Reposted (with alterations) from February 18, 2008.

If you are writing a decent amount (if so, congratulations! You’re half way to being a writer!), you probably use a computer quite a bit. Even if you choose to write in notebooks as I do, you will generally still type up your work afterwards. This kind of activity, especially if combined with regular other computer use, may leave you with painful cramping in your fingers, hands, and wrists that, if I understand these things correctly, may lead to more serious conditions such as carpal tunnel syndrome.

When I complained about wrist and finger pain, a programmer friend suggested Workrave. This program will alert you every so often that it’s time to take a break, and then count down until you may begin using your computer again. These short little breaks do wonders to prevent pain not only in the hands, but also, as I quickly discovered, in the knees as well. Just by standing up and walking around the room a little until the countdown ends has almost completely gotten rid of my stiff right knee issue.

It’s very easy for time to get away from me once I get into a writing mood. When I feel like I am on a roll, the last thing on my mind is taking a walk-around-the-room break. This has often lead to computer use for 5-10 hours straight followed by intense physical pain. When I’m “in the zone,” I’ve even been known to forget to eat, so this little program has even managed to cure the whole “starving” part of being a starving artist! Talk about a miracle cure!

Reposted (with alterations) from January 4, 2008.

The Writer’s Resource Center (silly Americans and your silly spellings) has an interesting blog about writing. I’ve only just skimmed through it, but I’ve already found it very useful and interesting. It covers many different types of writing (creative, poetry, and even technical writing) as well as how to get published, how to edit, etc. If you have a blog reader, I highly recommend that you add this site to it.

Reposted (with alterations) from June 9, 2008.

I have tried several times to build worlds and, while I can successfully complete (to the extent that worldbuilding is ever complete) that stage, I am never able to transition into the next stage: actually writing within the world that I’ve created. What inevitably happens is that I end up with such a complex world that I don’t feel there’s room for any story-telling left. All the benefits of fantasy, of being able to shape the entire world to suit the needs of the story, are gone because the world is established. This essentially stifles my writing – the exact opposite of what worldbuilding is meant to do!

This is something I am experiencing now with my latest world. This time, I tried to make it as realistic as possible. There are gods and magic and mythical beasts, but everything works. The world is also very close to the real world in the sense that all my cultures are heavily based on various real world cultures (with a few variations caused by different histories). My intention in doing this was to create something that was complex enough, but also flexible enough, that I would have room to write.

Well, I’ve now reached the point where I can write a story I’ve been kicking around in my head for eons. Unfortunately, I am finding myself having to tweak the story to fit the world. I created the entire world so that I would have a framework in which to tell this story and am now finding myself needing to abandon central portions of the story to fit the world. This is just all wrong!

I’ve learned that there are two-types of worldbuilding:

1. Worldbuilding to provide scaffolding for a story.
2. Worldbuilding because it’s fun and is a fantastic way to learn about the real world.
3. Worldbuilding to role-play. (I don’t count this because I have no experience here. I really cannot comment.)

I have come to believe that it’s incredibly important to decide your purpose before starting any worldbuilding project because it will save you a lot of time and tears later on. The methodology you might use will be quite different, for example:

1. When worldbuilding for a story, plan the story out first. Your first step will be to find the most appropriate tone for your story and to plan our your world accordingly. For example, an adventure story will need lots of monsters (whether they be human or otherwise) for your heroes to fight. A gothic horror may require some elements of the supernatural, scary landscapes, and oodles of dark castles hidden away in woods prowled by wolves and haunted by the ghosts of unrequited lovers. You will also need to figure out what details will be necessary in your world to match the story. For example, a story about racism will need two visibly different races. If you want your character to escape a certain predicament due to a legal loophole, you will need a legal system that allows that loophole to be present – not to mention a society that upholds the letter of the law even if the judge/jury’s personal bias would prefer a conviction. After that, it’s all about mutual evolution – allowing the world to inform the smaller details of the story and visa versa.
2. If you are worldbuilding for fun, you don’t need to worry so much about what would work in a story. Rather, you have more freedom to let loose and create something with a more stand-alone beauty. You will also have more time to spend on the smaller details of your world. For example, I once chronicled the names and brief biographies of every ruler for one of my countries going back two thousand years!

Obviously, your intentions can change as you go along. A world you created just for fun may inspire you and a great story may come from it. Similarly, a world you created for a particular story may take on a life of its own even after you’ve finished or abandoned the original story. But my point is more about immediate goals – determining your needs when embarking on a new project and focus more on catering those particular needs.

Reposted (with alterations) from November 12, 2007.

This site is just fabulous. It’s a great site with all sorts of resources for writers of all levels (located here). It covers editing, submitting manuscripts, constructing plots, world-building, dealing with writers’ block, and more. The site is also famous for its Writer Beware postings where a community of writers warn each other about scams in the publishing world.

If you haven’t checked the site out yet, I highly recommend that you do so.

Reposted (with alterations) from December 4, 2007.

Thesaurusitis (also sometimes called “thesaurus rape,” but I’m not particularly fond of that term) is when an author uses words that are too obscure or uncommon in an effort to appear smarter. The most grievous example of this is when the author misuses the word. It’s called Thesaurusitis because it occurs most frequently when authors use a thesaurus to find synonyms for “small” words.

OBSCURE WORDS

Let us first agree that the purpose of writing is communication. It really doesn’t matter what you are writing, your goal will always be to communicate something – whether that be an argument, an idea, a design, or a story. Using obscure words in an attempt to appear smarter risks confusing your reader. A confused reader will not understand your message, therefore you will not be communicating.

When writing a story, your goal should be Suspension of Disbelief; you want your reader to put her own life aside for a little while and live within your story. Your reader “believes” the story for as long as she is reading. When you use words that feel out of place, either because the reader doesn’t know them or because they are just too archaic, it forces your reader out of the story, making her conscious of the artifice. This is the last thing you want.

You may be getting the impression that I am advocating a general “dumbing down” of writing – this is not so. Rather, write at your own comfort level. Do not try to “dress up” your writing or make a conscious effort to raise your vocabulary. Rather, think of the language you might use when chatting with a stranger at a bus stop. Another strategy is to decide on your audience and write for their comfort level. Whatever you do, though, do not write above your own comfort level because that frequently leads to my next issue:

MISUSED WORDS

When attempting to dress up their writing, many authors will use a thesaurus. Now, thesauri aren’t bad things in and of themselves, but they are frequently used foolishly. It is my firm belief that all thesauri should be printed with “there is no such thing as a true synonym” in big bold letters on the cover. Doubles simply do not exist. If they do, one will either fall out of use or adopt a slightly different connotation.

To give you a concrete example, my thesaurus gives “allow” as a synonym for “legalize.” I think that most of us know that while these two words do mean the same thing on a very general level, we would not use them interchangeably. To “legalize” something has a very specific meaning that “allow” doesn’t have. When I tell my hypothetical kids that they can go to a concert, I am not “legalizing” concert attendance.

This is the trap many people fall into. Imagine that you didn’t know what legalize meant and you wanted a fancier word meaning “allow.” You might use the sentence: “Herbert legalized his children to go to the concert.” That’s the risk you take every time you use a thesaurus. Instead of sounding smarter as you may have intended (or sounding varied if you were trying to avoid repetition), you will instead embarrass yourself.

So the general rule when using a thesaurus is that you may use it for inspiration, but you should never use a word that you don’t already know (or, at the least look it up in a dictionary first).

Reposted (with alterations) from November 30, 2007.

Something I often hear from the amateur (meaning: not published) writers I talk to is that their muse has left them or that they are having trouble finding inspiration. This is a situation I can’t understand at all; it’s a problem I’ve never had to face. It’s not that I’m exceptionally lucky, or that I’ll be hit by the Big One soon and my writing will crash. Rather, it’s because I’ve never seen inspiration as something that’s to be found or stumbled upon and I’ve always felt that searching for it would be a waste of time.

Obviously, I’ve felt that pang of inspiration, that sensation of total possession by an idea. I’ve felt that feverish need to get the idea onto paper quickly, quickly, quickly before it vanishes. But the product of these episodes are all lying in a drawer somewhere unfinished. As soon as the initial enthusiasm runs out, I have no idea where to go with the story. I call this “writing myself into a corner.” The added shame of this kind of inspiration is that, once written, they never live up to my original idea and I will invariably feel disappointed in myself. So for me, inspiration has always been something I consciously create. I am not an aeolian lyre.

Many of the amateur writers I tell this to look at me like I’m a freak. “How does that work?” Well, I have quite a few strategies and I’d like to share one today:

First, I will sit back in my tattered old desk chair with my eyes closed. Then I will imagine a scene. It might be a scene from a movie I’ve just watched (in which case, I must consciously forget everything about the movie except that one scene), or it might be a scene I saw while I was on the bus that morning, or it might be something my Sims recently did (yes, I know, I play Sims and I’m a girl – I am such a stereotype!). You can take this scene from anywhere. This minuscule chunk of inspiration (certainly not enough to write a story from) is the only one we will use and, luckily, you can get it from anywhere.

So let’s say I imagine a guy and a girl fighting. Next, I’ll start asking myself questions. Who are they? What has led them into this fight? How does the girl want the fight to be resolved and how does the guy want it resolved? How does the resolution that actually happens fit with the guy and the girl? Does one win and the other lose? Was there a compromise so they both feel like they are losing out? Was there a compromise so they both feel satisfied?

The first question (“who are they?”) is the most important. This is the one I will usually spend the most time thinking about. I will think of their names, I will think of their histories, I will think of their personalities. I will try to think of the entire deck of cards they are bringing to the table for this fight.

I keep going like this, asking myself as many questions about the situation as I can come up with. Then, I’ll ask myself questions about the questions I’ve asked, so forth and so on. Eventually, a story emerges and I can start writing. I call this the builder method. You start with a single mini-idea and the entire story flows logically from that in a great chain of questions.

If you’ve given this method a try and found that it works/doesn’t work, leave a comment and tell me about about your experiences!

Reposted (with alterations) from October 25, 2007.

A songwriter friend recently send me this link. If you need to find something that rhymes with a word, simply input your word and select the type of rhyme desired (the site offers end, last syllable, double, beginning, and first syllable rhymes). The site will then generate a list of rhyming words.

It’s an incredibly useful tool and I sincerely thank the creators. I’ve used rhyming dictionaries in the past, but the ability to select the type of rhyme is a massive improvement. 

Culture

Reposted (with alterations) from October 27, 2007

When I talk about constructing an artificial language to my friends and family members, the most common reaction I get is “are you crazy? You need to get out more! Why don’t you get a hobby or something?” Well, constructing languages (or ‘conlanging’) is my hobby, and it’s a terribly fun one if you enjoy things like linguistics or puzzles.

I started conlanging very early. Coming from both an English and a French background, I had a lot of experience to draw from (and often came out with sentences along the lines of “il vas rain beaucoup today”). I started by making up secret languages with best friends. This mostly involved babbling nonsense and pretending to understand each other, but some words were repeated and eventually acquired their own meanings.

In my early teens, I started experimenting with actual language construction that included grammatical systems and root words. I hadn’t yet learned about phonetic consistency, do I drew from words I learned from all over the world intermingled with nonsense syllables I came up with off-hand. My grammar was simplistic and most probably unusable (though at least I avoided the common phase new conlangers go through of creating an “English with different words” language). It wasn’t until the last year or so that I’ve started approaching this hobby in any kind of serious or methodical way.

I was lucky. Grammatical instruction in Swiss schools is very comprehensive and I had been learning other languages (to date including German, Spanish, Latin, and Russian) for most of my life. Knowing only one language will make creating a language much more difficult, mostly because the grammar will be largely invisible, intuitively felt rather than intellectually known, and because it will make it that much harder to creatively imagine how alternative systems might work. To quote Goethe: “He who knows one language knows none.”

For the purposes of this guide, I will stick to the process of language creation. I will explain a few grammatical concepts, but this will not be the focus. Rather, I will recommend studying foreign languages, reading grammar books (some are actually quite pleasant reads), and the Zompist Language Construction Kit (which provides an alternative method for language creation as well as many grammatical explanations).

My first step when creating a new language is trying to understand the culture I am creating it for. Since language and culture are closely related, this gives me a sense of direction. For example, cultures with a big emphasis on social hierarchy may have multiple pronouns to reflect the relative positions of speaker and the person she is speaking about. They may also include modifiers for people’s names to reflect social status. Cultures that make little distinction between male and female members may not have gendered pronouns.

Culture can have an impact on a phonetic level as well. For example, a rough Barbarian culture living in a desert wasteland might have harsher sounds, while a plump and happy culture living in a warm region that is protected from invaders and has ample food growing without the need of care may have softer or more melodic sounds.

Establishing a culture first will also help when entering the lexicon step of language creation, informing the sorts of words the culture is likely to have. For example, a hot desert culture may need to borrow a word to express “snow.” A communal and egalitarian culture may not know how to express ideas like “power” or “king.”

Phonemes

The next step is to create a phonetic system. There’s an easy way and a hard way to do this. The easy way is to pick an already existing language and use its phonetic rules. To give an example, I’ve created a language that sounds like French. The hard way is to actually sit down and come up with a totally new phonetic system (have fun coming up with aliens whose mouths are physically different from our own – which of our phonemes are impossible for them to pronounce and which new phonemes might they create?).

If you decide to make up your own, I recommend learning something about phonetics (including a phonetic notation system such as X-SAMPA or IPA). Some people have mentioned choosing a dominant part of the mouth the native speaker would use (some languages tend to use the front of the mouth, some are more nasal, etc…). If you plan to do this, I’ve found a website that may help.

Whichever method you use, here are a few things to consider:

1. Are the sounds predominantly harsh, using a lot of Ks or aspirated Hs?
2. Are the sounds soft, using mostly vowels and soft Hs, Ls, Ns, etc…?
3. What are some of the favoured sounds of the language? Which letters are used more frequently and what letters exist but are hardly ever heard?
4. What are acceptable combinations? For example, is it against the rules to use a EE sound after another vowel?

Grammar

Once you’ve decided on the phonetic system, it’s time to come up with a grammatical system. I’ve found this to be the most time-consuming, confusing, and difficult part of the entire process. The good news is that once the grammar is planned out, it’s fairly simple to take the phonemes from the last step and fit them together into the grammatical structure. It almost becomes a matter of just filling in the blanks. Of course, we have to get through this section first!

Just to cover some basics: Sentences are generally formed using a verb, subject, object, indirect object, and dependent clause. Words can be nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns (personal, demonstrative, and possessive), prepositions, conjunctions, interjections, or adverbs. There are other possibilities and not all need to be present (in fact, if you want to give yourself a challenge, try eliminating all adverbs from your constructed language). If you are unsure of what any of these terms mean, look them up before getting started.

The following is a checklist you may wish to use (you may of course add or subtract any elements you feel necessary):

1. Word order (which I expand to include whether the language is inflected or not)
2. Stress pattern (both for single words and for complete sentences) – where does the stress come? If you don’t know what a stress is, try adding “fucking” to a word in English. The first syllable after the addition is the one that would normally be stressed. For example: abso-fucking-lutly is absoLUTly.
3. Grammatical gender – Some languages have none. Some use male, female, and neuter. Some use living object, human, inanimate object, and God. There are plenty of options, so feel free to play around a bit.
4. Negating sentences – In English, we make a positive sentence and add the word not after the verb (as in “I do not want to go”). In French, two such words are added, one before the verb and one after (as in “Je ne veux pas“).
5. Numbers – Just to give some examples of possibilities, the number 27 might be expressed in many different ways including twenty seven, two and seven, seven and twenty, seven and two ten, and so forth. Consider also that your language may use something other than base ten (Napoleon, for example, tried to switch French over to a base twenty system, creating numbers like quatre-vingt (four-twenty) to say 80!).
6. Questions – Questions mostly come in two forms: yes/no questions and general questions. Yes/no questions simply require a yes or a no as an answer while general questions require a more elaborate response. Many languages formulate the questions differently based on the type of answer needed.
7. Conjunctions – Conjunctions join two ideas together. The most commonly used in English are probably and, or, and but. In addition, there is when, because, after, while, if, and composite conjunctions like neither… nor… or both… and…. Consider also that these can be used differently than they are in English. For example, Latin uses one type of or to mean “one or both” and another type to mean “one or the other.”
8. Definite and Indefinite Articles – We need one of these before every noun in English. Some languages will have one as the unstated default, only having a word for the other.
9. Verb Conjugation – First decide how conjugation will take place. The most common way is for the verb to have a root that remains unchanged while an ending is changed to reflect tense, mood, person, gender, and number. Other options include having an ending that reflects person, gender, and number and a prefix for tense and mood. Use your imagination. Many languages will also include a special form to indicate that the subject performed the action on herself. To make things easier, I have identified the following tenses that I use for all my languages: Infinitive, Habitual, Past Perfect (a completed action), Past Progressive (an ongoing action), Past Subjunctive (wishful), Uncertain Past, Past Imperfect (an action that was not completed, “I was watching TV while Robert did my homework), Present Indicative, Present Subjunctive, Uncertain Present, Future Indicative, Uncertain Future, Future Subjunctive, and Imperative (a command).
10. Pronouns – This is where all that work you did designing the culture will come in handy. Pronouns should reflect the gender and social distribution ideologies of your culture.
11. Declensions – If creating an inflected language, determine how nouns and adjectives will decline.

Lexicon

The lexicon is the words (or, more accurately, the morphemes) used in your language. To make things easier, try thinking up basic words that can be used as stems for other words. For example, I created a language that used the stem “soul” to create all of the following words: divine, good (holy), self, etc.

Another interesting trick I’ve seen is to come up with word combinations. For example, assign a number value to each phoneme you came up with. Next, draw up a chart with every possible combination of one, two, three, four, or five phonemes (or more, but remember that longer words will be rarer). For example, if my language has B, Ah, D, T, Eh, and L, I might assign each a number in order. My chart might begin like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 23, 24, 25, etc. The next step is to go through all the results and cross out any combinations that are impossible. For example, Btld is a bit too difficult to pronounce, so I will reject it as a potential word. What you will end up with is a list of useable words that need only to be assigned meanings.

Real languages tend to be pronounceable and, where following the word would cause difficulty, words are made irregular. A great way to simulate this is to construct your language following all the rules you’ve drawn up and then say each word, conjugated verb, declined noun, etc. as quickly as you can 20 times in a row. You should naturally alter the sound to make it more pronounceable.

Alphabet

The final step is to come up with an alphabet. If your culture is a literate one, this might mean completely original letters. If not, you may simply use a romantic alphabet, transcribing your phonemes into something recognizable for an English audience. Remember that each phoneme does not require a separate representation. In English, for example, we use the letter A for all the following sounds: father, mat, make, march, main, taught, steal, manor, etc.

If you want to come up with an original alphabet but are having trouble, try closing your eyes and squiggling on a piece of paper with a pen. Then open your eyes and scan the squiggles for anything useable. You may need to do this several times before you have enough letters for a full alphabet.

Also, while coming up with letters, consider the culture of the language. A culture that has invented paper may have flowing letters while one that carves its words on wood is more likely to have vertical and diagonal lines (horizontal ones being too difficult to carve as they go against the grain of the wood).

Extra

Try to make the language as functional as possible. Remember that while apostrophes might look totally awesome, they are used far too commonly in fantasy languages/names and often have no discernible purpose.

As a final note, I would just like to point out that this is the process that I personally use when creating language and is not by any stretch of the imagination the only option. To find out some other methods, I’ve asked around GaiaOnline and here’s the result:

• NothingOf starts with an alphabet and then culture and grammar are determined together. She has identified her greatest difficulty in language creation as determining when and where to use her invented words in her creative writing and how to convey the sense that it is a real language and not just a collection of “cool-sounding noises.”
• Homurakitsune, creator of Niora, likes to experiment with different strategies. To date, she has tried coming up with a vocabulary first, with a grammatical system first, and is currently creating a language by coming up with both simultaneously. She says that she usually creates the language first and then bases the culture around it, altering when inconsistencies occur.
• Dopplegaanger created an alphabet first, then added sounds and consonant clusters. He then created the grammar and, finally, the vocabulary. For his latest project, he looked up cases on Wikipedia and turned them into a language, adding grammar as he went. He then created a culture. He hasn’t started working on the vocabulary yet.
• Xeigrich starts with the sound of the language (using an IPA chart to pick sounds that work well together and provide variety), then he makes some basic words before tackling the grammar. Finally, he fleshes out the lexicon. He finds making the grammar to be easy but has a lot of difficulty making up words.
• Eccentric Iconoclast likes to start with an idea (“what would happen if a language did this…”).

If you would like to be mentioned, please leave a comment!

Reposted (with alterations) from November 11, 2007

One of the most common and easy ways to convey to a reader where a character falls on the moral compass is to use what I call the Puppies and Showdowns method. The idea here is that certain acts contain a near-universal moral connotation. For example, a character who kicks a puppy is bad while a character who wins a showdown but spares his opponent (especially if it gets him into trouble because it was supposed to be a duel to the death) is good.

This is the simplest way to convey moral alignment and, as such, should be used sparingly. Like most clichés, this method was once very powerful in controlling which characters the readers liked and didn’t like, but silly through overuse. In my household, any story that includes the kicking of a puppy or mercy at the showdown is met with a roar of laughter (which, incidentally, is another cliché).

Now, this doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be used at all. Also like most clichés, a good writer can use their connotations in her favour. Consider, as an example, this situation from the TV show Avatar: Prince Zuko is set up in the beginning of the series as the antagonist. He is chasing the Avatar around and acts cruelly and ruthlessly. However, in one episode, he is challenged to a duel to the death against one of his nation’s commanders. He wins, but spares the man. Here is a character who straddles both sides of the Puppies and Showdowns concept. When this showdown occurs, the viewer is confused. We had already aligned Zuko on our moral compass, but now he’s doing something we have been trained to associate with the other side. This sets up a very interesting character who must battle between the different influences in his life and become either good or evil.

A long time ago, I made a post about yWriter3, a program I had just discovered. I played with it for a little while and then decided that, while it certainly did have some very neat features, it just wasn’t for me.

Somewhat recently, I’ve rediscovered this little gem, now in version 5 and I’ve started using it for my latest writing project. As I am still in the planning stages, I haven’t had a chance to work with all the features yet, but it really does have a lot of very interesting and helpful features.

The idea of the program is that it helps you write your stories in an organized way so that you can see your master plan with all the details you need at a glance. This allows you to shuffle scenes around, remind yourself of what has already happened, and so forth with considerable ease. Essentially, it would take the place of a detailed outline. Is it necessary? Obviously not, people have been writing stories without fancy gadgets for as long as human memory stretches back. Will it make your writing better/good? No. Sadly, the program hasn’t been invented yet that can do that. All this will do is help you organize your ideas. If your ideas suck, they will just be organized in their sucking.

When you first start up the program, you can create a new project. There are fields to input the new project’s title and your own name as well. You then create your first chapter (that you name and enter a description for). Within each chapter, a separate folder is created for each individual scene. This is where it gets fairly interesting. The scene can be titled, and a short description added. There are also fields to fill in the scene’s goal, the conflict, and the outcome. Relevance, tension, humour, and quality are then rated. What makes the scene feature especially good is that you can select what the draft status of the scene is and how long it lasts in terms of minutes, hours, and days.

There are other options, too. For example, there is a field for creating character profiles (full name, nicknames, biography, and goals/at stake) and the characters can associated with certain scenes. You can then search for all scenes containing a certain character. It’s quite clever, really. There is also a similar option for locations and items. If you are working on NaNoWriMo or a similar project, there are a daily word count and word count goal features.

I’m not sure I would trust it with the only copy of my work just because software has the nasty habit of crashing or becoming corrupted or whatever else. However, I find this program to be very interesting and fun to use and I suspect that it would be rather useful as well. It’s also very intuitive. If you are anything like me, you can pick up on most of the features after just a couple minutes of playing around. And, of course, it’s free!

I will be using yWriter5 for my current writing project and I would like to revisit this for a proper review once I have a better sense of its limitations.