How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card
Authors: Orson Scott Card
Tags: Science-Fiction, Reference, Authorship, Language Arts & Disciplines, Writing Skills, Composition & Creative Writing, Creative Writing, Fantasy Literature
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acting by that credo, they’ll trust you, and you’ll deserve their trust. But if they catch you faking it, and doing it so carelessly that you can easily be caught, they’ll figure that if the story wasn’t worth much effort to you, it shouldn’t be worth much to them, either. They may still like the story; but you have blunted the edge of their passion
Can the Human Mouth Pronounce It?
Be careful, too, that the language you invent is pronounceable for your Englishspeaking readers. Words or names that are mere collections of odd letters, like xxyqhhp or h’psps’t are doubly dumb, first because they constantly distract the reader and force him to withdraw from the story and think about the letters on the page, and second because even strange and difficult languages, when transliterated into the Roman alphabet, will follow Roman alphabetic conventions.
If you doubt it, look at how languages as diverse as Chinese, Navaho, Arabic, Greek, and Quechua are represented in Roman characters. They’re meaningless to those who don’t speak the language, and when you pronounce them as written, they won’t sound much like the real language, either. But you can pronounce them, after a fashion. And therefore they don’t distract from the story, but rather help the world of the story seem more real and complete.
This especially applies to alien and foreign names. You want that name to be an instant label for a character or place-but you must remember that it can’t be a merely visual label. Even though most of your readers don’t move their lips, you must take into account the fact that many (if not most) readers have a strong oral component to their reading. In our minds, we’re reading aloud, and if we run into a word or name that can’t be pronounced, it stops us cold. The visual symbols-the letters-are continuously translated into the sounds of the spoken language in our minds. And for those of us who read that way, names like Ahxpxqwt are perpetual stumbling blocks.
Subsets of English
Most of the time, though, the made-up languages in your story will all be English. Or, rather, a subset of English.
Every community develops jargon-words that have meaning within the context of that community, but have no meaning, or different meanings, to outsiders. Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is an extreme example of this, as the reader is almost overwhelmed by the strange and at-first-incomprehensible slang of the street hoodlums. Yet so artfully designed is his future street slang that in fact you grasp the meanings of most expressions intuitively, and quickly learn the others from context. Within a few pages you think you’ve been speaking this slang all your life.
But Burgess is better than most of us-his invented slang is so effective
because he actually understands the many mechanisms by which slang develops: circumlocution, euphemism, rhymes, irony, foreign borrowings, and many, many more. When he had his characters use the word horrorshow for “really neat,” he was, in part, following the same path that, years later, led to the use among American black youths of the word bad to mean “really neat.”
You don’t have to go to Burgess’s extremes in order to use made-up languages effectively-indeed, you probably shouldn’t. Invented languages are a lot more fun to make up than they are to wade through in a story. Most of the time, you’ll use just a few terms to imply a jargon or slang or a cant, just as you use only a few phrases to establish that two characters are speaking a known foreign language.
5. Scenery
This is the part that most people think of when they talk about world creation: coming up with a star system and a planet and an alien landscape. You calculate the diameter and mass of the planet, its periods of rotation and revolution, its distance from the sun, its angle of inclination, any satellites it might have, the brightness of the sun, its age.
The result is a very precise set of
Can the Human Mouth Pronounce It?
Be careful, too, that the language you invent is pronounceable for your Englishspeaking readers. Words or names that are mere collections of odd letters, like xxyqhhp or h’psps’t are doubly dumb, first because they constantly distract the reader and force him to withdraw from the story and think about the letters on the page, and second because even strange and difficult languages, when transliterated into the Roman alphabet, will follow Roman alphabetic conventions.
If you doubt it, look at how languages as diverse as Chinese, Navaho, Arabic, Greek, and Quechua are represented in Roman characters. They’re meaningless to those who don’t speak the language, and when you pronounce them as written, they won’t sound much like the real language, either. But you can pronounce them, after a fashion. And therefore they don’t distract from the story, but rather help the world of the story seem more real and complete.
This especially applies to alien and foreign names. You want that name to be an instant label for a character or place-but you must remember that it can’t be a merely visual label. Even though most of your readers don’t move their lips, you must take into account the fact that many (if not most) readers have a strong oral component to their reading. In our minds, we’re reading aloud, and if we run into a word or name that can’t be pronounced, it stops us cold. The visual symbols-the letters-are continuously translated into the sounds of the spoken language in our minds. And for those of us who read that way, names like Ahxpxqwt are perpetual stumbling blocks.
Subsets of English
Most of the time, though, the made-up languages in your story will all be English. Or, rather, a subset of English.
Every community develops jargon-words that have meaning within the context of that community, but have no meaning, or different meanings, to outsiders. Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is an extreme example of this, as the reader is almost overwhelmed by the strange and at-first-incomprehensible slang of the street hoodlums. Yet so artfully designed is his future street slang that in fact you grasp the meanings of most expressions intuitively, and quickly learn the others from context. Within a few pages you think you’ve been speaking this slang all your life.
But Burgess is better than most of us-his invented slang is so effective
because he actually understands the many mechanisms by which slang develops: circumlocution, euphemism, rhymes, irony, foreign borrowings, and many, many more. When he had his characters use the word horrorshow for “really neat,” he was, in part, following the same path that, years later, led to the use among American black youths of the word bad to mean “really neat.”
You don’t have to go to Burgess’s extremes in order to use made-up languages effectively-indeed, you probably shouldn’t. Invented languages are a lot more fun to make up than they are to wade through in a story. Most of the time, you’ll use just a few terms to imply a jargon or slang or a cant, just as you use only a few phrases to establish that two characters are speaking a known foreign language.
5. Scenery
This is the part that most people think of when they talk about world creation: coming up with a star system and a planet and an alien landscape. You calculate the diameter and mass of the planet, its periods of rotation and revolution, its distance from the sun, its angle of inclination, any satellites it might have, the brightness of the sun, its age.
The result is a very precise set of
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