Katherine Frances's Blog, page 31
August 1, 2018
biggest-gaudiest-patronuses:
vorethewealthy:
I love those friendship dynamics that are like...
I love those friendship dynamics that are like order/chaos. Like one wrote the rulebook and sixteen sequels and the other one saw the word “rule” and “standard” and immediately fucking burned them like??? And then they team up and it’s a constant criss cross of “sorry for my friend he’s an asshat do you accept bribes” and “sorry for my friend he’s wearing his clothes inside out because he hates normalcy may I request a meeting with your ambassador”
Y'all can tag your ships but like the FRIENDSHIP ARC
And then there’s an arc where child of chaos is in a really tense court room or something similar and is like “actually according to law 243.a”.and order agent just !!!!!!! I’m gonna die
Or they’re at a market or some shit and order agent just fucking,,,,, kicks the nearest statue except it’s really solid so they hurt their foot and they shout a stream of swear words before yelling “DOES ANYONE KNOW WHERE I CAN BUY AN ILLEGAL PRODUCT” and chaos kid is like holy SHIT
this is exquisite and I need examples or I will emit an emotion don’t test me
philosophicalconservatism:
“Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children,...
“Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.”— D.H. Lawrence. (1885 – 1930) English writer and poet
July 31, 2018
Getting Comfortable: On Setting Up Your Writing Space
Check out my tips for getting comfortable in your space so that your writing can be at it’s most productive!
Creating a Fictional Language Step-by-Step
The first step in creating a language for a fictional universe is deciding the feel. How do the words flow? How do they sound? Is it a goblin language that’s spat out in short, rough bursts? A soft, melodious language of elves? Is it ancient or new? Once you’ve figured out how you want your language to feel, you can move onto step 2.
Research other languages. These can be fictional languages or actual languages that are similar to yours. When deciding on my language for my finished novel, I took a lot of inspiration from Hawaiian, Italian and Latin. If you’re not sure where to start, go to Google Translate, dump a sentence into the translator, and filter through a bunch of languages to see which ones you like.
Once you’ve conceptualized and done the research, it’s time to actually start building. Make sure you establish grammar rules. These don’t have to be super complex. Figure out how you’d make something plural, (like English ‘s’ and ‘es’) or what an action verb looks like. (English ‘ing’) If you aren’t sure where to start I recommend looking up English grammar worksheets for kids and basically remaking them to fit your language instead.
NEXT! Create a separate document where you’ll keep all the new words you create. Keep a guide, not a dictionary. What I mean by that is instead of just listing words and describing what they mean, keep words in categories like “Times of Day”, “Numbers” and “Greeting, Goodbyes, and Responses”. Chart them out so you have the word in your language, the pronunciation and the English equivalent.
The fifth step is developing common phrases. For example, if you figure out how to say “A good morning to you” in your language, then you’ve figured out five full words and you’ve constructed a useful sentence for future use all at the same time. You don’t need 300 pages of words, just enough to fake like you might have actually done that much work!
Lastly, think about dialect, accents and slang. If this isn’t an ancient ceremonial language and it’s something your characters use in their day-to-day lives then there’s a good chance that they’re using short forms of words, contractions and slang terms. Additionally, if two characters speak the same language but come from different parts of the world, their versions of the language will probably differ. These things might not even be evident to the reader but they should be to you.
And that’s it, really. I could honestly write a whole other post on how to USE a fictional language in a story. So if you guys are interested in the formatting and general use then let me know. Oh, and I also recommend @worldanvil to help build your language. I didn’t know it existed when I wrote up mine or I totally would have used it.
