Vocabulary (Wording Gooder)
One of the things I try to be careful of in my books is the word usage, both in prose and dialogue, of my characters. I write in a very strict third person point of view (PoV) style, with no information coming to the reader that the characters don't get. The prose voice is their voice so it sounds distinctive, just filtered through me so it's somewhat consistent across books.
For example, Victoria uses a much more extensive vocabulary and convoluted grammar to express herself, because that's how she thinks. She's all about precision and clarity, she isn't going to truncate her thought processes to accommodate any preferences for brevity when her true intended meaning is paramount. (See what I did there?)
But that's not all I worry about. I write fantasy books, so I think about idioms and whatnot that may not make any sense coming from the mouth of, say, Vimika in Midnight Magic: A Fantasy Lesbian Romance. She lives in a completely fictional world, so I try not to give her any thoughts or phrasing that sound contemporary or culturally specific (other than her own, obviously). Something like... 'right off the bat.' What bat? There's no baseball in Atvalia! Or in a lot of the real world, which makes it even stranger for her to say. (Or think!) She can't call someone 'chicken', she has to say 'coward' or some other synonym. Chicken=coward barely makes sense in contemporary English. Do they even have chickens in Atvalia? (Yes. They are dignified beasts who go to their doom with their heads held high.)
In the Ashes books, I've had to look up how old certain idioms are to make sure they aren't completely anachronistic. In Colours of Dawn someone mentions 'true colours', and I didn't actually know where it came from or when. I thought it might have been TV or newspapers or something, but no, it has to do with naval flag displays from way back in Ye Olden Days. (Safe!) But I checked!
What about time? Nobody reckoned time down to the second until after the mechanical clock was invented. Why would characters who live in a world without the concept break down time that small? They would never conceive of it! 'Right this second', 'she thought a few seconds', etc. are all out. Do they have weeks? So much of how we think about time is completely arbitrary, but it has to make sense to you, the reader, which means I can't really play around with it too much without things breaking down and becoming hard to follow.
Virtually every word choice in my books is deliberate and there for a reason (though some temporary 'good enough' ones to survive all the way to your eyeballs). It's one of the biggest tasks I undertake in the middle drafts, and the point where character voices really start to come out; when a story becomes their story.
And it's only when it becomes their story that it becomes worth reading.
For example, Victoria uses a much more extensive vocabulary and convoluted grammar to express herself, because that's how she thinks. She's all about precision and clarity, she isn't going to truncate her thought processes to accommodate any preferences for brevity when her true intended meaning is paramount. (See what I did there?)
But that's not all I worry about. I write fantasy books, so I think about idioms and whatnot that may not make any sense coming from the mouth of, say, Vimika in Midnight Magic: A Fantasy Lesbian Romance. She lives in a completely fictional world, so I try not to give her any thoughts or phrasing that sound contemporary or culturally specific (other than her own, obviously). Something like... 'right off the bat.' What bat? There's no baseball in Atvalia! Or in a lot of the real world, which makes it even stranger for her to say. (Or think!) She can't call someone 'chicken', she has to say 'coward' or some other synonym. Chicken=coward barely makes sense in contemporary English. Do they even have chickens in Atvalia? (Yes. They are dignified beasts who go to their doom with their heads held high.)
In the Ashes books, I've had to look up how old certain idioms are to make sure they aren't completely anachronistic. In Colours of Dawn someone mentions 'true colours', and I didn't actually know where it came from or when. I thought it might have been TV or newspapers or something, but no, it has to do with naval flag displays from way back in Ye Olden Days. (Safe!) But I checked!
What about time? Nobody reckoned time down to the second until after the mechanical clock was invented. Why would characters who live in a world without the concept break down time that small? They would never conceive of it! 'Right this second', 'she thought a few seconds', etc. are all out. Do they have weeks? So much of how we think about time is completely arbitrary, but it has to make sense to you, the reader, which means I can't really play around with it too much without things breaking down and becoming hard to follow.
Virtually every word choice in my books is deliberate and there for a reason (though some temporary 'good enough' ones to survive all the way to your eyeballs). It's one of the biggest tasks I undertake in the middle drafts, and the point where character voices really start to come out; when a story becomes their story.
And it's only when it becomes their story that it becomes worth reading.
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