TTYU REtro: Must we always have monarchies? Seriously?

Some time ago on SFSignal, a number of notable authors were asked to weigh in on the question of why monarchies are so overwhelmingly chosen as the governmental systems of fantasy stories. The article is here. It's actually quite a fascinating question, so I thought I'd give a few of my own thoughts on the subject.

I find it really easy to see why monarchies are so often chosen. Not only is there a certain romanticism in our cultural hearts concerning the age when monarchies were the dominant social structure around the world, but they do give you some big advantages in storytelling. The biggest one is simplicity.

Think about it. One Dark Lord. One Good King/Queen. It gives you focus. If you decide to go into more depth, it gives you a single character to go to the hilt with. It also saves you a lot of work. The workings of a democracy - as has been abundantly demonstrated in the US - are full of characters and underlying influences that we don't always understand. Somehow recreating, or redesigning, those influences in an entirely new world would be... messy. Difficult, to say the least. Please notice that I'm not saying we shouldn't do it - but this might be one reason why we typically don't.

Another reason is that we strive to achieve a feeling of difference in our fantasy. The familiarity of democracy would need to be explicitly counteracted in any fantasy setting, so that that sense of wonder would not be lost.

Of course, there are other options. I'd love to see someone tackle a communist government sometime - Ursula LeGuin did something along those lines with Orgoreyn in The Left Hand of Darkness. Of course, I'd hope whoever took on this type of government (or any other type, for that matter) would take their job seriously and look at the actual impact of example governments in order to explore both its advantageous and disadvantageous features.

The Varin government (from my novel) might look like a monarchy at first glance, but it isn't quite. I suppose you'd call it an oligarchy with one member who is more important than the others. The Eminence is the ruler, and has a throne, but wears no crown. He also has an official Heir, but the Heir is elected by vote of the fifteen members of the Cabinet. Each of the twelve great noble families provides a candidate, and they run off against one another in several rounds if voting until only one is left. It fits with my vision of Varin inasmuch as I strive to achieve a world that seems very familiar, but is marked with major differences from our own expectations.

What kind of governments are you working with in your projects? How diverse can our concepts be? What makes a familiar system work? What makes an extremely different system work? Must we always have monarchies? Seriously?

It's something to think about.

Come see me November 1-3 at Convolution!

I have a convention coming up! On the weekend of November 1-3, I'll be attending Convolution in Burlingame, CA. If you happen to be in the Bay Area at that time, come and see me!

Here is my speaking schedule:

Friday, November 1 at 4:00pm - Storytelling as Cultural Learning
With Gregg Castro and Davidson L. Haworth

Saturday I'll be around the convention because I'm participating in the writers' workshop. You might be able to catch me in the lobby...

Sunday, November 3 at 1:00pm - Girls and Tech
With Wanda Kurctu and Barry Kercheval

Sunday, November 3 at 3:00pm - Creating Languages
With Gregg Castro


This should be a convention with a great intimate feel, and I have several great friends on programming, too (like  Lillian Csernica, Gregg Castro,and Wanda Kurctu). The highlight of the weekend promises to be the Goblin King's Masked Ball on Saturday night (which I hope I can attend!).

I hope to see you there!

TTYU Retro: How Sports Impacts the Wider Culture by Tim Wade

World Building: How Sports Impacts the Wider Culture
by Tim Wade

I have lived in the Australia, Japan and the U.S., and as a huge sports fan I have really enjoyed watching the sports of each country and the culture of those sports. You see, Sports has a culture just like anything else, and it should be considered in world building. People have a natural instinct to play sports and compete. Even if your characters are not interested in sports, and even if your society does not have an official league, there is sports somewhere. Is there a city league, semi-informal that competes with the other areas of the town? Remember that baseball competition in the US was developing for years before the National League was established. And being exceptional is not necessary, everyone wants to play and cheer on the home town team.

So now there is a place for games. Who plays them? Or the fascinating question: which sports are meant for which people? In the book Playing the Enemy about South Africa's triumph in the 1995 Rugby World Cup (the movie was titled Invictus), the author discusses outsiders on the team. He covers the roles of the black player but also mentions the "Englishman" in the team. You see, in Apartheid South Africa rugby was an Afrikaaner sport, cricket an "English" sport and football (soccer) for Blacks. The place of the black players was revolutionary but the English South Africans were also out of place, in a different way. I recommend the book (I just wish he had explored the game tactics as much as the politics).

Sports also is often the first place for minorities to get wide social recognition. Sports are a meritocracy by virtue of their scoring structure, and when a starting five from Texas Western beats the mighty Kentucky Wildcats to win the college basketball championship, it becomes time to recruit black players to Lexington. I just saw the movie this week with the family on DVD - Glory Road - and recommend it. I have been moved by the stories of Jackie Robinson and other pioneers and that story continues all the world over, from the Ella brothers in Australian rugby to Konishiki and Akebono in Japanese sumo. In your world, how do sports challenge restrictions on social mobility?

Sports does not only challenge on a racial level but also on a class level. In my home town of Melbourne, there are Australian football teams are associated with the upper class: Melbourne, Carlton, the working class: Richmond, Collingwood, and the middle class suburbs: Essendon, Hawthorn. A lot of those distinctions are not relevant to the players in this era of a nationwide draft, but the clubs still promote these identities. What are the class distinctions between teams or between sports in your world? Are there sports that are too uncouth for the upper class, or sports too refined for the workers? Are some games officially banned? Think dogfighting or cockfighting; underground violent sports have always shown the seedier side of society.

I'd also like to look at the fascinating sports-cultural case of Hideo Nomo, who left Japan to play baseball in the U.S. He was one of the best players in Japan, and won the best pitcher award at least once. His team was mediocre and he wanted to win, so he offered to take a lower salary so his team could make a trade to improve their chances. When his management refused to do so, he asked to be traded so he could play for a good team. His team did not want to trade him to a rival, and as he was playing in the less popular league (Pacific League) they did not want to trade one of their few superstars to the Central League. So Nomo was offered a contract allowing him to leave Japan, but giving up his rights so he could never play in Japan again. The Japanese press pilloried him for being a traitor to his team and for shunning the team concept. He took the challenge and played for the LA Dodgers. The very first year, he played in the All Star game, won Rookie of the Year and set a team strikeout record. I watched him a lot that season and thoroughly enjoyed a one-hitter complete game he threw at Candlestick, striking Barry Bonds out 4 times, and getting two hits himself. A huge Japanese crowd turned up and my wife and I were speaking Japanese to our neighbors. Well, after such a successful season he was treated like a hero upon returning home. He broke the ice and now there are Japanese players in all positions, all through Major League Baseball. Nomo had an up-and-down career in the US because he was over-pitched in Japan and never could deliver his best stuff in the US. But there is a special category of pioneer in the Baseball Hall of Fame, and I hope it is considered for Hideo Nomo as people look back on his accomplishments.

So what sports are in your world? Who plays them? How are they supported? Let's please not leave J.K. Rowling and Quidditch as the most famous sport in speculative fiction! I love Quidditch, but any sport where Ireland wins a World Cup final is clearly fictional. ;)


Tim Wade is an Australian and American dual citizen, and a huge sports fan as well as an avid reader in all genres - not the least of which are science fiction and fantasy. Tim, thanks for sharing your insights with us!

Setting and Worldbuilding: Not quite a case of To-ma-to, To-mah-to

I'm going to be giving a worldbuilding workshop soon, for a local writer's club. I'm really looking forward to this. Mind you, I love going to conventions and talking about worldbuilding topics with people for an hour or so... but this will be different. Hands-on. Analyzing quotes to see what authors are doing, interacting with people face to face, spending several hours engaging in the worldbuilding topic.

Several times, I've been asked by the organizer to make sure that my workshop is accessible to non-genre writers. Several times, I have assured him that it will be. We'll be working with quotes from nonfiction, mainstream fiction, and genre.

I suspect, because the activity we're doing is labeled worldbuilding, that most of the people in attendance will be genre folk. I hope not, though.

In mainstream fiction, and in nonfiction, we talk about "setting," not worldbuilding. I really feel that using the word "worldbuilding" is more effective in describing what writers do, for one critical reason.

The world is not on the page. Only the words are. The world we feel when we read is in our minds.

This may seem obvious, but in fact, I can't emphasize this enough. The reality that we feel while reading is only in our minds, evoked by the words that we read. Any writer, in choosing the words to use, is choosing what aspects of a world to evoke. That means that certain words will evoke our own world in a non-fictional way, certain words will evoke our own world but place fictional events within it, and still other words will create a sense of a world that is somehow fantastical. It's like a magical spell - the realities that it creates are so strong that we can believe in them (at least for a time) quite as much as the reality we see and hear and smell.

This is why the word "worldbuilding" appeals to me so much. Each word we put on the page is a small piece of the whole. Not a brick, though. In my head right now I'm imagining each word as a pebble dropped into a pond, with ripples surrounding it that represent all the different possible contexts in which the reader has previously seen it. Each word then drops in a different spot, and the ripples join together to create a most amazing work of art in multiple dimensions.

Not only is it an amazing process, it is not an entirely reliable one. The author controls the pebbles, based on the patterns the ripples make in his/her own mind. But the author only controls the pebbles. In a reader's mind, the ripples created by those pebbles will be different - possibly, vastly different - because the contexts in which the reader has heard the same words can be so different.

You could say that worldbuilding is a bigger challenge for the genre writer. Why? Because we can't rely on readers to have the same vision of our worlds that we do. We can't use the word "house" and expect a person's natural gut sense of what "house" means to fit within our model. All this is true. However, mainstream and nonfiction authors who are really good at what they do manage to create a very specific sense of place, and not only of place but of emotional association with that place. Stieg Larsson in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo puts us in Sweden with incredible effectiveness. To me, that is also worldbuilding.

Good writers cannot rely on "default settings." This is in part because default settings are generic and boring. But it is also because we can't know what our readers' actual default settings are. This is one of the traps that is all too easy to fall into. I think immediately of prejudice. If a writer is relying for his/her worldbuilding on male gaze, or a default that is either all-straight, all-white, all-cisgendered, all-able, etc. that will not only be evident to the reader, but detract from the effectiveness of the worldbuilding for anyone who does not share those defaults.

I guess you could say that I've expanded the contexts in which I use the word "worldbuilding," so it suggests not just setting but character, not just the unreal aspects of a fantastical world but also the unreal aspects of a real world - since, after all, all we're doing is putting words on a page.

It's something to think about.




#SFWApro

Dialects and Voice - a 'Dive into Worldbuilding!' Hangout Report with Video

Boy, I had a great time at this hangout last week. I was joined by David Peterson, Erin Peterson, Glenda Pfeiffer, and Lesley Smith. I apologize for the misspelling of the video title (Dialect and "Vice"?? yes, a typo I didn't notice until it was too late, lol).

I started out by asking David whether he works with dialects on any of his HBO shows. Basically, dialects do exist in the worlds he works with, but the extent he works on them depends on what is going to appear on screen. Defiance is localized to a single town, and therefore there isn't much diversity of dialect there, since all of them use the dialect of the local area. However, he has asked himself what might happen elsewhere, since the Defiance aliens are present all over the world. We imagined that pidginization (simply put, when populations take some words from one language and some for another to cobble together a workable shared language) would occur differently in each location, such as South America (Brazil), France, etc. and in those locations the influence of English would be much lessened. We also got a hint that a dialect might start to appear in Game of Thrones next season...

How do we define dialects, linguistically? Basically, when two modes of speaking are mutually intelligible (they can be understood by speakers of the different modes), then they are considered dialects. When they are unintelligible, they are considered different languages. Imagine that two modes of speaking might have the same grammar, and 90% of the same vocabulary - those would be dialects.

On the other hand, this most basic definition can change. There are some grammatical differences that occur across dialects, like verb endings in Japanese dialects. The biggest difference, however, is when languages are defined as "dialects" or "separate languages" for political reasons. Hindi and Urdu are very close in their linguistic features, but are associated with different countries and populations, so they have different names. Portuguese and Spanish were in the distant past mutually intelligible, but at this point are not. The different languages of China are mutually unintelligible, but because of the ideological importance of unified cultural identity in China, they are called dialects. At the Barcelona Olympics, an agreement was apparently made that people would only speak Spanish, so it raised some eyebrows when the Mayor of Barcelona got up and spoke Catalan. Arabic is spoken across great areas of the middle east and north Africa, but the Arabic dialect spoken in Egypt would probably be near-unintelligible to a speaker of the Moroccan dialect of Arabic, while the differences between Egyptian dialect and Tunisian would probably be less extreme. In the case of Arabic, the disparate populations are helped by their general knowledge of modern standard Arabic - which nobody really uses in daily conversation, but everyone shares. Japan also maintains a "standard Japanese" which is not really spoken locally, but which everybody learns in school and which is what is spoken on newscasts.

My own experience with the difference between standard and dialectal language was that I'd learned standard Japanese in class - since standard Japanese is the only one that gets taught to foreign speakers - but when I first went to Japan, I had a homestay in Kyoto. I landed and discovered that I was having terrible trouble understanding what people were saying, because I had learned none of the special features of the local dialect! Believe me, I put some effort into catching up on the differences after that - but my host families still refused to teach me to speak the dialect, because they felt it would be a problem for me (dialect is often criticized, especially in Tokyo).

Erin noted that sometimes people can "understand" related languages that are not their own, but they can lose nuances, and also they can fall into "false cognate" traps, where a word that sounds similar between languages has a very different meaning in the two different languages. (Wikipedia distinguishes between false cognates and false friends, but my own experience is that what they call false friends can also be called false cognates). The words "embarrassed" and "embarazada" mean "embarrassed," and "pregnant" respectively - and if you misuse them, you will end up pretty embarrassed!

When it comes to considering dialects, it is also important to consider sociolinguistic and socioeconomic dialects. That is to say, dialects don't just differ between regions. They can also differ widely due to social groupings within a single area. My Varin world has two dialects of this type: one is used by sailors and the people who interact with them in the city of Safe Harbor, and the other is a dialect spoken by the undercaste.

David warns that you should try not to use stereotypcially stigmatized variants of English as flags for dialects in a created world. Just because your people are high class doesn't mean you should write their language in an English accent; just because they are low class doesn't mean you should try to write in a Cockney style, or some kind of dialect that is seen as low class in your geographical area. Someone is going to end up insulted.

We noted that many films set in France have the actors using British accents. This is a kind of shorthand, since we know that there are different dialects associated with class in Britain. It can work decently well in a film, but it can also be done badly. I always wondered why the Vikings in How to Train Your Dragon would have Scottish accents, while the protagonist was American. One of my guests asked, tongue in cheek, "How else would you know he was normal?" This kind of thing makes me want to pull my hair out a bit. Lesley noted that the same thing was done in the movie Chocolat, which was supposedly set in France but could easily have been set in English. I believe it was David who found the method used in the movie Amadeus - where all the actors spoke in their own native dialects - very distracting.

We talked a bit about rendering dialect with spelling. This is not something I personally recommend, because it can make your dialogue hard to read, and has historically been used in some very insulting and racist contexts that you might not want to associate yourself with.

I asked a question that had come up in our last discussion, whether literacy and/or television slow down language change. David had a great way of thinking about this, which is that you maintain the linguistic structures in your head that are most useful to you. Thus, if you read a lot of classical literature, you will maintain classical linguistic structures in your head to help you understand it. If you keep up with a lot of international stories, you might maintain more British vocabulary. The simplicity of global communication makes a lot of different ways of speaking accessible to us. It is useful to talk to people in various areas rather than just people around you, because it will keep your language use diverse and complex.

Dialect also has a social value, because it marks insiders and outsiders to a particular language community. If you are writing in a context that requires you to use a particular existing regional dialect, be very careful and make sure you have done lots and lots of research - including running your work by (ideally) more than one person who speaks the dialect in question. You don't want to get it wrong, because people from that population will be able to catch your mistakes and will likely feel disrespected. I mentioned Stina Leicht's book Of Blood and Honey, because it's a really great example of a book that uses dialect well. The book deals with the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and crosses them with fae folk in our world - and it's amazing. She did years of research and reading of Northern Irish literature, watching movies, etc. to perfect her language use, and the effect is amazing. I read a bit aloud, which didn't sound at all Irish because I can't do a Northern Irish accent - however, my intent was to show that she got the dialect across beautifully even without having to change spellings (she uses some special local words). When this is done right, readers will "feel" a dialect even if they are not familiar with it in the real world.

Using fictional dialects is different, because you have no accountability to a world population. However, it's a good idea to make sure that you don't accidentally have world accountability, as I mentioned earlier. Mike Flynn is an author who does this great. I read a sample of his work, showing how he uses just a few made-up words, and other words with older etymologies (words with an archaic feel) to create a mood surrounding the language of his stories.

Glenda particularly noticed the rhythm of the language in the Flynn story, and therefore we talked briefly about how meter, or rhythm, can be a really great way to create a sense of dialect.

Word choice is also very important. When we hear a word, it brings up all the contexts in which we have ever heard it, simultaneously in our brains (yes, it is cool). Thus, words that are associated with narrow contexts always bring up a sense of that context. When have you heard the word "unrequited" and not thought, "love"? Words that appear in lots and lots of contexts are the ones that become generic.

It was at this point that I brought up the idea of voice in writing, because for me, dialect and voice are closely related. Any story that uses a close point of view can (and in my view, should) try to capture the voice of the character in the narration. This can be done badly. However, it can also be done very effectively. As an example, I read the opening of Janice Hardy's book The Shifter (called The Pain Merchants in the UK). The main character, Nya, has a very distinctive voice that comes from several things - the mention of chickens, her frequent mentions of her grandmother, who goes by "Grannyma" (there's a dialect feel for you!), and her frequent citing of her grandmother's proverbs.

Dialect issues can cause book titles to be changed! I mentioned that I thought The Shifter was changed because marketers in the US didn't want to create an accidental association with drugs by using The Pain Merchants. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was changed to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone because marketers thought Americans wouldn't know what the Philosopher's stone was, and might get turned off by the word philosopher (sigh). We were all saddened by the perception that Americans are stupid and need things to be simplified for them.

I mentioned how one can change grammar to convey alienness and alien voice. The examples here were Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and my own short story, "Cold Words," both of which use wolflike aliens but in very different ways. You can learn more in depth about "Cold Words" and its language use here.

Lastly I read a piece of a work in progress, where I'm working on the dialect of the Variner undercaste. It involves a special use of plural pronouns instead of singular ones, which means that I can't entirely write the surrounding narrative in the dialect, because critical information about gender would be lost, making it hard to distinguish between characters. David mentioned that it's pretty common to use plural pronouns to refer to people in dialects across the world, because it's considered less direct. Indeed, the formal "vous" pronoun in French, which has analogs in many Romance languages, is a plural.

Someone recommended the play "Not I" by Samuel Beckett.

This was another one of those discussions where I felt we were rolling right along at a terrific clip, and could have gone on a lot longer! Thanks to everyone who attended and contributed.

Here's the video:

Handling Continuity Markers Across Chapter Transitions

So you're reading a book, and as you read along, you get to the end of a chapter. What is the relationship between the end of the chapter you just finished and the beginning of the chapter you are about to start? I thought I'd look at some of the different ways that one can transfer between chapters.

Isn't it just what happens next?
Sure, okay, sometimes it is - but let's talk about what that means. The events of a story grow out of one another organically, which means that every event is connected to every previous event in several ways. The motives and actions of the protagonist are critical to creating a sense of continuity across chapter borders. That means that it's a really good idea to end a chapter with the sense of the protagonist having a plan, or intending to do something. Having people fall asleep at the end of a chapter is often cited as a no-no, because so often it implies that the person is relinquishing their sense of forward drive. However, it can work. Here are a couple of examples of the "and then..." transition.

From Gustav Gloom and the People Taker by Adam-Troy Castro (end of Chapter 3/beginning of Chapter 4):
 "...It was nice to meet you, Fernie What. Maybe I'll see you again."
 And then he walked away.
But there was also something very strange about the way he walked away, something about the way the gray mist at his ankles bubbled up around him with every step, the way the air seemed to thicken and turn black  the farther he went, until it was hard to make out his black hair and black suit against the darkness that surrounded him even in daylight.
***
That night Fernie enjoyed one of her favorite dreams: the one about the atomic zombies. [...] Unfortunately, all the zombies in tonight's episode looked like Mrs. Everwiner, and all she had to throw at them were cash registers.

Really, saying "it's what happened next" doesn't tell us a whole lot. How much time has passed between "now" and "next"? What is the next important event? In this example, there are two things linking the two chapters together. The first is the phrase, "that night," which tells us how much time has passed and thus helps us to orient ourselves to the resumption of action a few hours later. The other thing is the reference to Mrs. Everwiner and the cash registers, which shows us the impact of the events of the previous chapter on the character's state of mind. She's sleeping, but she's doing it at the beginning of the chapter, and in spite of sleeping, she is able to show that the events of the book are beginning to affect her.

Keeping a reader oriented to time, place, and character, is very important when you have a break in the story, and I'll continue to talk about it. Nnedi Okorafor's book The Shadow Speaker has two consecutive chapters that begin with the phrase, "The next day..." but this kind of phrase is so useful to orient a reader that it's near-transparent (i.e. you'd never notice that the temporal orientation was accomplished the same way twice, and even if you did, it wouldn't seem problematic). This same book has a really great example of a character in bed at the end of a chapter without causing any loss of momentum.

"As daybreak neared, finally - maybe it was due to a clarity brought on by fatigue or maybe it was that Ejii finally pushed aside her subconscious reluctance - for whatever the reason, Ejii could suddenly understand the shadows for the first time ever. She listened to them. And what they told her dashed sleep from her body for the rest of the night."

That wasn't restful. It sets up an intense curiosity about what the shadows said, which carries over into a scene of cooking that opens the following chapter. The interesting thing about the cooking scene is that it keeps us from what we want to know... but it also shows Ejii trying to do normal things while she gets around to asking her mother some pretty serious questions. We perceive those questions as having been inspired by her experiences of the night before, and the two chapters get tied together.

Do I need cliffhangers?
The quick answer to this one is, "no." But you do need to have drive. A cliffhanger helps bridge a chapter break by making the reader curious about whether the character will get out of her/his current predicament - but it's not the predicament that creates the bridge. It's the curiosity. One big mistake I've seen people make with cliffhangers is deliberately setting one up at the end of a chapter, but then failing to return to the resolution of that cliffhanger at the start of the next chapter. Note: sometimes we can change points of view and depart from that story arc for a while; that's all right so long as you address the resolution of the cliffhanger the next time you return to that story arc. What doesn't work so well is if you go to the beginning of the next chapter and completely skip over the cliffhanger's resolution, shoving it into the background so that you can get on with the important action that follows it.

If your cliffhanger is not important enough to merit a full narrative of its resolution, then it is contrived and shouldn't be there.

Sometimes all you need to do is have your protagonist ask a question or formulate a plan. Chapter Five of The Shadow Speaker ends like this:

I need to talk to Arif and Sammy, she thought.

Bam! There you are, motivated to see what happens when Ejii talks to Arif and Sammy. And then when you see the opening of Chapter Six, which begins, "The next day, they met at Mazi Godwin's house," you've been set up to know who "they" are, because Arif and Sammy were mentioned, and thus set up as referents, at the end of Chapter Five.

The last example I'm going to put here is from Janice Hardy's book The Shifter, also known as The Pain Merchants in the UK. It demonstrates both a cliffhanger and what I call a "direct resumption" of the plot arc, meaning that the action resumes in the same moment that it broke off, with no time delay. The protagonist, Nya, has just been accosted by a League Elder "in full gold cords."

Disobeying would make me equally suspicious. I'd never make it past the guards anyway, no matter how much that fellow liked me.
"Now, girl."
Nothing good ever followed just two words.
I stepped forward, wondering what time they served lunch in Dorsta prison.
***
The Elder stared down at me, looking as solid as the thick columns that supported the entrance-hall balcony behind him.

Believe it or not, here the most important word that establishes close continuity is the word "the." "The" sets us up to anticipate that the noun it accompanies is one known to us, and thus makes it clear when we hit "Elder" that this is the same Elder who just spoke to her at the end of Chapter One. The other thing that establishes time continuity is the location (entrance-hall) which had already been established in the previous chapter. It's easy to conclude as a result of this - and given the absence of any indicators of the passage of time - that we are resuming directly, i.e. picking up in the same instant we left off. I'll say more about direct resumption in a minute, when I talk about "direct handoffs."

So far, we've seen continuity set up several ways. One is time continuity. One is continuity of motive. Another is continuity of location. Still another is continuity of referents. You can use any one of these, or more than one at a time (even all at once!). It's important to be aware of these continuity markers because readers will be actively (if subconsciously) searching for them as they read.

What do you do if you are switching points of view?
 A switch of point of view is a pretty big point of discontinuity. It's also one that has become pretty common, as point of view switches have become a very popular method in storytelling. In the case of a POV switch, you need to have both discontinuity markers, and continuity markers.

I'm going to start with "direct handoffs," because they're most closely related to the previous examples. This is when you are in the middle of a scene, pick a moment, and then switch point of view without leaving the scene at all. Here's an example from my novel, For Love, For Power:


In his parents' room, the chairs from the lounge corner had been pulled out into the middle of the floor. Between them stood an Imbati – Aloran, the one from the play session.
No tattoo on his face for now, but maybe not for long. Dear gods.
Father grinned. "Now, don't tell your mother," he said. "It's a surprise."
***
Grobal Tagaret was not the person he'd wanted to see.
Aloran fought the urge to tense his arms and shoulders. Distance yourself, the lesson said. Measured breaths relieve the body. Relief of the body calms the mind. The calm mind is observant and prepared.

Basically what we have here is that at the end of Chapter 5, Tagaret has just walked in and discovered someone whom he refers to as "an Imbati" (a caste identity reference), before identifying him as someone he has previously seen. He's pretty upset about this, and his father asks him not to tell his mother, something that is (a) very unlikely and (b) in itself, upsetting to Tagaret. This establishes curiosity about what Tagaret will do next. Across the chapter break, then, we are likely to be waiting to see what Tagaret will do. The first sentence of the next chapter does refer to him, but importantly, it refers to him by his full name, which Tagaret himself never does. In that first sentence, Tagaret is being observed by someone who has clearly just discovered him... and thus when we see Aloran appear as the subject of the next sentence, we can conclude that we have not left the interaction. We do get to see what happens with Tagaret, but our concerns are different, since we've suddenly switched into Aloran's head and are now experiencing his motives, and observing Tagaret with his judgment - and also, with his ignorance of Tagaret's true feelings.

This kind of point of view switch is actually pretty unusual in my experience. It features a lot of continuity markers, which makes the presence of discontinuity markers so important (or we might erroneously conclude that we were just doing a direct resumption, rather than a direct handoff).

So let's look for a minute at point of view switches where the new point of view character is not in the same place or interaction with the one from the previous chapter. What happens there?

Here's a switch from Gustav Gloom and the People Taker: 

Fernie screamed in rage and frustration while the People Taker left to take her family.
Pancakes would surely not be involved.
***
The neighbors had always thought Gustav was the saddest little boy in the world. They thought this because he looked lonely behind the fence, and because he never seemed to smile, never seemed to show that he even knew how to smile.
But he had never truly known despair until he saw the People Taker stuff Fernie in his sack, pull the drawstring tight, and strut out the front door of the Too Much Sitting Room.

This one is a cliffhanger. Castro leaves Fernie trapped and unable to stop the bad guy. The sudden switch to "the neighbors" zooms us way out away from the protagonist's point of view, but since we're hearing what they thought of Gustav, we're already feeling the discontinuity and preparing for something relevant to Gustav. Critically, he has already become the main referent and been reerred back to as "he" three times by the time we hit "But he had never truly known despair..." and land with a thump in his head. We're also given a chance to recall the events that led to his despair, and from there we get to move forward in his point of view.

There are other kinds of switches where discontinuities require special types of fixing. If you're switching between two first-person points of view, indicating the name of the new point of view character in a chapter title is a good method I've seen used by authors like Kij Johnson and Rick Riordan. Some authors use fictional quotes to establish context for the new chapter's opening. Some use small snippets of other material.

I was recently working on a chapter transition that got me thinking about these issues. The transition is between chapter one and chapter two, and moves between two point of view characters in my Varin world. Now, these two people will meet each other later on, but as yet they are in two different towns. That means that I have to make sure to create markers of the difference in character and voice, and establish a difference in location. The other challenge is that they are members of the same caste, so I have to make sure to include some similarity markers as well. Whew!

What I decided to do was to pick up on a piece from the middle of the first chapter that looked like this, in which Corbinan (POV #1) dissuaded his friend Basi from taking a complaint to their Imbati-caste boss:

She [Basi] adjusted her hood, and turned away toward the steel door of the office, marked in black paint with a long spike that pierced through a hovering oval. "We have to make it right."
That didn't sound good. Corbinan jumped into her path. "Basi, don't go to the boss."
"But maybe if —"
"Look. Melumalai are one thing, but Imbati? No good comes of talking to Imbati, ever. Promise ye sure, it'll only make things worse." Imagining that same pierced oval tattooed between an Imbati's expressionless eyebrows made him shudder.

I decided to use the door as a marker of both similarity and difference, so when I open up Chapter 2 with Meetis (POV #2) planning to go talk to an Imbati-caste boss, it helps to establish not only the different location and scenario but also a sense of foreboding:

In proverbs, the door to adulthood did not have Imbati warden's diamonds on it. Akrabitti Meetis hesitated before the central office of Daronvale prison, straightened her hood and loosened her too-tight grip on her identity papers. Proverbs also said that good folk approached the door with their hearts free of secrets.
She lived as proof that reality didn't follow the proverbs.

All through these examples you can see me talking about "markers." I find it a useful way of talking about continuity, because any tiny little similarity or difference, even one word, or one referent, falls on the scale of continuity or discontinuity somewhere. Sometimes all you need is that one word (or phrase), especially if you are using a "what happened next" transition where you're able to re-use a lot of the context across the borderline. On the other hand, if you're working across a transition and you see only discontinuity markers, it's a good idea to see whether there is any kind of context you can give a reader to help that person see where your new chapter opening fits into the whole (be it quote, location/time markers, or other methods).

It's something to think about.



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TTYU Retro: Can I use signature phrases to distinguish between characters?

When I think of signature phrases, or catch-phrases, I typically tend to think of superheroes (I imagine a lot of you do as well). Spider-man is known for the piquant phrases he uses to taunt villains, and he's not alone. Ordinary novel or story characters certainly don't have to be so flamboyant, but I find that signature phrases can actually help them as well.

A signature phrase doesn't need to be so incredibly sassy that it's unmistakable. Though that typically works well for superheroes, it's usually too much for a novel character - even an important one. On the other hand, you can give relatively innocuous phrases to characters as well.

Here's an example. One of the characters in my novel, a man named Erex, tends to say, "In fact." Not once or twice, but in just about every lengthy speech turn that he gets. It fits with his character, because he's a sort of guidance counselor, and the phrase helps him to sound the role. It's only two words, but it gives him a very distinctive speech quirk to match his personality. Here's one of his interactions:

"Are you feeling all right, sir?" Tagaret asked, shaking the hand he offered.
Erex nodded. "I am well. You're kind to ask. In fact, I needed an excuse to come and find you."
"I didn't forget to report my grades, did I?
Erex smiled. "No."
"Then Father invited you."
Erex's smile diminished. "In fact, no. However, when I became aware that Garr had invited certain individuals, I made sure to come. He knows I'm here."
"Individuals?" Oh, gods, how just like Father – he'd probably invited half the cabinet!
Erex spread his hands. "Individuals with whom I'm quite well acquainted, in fact, so I thought I might be able to help."

One of the reasons that signature phrases can work so well is that people have speech habits, and those will stand out. I'm sure you know someone who uses the phrases "you know" or "like." Do you also know someone who overuses one of them, or both? I knew a young woman once who said "you know" so often that it nearly interfered with comprehension. She knew how to say "you know" compressed into an inhale!

I was revising through my manuscript yesterday and one of my characters said "Oh, dear." This surprised me. On the other hand, it was rather a nice thing, because my main character typically says "oh, no" when something bad happens, and I was happy to hear the other character saying something different. Then a little bit later I ran into someone else saying "Oh dear" and became alarmed. Maybe it was a phrase that happened to be on my mind that day, and suddenly it started sneaking into everybody's dialogue. That didn't make me happy. However, I decided I'd change the second instance of it to "Dear me" instead. I don't think that "dear me" will become anything like Erex's "in fact" for the character involved, but it was useful to think through how two different characters would be distinct in their reaction style.

In fact, ;) this is what we're really looking at - ways to keep characters distinct from one another. I would hope that we also spend a lot of time making characters distinct in other ways - personal history, emotional range, backstory, cultural background, etc. But it's also good to take a look at a character's first reaction to a shock, and make sure that he or she doesn't have the same reaction every time - and certainly that he or she doesn't have precisely the same reaction style as another character. In this respect, signature phrases can become very helpful.

It's something to think about.

#SFWApro