Writer to writer: From think to ink - Gail Carson Levine 2014
Clarity and gizoxing
Underpinnings
Along similar lines as Maybeawriter’s post quoted in the previous chapter, Susan Lee asked, “Do you have any tips on writing? As in making sure people who read it will understand what you wrote?”
Unless you’re creating experimental fiction, clarity is the primary objective, ahead of plot, characterization, setting—any of the elements of storytelling. Clarity isn’t even an element! It’s the air a reader breathes.
Being clear doesn’t mean we can’t be complex. We can suggest something that will be more fully explained later. Our reader doesn’t have to understand what we intend at exactly the moment we suggest it. Realization can be delayed. Mysteries delay understanding constantly. That isn’t lack of clarity, that’s simply interesting storytelling.
But we don’t want to confuse the reader accidentally, and we can do so by making technical mistakes.
For example, loose pronouns will muddle the reader. If I write, The food was overcooked and everybody was arguing. It made me sick, the reader doesn’t know what it refers to—the meal or the arguing or both. It is the loose pronoun in this instance. And sick is imprecise, too, although it’s not a pronoun. Heartsick or stomach sick? Explaining in later sentences helps, but being specific from the beginning is even better.
When two males or two females are together in a scene, clarity can be hard to achieve, as in James waited an hour for Justin to show up. When Justin finally arrived, he was very angry. This time the pronoun he is loose. Who was angry? James for having had to wait or Justin for some other reason? And yet When Justin finally arrived, Justin was very angry sounds terrible. What to do?
Recast it. James waited an hour for Justin to show up. New paragraph. Justin entered the restaurant pale with anger. “If I ever have to wait another hour for my sister to finish practicing her flute, I’ll . . .” No confusion.
In A Tale of Two Castles the dragon character makes the pronoun business easier. Masteress Meenore is an IT because dragons rarely reveal their gender, so IT can be in a scene with a male character and a female character and, unless another dragon is present, confusion is impossible, and since IT is capitalized IT can’t be confused with an inanimate object, like a bowl of soup or a shoe.
Finnish, I’m told, has no masculine and feminine pronouns. A man is an it and a woman is an it. I don’t know if this creates a problem for people writing in Finnish, but I’m told it sometimes makes translation difficult.
The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White is a slim book about style and English usage. Usage means the way a word is used. For a guide to clear writing it can’t be beat, in my opinion. A book that’s devoted entirely to usage, like Garner’s Modern American Usage, is helpful, too. Usage books are arranged alphabetically, dictionary style, a cinch to figure out.
The usage issue that gets me into trouble every time is the difference between take and bring. The examples that a usage book provides make me understand for at least five minutes. Other people often misuse lay and lie, a pet peeve of mine.
But usage changes, and if everybody keeps lousing up lay and lie, the rule will change and I’ll have to get used (pun intended!) to it.
For those of you who are writing to have your work published, I suggest you take my advice about usage to heart. And here’s a command about grammar and spelling: Get it right. An editor won’t give the newbie writer any latitude on this. Only a rare editor will read beyond more than one misspelled word and even one grammatical error, like a mistake in agreement between noun and verb. Agreement means that a singular noun or pronoun requires a singular verb, and a plural noun or pronoun calls for a plural verb. This is the kind of sentence that sometimes gets people in trouble: Either Mary or her little lamb is going to school is correct, and Either Mary or her little lamb are going to school is wrong.
If you’ve finished a story, a novel, or a seven-book series that you want to submit to a contest or to a publisher and you’re not certain that you’ve got all the pesky little elements right, ask an authority, like an English teacher or a librarian, to read your work. You can tell him that you don’t want a critique of your plot or your characters, just the grammar, usage, and spelling.
Now enough of me as taskmaster! It is possible to write more or less understandably with nonsense words, and for word lovers like us, it’s fun and a pleasant break from the hard parts of writing fiction. I made this up:
Marisette gizoxed down the previo at zyonga speed. If the ashymi didn’t boosheg, she’d find herself and the precious kizage in the boiling svik and all would be owped.
Boy, I hope that ashymi booshegs! We understand enough to grasp that otherwise Marisette is in deep trouble, whatever the trouble is. I don’t know if we could keep this up through a whole story, but a little is a blast.
Along these lines there’s Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” in Through the Looking Glass, which is packed with action and words that have no meaning. Here are two stanzas:
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
Manxome sounds pretty bad and uffish thought in my opinion feels useless. Better stick with your vorpal sword, dude.
If you don’t know the whole poem, I can’t wait for you to read it. Try saying it aloud after you’ve read it to yourself a few times. Act it out. It’s very dramatic.
When I read and reread the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I used to say the language of the orcs out loud because I loved the sound. Since then, I’ve made up fragments of several languages of my own, and you can too. Here are some of the questions I learned to ask myself:
• How will the language look? You have punctuation marks, capitals, and repeated letters or omitted letters to work with. Gnomic in Ella Enchanted and Fairest, for example, is punctuated backward and the capitals appear at the end of a name and at the end of the sentence. Abdegi, the language of the giants, also in Ella Enchanted, is missing the letters that have a soft sound, like the letter f.
• How will the language sound? Each of the languages in Ella Enchanted has a particular sound. Abdegi is accompanied by emotional noises, like whoops and howls. Every word in Ayorthaian begins with a vowel and ends with the same vowel.
• Will there be consistent meaning? When a word repeats in a language in Ella Enchanted, it’s the same each time. I kept a glossary to make sure. For example, the Gnomic word brzzay always means “digging.” By contrast, in Ever the word for digging might be ioopll the first time it shows up and eressc the next. My thinking was that Wadir, where the language is spoken, is a dreamlike place, and things shift unexpectedly in a dream. If you decide to let meanings change, you should have a reason, as I had. Are you going to deal with grammar, tenses, plurals, etc., in your new language? I never have. I did a little with plurals and past tense in Ella Enchanted but not much, and I wasn’t careful about it. However, more power to you if you go all out.
There’s French (sort of) in A Tale of Two Castles—anglicized French, meaning that I gave French words an English spelling. One of the streets is Roo Street. In French, as you may know, rue means street. The ogre’s name is Count Jonty Um, which comes from the French gentilhomme, and the meaning of his name has significance for the story, although it’s okay if the reader doesn’t get it; I would be crazy (bananas, batty, cracked, etc.) to require readers of a book in English to know French! To those who don’t get it, his name is just Jonty Um, without any special significance. If you know another language to some degree (I don’t speak fluent French), you can do what I did. I like putting inside jokes in my books that I can chuckle over, even if I’m the only one laughing.
When we fool around with languages we’re exploring language itself, a worthy endeavor for a writer.
Writing time!
• Your main character seeks out another creature—could be a Martian or an elf or a dog or something else. Each needs something from the other, but they don’t speak the same language. They may not even think the same way. Write their meeting and your MC’s attempts to get what he wants. See if you can work the story around so they are able to figure each other out, but don’t make it easy.
• Or, going the other way, your MC is the other creature, trying to communicate with a human.
• Invent your own nonsense words and put them in a paragraph or a poem. Max out on the made-up words while still letting the reader gain a sense of what’s going on. If you try a poem, remember that rhyming is a snap with nonsense words. Ashymi boosheg, for example, can rhyme with dusheemee goothegg.
• Write a romantic moment in which all the terms of endearment are incomprehensible, you adorable quayth.
Have fun, and save what you write!