Building the World: Language

2018 Goals Update
Books read: 23
Words on LIBRARIUM: 4,646/4,646 (It's finally dONE THANK GOODNESS)
Words on BRUSHSTROKES: 1,020/? (probably around 80-85K)

I finally feel like I'm back in the saddle as far as writing goes. The last couple of weeks have been lackluster as far as my creative work--day job stuff has taken up more of my time and I've, frankly, been lazy and distractable.

One of the things I've been doing while not getting words on the page is playing Dragon Age: Inquisition (which is my least favorite of the DA games, but we no longer have a working controller for our Xbox 360, so it's the only option right now).

For those unfamiliar, Dragon Age is a series of fantasy role playing games (we know how I love my RPGS) set on the fictional continent of Thedas. This is, in general, a meticulously crafted world. The various nations each have their own history and sets of relationships and political structures. Each location has its own architectural style and fashion, its own set of norms and hobbies. It really is spectacularly well thought-out.

Except for one thing.

Language is one of the aspects of world building that I don't think gets the attention it deserves. And I guess, in some ways, I get it. Not all of us are Tolkien. Most of us don't particularly want to sit down and create an entire fictional language (you don't actually have to do that to have quality language world building--but I'll get to that later).

It's pretty easy to wave away language in settings that involve multiple countries or planets by saying that everyone speaks "Common"--I mean, that's the one language that your character automatically knows D&D. But just saying that there's a shared tongue ignores the way that language intertwines with history and politics.

Basically, a language doesn't just become common. It's a process that's wrapped up in economic and colonial relationships.

Allow me to get sociological for a minute.

What are some of the situations where a language becomes widespread? Which of our fictional nations' languages would be the one most likely to be picked up and used in other countries?

The languages of colonial powers tend to be more widespread. English is spoken around the world in no small part because for a while the English national pass-time was sailing around the world, conquering nations and making the native peoples speak and behave in an Anglicized manner. England's not the only example--the story of how Spanish became the dominant language in so many Central and South American nations is pretty similar. What nations or world in your fictional setting have the itch to claim land in other nations or on other planets? The colonized often have to learn the language of their colonizers. Which language is "common" will in some ways be a matter of which nation has power.

Trade will also have an impact on what languages people learn. Which nation holds the economic power? Who controls the shipping lines? If you want to make money--if you want to be able to trade with other nations, to expand your markets--you have to learn that nation's language. Again, power is at play. The nation (or group or whatever) that controls the trade lines doesn't need to learn others' languages because they are the folks you have to go through to make money. They're needed and as such they can dictate terms. Learn our language if you want access. Take it or leave it.

It seems like such a little thing, but something as simple as what language is most commonly spoken can add so much detail to a fictional world. Ignoring this part of world building pokes a hole in your world's history.

Now, when it comes to fictional languages--I definitely get the unwillingness to craft an entire language. I know some basic structural things about my alien species' languages in my space opera, but I don't have a dictionary or anything like that. But I don't necessarily need to have one. I wrote the whole book, even scenes that are spoken in one of the fictional languages, in English. With a few hints, the reader can assume what language is being spoken.

Movies do this all the time. US adaptations for Les Miserables, for instance, are typically scripted in English, but we don't assume that all of these 19th century French folks are actually speaking English. The same idea can apply for a fictional language. An author can drop some clues--mention the setting and origins of the characters, say something about the familiarity of a language or if someone struggles to find a word, or even flat out say that someone is speaking in a particular language--to plant the idea of what language is being spoken in the reader's mind. No need to come up with a new language. Unless you just want to.

Every aspect of your world is a chance to make the reader's experience of it more complete. Language is no exception.

So, maybe take some extra time to think about who's speaking what and why.

Playing Around

I finished up a contracted project this week, which means that I've got some free time to fool around.

Okay, actually it means that I can start working on the next round of revisions on Project 2016 and on a short piece for the anthology my local writing group is putting together. But I can pretend that I'm going to take some time to relax.

Really, one of my favorite pastimes is one that mixes well with my work. It lets me explore stories and try to get inside a character's head to see what they'll do when confronted with different situations and options. It lets me take part in a narrative that may go down unexpected roads. It lets me get a sense of who a character is without having a specific set of events planned out and pinned down.

Have you figured out what I'm talking about?

RPGs have, in the last five years or so, become one of my favorite hobbies. I played my first session of D&D back in 2012 and had more fun than I think I've ever had in my life. I've tried other systems since then--World of Darkness, one of the Star Wars systems (shout out to my RPG buddies from grad school--I miss you!).

I started playing the first Dragon Age game around the same time, and while video games aren't and will never be my "thing," Dragon Age and Mass Effect are two series that I'm pretty much always down to play, and I've played each game over and over.

I think, for me, the appeal hits on two levels. The first is the performance. I love theater--I had aspirations for being an actor at one point. Though I'm not able to pursue that professionally, it is still nice to get to play around and stretch those muscles (you never stop being an actor, I think--but you do sometimes stop trying to make your money that way).

The second draw is the way that the games help me figure out a character. I've never written anything that stars a character that I played in an RPG (though my WoD changeling Val is begging for a story), but I have sometimes based my characters on things that I'm working on. It lets me put the character in a situation where I don't know what will happen. This isn't really possible in a story that I'm writing because, as I've mentioned, I start with some pretty thorough outlines. Knowing what happens or what needs to happen changes the way that I approach the character.

Playing with a character in an RPG lets me take the character out of the box. In tabletop, I don't know the endgame. I have to rely fully on the character's instincts, even if those instincts mean that the character is going to run right up to something that will probably try to kill them (I played a chaotic good druid once and nearly died pretty much every session).

Even playing a character based on one of mine in a video game is useful. I know the story (because I pretty much only play two series of games, and I know how all of the current stories end), but the situations aren't the same ones that I put my characters in. It gives me a chance to sit down and figure out what different situations might pull from my characters. I've learned a lot about who some of my characters are this way.

So I'll still be working on projects in the coming weeks. But I do plan to spend some time playing--because the playing, even when it feels frivolous, helps.

The Who and the What

There are a million concerns that come up when I'm writing a story--pacing, development, wording, and on and on. But there are two that come first, two concerns that are the crux of the process.

Character and plot. Or, the who and the what.

Who is my story about? What happens in the story? These are the first two questions I have to find answers to when I start work on a new project. And they seem obvious. I can't tell a story unless I know whose story I'm telling. And if I don't know what happens, then I just have characters hanging around with no particular aim.

These are basic, bare-bones questions. The should be simple.

But I have a hard time answering both. I can come up with characters that live and breathe. Or I can come up with a fully-articulated plot. But I run into problems when I try to do both.

With Evin, the plot came first. I had the story worked out from beginning to end. I knew all the moving pieces of what would happen. But the characters were vague--ideas more than living participants for the story. They sounded the same. None of them had specific motivations beyond "do what the plot requires we do." I didn't have moments where I wondered what the point of a particular chapter was. I knew what beats had to be hit, what set pieces there had to be in each segment. I knew what scenes I needed.

But the human element was missing.

I did something around 5 drafts of Evin before it got to where it is now. There was a lot that was improved on between the first draft and the published draft. The voices are more specific. The motivations are somewhat clearer. But when I look at the book, I'm not satisfied.

With Project 2016, the situation was largely opposite. The characters came first, a team of them with specific backgrounds and desires and voices. I knew who these people were, and I knew them completely--and almost immediately. Not just how to make them sound different on the page, but what made them tick. Why would this person say these words? Why is this one the one that has to take the risk or do the task? Why does this one react so strongly to a particular situation? I could drop these characters into almost any scenario and know how they would interpret it. These characters aren't vague--they live and breathe.

But I was never completely sure what to do with them.

Evin's plot never changed during the process. The journey, the goal--I knew what they were from the beginning.

With Project 2016, I came up with a potential conflict and explored. I got a skeletal plot. I let it sit for years before coming back and refining it--fleshing out the conflict and figuring out some scenes that the characters' personalities would dictate. And then it wasn't enough.

I want people to connect with these characters--and to get that to happen, I figured out that the plot couldn't start where I thought it did. And that it might need to continue after I thought it would end.

I can't speak to which process is the better one for me in the long run. I personally feel more connected to Project 2016 than to Evin, but that could just be because it's the current project. Or I could be happier with it because I've learned new tools and tricks since I did the work on Evin, and it might have less to do with the process than with the level of experience. All I do know is that I have to get to a point where the what and the who are both fully formed. I can't rely solely on an interesting plot or solely on complete characters to compel a reader to stick with me.

For my readers who are writers, where do you start with a new project? What parts come first? How do you make sure you're giving each piece the best you can offer?

Building

I generally don't feel like I'm very good at world building. Which is awful, because I seem to always want to write things that require a lot of world building.

Evin required me to build the forest and the worlds connected to it. The forest and the places the characters came from each had to have their own distinct ambience and identity. It couldn't feel like I was sending the characters to the same places over and over. I hope it didn't feel that way.

Project 2016 also demanded some world building--more, in fact, than Evin did.

See, Project 2016 is a set in the far future. And in space.

I love Firefly, but I will never understand why you go through the trouble of telling a story in space only to not have any aliens. Seriously. None? None at all?

There are several ways that this gets complicated. First, though my two POV characters are both human, they don't have lives like humans living today. Time, technology, and interaction with other sapient species have changed social arrangements and day-to-day activities for humans. It's up to me to determine how much has changed--and how much has stayed the same. I have to determine what technology exists, how it's used, and who has access to it. Beyond that, I have to figure out who came up with the technology first, because that's going to play a role in things like where the money is, who gets to make governmental decisions, and even what language people will speak--not just my human characters, but the other characters they come into contact with.

I also have to figure out my nonhuman characters--to build their species from the ground up. What about them is similar to humans and what's different? Why did these particular differences develop? How might these physical differences shape differences in culture (for instance, one of my species has a very refined sense of hearing--so they don't listen to music with brass or wind instruments because they can easily hear the spit moving through the instruments and it sounds gross). Does each species tend towards diplomacy or warfare? I also have to figure out how each species first came into contact with the others--peaceful first encounters might mean alliances, where violent once might mean long-standing grudges, and either is going to shape how members of different species interact.

And all of this is aside from the building required for any book--the characters' personal histories and their specific experiences with the framework of the world they live in and other characters associated with different groups, whether they're technologically savvy, if they've ever even seen a person from a different species.

There are so many moving parts that I'm not always confident that I'm doing a good job keeping track of them. Evin seemed like it was easier--though that could honestly have been more of a factor of my not knowing as well what I was doing.

For Project 2016, I built a universe bible. For me, it's a word document where I've listed the rules of the story's world--the history, notable people, some of the laws and political set ups. It has a brief description of each of the species and how they relate to the others, a history of how some of the important organizations and groups were formed and what the popular opinion of them seems to be.

I think I've been pretty thorough this time--more than I have been in the past. But I still worry that I've missed something. Part of the problem is that I don't usually know what aspect of the world I don't have pinned down until I need it in the story. And then I end up having to go back and put it in (and usually adjust everything around it so that things still make sense).

At this point, I know the world of Project 2016 well, and, as I said in the last post, I'm pretty fond of it.

Putting together the world of Project 2016 has been a lot of work, and I'm not sure how effectively I did it, though I can safely say I'm confident that I did it better this time than last time. And there's a lot of information that I have that's didn't make it into the project (though some of it may be in future projects, if I revisit this universe).

World building is the best and worst part of the process--there's so much potential for the story when you start putting the world together, but there's also so much that can go wrong or get out of hand (at what point does world building stop helping the story and start getting in the way?).

I'm in the early stages of world building for the next project, though I haven't completely left Project 2016. I still don't think I'm great at it, but I do think I'm getting better.

That's the best part of writing, I think. It's always hard, and sometimes I hate it, but I keep getting better--and I do love that.