Dialects

So I know this has been brought up before, but what is the deal with us Americans and making the Elegant Other into British people?  Just a few minutes ago we finished watching Thor.  That has figures from Norse mythology speaking with vaguely British accents.  Prince of Persia had white actors using those accents as Ancient Middle Easterners.

With Thor, you can't really blame the movie for this trend.  From what I've seen of the comics, they talk with archaic English language.  So the movie just kinda went with that.  Really toned down in comparison, actually.

Maybe this is part of a larger problem that writers have to address when they are telling stories involving other cultures.  In many stories, people who don't speak English are commonly "translated" into English when they're speaking.  Some high fantasy authors invent languages to increase the mystique of these other cultures.  And in many, many cases, people have differing dialects that often break the rules which are in place for the rest of the narrative.

Like in Huckleberry Finn.

So I guess there's probably a right and a wrong way to do this, but people tend not to agree on the subject.  For example, I find that you have to be really careful writing dialectic dialogue, because you can make characters unintelligible or waste valuable time creating a flavor that isn't necessary to the story.  But if one of your characters is from Jace and another is from Leyn, and the people from Jace live lives ordered around trade, the way the Jakind talks should probably reflect that way of life whereas the more agrarian Leynon would have entirely different turns of phrase to get his point across.  That was a more obscure reference (in that unless you're one of two or three people you'll have no idea what I'm talking about) so let's speak a language a few more people might follow along with:

Like bilgesnipe, a well-used analogy in Avengers (though not necessarily on the part of the character using the analogy).  They're beasts who don't exist on Earth so don't have a name, but they're a common, repulsive trouble on Asgard, so Thor naturally thinks to use them in an analogy, but the analogy itself almost falls apart until the God of Thunder is able to recover the substance of his intent:  that Asgardian behavior on Earth has been unpleasant in the past.

Also from the Avengers, there's Captain America's elation at understanding the reference to Flying Monkeys as opposed to every other reference the characters were making.  Part of the shades of the character dynamics in that movie is the kind of language the characters speak (and the personhood behind that language).  Because Bruce and Tony are able to speak Tech with each other, they can connect over that—but the love of simplicity and the way that comes out in your attitude (and the way you speak) forms camaraderie between Bruce and Captain Rogers.  Then you have Black Widow, who knows exactly what sorts of things to say (both with her mouth and with the rest of her face) to get the information she requires.  Her interrogation technique is all about lines of communication.  And when she talks about her personal interest in the events of the movie, she does so in economic terms, which is both an efficient way to remove herself from her emotional connections and a strong metaphor for the kind of debt she feels she owes.

There's a reason I liked the Avengers a lot.  As I've said before, it wasn't just the pretty effects.

I think I've gone on long enough for tonight.  Go get some sleep.  Unless you're reading this tomorrow, in which case you don't necessarily have to.

-shrugs-

Character and World-building

I said yesterday that there's a beta event for Guild Wars 2 this weekend.  I am immensely excited for this, and hope to spend a large amount of time playing.  Maybe that old computer can even get set up for GW2 so I can play with my wife!

Running is my go-to idea for exercise, but I'm really bad about doing it.  I should probably do it soon, but the internet!  And the things!

And pizza!

Friday and Saturday I talked at length about diction and word choice and how they relate to writing (with a focus on Fantasy because, well, I'm me).  I wanted to talk today about characterization and its utmost importance.

As far as I'm concerned, if you're going to tell a compelling story it requires at least one person at the center of things, experiencing and interpreting the world, and influencing it with agency.  If there  isn't a person involved, it's not a story in my estimation.  That isn't to say it isn't art.  There's quite a few poems where there's hardly an author's voice, let alone a narrator (though this is most often a finely crafted illusion because, you know, there's an author or at least an editor where there's words involved), and that doesn't detract from the artistry of the poem.  Similarly, visual arts don't need human subjects to be artful or beautiful.  They just aren't stories in my eyes.

Now you might mention wilderness documentary stories, like that Chimpanzee movie.  But here's the thing:  in those works, the creatures depicted are anthropomorphized.  They're not people, and I believe they shouldn't be treated like people.  That's why movies like that bother me.  When things get more metaphorical it bothers me less, but animal movies annoy me because the stories pretend that these creatures are people.

I am making sure to use the word "person" because that is a more significant catch-all than human being.  In my worldview, the only "people" are human beings (aside from God and maybe angels).  However, there is a rich tradition of giving a non-human the aspects of personhood (self-cognizance and the like) throughout human history.  It's a good exercise for the imagination.  So I should clarify that the stories that bother me the most are the ones that are direct documentaries, especially of primates, that try to sell them as people when they're not.

So anyway, people are at the center of storytelling, because people are the origin of stories we tell.  I also believe that God is a storyteller, and that he has imparted stories to us, and that our penchant for storytelling is part of His image in us, but that does not detract from the centrality of people in our storytelling.

I've said all this to contextualize why doing your characters right is as important to the world you build with your story as diction and word choice.  It's also not one of the things you think about when you think "world-building."  That phrase conjures to mind the imagining of geography and infrastructure and special laws outside the ones that govern our universe.

But all that mind-blowing stuff has no meaning and no purpose when not considered through the lens of character.  It's hard for me to say this.  I love world-building for the sake of it.  Coming up with places and types of magic and different political systems is really fun.  But I realize that if you don't have a character who reacts to the circumstances you've invented for him (or her, or it) you don't have a story.  You just have a world.  And it's harder to sell or spread the word about a world you built aside from within a story.  You need a medium to convey the world you've carved in your mind.  That's where the art comes in, and fantasy writing relates to world-building as a medium for that creation you've done.

In the series I worked on for most of my adolescence, called Talas Ke, there are two characters who come from (a slightly alternate version of) Earth, but spend the vast majority of the series on Talas Ke, the world I built.  They bring all their prejudices, experiences, memories, mannerisms, and so on from Earth with them, and view the differences of Talas Ke in light of that paradigm.  It's a fairly common formula, and because I started writing it when I was about twelve I wrote to discover, building the world as I went.  Looking back, I see the world-building and storytelling I did when I first wrote that story as sloppy and sometimes ill-conceived, but I've been told by many of those who've read it that it works.  Why?

Because they cared about the characters.  I plunged my characters into the world that I had made, as shoddily as I might have made it, and made them live it.  Because they lived it, and they reacted as fully as I could make them react, and as fleshed out as I could make them, I had invested readers.

Now, as I reflect to friends and family on my disappointments with that story, and express my need to revise it to a tremendous extent, I likely have some disappointed, invested readers.  It's because of them that I haven't given up on Talas Ke and intend to return to the world soon, to finish what I started almost ten years ago.  It's also because, in my slightly-insane writerly way, I owe it to those characters to finish their story.

Most of my short stories fail because I can't give the characters the roundness they need.  Epic, mainstream, AAA endeavors in writing or in film fall short because the characters aren't written true to themselves and to the world.  And do you know why the Avengers was such an awesome movie?  Why it's a record-breaker?  It's because Whedon wrote the characters well, and gave them their fullness to live in the world that was made.  If the characters weren't well written, they couldn't have been well-acted, and then no amount of fancy special effects shots could have saved the movie.

If you agonize over anything when you're writing, let it be the characters.  If you believe the characters, you'll believe the story, even if the world-building sucks or is just plain mind-raping.  Homestuck, as another example, has characters I am invested in for better or for worse, and it's that investment that has me reading through all the appearifying antics and yellow yards.  Characters are why I'm still reading the Wheel of Time series, and why after the first season of Game of Thrones I wiki-walked through what remains of the story, and might even read the remaining books as they are released.  They're also why A Song of Ice and Fire hurts me deeply to consume as a story, because it punishes you for caring about characters.

And if it sounds too painful to agonize over your characters, know that it gets better over time.  Maybe it's because you get more heartless, or maybe it's coming to terms, but unless you're a children's author you're very likely going to kill off a character you love at some point when you're writing.

I'd give some pithy saying, like "invest in your characters, and..." but I can't come up with the second half.  So just that.  If you're telling a story, invest in your characters, then build your world for them.

See the Avengers

Apparently I never blogged today.  What did I do?

I saw the Avengers.  It was the best thing.

The best thing.

I really don't have anything else to say.  I loved it to death, and I hope to see it again.  That's really all.

Other than:  go see it.  Seriously.  It's awesome.