I haven't blogged in a week, almost exactly. That's not conspicuous at all, is it? Don't worry, I might start blogging more frequently again soon. I start orientation next week. The pressing concern for the moment is this:
I'm standing in a wedding on Sunday. I'm excited, but it's in Ohio, and my wife has to work, so that means I'll be apart from my wife for the better part of three days, and as jazzed as I am I'm going to be exhausted, because I know like... three people who are gonna be in the wedding? I don't know how many Houghtonites will be at the wedding, and that's really the only group of people I know of the bride's, and I know even fewer of the grooms.
Still I'm honored to stand and witness the marriage of two good friends whose distance from me is yet another prod making me yearn to invent teleporters.
Graduating from college seems to have been a subtle shift in anxieties. Some would say the stakes are higher now than they were, though monetarily I would say no way in heck are they actually. Except that the high stakes from college have rolled over in the form of student loans looming over my head, demanding to be paid.
But I feel less like there's a single pressing project I need to finish to determine the course of my future, and more like every choice I make throughout every day contributes to the life I'm leading.
It's terrifying, but in the same way as a dull ache is agonizing.
Subtle, and always there, applying pressure.
I'm slowly making my way through The Hunger Games, to the pleasure of my family members who think it is quite good. I have personal taste qualms about the first person present storytelling, though I think Collins executes it fairly well. I am most impressed by the wells that go unmentioned in the story, one of things so often overlooked in first person stories. The narrator is not always a stand-in for the author, and his/her flaws are rarely explicit, since it's hard to be fully conscious of your own failings. The first person narrator in an active story is never (if the story is well done and the character well-fleshed-out) the unequivocal voice of truth.
Honestly, my personal voice choices have edged towards the third person omniscient, with the narrator having verisimilitude with the author. It's an old-fashioned preference, but there it is.
At the same time as I wade into the strange coincidental cousin of the film Battle Royale, my wife is finishing up with The Wise Man's Fear, which means I can nerd out with her over a lot of stuff and we equally anticipate the third installment of the Kingkiller Chronicle. I had some small ambition to review The Name of the Wind myself after reading a particularly aggravating review written by a professional. I have since procrastinated and haven't done much that could be considered creative in the last week or so.
But I have played Guild Wars 2 like its servers are shutting down. That's what you do when an MMO releases, right? Play it eight hours a day for the first week? That's pretty much what I did.
Now I sit and scoff at my own buffoonery and resist the urge to play the game. It's hard, okay? I love that game. It's a mild obsession, and I'm doing my best to be an adult about it.
It's not going anywhere.
Time marches forward and more cool stuff is on the horizon. Homestuck continues to be fantastic, a new season of Doctor Who approacheth, The Hobbit comes out this winter, and people have finally stopped harping on the "end of the world" that's supposed to happen before the year's over. I probably jinxed it by saying that out loud on a blog that gets broadcast to... ten people? I don't even know who all reads this blog, though you're awesome if you do, whether you agree with most of it or not.
One thing I've noticed about my life now is I don't feel like I'm in an environment where I can say, "All right, now I have to work on this" and have that be accepted. That's probably just my bogus feelings, but it's true. I feel like, since I don't have a grade waiting for the work that I do where the value of that grade is a condition of my earning honors that can get me hired better, any work I do is just frivolous head-in-the-clouds creative stuff. I'm not saying my family doesn't support my art, but...
I need an art space. A place to sit down that is the place where the ideas and the words are blended in an alchemical concoction meant to be administered to as many individuals as possible. Okay, that got away from me.
-shrugs-
That's it for now. Bye guys.
Showing posts with label wedding coming up. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wedding coming up. Show all posts
Friday, August 31, 2012
Friday, June 1, 2012
Diction is More Than What You Say (It's What You Don't)
This morning I ordered a physical proof of my novel and it should arrive in ten days, so I have at least that long to wait to push the ball forward another inch.
Yesterday I told you in no uncertain terms that I haven't "made it" in writing, but I do kind of have a degree in it now. So now I'm going to give you a lesson on writing fantasy.
Well, honestly this lesson sort of applies to whatever sort of writing you're doing. It's about diction—your word choice—and it basically goes like this:
What words you use (or don't use) when you're writing a particular work make up the pieces of the world your reader builds in their heads.
This is a pretty big thing. It's actually why I rarely write contemporary fiction. What does it mean? It means you can cue a reader in on the kind of places and people they're reading about starting with your first sentence. It means books of certain genres tend to use similar words to describe similar concepts. It means someone who understands the way words create space and can use that constructive power well will be an artful writer regardless of what kind of writing they engage in. Even technical writing.
This isn't the only thing by any means, but it's huge. People who can't do this end up with pretty big communication barriers, and it's mistakes in this realm that I find the most irritating—but also the most difficult to hold against the instigator. I'd put infer/imply swapping and they're/their/there mix-ups on the far end of diction, as they're obvious mistakes.
A better example of a diction mistake is an anachronism. If television didn't exist during the time you're writing about, it should never be mentioned. Except when it should. There's a world of ironic humor that involves placing anachronisms all over settings that shouldn't have them, and a time travel story will be filled with these anyway (a good one will place them well). Also, there is no such thing as an anachronism in contemporary writing, so long as characters are eccentric/eclectic/well-read enough to know the words. That doesn't qualify for, say, people speaking Latin as their first language or something, but anyway.
I'll give another example of word choice that will hopefully illustrate what I'm getting at. In the world of Hearthstead that my cousin and I created, there is no such thing as the undead. There are no necromancers and no ghosts and no zombies digging their way out of shallow graves. Further, the possibility doesn't really cross most people's minds. Because of this, no one uses the word "undead," and the only way you might catch onto this is because there is one character in the series who has a crippling fear of the idea of revenants (undead). Because no one else bothers with the idea, he doesn't think of them as "undead," and his very concept of them is much more vague than our encyclopedic mythologies of the various forms of Risen Dead. Now, when I was writing the book, I could have included the word "undead," but it made more sense for one person not to try to coin a word for something that didn't even exist.
As another example, one of the things I used to do more often than I do now was to create a sense of antiquity to the world by removing all contractions from my narrative and from character's dialogue. It is possible to make natural-sounding dialogue and narration without contractions, even to the point where readers don't necessarily notice the absence (unless they're looking for it), but a people who naturally won't think or speak in contractions is a people who haven't had a reason to compress their speech. It's a remarkably plain way to change things up.
Similarly, if you fill your writing with as many words as possible that contain three or more syllables, no one will take you seriously. Sometimes, what you need is a short, sweet summary.
"'Nuff said."
I might talk more about diction tomorrow, or whatever else I wanna do. I might not have the chance to blog at all, since I'll be across the state and possibly attending a bachelor party. Then Sunday is my cousin's wedding, so maybe I'll get to blog that evening? We'll see. Maybe I'll have some face-punch videos for you for Monday. Like I said, we'll see.
Real quick I have to talk about two things I love. One is that Lego is finally doing stuff with Lord of the Rings, and it is hands down the best thing. Ever. Also, a huge chunk of my video game life has been dedicated to the Final Fantasy Advance games, with their addictive power creep, Dual-wielding glory, and strategy-rpg blend that's just fantastic.
Speaking of Final Fantasy, a friend of mine recently started a thing on Tumblr involving pants and FF, so if you start hearing about Final Pantasy, just remember that I know that guy, and he's even cooler than FP makes him seem.
And I think that's all for now.
Ciao.
Yesterday I told you in no uncertain terms that I haven't "made it" in writing, but I do kind of have a degree in it now. So now I'm going to give you a lesson on writing fantasy.
Well, honestly this lesson sort of applies to whatever sort of writing you're doing. It's about diction—your word choice—and it basically goes like this:
What words you use (or don't use) when you're writing a particular work make up the pieces of the world your reader builds in their heads.
This is a pretty big thing. It's actually why I rarely write contemporary fiction. What does it mean? It means you can cue a reader in on the kind of places and people they're reading about starting with your first sentence. It means books of certain genres tend to use similar words to describe similar concepts. It means someone who understands the way words create space and can use that constructive power well will be an artful writer regardless of what kind of writing they engage in. Even technical writing.
This isn't the only thing by any means, but it's huge. People who can't do this end up with pretty big communication barriers, and it's mistakes in this realm that I find the most irritating—but also the most difficult to hold against the instigator. I'd put infer/imply swapping and they're/their/there mix-ups on the far end of diction, as they're obvious mistakes.
A better example of a diction mistake is an anachronism. If television didn't exist during the time you're writing about, it should never be mentioned. Except when it should. There's a world of ironic humor that involves placing anachronisms all over settings that shouldn't have them, and a time travel story will be filled with these anyway (a good one will place them well). Also, there is no such thing as an anachronism in contemporary writing, so long as characters are eccentric/eclectic/well-read enough to know the words. That doesn't qualify for, say, people speaking Latin as their first language or something, but anyway.
I'll give another example of word choice that will hopefully illustrate what I'm getting at. In the world of Hearthstead that my cousin and I created, there is no such thing as the undead. There are no necromancers and no ghosts and no zombies digging their way out of shallow graves. Further, the possibility doesn't really cross most people's minds. Because of this, no one uses the word "undead," and the only way you might catch onto this is because there is one character in the series who has a crippling fear of the idea of revenants (undead). Because no one else bothers with the idea, he doesn't think of them as "undead," and his very concept of them is much more vague than our encyclopedic mythologies of the various forms of Risen Dead. Now, when I was writing the book, I could have included the word "undead," but it made more sense for one person not to try to coin a word for something that didn't even exist.
As another example, one of the things I used to do more often than I do now was to create a sense of antiquity to the world by removing all contractions from my narrative and from character's dialogue. It is possible to make natural-sounding dialogue and narration without contractions, even to the point where readers don't necessarily notice the absence (unless they're looking for it), but a people who naturally won't think or speak in contractions is a people who haven't had a reason to compress their speech. It's a remarkably plain way to change things up.
Similarly, if you fill your writing with as many words as possible that contain three or more syllables, no one will take you seriously. Sometimes, what you need is a short, sweet summary.
"'Nuff said."
I might talk more about diction tomorrow, or whatever else I wanna do. I might not have the chance to blog at all, since I'll be across the state and possibly attending a bachelor party. Then Sunday is my cousin's wedding, so maybe I'll get to blog that evening? We'll see. Maybe I'll have some face-punch videos for you for Monday. Like I said, we'll see.
Real quick I have to talk about two things I love. One is that Lego is finally doing stuff with Lord of the Rings, and it is hands down the best thing. Ever. Also, a huge chunk of my video game life has been dedicated to the Final Fantasy Advance games, with their addictive power creep, Dual-wielding glory, and strategy-rpg blend that's just fantastic.
Speaking of Final Fantasy, a friend of mine recently started a thing on Tumblr involving pants and FF, so if you start hearing about Final Pantasy, just remember that I know that guy, and he's even cooler than FP makes him seem.
And I think that's all for now.
Ciao.
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