They Don’t Have a Word for It

March 5, 2013 ~ 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.

Peeve of the Day

February 24, 2013 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

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.

What He Said.

February 23, 2013 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

I was going to write a post about this: ‘Libraries Have Had Their Day,’ Says ‘Horrible Histories’ Author.

But then I went on the road for a week, and when I came back the estimable John Scalzi was already on the case: A Personal History of Libraries.

I can’t help but think that there are two kinds of people who believe that shutting down public libraries is a good idea: the ones who, not being bookish people themselves, have no idea how important libraries are to people, bookish or otherwise, on limited budgets; and the ones who know exactly how important library access is to such people, and have their own selfish reasons for wanting to deny it to them.

(We need a better class of robber baron for this new Gilded Age of ours. At least Andrew Carnegie built libraries, instead of trying to tear them down.)

If Wishes Were Horses

February 12, 2013 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

Two things I wish that writers wouldn’t do:

Tell readers what, and how, they should think about their books. Believe me, I understand the impulse. One of the hardest things to accept, if you’re a writer, is that once your story is out there loose in the world, you have absolutely no control over how other people incorporate it into their own heads. The readers who excoriate you for crimes you had no idea you were committing are bad enough; the ones who really like your books for reasons you find repulsive are even worse; and sometimes the urge to tell everybody that They’re Doing It Wrong becomes well-nigh insurmountable.

Go back and rewrite their earlier works to make them better. I can understand this impulse, as well. We all like to think that we’ve improved in our art since we started working at it, and our novice-writer gaucheries can make us wince. But rewriting one’s early stuff to bring it up to standard doesn’t usually improve it enough to make it worth the loss of the energy and reckless endeavor that often characterize newbie work. (I know there are things that I tried to do, and at least came close to carrying off, in my early stuff that I wouldn’t attempt to do now because I know how low the odds are for success.)

As for writers who go back and revise their earlier work to bring it more into line with their later political or philosophical convictions . . . they depress me. Sure, you don’t think that way now, I want to say to them; but an earlier version of you once did. Trying to bring those thoughts and words around to the current standard always strikes me as like trying to kill that earlier you.

Question of the Day

February 11, 2013 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

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

February 2, 2013 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

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.

More Nifty Internet Stuff

January 29, 2013 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

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.

The Perils of Lexicography

January 25, 2013 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

Merriam-Webster lexicographer Kory Stamper of harm•less drudg•ery has an entertaining but pointed blog entry about dealing with the sort of people who take the dictionary as an authority on things for which it isn’t one.

Ten years ago, we added a second subsense to the noun “marriage” that covered uses of “marriage” that refer to same-sex unions. Someone eventually noticed.

Outrage! screamed about 4,000 emails, all flooding my inbox in the space of a week. How dare you tell us that gay marriage is okay now?

I was not surprised, honestly: I drafted a long, thoughtful reply about how words get into the dictionary, noting that this sense of “marriage” had been used by both proponents and opponents of same-sex marriage since at least 1921, and finishing with the caution that the dictionary merely serves to record our language as it is used. I spent the next two weeks doing nothing but sending this reply out to everyone and their mother.

But that wasn’t the line that made me laugh out loud at my computer. That line was this one:

As for the dictionary being a moral guide, it never was and it never should be. We enter the words “murder” and “headcheese” into the dictionary, but that shouldn’t be read as advocacy for trying either one of them.

Anyhow — go read the whole thing. It’s good.

Another Thing Not to Do

January 23, 2013 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

Don’t cut the ground out from under your own feet.

There are some words and phrases that, while they’re meant to intensify the meaning of a word or phrase, more often have the effect of weakening it. Very is one such; instead of adding a stronger punch to whatever it modifies, it suggests instead that the writer didn’t think the idea was mportant enough to spend time finding a better word.

Rather and somewhat have a similar effect; they undercut what’s being said.

And then there’s seem. Most of the time, seem is better avoided — also seemingly and apparently and appear to be. Don’t shilly-shally; if something is hot, say that it’s hot, not that it seems to be hot.

(This brief bit of crankiness brought to you by the temperature outside, which is currently -20 F, and by the question, “How warm can you keep a two-story house with a full basement in deep snow country?”, to which the answer is, “Never quite warm enough.”)