I had something significant planned to post today, but I ran out of time. Instead, here’s an interesting observation: April 2012 was my highest traffic month ever, with more than 5 times as many hits as I got in April 2011! So whatever I’m doing here (really, I barely have any idea what that is), it’s obviously working for somebody.
Here’s to ever-growing traffic in the future!
The advice to hurt your characters is given so often to writers that I thought it was a cliche by now. In fact, I would have told you that things had swung too far the other way, with some writers relishing in inflicting every known form of pain and suffering on their poor protagonists.
But maybe everyone didn’t get the memo? A friend of mine recently asked me to read her manuscript, and while there was a lot that was good about it, it had one glaring flaw. Everything was too easy for the protagonist. There was a conflict, sort of, but it was all worked out with a nice heart-to-heart and some convenient self-awareness. No one got hurt, no one was mean or selfish, and absolutely no one antagonized. Despite the protag’s many endearing qualities, it was very hard to really root for her, because she never had a real obstacle to overcome.
I remember, some years ago, reading another manuscript with many of the same flaws. In both cases, I think that the authors were mislead by their choice of genre to think that they could write a story without struggle and without pain. One was an Edwardian romance, and the other a light contemporary comedy — both of these being genres that generally eschew the dark and gritty. But the lack of angst and torture does not mean that you get to ignore basic requirements for plot and conflict. Rather, the struggles and the difficulties that the protag faces have to be that much more significant to the character, and the struggles that the protag goes through have to be that much more difficult in order to make their goals seem worthwhile.
Wes Anderson is the master of this. In most of his movies, the characters are moved by solely personal goals, and little is at stake other than their individual aspirations. The tone is light and funny, even when pirates take over your boat, and the angst is comic rather than dark. But this doesn’t mean that Anderson is easy on his characters. On the contrary, he throws every kind of obstacle that you can imagine in their way, and often they don’t actually get what they want, even at the end of the story.
This is how you should make a light contemporary comedy. Not by toning down the conflicts, but by turning them up, making them more meaningful and more over-the-top, and having your protagonist treat them as deadly serious regardless of how absurd they are.
(As for me, I don’t have this problem. If anything, I err on the side of dark-and-gritty. Which has problems of its own…)
Natasha Oliver recently tagged me. Now I must participate in a meme. Now, I sort of hate memes, but this one seems kind of fun, so here goes nothing.
Fortunately, I’ve been working on the second draft of The Wedding of Earth and Sky lately, so I have page 77 already edited nicely.
Bhaalit chuckled. “The hard part will be building them. Everything after that is just standing and pulling.”
They began early the next day. Keshlik sent Bhaalit and half of the warriors with axes to to fell the lodgepole pines that grew a few miles upstream. The men were warriors, not loggers, so it took excruciatingly long for the first log to appear in the stream, bobbing to where Juyut and a half-dozen other young warriors plunged into the water and wrestled it to shore.
You may be asking yourself, Who are these log-chopping warriors? Where are they going? What are they building? How am I supposed to pronounce their names?
Unfortunately, I can’t answer these questions for you right now. Let me finish revising the book first.
(One hint on the pronunciation: Bhaalit is [ˈbʰaːlɪt]. Good luck with that.)
So… here’s something embarrassing. Due to certain calendaristic confusions, I had the date of Easter wrong. Most people here in the U.S. celebrate the Protestant/Catholic Easter, which of course was last Sunday. My wife and I do celebrate that date with our friends and family, but we make our primary religious observation of the feast on the Orthodox date, which falls a week later. However, I didn’t realize until late last week that Orthodox and Catholic Easter don’t fall on the same date this year—I misread my calendar, and was confused by the fact that Lent began on the same week under both calendars.
So now it’s Holy Week (again), but I already used that excuse for not blogging once. However, rather than try to beg off (again), I will simply make a brief announcement:
My story The Typographer’s Folly was just accepted for the Bibliotheca Fantastica anthology from Dagan Books. The release date for the anthology hasn’t been announced yet, but expect further news as the publication approaches.
… so no blogging.
This week’s entry in the Weird Linguistics category isn’t so much "weird" as "amazing". But I have to stick with the title I’ve got.
You are probably familiar with the Indo-European language family, the family to which most of the languages of Europe belong. Proto-Indo-European was originally the language of a semi-nomadic group on the steppes of modern-day Ukraine or Central Asia, who began a series of expansions some 7,000 years ago spurred by a series of technological advances— especially farming and the chariot. Their prehistoric expansion eventually brought them all the way to the Atlantic Ocean and the British Isles. In the east, they came to the northern part of India as part of the Aryan Invasion, and a far-flung group known as the Tocharians got all the way to Western China.
Indo-European Expansion
I find it astounding to consider that some random group of nomads managed to strike the cultural-linguistic jackpot, so that their descendants pushed all the way from Central Asia to eastern India and western Europe in prehistoric times—and to eventually dominate most of North and South America as well. I’m even more astounded by the fact that we can reconstruct this expansion from linguistic and archaeological data thousands of years after the fact.
But this is not even the most impressive pre-historical linguistic expansion that we know of, which brings me to my real point. The real champions of geographic expansion are not the Indo-Europeans, but the Austronesians.
Austronesian language dispersion
The Austronesian languages include Hawaiian, Fijian, Tagalog, Malayan, Maori, and hundreds of other languages spoken throughout the Pacific and Madagascar. The Austronesians expanded from their original homeland on the island of Taiwan in a series of waves spaced throughout prehistory, but while the Indo-Europeans were going overland, the Austronesians were going over the sea. And boy did they get around: not only did they populate all of the islands of Polynesia, Micronesia, and the Philippines, but they also turned west and got all the way to Madagascar. This latter fact is tremendously surprising: Madagascar wasn’t settled primarily by Africans crossing the relatively narrow Mozambique Channel, but by Austronesians who had to cross the Indian Ocean from Borneo to get there.
This is, to me, far more impressive than the Indo-European expansion. No Austronesian society ever had hulled ships, but they still managed to navigate the vastness of the Pacific and cross the monsoon-wracked Indian Ocean centuries before any other civilization would attempt the same thing.
Yet even this is not the most far-ranging language family we know of. No, that distinction belongs to the Dené-Yeniseian languages.
Dené-Yeniseian language dispersion
The Indo-European languages are the ones that all English speakers are familiar with, and you’ve probably at least heard of several Austronesian languages. But chances are that you have never heard of even one of the Dené-Yeniseian tongues. Do you see that little green smudge in the middle of Siberia in the map above, just north of Mongolia? Those are the Yeniseian languages, a nearly-extinct family of languages spoken by the indigenous peoples of Central Asia. There are only six known languages in this family. Only two of them survived into the 20th century, and only one of them (Imbat Ket) is still alive today. But we are lucky that it has survived, because the evidence that we have of the languages has proven them to be the only known pre-historical linguistic link between the Old World and the New.
The American cousin of the Yeniseian languages is the Na-Dene language family, which comprises several branches found in Alaska, Canada, California, and the American Southwest. The dispersal of this branch is something of a story in itself, with Na-Dene speakers occupying a large continuous area in the northernmost part of the Americas, but with distant relatives much further south. This southwestern branch contains the most famous tribes of this family: Navajo and Apache are Na-Dene languages, and these languages are the only ones whose names might be familiar to the average English speaker.
The distance from the heart of Siberia to southwestern America is even greater than the distances covered by the Austronesians. Yet while we understand the history and the expansion of the Austronesians and the Indo-Europeans very well, the Dené-Yeniseian languages mostly present us with mysteries. No one knows where their original homeland was. No one knows the motive for their expansion, or if it can even be called an expansion. We don’t know how or when the Proto-Yeniseians crossed from Siberia into America, and we don’t know why the American branch of the family is split into such distant northern, southern, and western lines. There are conjectures and guesses about all of these things, but precious little that we can identify as fact.
Nonetheless, I find that this linguistic relationship surprises me more than any other. It’s one thing to know, abstractly, that the Americas were populated from Asia at some point in the distant past. It’s quite something else to boil that fact down into a set of cognates, and to be able to say with some certainty that these two languages separated by thousands of miles of ocean and ice in fact sprang from the same ancestral tongue. It’s the most amazing thing in linguistics.
This being the second post in my series about weird linguistics, I’d like to point out that it’s not necessary to travel to strange and exotic climes in order to find bizarre grammatical features like ergativity. English itself is plenty weird. Today I’ll demonstrate this by discussing negative polarity.
English is a simple language in many respects. We have barely any case system to speak of, minimal verbal morphology, and a simple consonant phonology. Our vowels are a little baroque, and our spelling is awful, but overall it’s not too bad. But there’s one thing that we’ve managed to muck up pretty badly, and it’s something so simple that in many languages you never have to think about it at all.
I’m talking about not doing things. Or, as we linguists like to call it, negation.
First, observe how a negative sentence in English is formed:
The English negative adverb is not, but of course you can’t just add not to an affirmative sentence. Instead, you have to have do-support, where the word do gets thrown in there just so that not (the lazy bum) has something to lean on. Unless, of course, there’s a modal verb or other auxiliary verb floating around, or a few other conditions apply. It’s a bit of a mess.
This is simple stuff, though. What I really want to talk about today is something even more pernicious called negative polarity. In English we have some words which are not themselves negative words, but which normally only occur when there is some other negative word in the sentence. These words are called negative polarity items (NPI). Let me crib some examples from Wikipedia:
(In linguistic literature, the asterisk is used to indicate ungrammatical utterances.)
The thing to notice here is that the NPI’s at all and any are not themselves words that convey negation. Nonetheless, those words are only allowed to occur in sentences which are negated with not, while examples (4) and (6) are ungrammatical for attempting to use those words in a positive context.
The rules for NPI can get really complex. For example, it is widely believed that they can only occur in downward-entailing contexts, though to explain some additional properties of NPI’s a more robust notion of veridicality is required. For example, NPI’s are allowed in questions, even if the questions are not negative:
And they can occur when qualified by adverbs such as hardly:
Sentence (9) above becomes ungrammatical if hardly is removed, yet somehow it becomes grammatical again if the sentence is qualified differently:
The reasons for this have to do with the veridical interpretation of habitual aspects and future time… which is all that I will attempt to explain about that. Read the linked article above about veridicality if you’re interested.
Now as a native English speaker you do all of this intuitively, and so you never have to spend a moment’s conscious thought on downward entailment and veridicality. (Lucky for you.) You can even invent new negative polarity items on occasion. But next time it comes up that a non-native speaker uses an NPI incorrectly, do be nice to her. This stuff is harder than it looks.
If you are not a linguist, a conlanger, or some other form of dedicated linguistic dilettante, you’ve probably never heard of ergativity. (If you are a conlanger, you may be sick of hearing about it, since it’s a perennial subject on the CONLANG list.) Ergativity is one of the weirdest linguistic phenomena that I know of, and because I’m that kind of nerd I’m going to share it with you.
Let’s take a simple transitive sentence:
The duck(A) bit him(P).If you remember your grammar at all, you know that the duck is the subject of #1, while the object is him. In English, we have the bare remnants of a case system for our pronouns, which requires us to use the form He for the subject and him for the object. You’ll notice that I’ve marked these A and P, which stand for Agent and Patient. My reason for using these terms will become clear below.
Now let’s add an intransitive sentence:
He(S) fell.Here the "subject" is he. I’ve marked He as S for Subject here.
In English, as in most languages spoken in Europe, the Agent of a transitive verb and the Subject of an intransitive verb take the same form. In fact, we are usually just call them both "subjects" and forget about it. In more formal terminology, the combined A and S case is the nominative, while the P case is the accusative.
But this is not necessarily the case in all languages. There are languages in which the Subject and Patient take the same form, and the Agent gets left out. This is called ergativity.
If English were an ergative language, we might express the sentences like this:
The duck(A) bit him(P).Him(S) fell.Note that our A, P, and S labels haven’t changed. But now the S and the P forms are the same, while the A form is different. In such a language, we refer to the combined S and P form as the absolutive case, and the A form as the ergative case.
If, by chance, you know a language with a more robust case system than English, it may help to think about how this would work in those languages. Take your Russian, German, or Latin and recast it with the subjects of all of the intransitive verbs in the accusative case. This is how an ergative language works. The only difference is that in a nominative/accusative language we think of the nominative form as the base form and the accusative form as the marked form, while in an ergative/absolutive language the absolutive form is unmarked while the ergative form is marked.
There’s more to it than that, and as usual Wikipedia has a decent overview, though I prefer the one with Cthulhu. Some ergative languages you may have heard of include Basque, Hindi, Georgian, and Tibetan.
To be repurposed in any way you think appropriate.
Pages and pages have been written on the topic of pantsers and planners. If you’ve been a writer for any amount of time, you’ve probably encountered the terms at some time, and chances are that you have strong feelings about which way is best, or at least which way is yours.
Me, I’m a planner. At first I thought it was a pantser, because I wrote my first novel without any kind of plan at all, and it turned out fine. (Relatively speaking.) But this turned out to be an anomaly: I was able to write my first book without any written plan because I had been planning it in my head for ten years. Once I moved on to fresh stories, I found that I needed a plan, or else I got lost and the story died.
However, nearly all discussions of pants vs. plan that I’ve read focus on plot and structure. Character, insofar as it’s mentioned at all, is either assumed to be part of the plan (by the planners) or to flow from that same wellspring of mystical inspiration that gives you the rest of the book (the pants). Here is where my technique is different from both the average pantser and the average planner: I plan my plots, but I let my characters take care of themselves. I know who the characters are, of course, but I don’t really know much about their personalities, histories, vices, or virtues before I write the story.
When I say this, a great many writers will recoil in horror. The problem, they say, is that then my characters will be lifeless, mindless plot-puppets going about and doing things because I, the author, have decreed it, and not because it flows naturally from the characters’ motivations. I had this fear myself when I first started this habit. But I discovered that my fears had no basis. The characters I created this way did not read like plot-puppets, but were as fully-fleshed as any other character I ever wrote.
The reason for this is simple: character is established by action. What this means is that it’s possible to learn about a character, even one that you’re writing, by observing what he does, in much the same way that you learn about the character of those around you by observing their actions. If your protagonist saves a kitten in chapter one, and punches his wife in chapter two, that tells you something about who he is. It isn’t actually necessary to have an elaborate understanding of his innermost thoughts in order to write his character; merely knowing what he does can be your starting place. In that way, your plot outline can suffice as a character outline. Your characters are the sort of people who will act in the way that your plot specifies.
If you do this badly, you can still wind up with bad characters. But generally these problems will already be visible in your plot outline. If the plot is implausible and unmotivated, then your characters will be implausible and unmotivated as well. But if your plot is taut and consistent, then in general the characters you discover while writing will hum.
The only downside to this is that I know my characters much better by the end of the story than the beginning, and I sometimes have to revamp the character’s thoughts and interior monologues from the first part of the story when I rewrite. But as writing problems go, this barely qualifies as a nuisance.
J.S. Bangs 