What deserves a name?

During our last hangout about Naming, the question came up: how do we decide what deserves a name? So we began by asking what kinds of things we put names on. People get them; places get them. Animals can get them. Sometimes, things get them. Quite a number of people name their cars; I knew a fellow once who named his dishwasher "The General" because it was so loud.

Paul suggested that the human tendency to anthropomorphize, or to attribute human characteristics like personality to animals and things.

Kat pointed out that she grew up with an animistic culture in which everything has personality, but she doesn't name things (that's not a necessary extension of a worldview that attributes personality to things). She lived on a boat, and boats have names, but other things did not.

We speculated that boats have names because when you call the Coast Guard or a bridge, you need to have a way of identifying yourself, so you identify the boat.

Paul pointed out that some addresses in England consist of the person's name, the name of the house, the name of the town, and what it's adjacent to. Names can be given to castles, mansions, and rich people's homes.

Swords can be given names, but they aren't always. Kat said that in Japan, certain swords of note were given names.

Would you name your kitchen knives? Which one or ones? Would you name only your sharp knives or your butter knives as well?

Inns will sometimes name the individual rooms they contain, but this is usually something that happens in places with very few rooms, or with themed rooms.

Do you name the rooms in your home? What do you call them? Does everyone who lives there agree what they are called?

It's natural to name pets, but what about computers? You may be asked to name your hard drive. You may need to track the name of the server that you visit when you play video games. You might want to give a computer a name that helps you track its function in a larger system.

Do we name food animals? Why or why not?

Hurricanes get named when they surpass a particular size and strength.

Some companies even name their marketing programs.

In a hospital, it might be helpful to think of names that would help patients understand a place's role in the larger system; another kind of name might confuse them.

We often label things when we feel they must be distinguished from one another.

Roman names, the nomen and the cognomen, would indicate who you were in the family structure. Many famous Romans went by their nicknames, like Cicero, whose nickname means chickpea.

Consider how you might name things in your secondary world to help people keep track of where they belong in relation to one another.

Names very often indicate social affiliation. Sometimes they are immutable, as a name that stands for a unique individual throughout their lifetime. Sometimes they change over the course of one's life, or they change over time.

People in our world enjoy acronyms that are pronounceable as names.

Stadium names used to be idiosyncratic, and now they have become corporate. That suggests a lot about the nature of our society.

Dormitories are often named so they can be distinguished. They might be named for famous people.

When you look at the phenomenon of places or monuments being named for people who have done great things, and then you compare that with the phenomenon of corporate name buying, it suggests something about how fame can or cannot be bought.

A complex naming strategy would require some investment in teaching readers, but it could be very helpful.

High elevation points might get a name. If a place is generally quite flat, a low hill might be named; but in a mountain range, only a really high or uniquely-shaped mountain would get a name.

What size does a community have to be before it gets a name? Does the community have to live in a permanent location, or can it be mobile? Do neighborhoods get names? What about unincorporated areas?

Sometimes the way you use names can reveal a lot about social structure, and also history.

Naming cars appears to be a relatively new phenomenon, but boats have had names since thousands of years ago.

I asked how the question of naming might reflect on the issue of capitalizing things, like The City, the South Bay, the East Bay, etc. When we capitalize, it gives a name-like quality to the thing being described. Che suggested that magical librarians might need to be called something different if they were part of a magical librarian's guild rather than simply a magical librarian.

There are rules for the use of mother vs. Mother; mother is a noun while Mother is a name. Sometimes it's less clear whether to use capitals on something like Lady.

Legislative bills for the government often get names or acronyms. Military operations get names; we were trying to think whether Desert Storm was the first one or one of the first ones named, but we couldn't be sure because we don't have military experience. It may simply be that those names existed but weren't widely known.

When you want people to talk about something, it helps to give it a name. Similarly, if you don't want people to talk about something, don't give it a name.

Thank you to everyone who attended this discussion. I really enjoyed it! Dive into Worldbuilding meets again on Tuesday, July 2, 2019 at 4pm Pacific. I hope to see you there!

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Naming

This is not the first time we've talked about naming on the show, but there's always more to explore on a topic this rich! We started out by talking about the Atlas of True Names, which gives translated versions of all sorts of place names from around the world. Over time, a place which has been given a literally descriptive name tends to keep the form of its name as the language changes around it, and the end result is that it turns into a string of syllables that have lost their literal meaning.

Brian remarked that a lot of rivers are named "water." The Celtic word for water is uisge, which is the origin of the word "whiskey," but also appears in various forms in many river names. These forms may include Usk, Esk, Ax, Ex, Aven, and Avon. This means that a lot of river names have built-in redundancy, and mean "the river Water." We parsed out the meaning of Stratford on Avon, which breaks down to:

Strat - street
ford - place to cross water
on
Avon - water

Newcastle upon Tyne is another place name that began as literally descriptive (a new castle had been built there).

I remarked that it's possible to think of someone's personal name as an unparsed unit, as when in High School I used to think of my teacher's appelation, "Mr. Sturch," as a single unit. When I graduated, and the social context of usage changed, he asked me to call him Nicholas, and I found it very difficult!

Context of usage is absolutely critical when it comes to names. Context includes who is saying the name, who hears the name, and when and where it is said.

A great many surnames come from the names of jobs, but have lost their literal significance over time. With names like Carpenter, the original word is still in active use and we can tell that it has a literal significance, but with jobs that have become obsolete, like Fletcher, Cartwright, Carter, or even Smith, the name quickly becomes dissociated from its past meaning.

The pool of possible first names in the medieval period was very small.
Many virtues have been used as first names (Faith, Hope, Charity, etc.) - not just in English, but in other languages as well. Imani is a name that means "faith."

Names can be changed. One place where many names were changed was Ellis Island. On Ellis Island, the people checking immigrants into the United States often misheard names and wrote them down wrong, thereby changing them. There were also cases where people thought they were supposed to give their profession, and their profession was written down as their surname. Many people had heard rumors that goldsmiths and silversmiths were wanted in the US, so they told the Ellis Island officers those were their professions... and ended up with them as surnames.

When you're working in a secondary world, I encourage you not to simply make names up. Have some fun. Retcon some historical Easter Eggs.

I would love to see a speculative Ellis Island where names are being changed. The cultural issues surrounding those changes could be difficult but also fascinating. Racism definitely had a hand in those name changes. Conversion from Cyrillic or other alphabets into Latin may also have had an influence.

People who were enslaved in the US often had their names forcibly changed. Sometimes they ended up having to use the surnames of the slave owners, and this has sometimes led to people changing their names away from those names later.

People sometimes change their names, or take on new names, when they undergo religious conversions.

People can change their name if they are affirming a new gender identity.

People can assume a stage name.

Names are very often associated with social affiliations. Thus, if your social affiliations are changing, or the terms on which you engage socially are changing, a change of name becomes likely.

Cliff mentioned titles. We touched on this only briefly, but he mentioned that a Southern man who is respected may be called Colonel even if he is not in the military. He also mentioned that in his sitar school, there are special titles for a maestro who is Muslim (ustad), and other special ways for members of the gurana to indicate each other.

Paul mentioned that George, Duke of Clarence, is likely to be called Clarence rather than George.

Not everyone uses a family name as a surname. Sometimes there are clan names. In my Varin world, there are caste names. These group-affiliation names may come before or after the personal name. In fact, just recently, Japan asked American journalists to change their naming conventions so as to list the surname first and personal name second rather than doing it in the American order.

The Peasprout Chen books use naming very carefully, with a mix of Chinese, Japanese, and different naming conventions. Peasprout's name suggests her humble origins.

Morgan mentioned that there is a different between a name when it is spoken and when it is written. Do we need to spell a name? How important is that? (People make lots of different spellings for names that have similar sounds.)

A computer system codifies quite a number of assumptions about what form names are supposed to take. Is it all flexible to naming differences? It may be, or may not be. How flexible is the government when it comes to recording names?

Arkady Martine's books use names that consist of a number followed by a noun, like 17 Waterfall or 3 Seagrass. The characters in the book consider the meanings of these names as they encounter them.

Racial or ethnic affiliation can also often be guessed on the basis of name.

We also talked about signatures. Do we ever get advised on our signatures and what they should look like? We do get advised on penmanship. Cliff told us that he decided at one point that his signature was too legible, and obfuscated it on purpose. People don't necessarily sign their names with pens, but can use signet rings or stamps (like Japanese hanko).

We are expected to provide our signatures for banks, for school permissions, and for many other daily purposes. We may have to do book signings if we are authors! The signature becomes a visual object. We can make choices about how and why to write our name differently. Do we have to be able to sign quickly? Do we need to have it be hard to replicate? Are we executives, or doctors? Alethea Kontis makes beautiful, artistically decorated signatures.

In the United States for many years it was the tradition for a husband's name to take over the wife's name completely. Thus Ms. Marie Estelle marrying Mr. Tom Clintock would become Mrs. Tom Clintock. This custom has changed, however, and more women are either appearing as themselves with a new last name (Mrs. Marie Clintock) or not changing their names at all. The custom of giving children the father's last name creates pressure on the wife to take the husband's last name so the family will have a unified identifier. Many people are heiphenating names, also, to combine the two surnames. Some couples create a new name using letters from the old name. At this point, there are various approaches to naming when a couple becomes legally official.

What is the point of a family name? Is it to identify members of the same family? Is it to sustain a lineage of ancestors? Answer this question and you may get new ideas about how to handle surnames in a secondary world.

Spanish names tend to take the surnames of both parents, allowing linkage back along the lineage. These names do get very long sometimes!

Brian says that in his experience managing payroll across multiple countries, he's seen lots of naming styles, but the one he hasn't yet figured out is the one in Indonesia.

Names often have a signifier for the individual, and a signifier for a larger group of some kind. What is the nature of that group?

Don't forget to consider nicknames.

Sometimes people use patronymics, in which the surname is "child of X" where X is the father. Iceland still uses these names. It would also be possible to use matronymics.

Thank you to everyone who attended and contributed to this enjoyable discussion! This week, Dive into Worldbuilding meets on Tuesday, June 18th at 4pm to discuss What Deserves a Name? I hope you can join us! Join the Dive into Worldbuilding group on Facebook for the latest updates, links, and topics!

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Jaymee Goh

It was a pleasure to have Jaymee Goh on the show after seeing her at SF in SF last month! If you'd like to learn about SF in SF (Science Fiction in San Francisco), go here. At that event, Jaymee read a horror story called "When the Bough Breaks," so we started out by talking about that story.

Jaymee explained that she arrived at that story via a process of several years. It started out with a dream of fear and anxiety associated with a strong sensation Jaymee had of pins and needles in her back, which her brain interpreted as a ghost. She gets quite a bit of inspiration from dreams. She took the idea of spirits hanging around us all the time, and added to it an image of a little boy lying dead in a puddle - he was electrocuted, but everyone knows that he was killed by spirits.

The story treats with the theme of kids not being taken seriously by adults.

In 1992 or 1993 there was a luxury condominium building that collapsed because it had been built on the side of a hill, and there was a landslide. The building hadn't been able to handle the runoff, and had been undermined. Jaymee put it together with her other ideas and asked, "What if this disaster had been caused by ghosts?"

"When the Bough Breaks" is set in Malaysia, and has a condominium building that is similar to the one in the real world collapse. There are many buildings designed with a courtyard in the middle so kids can play. In her story, the courtyard is between the condos and the face of the hill, and it's called "The Cradle."

I was really fascinated by the way Jaymee used language in her story. She explained to us that this is exactly how Malaysians talk. She described it as the country having several major languages, and people having a basolect - one main language - to which they would add grammar and vocabulary from others. Maybe the base would be Malay, with Chinese and English added. Maybe if the person was middle class it might be English with Malay and Chinese added. In the story, it's very clear that this is not an exclusively English-speaking community. When she was hanging with friends there would be various groups with different accents.

I asked Jaymee if she found it at all hard to balance the authenticity of the speech with the need for the audience to understand it. She said it's not too hard to balance because there's high compatibility, with a lot of vocabulary and grammar coming from English.

"This is literally how my family talks," she explains. There are degrees of difference from family to family. She compares her work to the short fiction of Zen Cho, who uses more Hokkien in the text.

We then talked about Jaymee's Steampunk work. She has an ongoing series looking at colonization of maritime Southeast Asia, including Kalimantan, Borneo, and the Straits of Malacca. The Portuguese were in Malacca and Singapore, and the Dutch, English, and Portuguese fought over the area.

In her work, steampunk technology is used to oppose colonization. The current racial dynamics in Asia are a direct result of colonization, so she is looking at what happens to the concept of Malaysian identity using a multiracial cast of characters with different cultural backgrounds. There are many turns of phrase she uses which are specific to the local geography.

Jaymee wrote the first story in this series almost ten years ago. She's had three stories published in this setting. She says it's hard for it to stand alone. Finding pre-colonial research resources from the region is hard, and sometimes it's hard to know how to start.

Sometimes it's hard to know how to tell a story if the technology involved is very cool but very visual.

Jaymee keeps files on stories she wants to tell. One story of this kind is based on another historical event of the 1960's. She saw a documentary about Chinese dock workers between the 1930s and 1960s, where the workers organized themselves by clan name or family name, and one of the clans was "mixed." She really liked the idea of all the clans, and the odd-one-out people banding together with each other. These clans competed for work by trying to make their teams the cheapest, fastest, and most available, but this led to tragedy. A shipment came in, and all the groups were trying to do the job right now. It was raining. They were supposed to throw a chicken in and see if it was safe to go in, and if the chicken died, they had to air the hold out first. This time they didn't use a chicken. Rotting onions in the hold had filled the air with poisonous gas, and this made the workers sick, and many fell into the sea as they came off the ship. Jaymee told us the story idea is that the only survivor of such an accident has survivor guilt and one day will tell the story of the actual accident.

Jaymee assured us, though, that she doesn't always focus on disasters or horrors. She is writing a story about a girl and an airship, and romance and matchmaking with nonbinary gender. The girl's family owns a crocodile farm. One of the messages in the story is "you can be as nonbinary as you want but people will still try to marry you off."

I asked Jaymee about her work in progress. She has been working on a fantasy romance for the last year. There are old stories about immortals performing miracles, but then one of the immortals refuses to perform miracles and disappears. Many religious philosophies ask you to distance yourself from worldliness, to be selfless, or to give up your desire for power. If you define yourself by the things you own, or by your authority, you go down a garden path of suffering. You end up losing the thing that defines you. But this is not how government or politics work. If immortals start disappearing, how do you deal with it? What happens if the influence of ancestral spirits were empirically indentifiable?

This is a love story, but lots of other things happen in it. The hero is an immortal who wanted to divest from the world, but falls in love instead. What happens when he comes to be invested? Does he gain mortality? Jaymee told us she had a whole argument with herself about this. The heroine is a woman who can speak to spirits.

There are interesting things about using immortals. Theoretically, an immortal would have long term knowledge about how things used to be. We become used to a lot of terrible things today, but who can remember useful systems that are now obsolete? The immortal who disappears goes away for a long time, but comes back looking for a bowl of noodles.

I really want to find out more about this story when it's finished!

I opened up the discussion to questions at this point. Kate expressed her appreciation of the story about the chicken in the hold, and compared it to the canary in the coal mine. Kat suggested it would be very interesting to compile a lateral wiki of global myths that showed their similarities. We also wanted to see an anthology of bird stories!

We also talked about a chicken marriage custom where the best man has to throw a rooster over the marriage bed. "Throwing the cock over the bed" is supposed to be a method of getting aboy child first. There is a similar custom where you have a rooster and hen in a cage, and open the cage and see which one comes out first in an attempt to divine the sex of your next child. There are a great many chicken-related traditions.

Jaymee, thank you so much for coming on the show! It was lovely to have you, and you are welcome back again any time. Thank you also to everyone who attended the discussion.

This week, Dive into Worldbuilding meets on Thursday, June 13th at 4pm Pacific to discuss What Deserves a Name? I hope you can join us!

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How We Start the Day

How we start the day is about the question of routines. That which is routine is often not thought about consciously, but even the most basic routines vary a lot across the world, and can give us interesting ideas for worldbuilding.

Breakfast in the United States was our entry point, and over time, breakfast in the US has come to be very sugar-based. Donuts, pancakes, and cereal can all be super sweet. Eggs and bacon, while traditional and not particularly sweet, are not what people typically eat on a daily basis. I told the group about an experience I had eating fish with pecans for breakfast in New Orleans, and how surprising this was for me. I've had quite a number of breakfasts in Japan that involved rice, raw egg, and seaweed (yum!).

Do you eat breakfast? Do your characters eat breakfast? If you have "reasons" to make it part of your routine, external pressures like kids going to school, or work outside the home, it may be something you do without thinking about it much. Or, like Morgan, you may have to make a conscious decision to have it. The amount of preparation involved in the food may be a barrier - quick cereal or toaster waffles might be a solution for not having a lot of time to cook or think. American culture has a lot of narratives about how important breakfast is, but if you are a person with chronic illness/fatigue, breakfast might be very difficult to fit into your day. And what if you weren't in a modern American home, but instead in the wilderness where you had to catch your breakfast? How would you do that? How would you prepare?

In Japanese, the morning greeting Ohayo gozaimasu (おはようございます）literally means "it's early."

 Paul says he grabs something quick for breakfast on a weekday, but cooks something savory for himself on a weekend day.

Kat brought up that not every individual can easily conform to expectations like those for eating breakfast. She's not a morning person, and her "stomach is not awake." If she's forced to eat cold cereal in the morning, she gets stomach pain. This was a problem when her high school had a breakfast check before school and she was unable to eat.

Many of our cultural narratives, like "breakfast is the most important meal of the day!" don't apply gracefully to all members of the society.

What other kinds of morning routines do we have? Do we pray in the morning? Do you shower in the morning?

Does your cat wake you up? Does another companion animal wake you? Can you imagine a character in a story being awakened by a companion animal staring, knocking objects off surfaces, or chewing hair, etc.?

Do you wake to the sound of your coffee being finished?

Does the family assemble for prayers at a family altar?

In Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, people cast omens for the day as part of the morning routine.

Do you have a social media routine in the morning? What does that do for you? Does it give you the sense that you are rebooting into yourself? That you are reconnecting with a local or global community?

Do you do "morning pages"? Perhaps you write to start your day, or draw.

Do you use stimulants? These have different effects depending on the person. Paul uses them to wake up, while Morgan uses them to level out. Kat has wildly varying responses to caffeine depending on the day. For me, it makes me jittery and then makes me feel ugh two hours later. A lot of societies use stimulants of different kinds. Would you simply give your world coffee by another name? Or could you construct new cultural habits around a different kind of stimulant?

Morgan says she often engages with a to-do list she sets up the night before.

In the morning, you may have to disengage from devices like a CPAP machine, or remove dental devices. You may have to engage devices like a boot for your injured foot. You may have to undo braids you put in your hair. You should probably get out of pajamas and into day clothes.

Do you wake others? Do you provide breakfast? Or are you the one being woken and provided with breakfast?

What does it mean to be "presentable" for the start of your day? How important is it? Can you leave your home in your bed clothes? Under what conditions? Can you drop off kids at school in your pajamas, or is there a parent dropoff dress code? Do you have to have your hair done? Toleration of a lack of preparation may be associated with racial privilege. Do you discuss the importance of looking presentable, and what that means, with your children? There is ableism involved in any hard-and-fast rule about presentability.

Is chronism something we should consider? Are morning people better treated, better catered to, than evening people?

Some people can change their sleep time habits. Other people find it harder or impossible. What is your natural rhythm? 24 hours? 27 hours?

Kat mentioned that in restaurants, people on the later shifts may say "ohayo" (it's early/good morning) as they first encounter their co-workers regardless of the hour of the day.

On space ships or stations, days are not connected to planetary rotations. Shifts are also needed for different times of day.

Is fetching water a key part of your morning? How does that work in different climates or different biomes? In an icy place, you might never let the fire go out. Water retaining vessels become very important in certain climates. What time is it safe to go fetch water?

In Edwardian times, if you were lower status, you would have to go to sleep late and wake early because it was your job to heat the ovens, bring water to people, and empty chamber pots. Before mechanization, people had to do these things behind the scenes.

Do you have to start your day with medication? Is this something that happens a lot in SFF? Maybe in cyberpunk, but not often in fantasy. Breakfast can be tied to medication, either because you have to take it with food, or an hour after eating.

Do you have to make school lunches? How many? What do you include? (This is very cultural). Do you have to participate directly in getting others ready?

What are your makeup and hair routines, if any? How long do they take? Do you have the option of choosing an easy presentation?

In Varin, unless you are a noble, you are required to put your cate mark on before you leave your home for the day.

What time can you enter someone's house? Paul remarked that in Rome, you were supposed to show up early at your patron's house.

What is the earliest time you can call or text?

What happens to morning routines if you are sharing space with others?

At what time can you stop being quiet?

How do you wake someone else? what do you say/not say? Do you use alarm clocks? What are they like? Do they speak to you? Do they run away from you? Do you pour water on someone?

This was a fun discussion. Thank you to everyone who participated. Our next meeting will be Thursday, June 6th at 4pm Pacific, and we'll talk about Naming. I hope you can join us!

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Sounds and Onomatopoeia

BAM!
POW!

These are probably the kinds of things we think of when we think about onomatopoeia, but one of the things we wanted to do in this discussion is expand how we think about the use of sound in prose.

Paul pointed out that paying attention to what people hear in a fictional environment is very important. Sound words themselves can come across as cool, or as esoteric, depending on which ones you choose.

I recently used onomatopoeia in a chapter I was working on, in which my point-of-view character was haunted by the sound of a weapon discharge after nearly being killed by it. What it involved was inserting the word "zzap" at different points in the narrative.

As with most literary techniques, whether it is effective or not depends a lot on how you do it. Any technique can be overused, or become intrusive. Rowan pointed out that redundancy is annoying. My own take on this is that repetition is a very powerful technique, and should be used carefully (because redundancy is annoying!).

Morgan noted that particular sounds can be very meaningful, such as the sound a coffeemaker makes when it's finished. A sawblade sound could also be striking. So can music.

Kat pointed out that the presence or absence of sound can be significant. What is the narrative impact when engine noise stops? What about birdsong? She talked about being in Australia and listening to kookaburras outside the window. This sound has so often been used by sound engineers to evoke the jungle - inaccurately - that it can be disconcerting. We get trained to expect particular sounds in particular environments, but sword-drawing does not make the sound sshhhinggg!

Think about what sounds you are choosing to describe. Why have you chosen them? What is important about them?

Think also about when you might notice sound. A heavy drawer makes a very different sound from a light drawer when opening. In radio plays, these differences would have been important to convey properly, but they're harder to capture in text.

Very often we are taught to write to show off beautiful ways to write. We should also try to think not just about how to make our writing sound beautiful but the larger significance of the techniques we use.

Onomatopoeia is optional in English but less so in a language like Japanese, where it constitutes a high percentage of adverbs.

Brian pointed out that if you focus on sound it can give your story more texture and weight, and a greater feeling of immersion. It directs your attention and adds dimension. It can also be an element of character voice.

The same event can be described with varying amounts of sound in the text. Here's an example:
"Crash" + description of lightning
"The lightning crashed"
Lightning lit the sky.

You can create a lot of sound-like effect just by using particular words with repeating sounds, as in alliteration, sibilance, and assonance. One author who does this beautifully is James Thurber in his children's works The Thirteen Clocks and The Wonderful O.

You can indicate a lot about your world by picking out sounds to describe. Adding those words can take time.

What is the reader's expectation of the soundscape? What do they know, or not know? Is the soundscape important? What should you describe, and how much, in order to capture it?

Steven King provides sound details, because you have to know what the normal sounds of a house are in order to understand what it means when they change. Set up the normal so you can understand departure from the normal. Character judgment is one good tool for doing this.

In comic books, you do have to come up with ways that things sound. This can be tricky!

In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, there is a recurring pockety-pockety sound that never gets explained, but may suggest he works in a factory in his real life.

The sound of a keyboard typewriter used to be the sound of word production.

Kat has written about a character with PTSD who is triggered by the presence or absence of certain noises. She astutely remarked that we should pay attention to the different sounds made by a pine forest and a broad-leaf deciduous forest.

Cliff pointed out that in The War of the Worlds, the presence of silence is very important to convey a ghost city.

What do places full of humans sound like? What do they sound like when they are not full of huans?

How do we represent language sounds that we don't understand? The word barbarian comes from the idea that foreigners used to say "bar bar."

If you don't describe accent or language, people will assume a default majority language. They will tend not to think it's their own language, necessarily.

Tobias Buckell has often dealt with issues surrounding how to portray patois in text.

We shouldn't always demand that the reader supply sonds for us.

Standardizing the "sound" of descriptive narrative is not always a socially neutral choice.

Robert Parker Spencer novels use a Bostonian dialect, and Morgan noted she never noticed the accent in the books until it was pointed out to her.

You can make deliberate choices at the phoneme level, in your word choices, in your prosody and rhythm to change the feel of narrative.

How much is an accent noticed by the point of view character? How much distinction is drawn between dialects in the world?

What kind of ideas do the people of your world have about what an upper-class accent is like? What a lower-class accent is like? All these judgments are culturally grounded.

What happens when you are writing a multi-species story? How do you deal with all kinds of accents?

Keep in mind that a character's native language is generally a major source of their accent in a second language. We have a lot of stereotypes and strong judgments we associate with particular social dialects, regional dialects, and foreign languages.

Thank you to everyone who attended!

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What Do Worldbuilders Mean by World? (Scope and Focus)

Worldbuilding is a word that started out being applied exclusively to science fiction and fantasy settings, but which in my view deserves to be applied more widely. One of the reasons I thought we should talk about it is that when the word comes up, as in a convention panel on worldbuilding, it tends to divide into two options:

1. How to create a planet from the solar system up
2. How to create a rich setting for story writing

Another one of the really common preconceptions about worldbuilding is that it requires you to create a world massive enough to require an entire "world bible," and all before you begin writing any of the story. This is not the case; worldbuilding can begin with the story and continue well after the story has launched, and it should not require you to fill reams of paper with notes before you can create a single word of the story about it.

Kat notes, however, that a key question is "How much divergence are you building into what the audience is used to?" In a sense, we're never NOT using a giant world, because whatever we don't invent tends to come from our own world, and is likely to be unconsidered.

Maris remarked that literary fiction also has key divergences from our world that need attention. Urban fantasy takes these divergences and pushes them further; science fiction and fantasy tend to take them even further. Kate added that even a sitcom that posits a bunch of rich white people living in big apartments in New York has a strong element of fantasy in it.

One excellent example of worldbuilding that involves creating a setting from our own world is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which creates a very strong sense of Sweden and its climate, locations, and culture. In my own case, this is a foreign world to me, because I've never been to Sweden. John Irving's work creates a very strong sense of New England as a setting. One can almost consider the world and its culture as a character in the story. Clarity of scene, and a sense of structure in the setting, arise from excellent worldbuilding.

Historical fiction also has a lot of worldbuilding work to do. It is often called upon to correct wrong ideas (especially about race) and help us understand what it felt like to live in the world during the time period it features.

Kat has a concept she uses called "projected reader," which basically refers to the intended audience of a piece, with a few nuances added - specifically, that the intention may not be conscious on the part of the author. What does your audience know, and what do they need to know? How big is the gap between those two things? What kind of bridge do you need to create between them, as an author? The answer to these questions may be similar whether you are in a secondary world or working in a world that is Earth, but unfamiliar to readers. Here's an example: if you are writing about high school, and your projected reader is in high school, then you are free to leave some things unexplained.

Some people like to know all the physical details so they can describe them in a way that could be rendered in a painting. Sometimes it's important to do this. Other times, it's less so.

Third person limited point of view is a really great way to limit the scope of what needs to be described.

If we want to consider what is happening at the word level, any content word has the ability to bring with it a whole load of contextual information that suggests things about the world. In the conversation I called this a word schema. The author has to choose a word that matches the intended contextual information as closely as possible, and may then have to do some work to control aspects of that information, cutting off some reader expectations and encouraging others.

If you are Tolkien and you write potatoes into your world, is it a problem? Which readers will accept it, and which will start wondering whether Middle Earth has experienced a Columbian Exchange? What happens if you bring silk into your world? What kind of contextual assumptions will it bring with it?

Future science fiction tends to bring traditional assumptions of its own. Rayguns and faster-than-light travel tend to be on the list.

How much do you need to know about a moon in order to write about it?

How do you deal with the iceberg problem, where you generally need to know a lot more than appears on the page in your story? How much are you supporting the material that is there?

Are your worldbuilding details story-relevant? Are they character-relevant?

I had a terrible problem with the worldbuilding for the Star Trek TNG episode Darmok because although I loved the language concept, I felt it was insufficiently supported by the worldbuilding.

In a sense, there's a contract between the reader and the author, what Jed Hartman calls "author points." It's a question of how much the reader trusts the author and what they are willing to allow, and what breaks their suspension of disbelief.

I then asked my discussants whether they felt there was any part of worldbuilding they would identify as indispensable.

Maris suggested the question of what your character can use as a metaphor: would a character use a water metaphor on a desert world, in what way, and what would that mean?

Kat talked about choosing curse words for the world, setting up rubrics of cursing and asking what a character is upset by. Is it religiosity, filth, sexual experience? Or should it be something like randomness? Or leaks (if you live on a space ship)? How does your character think of the world and its relations and expectations? Is the person marginalized? Do they have a struggle with the environment? Attitudes and judgment are really important here.

 Maris remarked that one of the most important things is what the character judges as normal vs. what is weird. 

What if being bilaterally symmetrical was surprising? This would hint at an alien experience.

Paul said he values family structures, relationships and marriages, and how kids are raised. What is the smallest nuclear family? Do people live separated, or in groups? What do societies do? What does that say about the world?

Cliff talked about implied worldbuilding, and what the reader needs in order for the world to make sense. He also noted that epic fantasy worldbuilding and flash fiction worldbuilding have very different requirements. He pointed out the marked/unmarked distinction. Something that is unmarked is considered normal, default, unremarkable; something that is marked is unusual, worthy of note. In our own society, a white cis male Christian Anglo-Saxon Protestant - who is bilaterally symmetrical - is the unmarked default. Anything that is unmarked in our society will be bought to story context by a reader, and the author has to build up story context in order to change that.

Whenever an author doesn't put a marker or label on something they are relying on the default. If you don't want something to be perceived as default in your story world, put a label on it.

A lot of story worlds assume the existence of liquid intoxicants in association with violence. "Saloons" are a genre in and of themselves.

Not all story worlds are built in depth and highly consistent. The kinds of departures a story is allowed to take from its norms are also part of the story's worldbuilding. Cliff mentioned how Futurama brings past assumptions into the far future, as when it features space pirates.

Paul noted you can start writing first and then backform the world later, building the iceberg underneath you as you go.

I mentioned exploratory drafts, which are drafts of a story in which the author is exploring the world for the first time.

Is realism valuable? Sometimes people will swear that it's more important than anything else, but people don't agree on what is realistic. A lot of times, realism has more to do with what expectations the reader expects to have fulfilled than the actual features of a world.

Fans will often build a wiki to try to make story worlds make sense.

Sometimes what you come into story creation with is a set of story kernels, or what Kat called shards. I imagine that story worlds grow like crystals from the shards we come in with. The principles that form those crystals are often unconscious, so we should look out for them and try to understand them.

Comic books retcon, reboot, and do all sorts of things with their storylines. The way I think of this is that comics are often fanfic of themselves. Maris said that instead of running on author points, they often run on character points.

Worlds are not always consistent. In Star Wars, "your outdated religion" was only 20 years ago! Though it should be pointed out that sometimes people in real life refer to each other's current beliefs as outdated.

There are many kinds of worldbuilding. A company like Disney might have teams working on world-internal consistency. When we had Monica Valentinelli visit the show, she talked about how to work for consistency in a shared world.

How much elasticity does the world have? How do readers/viewers cope with departures from norms? How much does this have to do with episodic storytelling? Does the storyline have to re-set to its norms after every episode?

This was a very interesting discussion! Thanks to everyone who attended. Today, Dive into Worldbuilding will meet at 4pm Pacific to discuss Sounds and Onomatopoeia. I hope you can join us!

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Drawings, Paintings, Photos, Video: How We Capture Images

This was a really fun chat, and I loved having so many people there! We started by talking about photos of people and how they are captured. Kat mentioned that occasionally there are places where you can get your silhouette cut out using a 150 year old silhouette technique that was once the best way to capture your loved one's image without great expense. Whatever happened to the silhouette cutters joined our previously-asked question of whatever happened to the buggy-whip makers...

Brian came in to drop some well-researched knowledge about portraiture in the Renaissance. He told us that the painted sculptures of ancient Greece and Rome had all had their paint rubbed off by the Renaissance, so the Renaissance sculptors imitated the greatness of the ancients by creating sculptures with no color added. Portraiture in the Renaissance was a rich man's game. You either did it to show how rich you were (your social status generally), or to show how pious you were. A lot of information in these portraits was symbolic and decodable. What you carried, where the portrait was set, and what you were wearing had specific messages to send to viewers of the portrait. (I've always thought this would be a fun thing to take advantage of in a fictional setting!)

Self-portraits during this period were a form of advertising. You would paint a picture of yourself that you could then sit next to so passersby could see how great you were at rendering an accurate portrait. Still lifes were also a way for artists to show off their technique.

Brian estimated that watercolors first started being used in the 1820-1830 range. They could be easily damaged by water. They also depended on the availability of paper. Pen and ink images, though, go back much further, and if you consider the water-based ink paintings of Asia, they go back much farther.

Art can have periods of little change depending on what is going on in the society. European paintings had about 150 years of stagnation. During a much earlier period, traditional Chinese art stayed very much the same for about 100 years. In the year 900 it was much more advanced than that of the societies around it. Kat pointed out that it had a connection to calligraphy, and that the training for calligraphy (at least) has a kind of cultural conservatism where you want to precisely duplicate the style of the master before innovating. Ink-making in China was also standardized, where it was far more do-it-yourself in Europe. The sinosphere had a lot of social stability, and placed value on social stability. Europe in the Renaissance had a lot of different competing rulers with less hegemonic control (unless you consider the Catholic Church hegemonic). The Ottoman Empire was located between these two very different cultural groups.

One key question to ask whenever you are talking about art history in our world, or in a fictional world, is "What gets preserved?" Whether art gets preserved will depend a lot on whether it's politically accepted.

Brian told us about a piece from Kent, England, which had been broken up. Some pieces were lost, and some were sent to France during WWII to try to get them away from the German attacks, and then ended up in the German salt mines after France fell. Art works have a ridiculously complex history.

In Japan, shrines are expected to be rebuilt because of the dangers they face: earthquakes, thunder, fire, and the old man.

Cathedrals were made of stonework and wood with the expectation that the wood would be lost over the centuries, but the stone would stay and the wood could be replaced.

We're trained to think that the things that count are preserved, but new storage media can cause problems. NASA is losing some of its storage media.

These days, a lot of value is placed on photo-like images. This value started surprisingly early. Brian remarked that the less representative art movements followed the advent of photography, to capture what photos could not, and maintain the relevance of the artistic techniques in an age where accurate representation was already taken care of by the photographic medium.

Of course, photography was used for artistic experimentation quite early, using perspective, and creating images of fairies and ghosts, etc.

In the days of sculptures and painted portraits, the subjects of those portraits were often portrayed as idealized versions of themselves. A body model might be used because a famous person might not want to sit for the length of time required for the portrait to be completed.

Photography gave the sense of being more real, but still people used creativity. These days, digital media are also used in creative ways.

In the Victorian times, people would have death portraits. You would have a picture of a family where a child who had died would be propped up in the portrait. In the 1880's-1890's, taking an image was an expense, and difficult, so for daily life it wasn't so critical, but if a child died then you might have no way to preserve their memory, so you would take the picture immediately after their death as a memorial. By the 1920's it had become easy, and this tradition disappeared.

Polaroids were an image-capture technology of a particular era!

There was also the idea of the "Kodak moment." Photography companies would want you to be aware of times in your life when you might want to take a photograph, so that they could continue to have business. Now, it's so easy to take pictures that Kat has her kids photograph the food inside the fridge and bring her the picture so she can tell them what they can eat without having to stop what she's doing. Brian takes photographs of signs and plaques at museums so he can refer back to them later. For me, having the ability to make digital photos meant I tried a lot more shots, and a lot more risky angles, etc. because I didn't have to waste film if I got them wrong. You can even take a picture of paperwork, or a phone number, rather than having to make a copy.

At this point, three-dimensional solid representations are precious. Busts are not terribly popular currently, but they might become so with the rise of 3D printers.

So how do we incorporate this into our worldbuilding? Well, there's always the Portrait of Dorian Gray... But it's a good idea to ask if you have artists in your sff. A lot of arts and crafts don't make it into our fictional depictions.

In my world of Varin, portraiture is going strong because the people have a religious view that discourages taking too-accurate images of people (called "stealing someone's face"). In Australia and New Zealand, you can often find warnings about sharing images or videos of deceased people.

We have a tradition of not taking pictures of the Queen of England eating, or blowing her nose.

IDs require photos or some kind of biometric information. But are people allowed to keep glasses on? Do you want a photo showing your ears? (Some agencies do) Can you wear a hat? Can you wear a colander on your head?

Do you smile in photos or not?

How do we identify people? Hair and eye color are not always useful metrics. What if someone were identified on the basis of how bilaterally symmetrical they were, instead?

We use photos to show off socially, and to communicate. I just had author photos taken for my forthcoming novel, and how I "come across" in such a photo is an important cultural consideration. There's value in putting a face on an author. What happens if you send a photo of someone else? Or of yourself, twenty years ago? It's a form of communication that makes a statement about a current reality. These days, we are represented by postage stamp-sized images online.

Think about the fake profiles that issue friend requests. What are they trying to achieve with the photos they steal? What values are they trying to access with their images of graying military widowers, or hot young things?

Kimberly brought up the question of verbally describing a drawing of an image, which has its own sort of inception-like redundancy. Describing portraits takes time, and is quite challenging. Artists imagined many different versions of the Iron Throne before one was accepted as the cultural canon. There are moving portraits in Harry Potter. You might take the time to describe a piece of art in depth if it were highly relevant to your plot, but mostly you'll sketch out just a few details.

Morgan noted that art, and feelings about art, can be instrumental in a point of view or a mood.

Where art is displayed, and how much of it there is, indicates things about your world. Think through where art would appear, and what it would depict, and whether it is permanent or seasonal.

We briefly mentioned representational caricatures like the ones you might see at an amusement park. What is the function of that? We decided we could have a whole discussion on Othering in such representations, but that we didn't have time right then.

Kat asked what it would be like to revive a heritage art in artificial gravity.

I mentioned my story "At Cross Purposes," which featured aliens who loved Art and considered it the purpose of civilization and progress.

We wondered about scent art and how that might be used in a story.

How do artists talk about their art? Is everyone an artist? Are only a few people artists?

Thank you to everyone who attended!

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