Marie Brennan's Blog, page 38

New Worlds: The Subtle Art of Naming

(Because Book View Cafe is still having technical difficulties, I am posting this week’s Patreon essay here.)

The last few theory essays have discussed language on the page. For the final one of both this calendar year and Year Five of my Patreon, I’d like to offer some concrete advice on how to create words and names that support the feeling of a plausible secondary world.

This isn’t about the phonology and orthography, the sounds and spellings used in a name. (We already discussed that way back in Year One.) Instead it’s about structure, about the underlying patterns and quirks that will make names come to life. In the real world, we don’t name things randomly, so following a few patterns in your story creates verisimilitude.

Since we’ve recently been discussing gender, let’s start there. It’s common for given names to be gendered, not just in which ones get used for whom, but in how they’re formed. Look at Spanish and Italian, where it’s common for masculine names to end in -o and feminine ones to end in -a. There are exceptions, naturally, but the pattern is persistent enough to be noticeable. By contrast, over in India the -a ending is often going to be masculine, while -i is feminine. It can also be about something other than the final sound: in Japan the unvoiced consonants (e.g. T, K, S) are considered more elegant and therefore more feminine than their voiced counterparts (D, G, Z), so the latter are less frequently found in female names.

Also consider the mutation of names into different forms. This can be about gender, with Charlotte being a feminine variant of Charles, Georgina a variant of George . . . but it can also show names spreading from culture to culture, so that in addition to Charles you have Carlos, and for George you have Jürgen. (Some variants are easier to recognize than others.) In Europe these cognates are hugely common because of the influence of Christianity, though non-Biblical names have also spread into different lands. Or what about nicknames and diminutives? Russian literature is notorious for these, but you find them elsewhere as well. Whether it’s elders speaking to children or good friends demonstrating their intimacy, having patterns in how names get shortened or morphed gives additional depth.

Family names may also exhibit patterns. Those Year One essays already mentioned things like occupational surnames, patronymics, and nobiliary particles; you can invent elements like that to include in your characters’ family names. (Including in gendered forms — fairly common with patronymics, and even found in occupational names, i.e. Brewer vs. Brewster, Webber or Weaver vs. Webster.) Here’s a trick, though: you don’t have to know what the elements mean. In the Rook and Rose trilogy I’m writing with my friend Alyc Helms, there are numerous Vraszenian surnames ending in -ek or -ček. I figure that’s probably a locative suffix, but if you asked me what Ryvček or Andrejek means, I’d have to pull an answer out of my ear. All that really matters is, if you see another name with that kind of ending, you’ll have the instinctive sense that it’s probably a family name.

The same goes for geographical names. In England there are many place names with endings like -ton, -ham, -ford, -wick, -port, and more. Digging into etymology can tell you what those mean — e.g. -ey comes from the Old English eg for “island” — but as with the surname suffixes, the recurrence of an element is more important than its semantic meaning. Just try to avoid using the same ending for a port city and a tiny village in the mountains . . . though heck, even then it’s not a big deal. If a reader ever calls you on it, make up an answer!

Some tricks for naming get a little farther into the grammatical weeds, though not very far. With geographical names, for example, you’ll sometimes want to think about the demonym, the form used to talk about people from a given place. English tends to form these in some predictable ways, with -an and -ian being the most common (Mexican, Colombian), along with -ish (Spanish, Swedish) and -ese (Chinese, Japanese). Even then, though, there’s some randomness and wild cards: why are people from Canada Canadian, instead of Canadan? Where the heck does the G come from in Norwegian? Why, when the local name for a certain country is Deutschland, do we call the place Germany and its people Germans? (There are answers to all of these, of course, but whether you want to dive far enough into your fictional history to explain them in your story is up to you.) Giving your fictional demonyms standard English-style endings will make things feel familiar, while inventing something like -ari gives it a bit more distance. Either way, an occasional “the people of France are French” bit of pattern-breaking adds spice.

Not everything is about names, though. I’ve started to notice that when authors invent a noun for something in their story, they rarely seem to give much thought to the plural. When there’s more than one of those things, the plural is either the same as the singular (as with the English “deer”), or else it’s just pluralized with -s or -es. But especially if your phonetic model comes from another language, consider going for something different. In German, for example, plurals are formed with -en, while in Hebrew it’s -im. But you don’t have to use a real ending; you can make up your own instead.

Getting to the grad student level of this stuff . . . remember above, when I mentioned the G in “Norwegian”? Did you notice Spain’s I falling out when it became “Spanish”? Sound changes of that kind are a fantastic way to make words feel more realistic. These can happen in demonyms: looking at the Rook and Rose books again, the people of Vraszan are Vraszenian. Or they can happen with plurals: we pluralize lihosz as lihoše, ziemič as ziemetse, kureč as kretse. (Try saying “kuretse;” see how easily that U drops out of the word.)

You can even — if you’re enough of a language nerd — think about how words connect to each other. Inflected languages like Latin, where words change their form based on their grammatical usage, have certain endings that show X belongs to Y. That’s how you get phrases like Agnes Dei, amicus curiae, Rex Angelorum, ars gratia artis, in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. You don’t need to have as many of these as Latin does (where there are different classes of nouns and different changes for both the singular and the plural), but if your story is going to be quoting multiple titles for people or books, a little structural consistency goes a long way.

And for our last trick, you can even play armchair etymologist! I owe credit for my awareness of this one to Amanda Downum, whose novel The Drowning City is set in Symir, on the river Mir. Notice the echo there? In Rook and Rose I applied this idea to the city of Nadežra, which sits on the Dežera. Since Nadežra started out on an island in the river before sprawling to the opposite banks, you can speculate that “na” comes from the word for “island,” and na + dežera collapsed into Nadežra. Furthermore, that’s the holy city of the goddess Ažerais — not quite the same, but they might derive from the same root? There are other, similar linkages worked into other clusters of words, so that the made-up names and terms don’t all stand in isolation, but echo each other in subtle ways.

Remember, you don’t actually have to work out what all these things mean. We aren’t all Tolkien, exhaustively working out the linguistic development of whole families of related languages. All you have to do is let some patterns appear in the names you invent — and then break those patterns before they get too strict. Because messiness? Is also very realistic.

The post New Worlds: The Subtle Art of Naming appeared first on Swan Tower.

New Worlds Theory Post: The Subtle Art of Naming

I’ve learned more about naming in fiction since I first touched on the subject in New Worlds, Year One. So for the final New Worlds Patreon essay of the year — on a fifth Friday, and therefore a theory essay — I’ve got concrete advice on how to make your invented names seem more real. Comment over there!

EDIT: updated with a new link, as before.

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Rook and Rose Book 3, Chapter 26

The climactic chapter!

Unlike the previous two books, we did not write this one in a single day. Which was for the best; neither Alyc nor I have the kind of physical or mental energy for that at the moment, not when what we had to comb through for the final scene was so complex. We finally hit the right notes, and with those in hand, we now know what kinds of hints we need to seed earlier to set that up properly.

. . . everything else I want to say about this would be a spoiler, so I’ll stop there.

Word count: ~188,000
Authorial sadism: We were going to give something back. But then we wrote how this actually plays out, and nope, that character just has to live without it.
Authorial amusement: We damn near sprained something trying to avoid echoing The Princess Bride in a very inappropriate way.
BLR quotient: Look, we’ve said many times this series is anti-grimdark. What do you think wins out, here at the end?

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New Worlds: Sexual Misbehavior (the actual essay)

(Because the Book View Cafe blog, which usually hosts my New Worlds essays, is having difficulty right now, I’m reposting the piece in question here.)

Having talked about what people do in bed (and how society feels about that) . . . now it’s time to discuss how things can go wrong.

This one comes with trigger warnings, as you might imagine.

We can start off in the shallow end with the things we don’t stigmatize nearly as much anymore. (Admittedly for values of “we” that may not include all of my readers; I’m speaking from the position of mainstream American culture.) Masturbation, for example, gets heavy disapproval in societies where sexual pleasure is considered to exist only for the purpose of convincing people to procreate. The same is true of oral sex: if it doesn’t put the seed where it needs to go, then it’s nothing more than self-gratification, and that’s a priori bad. We’ve normalized those to a fairly high degree, along with same-sex intercourse. Although homophobia is far from gone, the laws against such activities are becoming a thing of the past; in the majority of the modern world, they’ve either been struck down or are simply ignored.

Speaking of those laws, I should pause for some terminology here. Although we commonly assume that “sodomy” refers to anal sex, its usage is actually broader than that. The most sweeping sense of the word is any non-procreative sexual behavior, but when we talk about anti-sodomy laws, the three things usually encompassed under that term are anal sex, oral sex, and bestiality. (Ditto “buggery,” which is more specific to Britain.)

Some researchers split bestiality into two different concepts, zoophilia (attraction to animals) and bestiality (sexual activity with animals). Not all those attracted to animals act on those impulses, and for those who commit the act itself, there’s reason to think it’s often as much a matter of opportunity as desire. The reported percentages of people who have had sexual contact with animals have dropped significantly as our population becomes more urbanized, and therefore has less contact with farm animals. Regardless, in most places the act is criminalized — but also weirdly common in mythology, usually with a deity taking the form of an animal. Whether that reflects prehistoric religious practice or merely some kind of symbolism, no one really knows.

Turning back to humans: I’ve mentioned incest before in the context of defining kinship, but we should take a moment to talk about it as a taboo and/or a crime. From a reproductive standpoint, the taboo makes sense because over time it can lead to inbreeding . . . but where’s the line for that? First cousins have often been considered ideal marriage material — even in Europe, where that falls within the range the Catholic Church deems too consanguineous for marriage. But when it comes to criminal incest, we’re mostly looking at far closer relations than that: siblings, for example, or (all too commonly) parents and their children.

That latter situation often combines two problems, incest and the sexual abuse of children. Viewed strictly from the perspective of contemporary laws and mores, though, that latter category is different from how we define it now; if people officially become adults at puberty, or at some numerical milestone far earlier than we place it today, then society does not treat sexual activity with them as pedophilia. Only the abuse of those who are not legally adults is criminalized or punished, at least under that header. (To be clear: I’m not making any claim that sex at an early age ceases to be traumatizing just because your culture deems you an adult. This is only about what society classes as a crime or a sin.)

The question of how society conceptualizes these things brings us to the elephant in the room: rape.

Tons of societies, both now and in the past, would readily agree that rape is a Very Bad Thing. Unfortunately, what they consider to be rape, and why they consider it to be bad, sometimes take appalling forms. I said in the previous essay that intercourse is sometimes treated as a duty spouses owe to one another; well, when that’s true, then there’s no such thing as rape within a marriage. If a husband wants sex from his wife (and it most commonly flows in that direction, though not always), then under this mentality, he’s legally and morally within his rights to take it whenever he wants. The wife gave her permanent consent by marrying him. In my country, we didn’t start to criminalize marital rape until the 1970s, and it wasn’t fully outlawed until 1993.

Nor have wives been the only vulnerable targets. In slave-holding societies, slaves are generally considered fair game; it’s legally impossible to rape them because their consent is meaningless in the eyes of the law. And our problems with victim-blaming now are simply a continuation of past attitudes where any “unchaste” woman — meaning not just a sexually promiscuous woman, but one who behaved immodestly or stepped outside society’s bounds — basically had it coming. Even speaking to a man might be taken as proof that she consented.

In fact, rape was often treated as a Very Bad Thing not because it harmed the woman, but because it harmed the man she belonged to. If she was unmarried, then the offense was against her father, who now had a soiled daughter on his hands. If she was married, then her husband was the one suffering grievous insult. Prosecution or revenge was for the man’s sake, not the woman’s. Meanwhile, folklore and history alike are full of women who died in the aftermath, either committing suicide, or simply perishing from shame. That was basically the only way to retroactively re-establish her virtue — because no virtuous woman would live with that stain — and if she didn’t do it herself, her outraged father or husband might do it for her.

Obviously in the preceding paragraphs I’ve slipped into speaking of rape specifically as something inflicted by men on women. That’s not true, of course, though it does represent the majority of sexual assaults. Women can rape men; women can rape women; men can rape men — and the rape of men might be the most stigmatized of all. Even in societies that aren’t ancient Rome, with citizen men whose status means they should never be beaten or penetrated, there’s a strong sense that being raped damages a man’s identity as a man. As a result, they can be even more profoundly reluctant to come forward than female victims are. This makes the true frequency difficult to measure.

But it does happen . . . and here’s a place where speculative fiction has often fallen down very badly. We have piles of novels that feature the pervasive sexual assault of women as just “how things were in the past” (nevermind the evidence to the contrary from historians who actually study that past), but vanishingly few that touch on the sexual assault of men. And this is true even in violent, hierarchical, all-male contexts — like, say, armies — which we know are where male-on-male rape is the most likely to happen. To pick one extremely well-known and justly criticized example: George R.R. Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire is positively saturated with sexual assault of female characters, but the Night’s Watch? The violent, hierarchical, all-male military unit that’s sequestered under harsh and dangerous conditions? The narrative provides them with a convenient brothel, rather than having them turn on each other. It doesn’t matter that most of those men are probably straight; so are most of the men who rape each other in war contexts. Rape is more about power than about desire, and as with bestiality, it’s a crime often born of opportunity.

If any of these offenses are going to appear in a story, it behooves the author to pay attention to when, where, and why they happen in reality. And while the in-story response to them may not always match our current ideals, that should be a deliberate choice, not unthinking bias at work.

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New Worlds: Sexual Misbehavior

I’ve already apologized to my faithful New Worlds patrons, but I’ll repeat it here: when I put up the poll for them to vote on the theme for December’s essays, I didn’t do the math and notice that if “sexual behavior” won out, that would mean I wind up posting about sexual misbehavior on Christmas Eve. And not in the wink-wink-nudge-nudge sense, but in the sense that this post comes with trigger warnings. So my apologies for the bad timing . . . but if you still want to read, you can comment over there. [Edited to provide new link due to BVC site difficulties.]

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Rook and Rose Book 3, Chapter 25

It’s a real progress blog! By which I mean that, after months of me posting well after the fact because I didn’t actually start progress-blogging when we started writing, I am for realz posting right after we finished a chapter!

And we are in the home stretch! Very visibly so, in fact. You see, Google Docs doesn’t always cope well with very large files; much above 50K words, you can start having problems with lag and such. As a result, we’ve always divided our drafts up into multiple files, one per part, to keep them in the safe zone. But because this book is in three parts instead of four or five, that would mean each one is in the 60-70K range, and we didn’t want to find out whether Google was going to get stupid about it. In order to keep the feeling that the file divisions are at structurally relevant points, we actually have nine files for this book, each one containing three chapters. (Yes, this will be annoying when we have to collate them all.) With Chapter 25, we have officially created the last file!

(Shhhh, don’t tell me if Google has fixed that problem in the years since we started writing The Mask of Mirrors. This is tradition now.)

People who have read the first two books can guess more or less what’s going on at this point, not in its specifics, but in its shape. Although things have been building toward these events for a long time, this is when the avalanche starts to roar downhill. Different people each get signs of Something Rather Bad; when they compare notes, it’s clear that actually, Something Incredibly Bad is going down. Which they will deal with in the next chapter.

. . . but Alyc and I en’t writing that one until next week, because dammit, we get some amount of holiday off. (Please to be disregarding the other work each of us is doing on the book in the interim, because we have a few holes we want to patch before we officially reach the end of the draft.)

Word count: ~182,000
Authorial sadism: . . . honestly, I think the meanest thing in this chapter is what Alyc did to me, suggesting a certain thing to do with pattern.
Authorial amusement: Giving a minor spear-carrier who may not have even had any lines before a crucial role to play.
BLR quotient: They’ve been bleeding all this time. They only just now realized.

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Rook and Rose Book 3, Chapter 24

. . . I’m going to pretend I didn’t start writing the progress blog for Chapter 25 instead of this one, despite that chapter not actually being done yet. >_< I know I talk about the writing of this book being remarkably non-linear, but really, that’s a step too far.

I suspect some readers will find the structure of this chapter a little odd. The first scene contains a watershed moment — the sort of thing you might normally expect at the end of a chapter. But it’s part of what I discussed before, us having a plotline where everything isn’t in the hands of our main characters. Trying to make a Big Satisfying Finale out of this moment would, we think, make it feel too pat. Instead it’s a messy tangle that’s being driven largely by characters who don’t get pov, and the watershed here is more a shift in direction than the end of a journey, because this is the type of journey that doesn’t end. The victory is in the turn, not the arrival.

Which isn’t to say we don’t have a cool watershed at the end as well, of course! We absolutely do, and it’s one with much more intimate personal weight for our protagonists. A moment of grace, where they think they’ll be able to do a good thing . . . and find they’ve managed something even better.

Word count: 175,000
Authorial sadism: Having to make your peace with something awful, so you can get past that to compassion.
Authorial amusement: “It’s a good thing you’re not the face of this operation.”
BLR quotient: Rhetoric has its moment in the sun.

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New Worlds: Sexual Behavior

This week’s New Worlds Patreon essay is a touch Not Safe for Work, as it deals with our changing standards around what’s considered “normal” for sexual behavior. Comment over there!

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Rook and Rose Book 3, Chapter 23

The non-linearity of this chapter consists in us having Ren re-learn a thing she originally learned in Chapter 18, which we’ve decided to pull out of there and save for here, so that she’ll have more opportunity to react to it. What we have here still isn’t fully developed, I suspect, but I do think it’s in the right place now. (And once again, I’m glad that writing isn’t performance art; we get to revise what we’ve done before you lot ever see it.)

I’ve commented in various places about how this book is kind of terra incognita in a way the previous ones weren’t. The core of what we’d developed in the game can be found in The Liar’s Knot; when drafting The Mask of Mirrors, we knew we were writing our way toward that target. But this book is the onward-rippling consequences of that core, which is in part terrain that the game hasn’t gotten to yet — or if it has, it’s been in the context of plots and characters which are nowhere in this series. Plus there are a couple of long-term conflicts there that the PC version of Ren hasn’t yet gotten to resolve.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying, this chapter contains two events I’m really looking forward to in the game, even as I partially scratch the itch by dealing with the book renditions of those situations. One is a much-needed revelation; the other is a much-needed ass kicking. It’s nice when people get what’s coming to them . . .

Word count: 168,000
Authorial sadism: Normally I think of this in terms of us being mean to our lead characters, but in this case I should acknowledge that we took what was originally supposed to be mainly a social downfall and made it, uh, extra dramatic.
Authorial amusement: “No wonder you got in the habit of lying.”
BLR quotient: The last stitches of love are bringing the fabric together.

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New Worlds: Homosexuality

It happens not infrequently with the New Worlds Patreon that I find a topic is too large to fit into a single post, and so it sprawls over two. That’s the case with sexual orientation; I’ve split homosexuality out for its own discussion. Comment over there!

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