The power of names

[hrj]

Yesterday and today I set myself to working on titles and forms of address to be used in the novel. I ran a large number of possible roots and compounds through the phonological mill, applied my general principle that romance roots are considered more upperish-class and germanic ones more lowerish-class, and picked the results with the right "feel". The next step was putting together a matrix of all relevant combinatorial interactions of class, formality, age, and intimacy and sketching out the general social rules for address and reference. The exciting part was that as I started firming up the results, I could feel the tone of the story shift from "generic Englishy feel" to "definitely Somewhere Else". "Mistress *placeholder*" is a rather different person from "Maisetra Sovitre". One of the fun things I hope to do in my overly-analytical way is to track the shifting relationships between the main characters not only in how they address and refer to each other, but -- in the case of the two POV characters -- how people get referred to during their "stage time". Yes, it's a bit excessively picky, but it's sort of like getting the food right, or the clothes right. I have most of the main characters named at this point, so I think I'm ready to start the revision process on Part I. I'm guessing that what with one thing and another this process will take me through the end of the year.

Comments

[zeborah]

I noticed that shift in feel when I renamed everything in the Scandinavian Story (quite early on).

It always makes me feel absurdly proud when I get to put in some detail of clothes or food (last week I discovered some period discussion of various types of wine, so I went through the WIP changing almost every instance of generic wine to some specific kind of wine appropriate to the situation) or... well, any kind of props, really, because that's stuff that I'm not usually very good at.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

changing almost every instance of generic wine to some specific kind of wine

That's a technique I learned when TA-ing cognitive linguistics. We do this unit on "basic level categories", i.e., the labels we use for sets of things that we interact with in the same basic way -- as contrasted with subordinate categories, i.e., more specialized types, or superordinate categories, i.e., more abstract groupings of things that share fewer similarities. (One of the classic examples is "pet" as superordinate, "cat" as basic, and "siamese cat" as subordinate.)

A passage in which all the references are to basic-level categories ends up sounding bland and boring: "He opened the door to his car and let the dog out." The same passage using superordinate labels is just utterly wrong: "He opened the door to his vehicle and let the pet out." Crank everything up to a subordinate level and the writing gets more vibrant: "He opened the door to his Corvette and let the spaniel out." Crank it up to an even more specific level and it starts sounding supercilious (which is sometimes the purpose): "He opened the door to his B2K Callaway Corvette and let the King Charles Spaniel out."

Any time I feel like a passage is too bland, I see if the details need to be kicked up a level in specificity.

[eowyna.livejournal.com]

Seems like a very Tolkienesque approach to story telling. I like it!

[aastg.livejournal.com]

Aw, c'mon - the whole point of studying this stuff, besides its being fascinating, is that it's just so satisfying to get it right. It's usually pretty satisfying to read, too, as long as the writer doesn't give in to the temptation to stall the narrative with too much exposition.

Footnotes are okay, though.

[xrian.livejournal.com]

It's just so.... so *encouraging* to watch this process in action. I can see the little gears whirling, brain kicking into gear... I'm _really_ looking forward to reading this!

[hrj.livejournal.com]

One of the "process oriented" parts of this writing project is that I'm keeping something of a process diary with notes on where the concept started, what threads went into it, how the basic structures evolved, and so forth. The stuff I'm posting is part of that, but only a small part. Most of it would be too spoilery in my opinion. I might let someone read it after they've read the finished novel, but not before.