All The Building Bricks

I’m aware someone else on the site is doing a world-building series.

I’m considering honestly doing an entire series just on language. Language-building as part of your world building, if you prefer.

Almost anything you write is going to require language. No, I don’t mean to write the book, because duh. Though I’d love to see one or more of you writing a novel through interpretive dance. If you manage it, you’ll probably have made your name.

But anyway, almost anything you write needs some thought given to language, beyond the language you use to tell the story: language embedded in the world and in the characters.

Look, before we plunge in, let’s just touch on “the words you tell the story with.”

If you’re not the type of person who is madly in love with words and different ways to express things in words — if you are, you’ll know. Because you’ll find yourself repeating certain words and turns of phrase for the cheer joy of their mouth-feel — do not overthink it. You’re allowed to be the sort of writer who is in it to tell the story, and that’s all. A lot of famous authors have been primarily story tellers, not wordsmiths. (Edgar Rice Burroughs comes to mind, for instance. Also Agatha Christie.)

If you are one of those, we advise getting out of your own way. Don’t be overly restrictive like the minimalists, or count the number of times you used adverbs or wring your hands over over-use of “that.” Just tell the story the best you know how, and count on it to shine.

OTOH if you ARE one of those writers who love words — brother, do I feel you! — you have work to do keeping the words from getting in the way of the story. Because they will. Left to your own devices, you’ll let the words carry you on their own tidal wave, and completely forget they’re there to work for you. When you’re done, you might have a work of modern poetry, but your readers will have a heck of a time following the story. My first book Ill Met By Moonlight underwent three revisions and is now understandable, if not an easy-read. (I got better. Perhaps the strict discipline was over-tight. I’m now learning to indulge here and there. But it’s like…. even one drink is too much. Well, even one uneeded, over wrought sentence can send me careening into pure self-indulgence and forgetting the story again.)

Now aside from that there is other language in the story.

No?

Well, we presume your people and place have names (though the total absence of them would also create a picture, mind) and that even in the most contemporary and unobtrusive of novel-worlds, your characters word choice, mode of expression and tone are part of a picture.

For instance, if your sewer-rat character speaks like a doctoral dissertation, or your barely-uplifted cat knows Shakespeare, you might have to explain how this came about. If you don’t, you leave the reader wondering what the heck.

Or take historical works… I’m not one of those people who peruses lists of when a word came to be to figure out if it fits with the time. Your reader won’t either. I don’t care if ponytail didn’t exist as a word in the seventeenth century, if you use queue you best be writing a book set in China, because words have flavors.

I also don’t do what an acquaintance used to do and carefully restrict language to either Anglo-saxon derived or Latin derived words. That’s now how people speak, and frankly, most people couldn’t care less where a word came from. In fact humans — not just English speaking humans — have an either distressing or invigorating tendency to grab words that are handy and run with them. I once spent an alcoholic evening with a friend tagging all the borrow words between Japanese and Portuguese, for instance.

However there are limits. I’m still giving the side eye retrospectively to the copy editor who tried to get me to say (in the Musketeer Mysteries) that Porthos knew something subconsciously.

While people were always aware of thoughts and emotions not precisely verbalized and out in the open, “subconscious” is very much an idea of psychology and the late nineteenth century and it has no business in the world of the musketeers unless I explain about the time mahine.

In the same way, I’m getting a wee bit tired of reading regencies where Lady Cheryl or Lady Tiffany are important characters. Look, yeah, creative naming always occurred, but fiction unlike reality needs to be plausible, and when your characters are lifted in toto from the 1990s you shouldn’t underline it with those names.

While at it, if your male character asks your female character for “affirmative consent” before kissing her in the Regency, I’m going to assume you’re writing this while drunk, or are completely and thoroughly ignorant.

In the same way if you’re writing about a foreign country, please know what language they speak there. Early on, in a writer’s group, I had a run in with a woman writing a novel set in Brazil, in which the characters often exclaimed “Mio Dios!” I tried to tell her it was “Meu Deus” and she informed me, stiffly, she’d been there. She’d heard it.

She might very well have, but the ear is not a perfect instrument. (More on that later.) I found out a couple of years after, when a friend visited Portugal that Americans don’t ear certain syllables right. There is a Portuguese river Mondego — pronounced like the french for “mon” e — pronounced like the e in hemp — go No matter how slowly or clearly I pronounced it, she heard Mon-Diego. I think partly from psychological expectation from the Spanish, and partly because that syllable might be difficult for the American ear. At any rate, the fact that she insisted on having Brazilians speaking Spanish was not a confidence builder.

Beyond that, I’ll note that if you’re writing something set in a foreign country you’re not familiar with, you should find someone who is, and run whole expressions by them. Puns are not terribly common as a form of humor in Portugal, for instance, and what you think is an obvious pun might not be for a native speaker (because the words are pronounced just slightly differently or because they’re used together so often no one thinks of the funny sounds.)

For these purposes, remember the past is a foreign country. There are things we say that are attached to our technology (why “Hang up” might not make sense to your kids) and will sound completely weird if set in the past. Enough to stop someone cold. Say you have Shakespeare saying something about “I did not wish to push your buttons.” Que?

Then there are alien languages.

See what I said above about the ear being an imperfect instrument. After some age (anywhere from 3 to 18 you stop being able to ear — without great effort — sounds not often used in your native language.

This is why some people, like me for instance, might have spoken English as their primary language for 2/3 of their lives, but retain an accent. People who view accents as a mark of lack of intelligence (yes, I’ve had that leveled against me, as have other people in public life) only reveal their own provincial nature. We simply don’t hear what we’re doing wrong. Yes, it can be retrained by techniques similar to speech therapy. I’d kind of like to do it, but it’s expensive, takes a lot of time, and husband wouldn’t like it. (The last being decisive.)

What I mean is, decide what syllables your characters in your alien or future society use and hear. The best way to do this is to pick a language that you base your made up one on, so that you know which phonemes are licit.

Because it’s a terrible idea to have Elol and Malol suddenly speak in clicks or only with rs and xs.

In the same sense, if your parallel history never had Jude-Christianity go global, find out what culture most influenced the modern world in that stream, and use names from that. Such a culture would be highly unlikely to have a lot of kids named Elijah or Moses. To put it mildly. Unless you go to the trouble of explaining that there have been excavations in the Middle East that have everyone agog from this peculiar tribe’s habits, kind of like the Egyptian everything of late eighteenth and early 19th century England. But without explanation people are going to go “the…. wait what?”

I was tripped recently while reading a regency (look, it’s popcorn books, when I’m tired. And the great coughening of 2022 — as a side effect of BP meds– left me BEAT) by having the two ladies go on the front porch to seat and talk.

Porch is the wrong word for a regency mansion. Entrance? Portico? Something. Not PORCH. But on top of that, the idea of their sitting there — I immediately saw them on rockers — amicably chatting was just…. wrong.

Anyway, please don’t become paralyzed by this. I realize I am in many ways more uptight about language than normal human beings. But–

Don’t think about it while you’re writing. Think about it afterwards, when you do your revision-read. That’s the time to go “Oh, dear. Am I too trippingly drunk on words.” Or “I have two alien characters named Vilvar, Oclor and… Henry? Maybe I should rethink that or come up with a funny explanation.”

And don’t sweat the small stuff. I forgave Lady Cheryl and Lady Tiffany for their ridiculous names, because the story is fun. Which, ultimately, is all that matters.

OT

Speaking of, I have re-released A Few Good Men, and yes, I would call it something different if I wrote it today. Also, I am aware that this is probably the absolutely worst blurb (or anything) I’ve ever written. Two weeks of not sleeping due to the great coughening must be blamed. I’ll try to rewrite it when I can catch eight hours of sleep.

The book, however, remains one of my own favorites of my work. Which might not mean anything. A parent’s preference doesn’t mean the child is perfect. But it does count for soemthing.

A Few Good Men

(And why #1 New Release in LGBTQ? Well…. Amazon. People who buy it for that might be a little…. shocked. :-P)