Art by Leeloo, Photo by CatA recent Locus Roundtable question led me to thinking about this. It starts with a confession: I read dictionaries, a habit since early, early years of Richard Scarry.
Not cover to cover, as you would a novel. Rather I pick them up, flip through the pages, pause to dip into them in search of new words to file away mentally. I relish new words so I’m always looking for them, especially sinewy and interesting new verbs, or nouns crusted with bits of morphological history.
I know I’m not alone in this — it’s a disease that many (though certainly not all, or even most, I think) writers (and some non-writers) share, and it’s not one its sufferers talk about much, because Good LORD how boring is that, reading the dictionary?
I have an American Heritage I’ll never part with, and beyond that the beloved Compact OED, three volumes and accompanying magnifying glass, that my brother Lowell got for me while I was in grad school and which will be with me till my dying days, I firmly well. And specialized dictionaries: a Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, a dictionary of foreign terms, another of fashion terms, and a glut of foreign language dictionaries, Russian, Hawaiian, Navaho, jostle for space on one on my most visited bookshelves.
Morphology — the history built into the syllables — fascinates me. That the proto Indo-European word “dwoh” (two) leads to words like double and duo and duplicate and duplicity (two-facedness) is just too cool. In my junior year of high school we had a vocabulary textbook that focused on roots – each section was several roots along with lengthy lists of words derived from them. I loved the idea that you could take a word apart and find its meaning built into it with the syllables of which it was made.
When I was in grad school, we had evenings of pot-luck suppers followed by play reading or rounds of the dictionary game (for which the aforementioned American Heritage was often employed). I will argue that playing word-games can be fun, but that playing it with clever writers can be intoxicating and exhilarating (note the shared root with “hilarity” there) and make you laugh so hard and long your face hurts. My all-time favorite remains the false definition for the word “nidor” – Naval acronym employed when inspecting submarines, stands for Nothing Is Damp Or Rusted.
Sometimes self-consciousness overtakes me. In high school a girl once asked me why I talked “so snobby,” an accusation that still pokes me on occasion. It’s a reason I like talking to other writers — no one views a previously unknown word as a hostile act but rather a gem that duplicates itself in the sharing. No one’s the poorer for talking to someone whose vocabulary stretches them.
Nothing jars on me quite so much as a word used in a half-right fashion, a square peg hammered down into that round hole and MADE to fit through sheer Humpty-Dumptyian insistence (an Alice in Wonderland reference that all we word-lovers know, go read the book if you never have, particularly if you’re a fantasy writer).
What about you? What are the words or word sources that you particularly love?
The notion of using a word in a “half-right fashion” is circular; the way that lexicographers know what the “right” definition of word is is by deducing its meaning from how people use it. Words aren’t manufactured in a dictionary and then released into the world of speakers and writers, where some people just don’t get them right. It’s the other way around.
Of course, people can argue that a word “should” mean this-and-that, based on its etymology, its historical use (evidence that’s often not nearly as concrete as is sometimes imagined, especially for “hard” or commonly “misused” words), or of course based on what a lexicographer has written. But the lexicon of the demotic has never been successfully corralled into boundaries established by dictionaries. People use words they way they will, and lexicographers in general consider their job not to be leading the crowd, but trying to keep up with it.
All that said, this doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible for people to use a word incorrectly. Individuals of course might simply have the wrong definition in their heads. A friend of mine has a favorite example where he says for a long time he thought the word “erstwhile” meant “distinguished.” And I’m sure I’ve corrected my misunderstanding of dozens (hundreds) words like that plus continue to have a healthy collection of words whose meanings I don’t have quite right. In those cases, tho, the writer is not insisting on a new meaning, I don’t think, and would not be obstinate about their intent. Then again … 🙂
I love dictionaries and encyclopedias, too. I collect words like a child collects pretty rocks. Ha–I collect those, too.
I remember being asked to ‘shut up’ by my ninth grade teacher when I corrected her use of a gerund. After that, I didn’t speak in a single class unless called upon until college. Where I was told to shut up by a very bad English prof, again. In grad school, I diagrammed a poorly written
sentence in the midst of a debate about what the first-year guidebook said was expected of us grad students on our second-year competency exams. The prof, a very proper British archaeologist, threatened violence when I showed the sentence was poorly constructed, because the modifier was on the verb. Turns out she’d written it.
Nowhere have I found as much love for words as in the midst of fellow writers. Even my linguist friends are less excited by them, I think.
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3 Things That End A Story Well
Think of the opening and ending of the story as the reader passing through the same door.Someone mentioned that they’d like to see a post on endings. Endings are hard. You have to go back and look for all the loose ends. It’s like weaving a basket – all those spiky little sticks poking out need to be woven together into a coherent shape. Here’s three things I think about when working on an ending.
1. Circularity is a big help. It provides a sense that the reader has returned to the beginning, but now everything is changed. Here’s a cheat – take something that appears in your first three paragraphs and invoke it in your last three as well. It can be changed – the rose that initially trembled, dew-covered, as our heroine picked it is now lying withered and flat in the road. Or it is a new rose, being picked by another woman who is the replacement for the first?
For an example of this, I’m actually going to be obnoxious and point to my own story, Magnificent Pigs. Technically I cheat, because the object I used doesn’t appear until the fourth paragraph, the brass bed which creaks in protest as Aaron sits down. At the end it’s become the object of Jilly’s salvation, the vehicle that carries her away into the sky. There’s other reappearing things: pigs are mentioned right off the bat (in the title, even) and they’re crucial to the end. And the story begins and ends with the idea of death and (hopefully) changes your perception of it.
Here’s another example, taken from Joe Hill’s wonderful “Pop Art” in 20th Century Ghosts (Kindle edition) It begins with a paragraph that sets up the rules of the story gracefully and efficiently:
My best friend when I was twelve was inflatable. His name was Arthur Roth, which also made him an inflatable Hebrew, although in our now-and-then talks about the afterlife, I don’t remember that he took an especially Jewish perspective. Talk was mostly what we did — in his condition rough-house was out of the question — and the subject of death, and what might follow it, came up more than once. I think Arthur knew he would be lucky to survive high school. When I met him, he had already almost been killed a dozen times, once for every year he had been alive. The afterlife was always on his mind; also the possible lack of one.
We know that the story is about the narrator and his best friend, but the focus will be the friend. We know it will have funny moments, and many of those come from Arthur’s mouth, so we like him even more. We know that in this story, the surreal is fair game. We know that there can be fairy-tale resonances. And we know, immediately, that the story will be about Arthur’s death.
That death returns at the end of the story, which I will not include, because you should read the story without that particular spoiler. But I feel comfortable in revealing that Arthur’s death reappears at the end in the shape of two people talking about it. It’s a lovely, well-constructed story with a lot of clever structure to it.
2. Give the reader space in which to appreciate your ending, a sentence or two of standing back and letting the story tumble into meaning in their head. That’s what “Pop Art” does – doesn’t end with the actual death, but ends with a discussion of it, which provides a chance to extract additional meaning from the story.
Here’s the end to Carol Emshwiller’s equally lovely “Grandma,” from the collection, Report to the Men’s Club (Kindle edition). The story, told by an superhero’s grandchild, begins with a litany of actions that the grandmother has performed in her role as superhero, and ends with the decision to take up that role (although somewhat modified), given physical form:
I’m wearing Grandma’s costume most of the time now. I sleep in it. It makes me feel safe. I’m doing my own little rescues as usual. (The vegetable garden is full of happy weeds. I keep the bird feeder going. I leave scraps out for the skunk.) Those count — almost as much as Grandma’s rescues did. Anyway, I know the weeds think so.
3. Let the reader hear the door of the story click shut. John Barth said this in a workshop one time and it’s always stuck with me. This is related to number 2, but even more, it’s the idea of providing a line that says “The End” or the equivalent, and lets the reader know the story is over. Have you ever heard someone read and not been sure when to clap? Those readers need to close the door a little harder.
Here, for example, is the end of Pat Cadigan’s “Vengeance is Yours” from her collection Patterns.
That’s the funny thing about vengeance. Half the time people hire me, they’re getting back at the wrong persons for all the wrong reasons. I should know. I’m an authority.
But then again, the vengeance isn’t mine.
BOOM the door is shut and the story is over.
Like beginnings, endings are important, and worth spending some extra time on. They’re the last handshake on your reader/guest’s way out the door, the smile or clever goodbye that makes them sigh in satisfaction, sitting in their homeward bound taxicab: “Oh, that was such a good party!” A good ending lets the reader close the book then sit back and savor its perfection, reconciling them to the fact that the dream you spun is over.
Writing exercise: Grab a story whose ending doesn’t satisfy. Using your first three paragraphs, write an ending that returns to that scene and lets us know exactly what has and hasn’t changed.
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As mentioned in the Wall Street Journal (hello new readers coming from there!) last year, I came up with a new class, “Punk U: The Whys and Wherefores of Writing -punk Fiction“, which attempted to explore some of the -punk subgenres, starting with cyberpunk and progressing through steampunk, dieselpunk, nanopunk, solarpunk, afropunk, monkpunk, mannerpunk, and a dozen others. Of all of them, the most fascinating to me — and the one that’s had the greatest influence on my recent fiction, is hopepunk.
What is hopepunk? The term was first coined by Alexandra Rowland as the antithesis of “grimdark,” a speculative genre featuring fatalistic nihilism and a tooth vs. claw environment. She wrote:
“The essence of grimdark is that everyone’s inherently sort of a bad person and does bad things, and that’s awful and disheartening and cynical. It’s looking at human nature and going, “˜The glass is half empty. “˜Hopepunk says, “˜No, I don’t accept that. Go fuck yourself: The glass is half full.’ Yeah, we’re all a messy mix of good and bad, flaws and virtues. We’ve all been mean and petty and cruel, but (and here’s the important part) we’ve also been soft and forgiving and kind. Hopepunk says that kindness and softness doesn’t equal weakness, and that in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act. An act of rebellion.”
Just the amount that I have seen people get more politically active in the last year has been amazing. I want to point out that kindness doesn’t necessarily mean softness. Kindness can mean standing up for someone who’s being bullied. If someone has a gun to your friend’s head, punching the guy with the gun is an act of kindness because you’re saving someone through that. So kindness is not always soft.
Kindness is not necessarily passive. Kindness is something that you can go out and fight for. Going to a protest, if you frame it in a particular way, is an act of kindness because you’re doing something for the future. You’re contributing to the future. You’re putting more good in the world is I think how I would define doing kindness. If you see someone being shouted at by a bigot on the subway, just standing up for them and having their back is an act of kindness.
And being kind also is something that requires so much bravery sometimes.
Others seized on the term with joyous abandon — and one of the signatures of hopepunk is, in my opinion, a sense that the writer is creating happily and full throttle. I’d call a number of the works on this year’s Nebula Award ballot hopepunk, particularly Trail of Lightning and The Calculating Stars, and I suspect there will be plenty of it on the Hugo and World Fantasy ballots this year as well.
Hopepunk is a reaction to our times, an insistence that a hollow world built of hatred and financial ambition is NOT the norm. It is stories of resistance, stories that celebrate friendship and truth and the things that make us human. In today’s world, being kind is one of the most radical things you can do, and you can see society trying to quash it by prosecuting those who offer food to the hungry, water to the thirsty, and shelter to those in need.
Claudie Arseneault spoke why she wanted hopepunk in her essay, Constructing a Kinder Future, for Strange Horizons:
The truth is, I’ve had enough of stories where your best friend or your closest family members are your most bitter enemies, where anyone you’re not in love with is an opponent to defeat, a potential traitor. Enough of stories where heroes must use each other as mere pawns, nothing more than pieces in a game, and abandon the “weak,” the naïve, the nice ones. Cruel ruthlessness is not our strength. It will not save us, and it should not be hailed as an acceptable means to an end, no matter the end. Our strength is in collaboration, in communities who link arms in the face of dangers, in perfect strangers donating to other people’s crowdfunding campaigns, and I want fiction to reflect that. I want characters who value their friends, who see perfect strangers as full-fledged human beings worthy of their help, and who fight the world with hope and kindness to be rewarded for it.
Is this desire for hope something new? No, it’s something that we’ve always celebrated in stories. Think about the moment in the Lord of the Rings when acts of kindness — first on Bilbo’s part, then on Frodo’s — lead to the moment where Gollum enables the ring’s destruction when Frodo falters and is on the brink of giving up his quest. Or go even further back, to Ovid’s Baucis and Philemon, who are rewarded for offering hospitality to strangers who turn out to be gods.
But in recent decades we’ve let other, darkerstories, mocking the earnest and shredding empathy, supplant those fables. Stories written by the kleptocracy, designed to make its victims despair and give way to apathetic acceptance, stories spat out daily by the messageboard shitlords trying to convince us that meme-based mockery should be the first reaction to any appeal to the human heart. They’re there to enforce the rule that to step away from the line– to be joyous or non-conforming or outside the system in any way — is to be aberrant and wrong.
One of the things resisting that is hopepunk. The movement has caught on, with some perceiving it as vital to sowing the seeds of resistance, as with Vox describing it as “weaponized optimism”, adding “Hopepunk combines the aesthetics of choosing gentleness with the messy politics of revolution.” In an article for America, Jim McDermott went so far as to call it “quintessentially Catholic“, saying:
Death on the cross, understood not as some brutal cosmic math equation but a personal choice to continue to love and give and believe even when your life is at stake, is the beating heart of Catholic hopepunk. So is Jesus’s vision of the Kingdom of God as a banquet where all are welcome and called to kindness, and the lives of holy people like Martin Luther King, Jr., St. Francis of Assisi or Mary MacKillop, R.S.J., who refused to accept the premises of the reality in which they lived and experienced their own deaths and resurrections as a result. It’s Greg Boyle, S.J., insisting “There is no “˜them’ and “˜us,’ there is only us,” young people from all over the world traveling to Panama to create and imagine the church or Mary Oliver inviting us over and over in her poetry to consider “our one wild and precious life.”
Hopepunk is a movement that understands the importance of stories and how they can affect change, and so hopepunk often — perhaps even usually — has casts that are as diverse as the world around us, featuring characters of color, transexuals, a-romantics, differently-abled, and more, building empathy by showing that there are certain basic things any of us want, regardless of which other or others we do or don’t belong to.
In thinking about it, I find that hopepunk has crept into my life over the past few years. The Feminist Futures Storybundle I just curated holds more than one example, as did last year’s version of it. The anthology I edited last year, which appeared at the beginning of this month, If This Goes On, is full of examples of it.
One of the charms of the hopepunk definition is that it’s somewhat expandable — happy + hopeful, plus an insistence that it’s not a totally hostile universe, seems to be the base definition. In fact, it doesn’t have to be speculative fiction. Here’s Bryn Hammond talking about examples of it in historical fiction.
One of my favorite writers, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., often preached kindness in his work. He also said, “Be careful what you pretend to be, because you become it.” Try being kind, being mindful of your impact on the world and lives around you, and you may be surprised at exactly how kind you can be.
Recently hopepunk has elbowed its way into my writing as well, insisting on the importance of kindness and community. I just finished up a story where that instinct plays an important part, and I know that the next story I’m turning to, about animatronic Beatles in a post-apocalyptic landscape, will have many of the same resonances. Is this a deliberate focus or accidental? I’m not sure, but I feel hopeful about it.
3 Responses
The notion of using a word in a “half-right fashion” is circular; the way that lexicographers know what the “right” definition of word is is by deducing its meaning from how people use it. Words aren’t manufactured in a dictionary and then released into the world of speakers and writers, where some people just don’t get them right. It’s the other way around.
Of course, people can argue that a word “should” mean this-and-that, based on its etymology, its historical use (evidence that’s often not nearly as concrete as is sometimes imagined, especially for “hard” or commonly “misused” words), or of course based on what a lexicographer has written. But the lexicon of the demotic has never been successfully corralled into boundaries established by dictionaries. People use words they way they will, and lexicographers in general consider their job not to be leading the crowd, but trying to keep up with it.
All that said, this doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible for people to use a word incorrectly. Individuals of course might simply have the wrong definition in their heads. A friend of mine has a favorite example where he says for a long time he thought the word “erstwhile” meant “distinguished.” And I’m sure I’ve corrected my misunderstanding of dozens (hundreds) words like that plus continue to have a healthy collection of words whose meanings I don’t have quite right. In those cases, tho, the writer is not insisting on a new meaning, I don’t think, and would not be obstinate about their intent. Then again … 🙂
I love dictionaries and encyclopedias, too. I collect words like a child collects pretty rocks. Ha–I collect those, too.
I remember being asked to ‘shut up’ by my ninth grade teacher when I corrected her use of a gerund. After that, I didn’t speak in a single class unless called upon until college. Where I was told to shut up by a very bad English prof, again. In grad school, I diagrammed a poorly written
sentence in the midst of a debate about what the first-year guidebook said was expected of us grad students on our second-year competency exams. The prof, a very proper British archaeologist, threatened violence when I showed the sentence was poorly constructed, because the modifier was on the verb. Turns out she’d written it.
Nowhere have I found as much love for words as in the midst of fellow writers. Even my linguist friends are less excited by them, I think.
I’m addicted to etymological dictionaries. I usually use them online, though
Oxford has recently come out with a new, historical thesaurus that I absolutely need to get at some point. http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Reference/?ci=9780199208999&view=usa
That looks pretty darn amazing and will take up a lot of my time.