Category: Words and Language

On Writing Forsoothly

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“Writing forsoothly” is the term we like to use around the house for all the different varieties of bad pseudo-archaic diction that infest modern fantasy — historical and created-world fantasy in particular.  J. R. R. Tolkien is undoubtedly to blame for a lot of it, because his characters do like their elevated language; what unobservant readers miss is the way that Tolkien modulates his characters’ dialogue, moving effortlessly from plain vernacular to almost-archaic high formal speech and back again, depending upon the situation and the company.  Strider the Ranger has a much commoner way of talking than Aragorn the Heir to the Throne of Gondor, but at the same time they’re both recognizably the same guy.

It’s probably unwise to play with writing in extreme forsoothly unless you can at least approach Tolkien’s level of skill and language-awareness.  It’s a lot harder to do than it looks, and the failure mode is dire.  But if you’re determined to give it a try — and nobody ever makes any progress in this game unless they regularly try things that they aren’t certain will work — there are a few things it will help to do first.

One:  Ask yourself, “Is this really the direction my writing talent lies in?” and answer it honestly.  If your interior Magic 8-Ball refuses to yield up anything more specific than “reply hazy; ask again later,” find a kind but honest friend and ask them.  Kind, because you don’t want your self-image pulled down and stomped upon with hobnailed boots; and honest, because you’re not asking them for sympathy, you’re asking them for the truth.

Two:  Prepare yourself.  Read genuine period or formal writing until it dribbles out of your ears.  If you start talking in Shakespearean or Regency English at the breakfast table, you’re probably ready.  And a good thing, too, because at that point your friends and family are either bored stiff with your project, or convinced that you’re going nuts.

Three: Stop researching and write.  Don’t worry about getting all the nuances down perfectly; you can always polish the heck out of the language in your second — or third or fourth or fifth — draft.

Four:  Go find that kind but honest friend again.  This time, ask them if the archaic or formal language in fact worked; and ask them, also, whether they think you got it right but took it too far.  As with so many other things in writing, a light hand is best.

(For an interesting example of archaic diction done well in an unexpected venue, check out the historical romance For My Lady’s Heart, by Laura Kinsale, now available again in e-book format after a long while out of print.)

Today’s Bit of Amusement

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Some dialect maps for American English.

Another Brief Note on Names

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The other day, I talked about portentous weather.  Which led, in the course of time, to thinking about portentous names — by which I mean the sort of name that tells the reader right up front what he or she is supposed to think about a character.

The Victorians loved this sort of thing.  Dickens positively reveled in it, especially for his secondary characters, who rejoiced in names like Thomas Gradgrind and Wackford Squeers; Gilbert and Sullivan parodied it in Ruddigore, when the trusty servant Adam Goodheart, upon his employer’s assumption of the role of Bad Baronet, changes his name to Gideon Crawle.

These days, most writers go for subtler effects — with at least one prominent exception.  I refer, of course, to J. K. Rowling, who didn’t hesitate to give her secondary characters names like Malfoy and Crouch and Shacklebolt, and her readers loved her for it.

Elsewhere: In Praise of Good Sentences

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From The Chronicle of Higher Education, a blog post on memorable sentences.

The post, and the comments, have some good ones, though so far they seem to have missed James Thurber completely.  At one point in my life I not only could quote Thurber extensively, I would — under sufficient provocation — actually do so.  (How could I not admire a writer who could come up with lines like “He was six-feet-four and forty-six, and even colder than he thought he was”?)

Anyhow — go over there and read the post and the comments.

They Don’t Have a Word for It

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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.

Peeve of the Day

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Today’s featured peeve:  People who don’t know how to use “y’all” correctly when they’re writing — or, more accurately, trying to write — a southern dialect, and who persist in using it in the singular, rather than as the second-person plural that it properly is.†

Because I have to say that I was born in Florida, was raised in Florida and Texas, and did my undergraduate work in Arkansas, and I’ve never in all my born days heard “y’all” used as a singular.

There are nuances, though . . . if I were to say to one person, “Why don’t y’all come over on Saturday night?”, the expanded version of that sentence would be something like, “Why don’t you and your significant other and all the kids (and Great-aunt Millie, if she’s visiting with you this week) come over on Saturday night?” Also, if I were to inquire of a lone sales clerk, “Do y’all have a left-handed frammistat?” I would be asking whether the store of which he/she is a representative had one in stock. If I said, “Do you have a left-handed frammistat?” I’d be asking whether he/she personally owned one.

I suspect that the reason “y’all”, like the coyote, is expanding its range where some other dialect formations are losing theirs is that while it’s marked for region, it isn’t especially marked for class — in the parts of the U.S. where it’s prevalent, it’s prevalent across the board.

†This is a more common offense in television and film than in written fiction, possibly because legions of unsung copyeditors have been helping to hold the line. But even written fiction gets it wrong sometimes.

Question of the Day

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Dear Dr. Doyle:

Should I major in English if I want to be a writer?

Signed,

Perplexed

Dear Perplexed,

Only if you really want to.  And certainly not if what you’re looking for from your college degree is a ticket to a well-paying job outside of academia.   (“Well-paying job” and “inside academia” being two phrases that do not usually collocate, any more than “well-paying job” and “writer” usually do.)  Whenever magazines and web sites do one of their “Ten Least Useful College Degrees” articles, “English major” is usually number one on the list.

You’re not going to get the sort of respect that comes from doing something impractical but obviously difficult, either.  Majoring in English has for a long time been the traditional default field of study for people who want a bachelor’s degree but don’t want to work very hard for it.  And in fact, majoring in English (or another of the humanities) is kind of like writing haiku:  really easy, so long as you don’t mind doing a mediocre job of it; but really hard if you want to do it well.  Most people don’t bother trying to do it well.

That being said, I majored in English as an undergrad, and went back for another round in grad school, and over time, the degree has been good to me.  So I’d say — follow your heart, just don’t expect to get rich doing it.

Peeve of the Day

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On the subject of swearing, cussing, and general bad language in fictional dialogue:

Profanity and obscenity have their own grammar, and if you don’t know first-hand how to deploy it, don’t try to fake it.  Either leave the bad language out completely or seek out a trusted beta reader with a fluency in the vulgar tongue.  The explanation, “I’m going to be writing about this, and I want to make sure I get it right,” opens a lot of research doors, some of them in unexpected places.  It’s a rare human being who doesn’t appreciate being sought out for his/her expertise.

Period-accurate bad language seldom works as well as it should, because the shock value is lost.  Made-up future bad language, for its part, doesn’t have the shock value to lose.  In the latter case, the best bet is usually to go with contemporary expressions — or, as the science fiction writer James Blish once said, “The future equivalent of ‘damn,’ expressed in present terms, is ‘damn.'”  Sometimes this is also the best answer for historical bad language as well, though it can depend on the overall tone of the rest of the book; most of the time, a writer of historical fiction has to walk a tightrope strung over the twin pits of presentism and forsoothery (about which I will write a post someday) without falling into either one.

Which brings us around — finally — to my actual peeve:

It’s either dammit or damn it.  Writing it out as damnit, with the silent n included, makes it look like the speaker is cursing out the egg of a head-louse.

Son of Comma-tose

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As I’ve   mentioned before, a lot of comma usage is a matter of individual style and taste.  Writers and their editors (and later in the process, their copyeditors) have had many a wrangle about exactly which commas in a particular work need to stay, and which to go.  As far as who wins — well, it’s an ongoing struggle, and over time the honors are about even.

There are, however, a couple of places where the commas are not just a good idea, they’re mandatory.  (One caveat: I’m talking here about standard American English usage, because that is my native idiom.)  For example:

Standard dialogue punctuation.  If a sentence followed by an attribution to a speaker would have ended with a period if it wasn’t in dialogue, then in dialogue it has a comma followed by the closed quote followed by the attribution.

“This is how you do it,” the writer said.
“Do what?” the reader asked.
“Punctuate dialogue, dammit!” said the writer.

Nouns and phrases in apposition to other nouns. Here you have sentences with descriptive words or phrases stuffed into them, like this:

Bob’s uncle, a traveling salesman from Indiana, retired to Jacksonville, Florida, to raise alligators.

Note that the commas in this case always travel in pairs — unless the appositive falls at the end of the sentence, in which case you have sentences like these:

Bob introduced me to his uncle, a retired traveling salesman.  His uncle raised alligators on a farm near Jacksonville, Florida.

It’s not a difficult thing to learn, it’s just a pain to remember if you haven’t already gotten the patterns burned into your brain.  As with most things, practice helps.

More Nifty Internet Stuff

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If a little learning is a dangerous thing, then a lot of learning is, well . . .  pretty damned neat, actually.

For example:  Gothic for goths.

Because, face it, what up-and-coming young goth — or anyone else, for that matter — wouldn’t want to know how to say, “My fancy new black underwear is chafing”?

(Sa feina niuja swarta undarklaiþs meina gneidiþ mik, in case you’re curious.)

God, I love the internet.