible. After all, creole languages are natural languages, vibrant, with functional grammar, and these languages develop naturally in locations where adults have been using awkward pidgin. Once you've put the accepted usage into the hands of learners, especially child learners, language tends to take on a life of its own.

So if you're creating a language, be careful of losing yourself in the conlang process, and make sure to keep an eye out for the needs of the story you want to tell. I encourage linguistic research, exacting standards, and lots of hard work - if that's what you're into. But for those of you who don't have tons of time to devote to language development, keep in mind that an effective and functional alien tongue doesn't need to be extensive to work. It just needs to be systematic and serve the needs of the story you want to tell.