Month: March 2013

They Don’t Have a Word for It

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

Some writing problems are problems across the board, no matter whether you’re writing mainstream or genre fiction: Point of view is tricky, and requires careful thought; the middle of a book is dreadful and disheartening; getting in the necessary exposition is hard work.

Other problems are genre-specific.  Take, for example, the problem of vocabulary and word choice in those genres where the stories being told are not set — or are not entirely set — in contemporary consensus reality: science fiction, fantasy, historical or alternate-historical fiction.  If you’re a writer working in one of these genres, there are going to be some words that simply aren’t available to you — at least, not if you’re a careful and word-conscious writer who doesn’t want to lose, or at least severely distract, some of your readers.

For example:  In a pre-clockwork society, timekeeping is unlikely to subdivide the day into pieces smaller than an hour or so; even an early industrial society isn’t going to break things down that finely.  Your characters aren’t going to have the vocabulary and headspace to think about doing things “in a minute” or “after a few seconds” . . . they might think about “in the blink of an eye” or “after a few heartbeats,” but they aren’t going to be pulling out their watches to check.

Likewise, your pre-industrial characters aren’t likely to think about things like nerves and adrenaline, because (absent some highly developed magical healing arts or the equivalent) they aren’t going to know about them.  Depending upon the state of medicine in that time and place, they’ll be lucky to know about the circulation of the blood.

Also, the English language as it exists in contemporary consensus reality has got all sorts of buried history and technology embedded in it.  If a character in your story wears his or her hair in a mohawk, or if a particular must-visit destination is a mecca for some group or class of people, then the history of your imagined world contains, by implication, both Islam and the Iroquois Confederacy.  If a character is a loose cannon and prone to going off half-cocked, then either you’ve got a post-gunpowder world or you need to rethink your description.

How long, you may ask, does it take before all the associated concepts and implications wash out of a word and leave behind an all-purpose bit of vocabulary?

As is so often the case with writing, the answer is “it depends.”  Generally speaking, the further back in time, or the more obscure the concept or technology, the closer the modern term is to becoming generic.  Also, a lot of your readers are never even going to notice or care about the issue.  On the other hand, some of your readers are going to be the sort of word and history nuts who pick up on this stuff and get thrown out of the story by it.

In the end, all you can do is know your audience and know yourself.  Then go with what feels right.

Thought for the Day

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If you need to slow a character down, or put him out of action for a bit, there’s no need to break his leg, give him a concussion, and make him come down with infectious equine encephalitis, all at once.

Spraining his ankle is usually enough to do the job.

Peeve of the Day

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Today’s peeve falls into the Annoying Plot Developments category.

Say you’ve got a character who has been told by the bad guys, “Don’t go to the police or else very bad things will happen.”  Or a character who is being pressured or blackmailed by the bad guys into doing something that will jeopardize their relationship with their one true (and presumably competent) love.

Do they, at that point, go straight to the authorities or the one true love and say:

Sirs/My Darling [as appropriate]–

The villainous kidnappers/my wicked uncle [as appropriate]

Want/wants me to steal government secrets/hide him in the hayloft [as appropriate]

Which will naturally cause you to believe that I am a spy/am meeting a secret lover [as appropriate]

No, they do not.  And a goodly chunk of the middle of the novel is taken up with the resulting unnecessary running-around — which may have been the reason for the annoying plot development in the first place.  But it is a sloppy and clichéd way to handle the problem, and your readers deserve better.

What’s in a Name?

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It’s a sad fact that short stories and novels have to have titles.  If they didn’t, then there’d be nothing to put on the spine of the book, or in the table of contents for the magazine or the anthology.

This means that the unfortunate writer, after having labored for weeks or months on something that may have lived quite happily with the designation “NewNovel.doc” or “short story in progress” or even “that thing in the green notebook”, now has to give his or her brainchild an actual name.  Cue angst, flailing, and general unhappiness.

Composers have it easy by comparison.  They call a project “Concerto Number 3 for Xylophone and Orchestra in B-flat Minor” and get away with it, where a writer who tried to run “Space Opera Volume Three with Blasters and Scaly Aliens” past an editor would only get laughed at.  (Oddly enough, though, the same writer could probably get away with using that title for a short story — there’s a lot more room for weirdness and wordplay in short story titles — but not more than once.)

Desperate writers do have a few resources they can turn to in their quest for a title.  Quotations from Shakespeare are always good; likewise, quotes from the Bible.  And if the Bible and Shakespeare don’t come through, there’s always Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.  Pulling a relevant or evocative phrase from the book itself also sometimes works.

If all else fails . . . console yourself with the thought that most editors know that thinking up titles is not necessarily a part of the common writer’s toolkit.  If an editor likes your book or story, but thinks that the title sucks, he or she will tell you so.  And at that point, it’s perfectly okay to turn the job over to a professional ask the editor for suggestions.