P’yatykhatky… If you read the name in a fantasy novel… you’d be rolling your eyes. Yet it is the name of a Ukrainian place, just liberated from the Russian invasion. I’d love to know what it means/ or origin, but I have no idea, and the internet didn’t immediately help me. The point it made so very well for me was that we have higher expectations of fiction than of reality. Reality is allowed to be stranger than fiction, without us rolling our eyes and throwing the book across the room.
As you may gather, the other shoe did not drop (Friday was the first day it could have dropped – not the last). This does not mean I am completely safe from shoe dropping by the dear bureaucrats YET, it just means the sort of equivalent of someone being harassed, and getting a restraining order, not that, AND a shotgun, a couple of German Shepherds and various other forms of… shall we say, insurance. In other words, it might work, especially on reasonable people, and much is better than nothing — but I am working hard on making damned sure. With luck we’ll move past ‘YET’ in the next few weeks — and I’ll tell the full story. But right now, it’s up there with ‘P’yatykhatky’. Implausible, but fact.
One of the things makes my personal dose of implausible reality laughable for fiction, is that… it isn’t just ONE implausible thing you’re asking the reader to suspend disbelief for, but a sequence of them. In fiction, you have a very small number of these that readers will stomach. You can use one to build many more on, but they are plausible in the light of their suspending disbelief for that one item. In the light of this I’d suggest holding back on weird place names (unless that is a core part of your plot) – or other irrelevancies and save the very limited supply of suspension of disbelief for something worthwhile.
And this is a picture of Bert, discovering that the suspension of disbelief in the coldness of winter sea does not make it warmer on the undercarriage :-).
Mad Genius Club 
55 responses to “Implausible”
It’s important that Bert was willing to try.
Take Care.
Concerning situations, people, etc being implausible in fiction, but being real, David Weber talked about a historical person (sorry I forgot his name) that Weber Fans would not believe in if Weber put him in a story.
Apparently, this gentleman was actually very smart but also did incredibly stupid things. 😀
It’s easier to do really stupid things if you’re very smart….and know it.
:lightbulb: Oh!
It’s just like driving!
It’s not safe to be a really good driver. It’s safe to be an at least slightly better than you think you are driver.
Who would believe Mad Jack Churchill?
And that’s if you limit it to the stuff he OBJECTIVELY did.
I remember David Drake having a note like that in one of his Lt Leary novels.
Apparently in the naval battle part of the book was based on, one of the reasons the opposition flagship was captured was during the entire battle, it was firing its cannons without actually loading cannonballs in them.
He did not include that in the novel, because it would have been unbelievable in fiction.
Fiction is more philosophical than history, as Aristotle observed. It omits clutter.
And, boy howdy, clutter removal is imperative. I have a nice-but-clueless college friend who dabbles in (unpublishable) Father Brown-style settings who knows what she likes to read/daydream about but can’t abstract the basic principles of how it’s done. Every now-and-then (most recently yesterday) she sends me an excerpt to critique. 17 character introductions (including name, appearance, profession/relationship in the first 3 pages (in a scene (sort of), not a Dramatis Personae section) , and no POV (authorial POV, but unintentionally). It was like reading a phone directory. As a reader, I felt sure there’d be a quiz.
She understands when I point these things out, but it never lasts. As far as I can tell, she doesn’t ever read any books/articles about writing fiction. Just daydreams, with all the clutter of dreams and less of the structure.
Could you push Techniques of the Selling Writer at her?
….actually, you COULD push her to write D&D style character books, too.
I know DMs who would kill for characters they could lift.
It depends on how patient she is with that breezy 1940s/1950s self help style of prose. Swain has a lot of valid things to say, but conforming to his era’s style of saying them sometimes makes him sound like a snake oil salesman to modern ears.
I actually got a kick out of looking at all the squirrelly little “I am giving you an example in the instruction” tricks.
And, seriously, Father Brown….
TBH, those didn’t even register with me. The resemblance to Norman Vincent Peale in tone and vocabulary did.
(To be clear, I adore Father Brown. But that does mean reading Chesterton, and he’s the first ENJOYABLE author I’ve ever had to take “bites” of, in his non-fiction. That is, read a bit, then stop and chew.)
…and that’s what she’s in love with.
She won’t read “how-to” stuff, and in fact her brain just doesn’t work in that analytical fashion. In a normal world we would have nothing technical to say to each other but, hey, college years and lots of mutual acquaintances & colorful scandals. She sets my teeth on edge when she gushes sweetness & light, but when she asks for commentary I have to find some way to do the responsible thing, even if it’s hopeless. She’s the Mary Poppins and I’m … um… the opposite.
In that case, the only way she’s going to learn is by osmosis. Introduce her to Margery Allingham if you can. She doesn’t have Chesterton’s philosophical depth, but she has similar tendencies when it comes to absurdity, scene-setting, and snark. From there, maybe she’ll expand her horizons to other Golden Age mystery writers.
“Colorful scandals”… as Bridesmaid at my wedding, she left her husband to run off with the Best Man, busting up his marriage, too. All of us had known each other for years by then. Then she married another friend and had a disastrous marriage, from which only one of her three daughters is still speaking to her.
Ah, the ’70s… the shenanigans we got up to… and the impossibility of living them all down. 🙂
Sigh. Sounds like some of my high school / college friends.
Well, if nothing else, such stories could be a bit of background for a character in your own work?
We had a chart in college called the “(Name-Redacted) Octagon” which diagrammed the, um, intimate relationships of a number of our circle of friends (the naughty 60s-70s) and ended up forming the core of a complicated web of connections and cross-connections that carried on for years after our time and probably crossed the continental US and much of Europe.
Some of us only figured as onesies or dead ends on the fringes (I married my college boyfriend), but the octagon of swapped relationships at the core maintained the graphic integrity thru organizations we’d never heard of and gender relationships unsanctioned by Satan. As far as I’ve heard, it at least restricted itself to Homo sapiens. But I’ve also heard it’s still a living document, so maybe eventually… when the aliens join in…
:switches to being boggled at Karen’s obviously impending sainthood from still being around someone like that when her own daughters aren’t:
“I know DMs who would kill for characters they could lift.”
ME, for one. Not a weak guy. Gimme the player that rips off Guts from Beserk, I got ya. The one that has powergame wannabe vibe, but no backstory? No problem.
The ones that bring a multi-volume set of backstory, and want it pertinent to the campaign? Oy. Those guys make me miss drinking.
Tell her to give them a problem to solve. A hard one, with consequences, that they don’t know how to manage. In the mad scramble, most of the clutter will vanish.
I write the same way. Everybody is sitting around enjoying each other’s company, showing off their outfits, bragging their trucks or whatever, until the manure hits the rotary air movement device. Then they fix it, be it a car crash, or an alien invasion.
The characters are fun to dream about, but they don’t really shine until you give them something to do.
Very true, and a good suggestion. Unfortunately, she has to recognize that she has a problem first, and she doesn’t (despite my somewhat acerbic editorial critiques).
This does seem to be a thing for some people. They don’t understand that the book they loved writing can’t be read by anyone else.
I have, somewhere in my bookshelves, something I bought at a Comic Con by some friendly guy who told me all about the book and writing it. I talked to him for a good half-hour.
Utterly. Unreadable. I could -not- get through the first chapter.
I don’t know what it was. The sentence structure was okay, the spelling was all good, descriptions were there, characters had reasonable names… but I couldn’t read it.
You know how the The Book Which Must Not Be Named, the sentence structure is hash? There’s a story there (being generous), but you can’t get past how bad the English is. This wasn’t like that. More like an evil spell that locks up your brain the more you read. The words don’t become a story, they’re just words. Very weird.
Yes! Yes! Everything she has written that she has successfully shoved under my eyes has exactly that property. It’s not just poorly done, it’s genuinely unreadable.
The grammar is correct, the sentences are well-formed…, and you would pay serious money to never have to read another line. It hurts. It’s the anti-fiction.
She became a mid-grade English teacher later in life (in tiny Christian school situations), and I can’t imagine what the effect must have been on her students.
Reminding us of the ancient aphorism:
Those who can, do.
Those who can’t, teach.
Those who can’t even teach become university professors.
No. Those who can’t even teach become administrators. (There is some category overlap at that point, however, in certain fields and departments.)
Or maybe your friend needs to start writing Chinese-style mysteries with lots of characters (see Robert Van Gulik’s Judge Dee series for a westernized version). For fun, take a look at the length of the cast of character from classic Chinese novels like Dreams of the Red Chamber or Plum in the Golden Vase.
Translation is probably along the lines of “the fifth hut/small house” or “five huts/small houses”. The transliteration
We’re prayi
(Abd fat fingered from the phone) the transliteration from Cyrillic is always… interesting.
We’re praying for your victory vis a vis the bureaucrats.
(And also ditto on the praying.)
*laughing* I was just coming in to share a link that said the same– “five houses.”
Good heavens, that is an EPIC name!
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780191866326.001.0001/acref-9780191866326-e-6121;jsessionid=E6C5C4DD9631AA2C9988EB4907FEE002
I have an advantage: I speak Russian, and Ukrainian is… very similar. Especially in the old place names.
I honestly just looked because I was curious if I could find it, and then I got tickled because that is SOOOO podunk and I love it.
Question, is it like Portuguese from Spanish? Or more like Spanish from Latin? (since I know you’re at least as familiar with those three as me and I have….uh… enough to get insulted when I walk past construction, and to take guesses at word meanings)
More Portugese from Spanish, possibly closer than that. I haven’t read a lot of Ukrainian, but It’s mostly been intelligible to me (though I’m rusty enough I’ve needed to hunt through dictionaries which skews things). There’s pronunciation drift, and a lot of idiomatic drift, but it’s not as crazy different as say Serbian or Croatian (which are mutually intelligible to each other, but maddeningly NOT to Russian. I can understand the words but they don’t mean the same things. Or could. See ‘very rusty’) It’s also closer to Russian than it used to be thanks to the Soviet Union.
Basically they split around the 1200 to 1300 time frame. From Old Church Slavonic (I think the formal linguists have renamed that now but eh? It’s called that because most of the language was preserved in church documents.) So we’re looking about the middle English time frame of drift. Ukrainian was more influenced by Polish and Hungarian.
Domo!
You know, you probably couldn’t get away with calling it “P’yatykhatky” in a book but you probably could describe is as
“It’s proper name was from some alien tongue with to many consonants all jammed together, that translated roughly to ‘The five houses’ The locals just called it Pat.”
I’m with Bert on “yeep, it’s still cold!”
I always remember Orson Scott Card saying that you could have one piece of “balognium” per story (or handwavium). Everything else needed to make logical sense within the story, or be possible with the right tech in the real world [sci fi]. More than one impossible thing, and readers start getting wary, or weary, and that’s the end of that.
I wonder what Bert thinks of the Building Council…. and how he, as a Dog, might express that…
That’s easy. Biting.
He might “bless” the building.
But the people might smell too wrong for him to bite. 😈
In fiction, you have a very small number of these that readers will stomach. You can use one to build many more on, but they are plausible in the light of their suspending disbelief for that one item. In the light of this I’d suggest holding back on weird place names (unless that is a core part of your plot) – or other irrelevancies and save the very limited supply of suspension of disbelief for something worthwhile.
A trick I’m fond of is lampshading.
That is– “this is ludicrous. So I’m going to make it clear, in world, that it’s pretty ludicrous, too.”
Like:
“Alright… next stop is P’yatykhatky.”
“….sure.”
“Oh, shut up. YOU try transliterating letters that don’t exist in your stupid language. It’s not my fault it looks like a cat walked on the keyboard.”
“It sounds like a cat had a hairball.”
“That’s because your language has no CHARACTER.”
“It’s not my fault it looks like a cat walked on the keyboard.”
That’s because that’s exactly what it says.
You see, once it was longer, but got eroded:
P’yat: P[eramb]u[l]ate
y: y[e]
khat: cat
ky: [on ye] key[board]
Isn’t philology fun?
Bert looks good. Having fun in the cold water. You sound better too, Dave. I like it.
Illegitimi non carborundum.
I’m with The Phantom.
P’yatykhatky looks like an alternate spelling for Piatykhatky, probably adjusted to the Ukrainian spelling. The word means “five houses.” If you think about, naming a city Five Houses in your mil sf story would have people complaining that is an improbable name for a village. After all, who would name a city Red Stick or something like that?
My husband’s family lives not that far from Painted Post and Horseheads.
There is a “town” around here, essentially two houses and a sign on #6 Highway north of Port Dover, called “Dog’s Nest.”
People keep stealing the sign. ~:D
There is also a place in the Channel Islands called Dogs Nest Rocks. And apparently dog nest is the old name for a dog bed. Educational!
Le Nic au Tchian in the weird Channel Island kind of French. The rocks are apparently dangerous, and there is a lighthouse on the tiny island to the same name, behind the rocks.
As they say, the reason that truth is stranger than fiction is that fiction has to make sense.
In a real life example, as I was reading this, the crew doing replacement siding on our house have had to go back and forth as to whether one section needs to be reinforced. So far, we’ve had 5 decisions on it, though it’s now fully committed to do.
Manufactured housing is interesting, frequently in the Chinese sense.
URGENT NOTICE TO WHOEVER IS CONFIGURING THE MGC BLOG – I’ve seen this before on another blog, and it is real – I am getting the widgets for the ADMINISTRATOR on comments. I.e., I can approve, edit, mark as spam, delete, and so on.
(No, I don’t remember which Genius is running it, or I’d DM them directly.)
I’m not the master admin, but I’ll let the bosses know and see what they can do.
It seems to be fixed. Whew!
I saw this happen once before, on WUWT – a much more target for attacks. As I understand it, it took several days of digging through the logs to get stuff out of the spam and delete folders.
Both of these are sites that aren’t hosted by the WPDE servers, but it worries me that one “mistake” in configuring those could expose a massive number of sites to malice.
(Fortunately, it only seems to affect the commenting widgets, so people can’t be banned.)
“…attractive target…” Seems the caffeine is still working its way into the bloodstream, I’m not diluted enough yet.