Fantasy Tropes: Ridiculously Lofty Diction

"Milady, mine eyes hath not laid upon any visage so beautiful as yours. 'Tis fairer than the sweetest nosegay."

I get why people in fantasy novels don't usually talk the way we do in modern society. Not only do they lack much of our technology (and a lot of our abbreviations and slang come from the ways our language has changed thanks to technology) but it also would just sound weird to have a couple of noble ladies walk up to each other and say "Hey biatch! Wassup?"

But that doesn't mean your characters have to talk with Shakespearean words and weirdly inverted syntax. It doesn't even mean they have to talk particularly formally, either.

I get the temptation. Everyone in LORD OF THE RINGS talks pretty, even the people who really shouldn't talk pretty. In Victorian novels and 18th century diaries, everyone's diction is high and their words are long. Making characters speak intelligently, with long sentences, big words, and without contractions (and I'm guilty of this one myself!) is a good way to make them feel like they're from another time or another world. It takes them out of that modern context, and yes, that is appealing.

But it is SO easy to go overboard with this. If you'd believe it, there's actually a freakishly-high-diction groove you get into once you start writing fantasy people like that. Trust me, when I was 14 ALL my fantasy characters spoke like they'd swallowed the OED and THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE. And a modern reader isn't going to be able to connect with someone who talks like Hamlet, anyway--unless they're actually reading HAMLET. (Even then, some people can't stand it.)

So, how do you keep obvious trademarks of modern diction out of fantasy dialogue without making your characters sound like they're being held hostage by Petrarch? Well, you can keep your diction pretty natural, actually. Eliminating things like "like" and "you know" and "seriously" from speech evens it out really well. Calling parents Mother and Father instead of Mom and Dad is pretty much an instantaneous royalty-ification. Don't use words that only came into popular use in the late 19th century or later--and if you're not sure, google it! (So if you're doing a medieval-esque setting, they wouldn't have had words like analgesic or addicted.)

Keep the slang to a minimum (unless you're not going with the familiar royalty route (more on this anon!) and are writing dockside workers--in which case you need low diction and a LOTTA slang), and if you must use a slang term, make one up! Or, slang is a place where it's okay to steal from Shakespeare or Dickens or whoever (though I do not recommend using 'alack!' as your slang word unless you're writing some kind of comedy.) Words for distance and time passage (like fortnight) are good--they sound old-fashioned, but they can still be used in a totally understandable and not at all awkward exchange of dialogue. "When will you come home?" "In a fortnight." And, hate to bring this up, a lot of curse words have been around for a long time, too.

And yeah, trying to come up with a pithy synonym for some of our slang is HARD. Believe me, I know. I spent forever trying to think of a synonym for "shut up!" and I still haven't come up with anything great. ("Be quiet" just doesn't have the same oomph, and something like "still your tongue" is rather awkward to say.) But my advice is, rather than saying something like "Still thy tongue or I shall cut it out with my sword!" just write around it. Eliminate the need for the use of "shut up" and put in something else--clapping a hand over someone's mouth, socking them in the jaw, snapping at them to make them stop talking, screaming over their words, whatever. (I do not recommend the use of "whatever" to end a sentence in fantasy dialogue.)

The biggest piece of advice I can give you is this: use your ears. You know when something sounds lofty and awkward, just as you know when something sounds modern. If you have to, read it aloud to yourself, or read it aloud to someone else. Your ears will tell you when the dialogue is right.

Fantasy Tropes: Freakishly Familiar Settings

Do I have enough alliteration in this blog title?

Fantasy, and by that I mean high fantasy, which takes place in an alternate world, (and excluding a lot of alternate history, urban, and paranormal) tends to be based on medieval England in varying degrees of strictness and accuracy. It makes sense; some of our favorite fantasy heavy-hitters like LORD OF THE RINGS are based in a medieval-inspired world. Medieval worlds don't have to be generic: there's a LOT in the medieval time period to supply a fantasy world with new and unique details.

But do you ever get that feeling like you've read a fantasy setting one too many times before?

I know I do. When it seems like the setting is primarily a castle, or a cute little village that lacks anything particularly identifying or unique about it, when the trees are just trees and the landscape is something vaguely like the English countryside. There are balls without specific fashions or dances, banquets without specific food or eating utensils or manners, wars with vague knights on horseback and maybe some archers...you get where I'm going with this.

Basically, when there aren't many details but those provided by books that have come before.

And detail is what, in my opinion anyway, makes or breaks a fantasy setting. Now, I am NOT advocating huge info-dumpy paragraphs describing every leaf on every tree on the way to Rivendell some faraway land. Dumping pretty but LONG and (honestly) hard to read descriptions of setting is another fantasy trope I'll come to at another time (maybe). But you don't need to sacrifice specific detail in an attempt to keep the reader from getting bored.

Think about it. What was so great about Harry Potter? Rowling only gave us a couple of lines of description at any given time, but she fed us these often and in interesting ways. And what she was feeding us wasn't just a generic castle with a stable and servants. She was giving us an intricate look at a very well-imagined world full of details. How did we learn about the inner workings of Hogwarts? We watched Harry struggle through it, be perplexed and awed by it, and finally, succeed at it. Without being bombarded, we got the sense of a long history not only of Hogwarts, but of a wide and specific wizarding world. Rowling left nothing up to generic explanation, and because of that, the world felt fuller--and we could imagine that there was something beyond what we were reading.

Am I saying that you should ditch the medieval setting? No way. It's a favorite! What I'm saying is that you should make your setting specific. If you can pull all those tiny details, from underwear to war strategy, from your imagination, more power to you. But what I find most helpful is to do research on something--on a particular part of the world, or a particular generation of a royal (or not so royal) family, or even something more narrow like early university systems. Basing worldbuilding, especially if you're a new fantasy writer, on real world settings is one of the best ways to make sure you're making a unique and specific setting and including enough detail so that you never give your reader the feeling that parts of your story exist in that white room vacuum, where it's hard to imagine any setting at all. You don't even have to pick a single time period--I'm very fond of mixing them, actually. And you can change whatever details you want--the beauty of fantasy is that it does not have to be any kind of accurate to your research.

But if you can write a hilarious (or hilariously dark) scene about a knight who has so much armor on he has to be lifted onto his horse via crane (which did actually happen!) and what that means for the war effort (or just for the jousting circuit!) suddenly your knights and their armor and their poor, poor horses will stand out--and so will your worldbuilding.

If you want a good example of worldbuilding, Rae Carson's THE GIRL OF FIRE AND THORNS (seriously, at this point I must look like some kind of TGOFAT stalker...oh well) has excellent worldbuilding. Her setting is unique, but one of the ways she made it so was by basing it on specific and real places (Spain and the desert being the main two). And she doesn't give in to long descriptions: you find out things through the main character's actions and observations. Without knowing exactly when it happened, you realize you can picture the world perfectly.

What do you think? Am I being too hard on the poor castles and inns and horses and forests? Or do you sometimes wish for something a little different, too? What are your favorite fantasy books that take place in a non-Medieval setting?

Favorite Fantasy Tropes...& How to Subvert Them: An Introduction

I'm going to do something new (!) on my blog, starting today. I read a lot (a ridiculous amount) of fantasy. In every sub genre you can think of. It's my favorite thing--always has been--to read.

I went to Rae Carson's signing last Tuesday, (you can see a picture of me with her (huge stalkerish squee!) in the left sidebar, and read my review of her stellar debut THE GIRL OF FIRE AND THORNS here) and one of the things she mentioned that inspired her to write TGOFAT was that while she loves fantasy, she got tired of seeing certain tropes, and she wanted to write a book that turned some of them on their heads. I think she succeeded.

I agree with her 500%, and making sure not to fall into the traps of tropes is one thing I strive to do in my writing. Kristin Nelson, in a couple of my favorite blog posts ever, talks about the "groan worthy" fantasy openers she's seen in her career as an agent. Seems like people are interested in this kind of thing. Well, okay, *I* am, anyway.

So what I want to start doing on this blog as a regular feature is talking about the tropes that I see so often in fantasy, as a reader and as a writer. Some tropes I see broken down more and more in books, and some I see staying for the most part the same. Maybe I'll even get to use that college degree in English to analyze some of these things.

What I'm particularly excited about dissecting:

+ Freakishly familiar settings

+ Why that damsel is always in distress

+ Flaming! Red! Hair!

+ What is this fascination with royalty?

+ Sexism and it's feminist counterpart

+ Hark! Another quest, Frodo!

+ Why Really Old Men make the best wizards

So...DO you want to know what's up with princesses in towers and magical swords and chosen people? Me too! I'm hoping to figure out some of why this is so popular, which parts we might still want to see, and which parts we're sick of. And, if you're trying to polish up a fantasy story, I hope I might provide you with an idea or two. I certainly hope to find some new ideas during this endeavor. :)

A note: This is all meant in good fun, and to help writers and readers of fantasy like me! And, because I'm such a geek, to provide me with discussion opportunities with like-minded geeks.

Come back TOMORROW! I'll be talking about setting and worldbuilding! :)

Also, today on YA Confidential, I'm blogging about the teen perspective on LGBT lit. I would love it if you went to check it out and gave me your thoughts!

Today I am not myself...and you could win agent critiques!

Today is a bit of a hodgepodge of things. First off, if you head over to YA CONFIDENTIAL, we're having a HUGE launch contest. Not only are there some super sweet ARCs up for grabs, but we have a five page critique from Vickie Motter and a query critique from Sarah LaPolla for you to win as well!

I'm also celebrating the launch of Talli Roland's WATCHING WILLOW WATTS by posting a picture of which famous person I would be if I could be anyone...

And I would be 18th century British writer, Mary Wollstonecraft, if only so that I could be attached to the awesome that is "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." Her life was short (she wasn't 40 when she died) and she lived in a time when women were treated as very inferior to men, but she didn't let that stop her from writing or from having some rather unconventional love affairs. (She's also mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who you may have heard of...)

So, who would you be?

Go visit Talli and tell her about it!

Check it out

http://yaconfidential.blogspot.com

Ooh...a NEW manuscript!

Beginning of August, I decided to participate in Camp NaNoWriMo. 18 days later, I had my 50k words. 3 days after that, I had a complete first draft.

The entire first half of 2011 I was working on the same manuscript, a manuscript that also took a good part of my writing energy and concentration in 2010. The dark fantasy manuscript that I've been writing all those letters to. Revising that has been at the forefront of my brain for SUCH a long time--and believe me, it was worth it. All that deleted and rewritten text was so worth it, because I really like how the manuscript turned out, and it surprised me so many times. (Don't get me wrong, it was frustrating as hell, too. But worth it frustration.)

But oh wow, I'd almost forgotten how fantastic it is to write a first draft, because the last first draft I wrote was in 2009 when I first wrote the dark fantasy project. Since then, I've REwritten two projects (one completely from scratch, which was kind of like doing a first draft), and I've done so much revising (I feel like a revision machine). New projects squished their way through the empty space in my brain and demanded to be written in as loud a voice as their unformed ideas could make, but the revisions always yelled louder, and so that's what I always did.

Until this project, this new manuscript, a YA fantasy, blew up into a monster sized idea with sub plots and side characters and world details and facets and pretty things. I actually wrote the first pages of it (going through EVERY SINGLE TENSE/POV combination (except 2nd person, cuz seriously...) until I settled on one) while I was doing the final read-through of the dark fantasy. In those final dark fantasy days, the YA fantasy would Not. Shut. Up.

I've had this idea for over a year. Maybe it was waiting so long to actually get to it (and I did have to keep myself from doing it so I could solidify a lot of points about the idea), but I don't know if I've ever had such fun writing a first draft, and that includes the first time waaaaay long ago when I realized I was going to actually FINISH a novel.

Part of what made it great was the same energy that made me want to keep revising the dark fantasy: they aren't just fantasy stories--yes, they're commercial plots and action fun and magic, but I also got to slip a little feminism and questioning binaries in there, too. In totally different ways than the feminism most people usually think of (like if you're thinking of burning bras or man hating, that's not what I mean at all.) I'm talking about worlds that never needed feminism because of their social structure, worlds that have other binaries or other -isms to worry about, worlds that never decided that a woman's biology makes her less useful or less of a person or just less.

This is my favorite part of writing.