How To Write Magical Words: A Writer's Companion

by Unknown

  Harry, all the manuscript is in English, yes, but you can add flavor of a new language in several ways:

  1. Syntax as mentioned earlier.

  2. Basic words inserted in text where the reader has no doubt what they mean.

  3. Basic words inserted in text with explanations following the first time you use the word and any time there has been a lot of manuscript text between usage.

  4. Basic words inserted with glossary at front or back.

  However, one still has to be very careful with this not to overdo and confuse the reader.

  How Far Is That Again?

  Misty Massey

  One of our faithful readers, Daniel Davis, recently asked a very good question:

  "I’m just wondering how others deal with time and distance in their stories. By that I mean, do you change the names of your time and distance from Earth standard (seconds, minutes, hours, feet, miles, etc) to something else, keep it the same, or do you even use standardized time? In a place that has no clocks or even sun dials, how does one have their characters deal with talking about time? Also, using English standard units of measure just doesn’t seem right for races who have never been on Earth, but using fictitious names for them could be confusing for readers."

  It’s an important point. It’s easy to use miles, inches, hours and such without realizing how very particular that language is to our own world. The likelihood of a race of people from another solar system using the same words to describe distance is almost nil. Time and space are necessary for a story, to keep track of the order things happen, and where. Maybe Dr Who can wrap his mind around time being a great big ball of wibbley-wobbley, timey-wimey stuff, but the rest of us require an explanation that’s a bit more concrete. Our characters have to have some way of marking the passage of time, and the amount of distance. Creating a vocabulary to solve that problem seems to be the most obvious solution. Except the writer runs the risk of confusing his readers by changing all the familiar words. How far is a frangem? If it takes pix hofrensesses to reach the capital city, how long is that, really? Finding the comprehensible balance between new vocabulary and reader understanding is vital.

  Most writers seem to keep the words for numbers, which is nice. Math’s already hard for me . . . I don’t know how everyone else feels, but if you start changing the numbers’ names, you’ll lose my attention. There’s always a threat of overdoing the worldbuilding and ruining the experience for everyone.

  Assuming that the numbers get to keep their names, we then have to look at the words for measurement. The first option, and the easiest, is to use all the words already in place. It’s safe, of course, and if you do a good job of world-building in all the other areas of the novel, no one will mind too much. I’ve seen writers use archaic words to describe distances—leagues, yonside or nigh, to name a few. It’s a great place to start, since most readers won’t be overly familiar with them. Read a little Shakespeare and you’ll find plenty of dandy words to try. This doesn’t work as well for science fiction, since the assumption is that your characters have moved beyond that somewhat vague style of measurement.

  Since you’re building your world from the ground up anyway, I think the best idea would be to make up your own words. Easy, right? A great place to begin would be the dictionary. Look up the words you’re wanting to replace, and read about their origins, then let your imagination wander a bit. "Mile", for instance, is derived from the Latin milia passuum, which means "a thousand double paces." You could rename the mile in your culture as milpache. (This is just off the top of my head—I’m sure you can come up with a more graceful word.)

  If your book’s people have a similarity to any of Earth’s plentiful and real cultures, you can investigate the language and borrow from it as well. Be cautious and respectful, though, especially if you’re borrowing from a language that’s still being spoken. The last thing you want to do is misuse the language and insult anyone. So you’ve made up your words . . . how does the reader know what they mean?

  Context. Present those new and thrilling words in context, and the reader will happily stick with you. Here are a couple of examples:

  The trip to Anferr took two kiddles, and Jon was exhausted by the time he arrived. He promised himself that next time he’d send someone younger, with a better back. Not everything had to be his responsibility.

  OR

  "Jon! Good to see you!"

  "Finally." He rubbed his back, groaning. "I hate having to sleep on the transport for even a kik, but the whole kiddle, sitting up . . ." he straightened. "I like my bed too well. Lead me to the coffee and toast, would you?"

  In the first example, a kiddle could have been anything—a day, a week, a six-hour chunk of time. There’s not much to connect to. In the second, we realize Jon was sleeping for a kiddle, which is much longer than a kik. And now he’s hungry for the morning meal. The evidence suggests a kiddle equals a night. It’s all about how you present the new and strange words. As long as you make it easy for the reader to make the intuitive leap, you’re in good shape.

  I used the rising and falling of the sun as the main measure of time passing in my book, since my pirates depend on the skies for navigation. They live in an archipelago, so they also determine distance by how many days it takes to get from one island to another. Fairly simple, but it’s all the distance and time Kestrel needed. The Danisobans have their own methods, but she doesn’t know about them, and since the book was from her point-of-view, it never came up.

  I’m going to throw the question out to my esteemed colleagues and all our other faithful readers. As we at Magical Words say, there is no single right way to do things, but there are lots of great ideas. How do y’all handle creating distance words? What books have you read that accomplished the job well?

  §§§

  Faith Hunter

  Misty, One of my main POV characters in my WIP is an animal. She thinks of periods of time in mooncycles. There is a the sharp-pointed moon, and its opposite, the pregnant moon. There is the hungry moon, and the hunter’s moon. I’ve had fun thinking/speaking with an animal’s mind, coming up with words that might make sense to her, making it basic enough to feel primitive, yet hope I don’t irritate readers with its weirdness.

  Daniel R. Davis

  I just thought of a possibility for determining sun span across the sky. Using a coin of the realm and holding it out so that it looks the same size as the sun and using it to estimate how many spans the sun has traveled across the sky since it rose. Kind of a simple and neat way of checking the time. Might even be able to come up with a renamed minute/hour scale that way as well. hmm.

  Edmund R. Schubert

  One of my pet peeves with a lot of fantasy is that frequently the language stuff is horribly overdone. Tolkien was a linguist who put a lot of thought into his Elvish; too many writers who want to follow in his footsteps think it’s sufficient to make up a bunch of junk and then end up with half of their character’s names having no vowels (substituting apostrophes instead); time and distance expressed in Uveuals and Snarnakithims; etc etc etc. There is a balance to be struck between giving your fantasy language distinction, and making it painful to read. Every time I come across a sentence like, "Grv’nth’k rode his horse for many uveuals, cover the six snarnakithims in half the usual time because he couldn’t risk being late for his meeting with Br’th’sm’pnl," I put the book down and walk away. I want to get lost in a story and that’s impossible to do if I’m constantly bombarded with gibberish.

  Writing Action Scenes

  A.J. Hartley

  Imagine you’re stopping off at the supermarket on the way home from work. It’s later than you had intended and the sun is already down. You’re irritated by a meeting you had earlier in the day, bits of which are replaying in your head as you start manhandling bags of groceries into the car. It’s raining and one of the paper bags has started to tear at the bottom. You figure that if you’re quick you can get it inside before any more damage
is done, but a can of tuna falls out and rolls under the car. Cursing, you stoop to pick it up, and that’s when you realize.

  There’s someone behind you. Someone who has moved quickly and quietly. Someone who means you harm.

  You turn, rising, forming a defiant question that will mask your sudden panic, and that’s when you see his fist and the blade it is wrapped around . . .

  Okay. So, for most of us, writing the rest of this scene will—mercifully—be an act of imagination rather than memory, and it’s a tricky thing to do. Partly, I think, the problem is with the medium itself, words on a page being—perhaps—better suited to reflection than the furious chaos of physical fighting, the danger and exhilaration of which comes across so much better in a visual medium like film. It can be done in fiction, of course, but how do you pull it off effectively?

  Let me start with one of my usual calls for balance. On the one hand, we need to know what’s happening so we can picture it, but on the other we want to feel what it’s like to be in the fight, and those two impulses can be contradictory. Unless your protagonist is a very cool-headed martial arts expert (and I’m assuming a limited third-person narrative here), describing every move of the struggle so that your reader can act them out is going to feel stiff and dull. As with larger plot points, the important thing is to remember that the meaning of the action is finally about its effect on the reader and its consequences for the characters, so that you don’t get mired in the mapping of its logistics. Real fights—even some verbal arguments, if you’re angry enough—don’t feel choreographed. They feel irrational, a swirl of gut-level, thoughtlessness. If your character feels like his or her life is in danger, we need to sense that, and we won’t if it comes across as either a ballet or like the blow by blow account of a role-playing game.

  Different writers tackle this balance in different ways, of course, and it may depend on what you want from the sequence in terms of the larger narrative, but I would caution against too much reflection during the fight. As with any action sequence, you probably want to keep the specifics tight: short, breathless sentences, setting up (and balanced by) occasional longer and more reflective beats. The reading eye leaping quickly from sentence to sentence echoes the speed of the action and (hopefully) gets the adrenaline pumping. Then you can move from the staccato to something with more detail or mood. Try this:

  The knife flashes up at your face. You block wildly, stumbling, and his other fist swings in. It lands hard on your jaw. Your head snaps back, and the night brightens. You taste blood against your teeth, and suddenly there is only panic and defiance and a wild, terrible fury. You lunge for his throat, forgetting the knife, your knee snapping up into his groin.

  And so on. The first 4 sentences are short and physical, as is the last one. In the middle is something a bit longer, a bit more abstract, which provides a turn for the paragraph, a transitional moment in which the attacked becomes the attacker. The next longest sentences (the 2nd and the last) still feel short, because they’re made up of three almost separate phrases which each convey an action. The longer transitional sentence is not much longer (though the repeated "ands" force a fractional slowing of tempo, I think, which gives weight to "panic," "defiance," and then "fury" . . . itself loaded with two adjectives to give even greater specificity and weight), because action has to feel like it’s happening in real time: that the number of seconds it takes to read the passage are about the same as how long the action takes to happen.

  Action demands that you prioritize. What should be part of the character’s or narrator’s experience here? Should he/she (or "you") be aware of the color and model of the car? Probably not. Adding that kind of detail is likely to make that whole section feel like an out of body experience. There may be good reasons to include such information, but for most action sequences those things are going to feel digressive and irrelevant. When describing fighting well, the reader is most likely going to be thinking very simple things as the sequence taps into his or her own feelings of fear or exhilaration, so what will keep them reading is a focus on answering equally simple questions: will the protagonist survive and how? A secondary question might be "Who is the attacker and why is this happening?" but you barely want even that in the reader’s mind during the fight itself. As the struggle goes on, you want the reader’s response to be visceral, animal, rather than analytical.

  The "show/don’t tell" rule is especially applicable here. Each moment should feel immediate, so beware those anti-suspense phrases which telegraph how things end up before you get there: "He didn’t think he had the energy, but . . ." "The first two ax blows barely made an impression on the armor, but . . ." "Only when he was down to his last bullet . . ." These are lazy phrases which effectively skip over time and ask the reader to pretend it was all gripping. Either make us experience each stroke, each shot, or leave them out.

  Lastly, keep it short. If the fighting starts to lag, or otherwise loses its edge—even in the description of a big action event like a large-scale battle—it has started to subvert its own purpose and needs cutting. Dialogue and exposition can occasionally get away with being a bit boring (particularly if their pay-off is elsewhere); action can’t. Action exists primarily for the thrill or horror they provide in the moment of reading. If you can’t feel your pulse starting to race as you read what you’ve written, it probably needs attention.

  §§§

  Misty Massey

  Sometimes I realize I’ve written an action scene that just won’t work. One fighter needs two left hands to do what I’ve said he’s doing, or the way I have them turn leaves them fighting each other back to back. When that happens, I call my husband and son to come into the room and block out the scene, just to make sure it makes physical sense. Once I even had my husband jump off the roof of our Blazer so I could see him land and roll. I can’t begin to tell you how much it helps; I know not everyone has people willing to do this sort of thing, so I’m lucky.

  I’m also lucky no one has been damaged yet. :-)

  A.J. Hartley

  Misty, I do the same. Walking through the steps of a fight (esp. with some deluded but helpful participant) is invaluable for visualizing exactly how things work. This goes for all physical activity in books: not just combat. While writing a scene in my last thriller where a guy was up on the ledge of a tower and trying to inch round the building, I laid out 2x4s around the walls of my house and worked my way round, pretending I was fifty feet up in the air!

  Joe McBee

  Great advice, A.J.! I now need to revisit the action sequences in my novel. I also love the idea of blocking the action sequences first so I can see how they would play out.

  One question: In terms of spacing for an adventure novel, how often should an action sequence come up? I’ve read novels before that were so action packed that they were exhausting and annoying. And then I’ve read other novels that seemed like they could use a little more action. Is there a "rule of thumb" for how much action one should see?

  A.J. Hartley

  Joe, good (and tricky) question. You’re right to say that different writers use different amounts of action, and that some are relentless. I’d go so far as to suggest there are genres within genres, and your best rule of thumb is probably to ask yourself what kind of book you are trying to write and then study examples of that subset. My thrillers use action rather sparingly (every fifty pages or so?) but I’m considered a bit sedate, especially next to the harder core thriller writers (esp. those set in military contexts).

  Writing Action Scenes: Part 2, Battles

  A.J. Hartley

  After my last essay on combat, I got a couple of queries/comments which asked about larger-scale fighting, and have been considering how best to answer them. I must admit that I was surprised (pleased, certainly, but definitely surprised) when my Will Hawthorne books got positive critical attention for their battle scenes, and I offer the following with the proviso that I don’t claim to be an expert on this and can only discuss
what has worked for me.

  1. Number

  Battles, if given real attention, are inevitably big "set piece" episodes, involving lots of characters (major and minor) and pages and pages of description. As a result, they have to be used judiciously, with an eye to the larger arc of the story. It’s worth remembering that though there are plenty of smaller skirmishes and action sequences in the three books of The Lord of the Rings, there are really only two large scale battles: Helm’s Deep and Pelennor Fields. The movie versions increased this number significantly, partly to suit the visual medium and partly to add scale and drama to three separate films, but even so (and I’m speaking as a fan of the movies) they start to feel repetitive by the end, particularly if you watch all three in sequence. Battles are the coup de grace of dramatic action, but more is not necessarily better. For one thing they generally need to get bigger, more significant, and more dramatic if they are not to feel anticlimactic, and this alone is reason enough to use them sparingly. Opening a story with a big, exciting combat sequence certainly gets the book going with a bang, but how do you top that? Begin too big and you’ve nowhere to go but down.

  2. Placement

  Some planning—even for you pantsers—is essential. Figure out how many battles you are going to use and then where in the story you are going to put them. Tolkien’s example is a good one: skirmishes at the beginning (Weathertop, Moria, and the death of Boromir), one major battle at roughly the midpoint of the story, and another even bigger one at the end. You may have more, of course, but you should think of the larger story in terms of its rhythms and stresses. I don’t think they have to escalate over a series of books, necessarily, but they probably should increase in dramatic intensity in a single book, and should be placed in accord with larger patterns of plot and character. In terms of classic three act structure, the two LOTR battles I mentioned occur at climactic points in the middle and end of the second act. It might be argued that Pelennor is part of Act 3, but if we think of the narrative as ultimately being the story of Frodo and the ring, the third act is all Mount Doom and the return to the Shire. It is true that battles can liven up a story, but if they are simply incidental (just an opportunity to get the blood pumping), keep the scale small. Large battles shouldn’t feel arbitrary.