Guest Post: Valerie Nieman on Going Away and Coming Home

“Since your book’s technological advances place it during the Renaissance, your characters are wrong because they should be speaking like Shakespeare.”

Imagine my surprise when a friend and avid fantasy reader said this to me. I can’t remember the last time I met someone who believed that level of linguistic authenticity necessary in a fantasy world. While I love Shakespeare, if every fantasy novel I read was written with historically and culturally accurate language, I’d go mad. I don’t speak German any more than I speak Old English. Egad! Not even the people of Shakespeare’s time spoke like Shakespeare.

Imagine if The Lord of the Rings trilogy were written like this:

When Mister Bilbo Baggins of Bag Endeth announc’d that he wouldst shortly be
celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special
magnificence, thither was much talketh and excitement in Hobbiton.

Or like this:

Hwanne Dryhten Bilbo Baggins of Faetels Ende abeodan se he dulmúnus aer gebréfan beon he endleofan-fyrest ongean a gebéorscipe fram déore, þider beon fela acwepan end onwæcenness in Hobbiton.

Not so bad in Shakespeare’s tongue, but how enjoyable would the reading be in Old English?

It’s a common misconception that all fantasy is based upon medieval Europe, and everyone talks like they’re in a Shakespeare play.

One reason I call shenanigans on this misconception is that when the day is done, it’s fantasy. It’s up to the author to build a believable world however they wish. That’s not to say that linguistics doesn’t play a crucial role in world building, but as the author, you have some wiggle room in how you develop your world or universe.

In my fantasy novel, Amaskan’s Blood, the world of Boahim consists of twelve kingdoms. Each one has their own culture that I built from a mixture of Earth cultures. But at its core, Boahim is a fantasy world that doesn’t exist on planet Earth and never did. I can set their scientific advances to be comparable to Middle Ages France, and yet, use magic to control indoor plumbing if I wish.

But what about linguistics? More specifically, word choice? If a kingdom is based on Renaissance France, must I write the novel in Old French? Tolkien certainly didn’t, and he was a linguistics master.

Yet Linguistics is more than word choice. It’s phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and the order of parts of speech. (You can read more on each of these here.) These are all elements an author must consider as they write a story in a fantasy world.

Rather than dealing with absolutes, writers should consider linguistics as an essential piece of world building. You would no more have a character in Renaissance France talking about gigabytes or than you would a scullery maid speak with a refined and educated diction.

So how do we find balance with our linguistics?

1. Your language must be believable. It should fit the time period and culture of the society, unless it has a strong reason not to do so.
2. Don’t overdo it with newly invented words. If I need a glossary at the end of the book to translate all your made up words, I’ll be sucked out of my enjoyment to do “homework.” Harry Harrison’s West of Eden comes to mind. I made it twenty pages in before the chore of translation drove me to toss the book in the “donate” bin.
3. Don’t overdo dialects. Dialects are also indications of language and cultural status, and should be used sparingly. If over used, it can fatigue the reader. (You can read more about dialect here.)

While Tolkien sprinkled bits of Sindarin, Khuzdul, and the Black Speech throughout his trilogy, he did so sparingly enough that it became flavor text””enrichment to his world building rather than a stopping block for the reader. That should be the author’s goal as well””enrichment.

While revising my fantasy novel, I kept a running list of terms that felt modern or out of place as I reread the novel. Then I used the Online Etymology Dictionary to look up the offending words. (There were over 300 of them, but it was well worth looking them up to ensure a good reading experience.)

For example, the word faux pas, French for false-step, dates back to 1670. In Boahim, one kingdom’s culture is heavily influenced by Renaissance France. It made sense in my timeline and culture for the word faux pas to exist. All that was left was double-checking whether a particular character would know and use the word. Word choice is as much a part of who your character is as the culture in which they belong.

If the time period or culture had been wrong””say from the 1800’s””it’s my job then to research why/how the word came about. I would have to make the ultimate choice on whether that word fit into the world I’ve established and the character using it.

Ultimately, it is up to the writer to build their world and decide what the characters would and would not know. Do your homework with your world building, and we’ll gladly follow the characters on their journey.

Bio: Raven Oak is the author of the bestselling fantasy novel, Amaskan’s Blood, and the upcoming sci-fi novels, Class-M Exile and The Silent Frontier. She spent most of her K-12 education doodling stories and 500 page monstrosities that are forever locked away in a filing cabinet.

She lives in Seattle, WA with her husband, and their three kitties who enjoy lounging across the keyboard when writing deadlines approach.

For more information and excerpts, visit http://www.ravenoak.net

Raven can also be found on the following sites:
Twitter: @raven_oak
Facebook: http://facebook.com/authorroak
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/raven_oak
Google+: https://www.google.com/+RavenOak
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/kaonevar/

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Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Unlike the more familiar Greco-Roman or Norse pantheons which feature vivid characters and well-defined myth cycles, the Inuit myths tend to ramble, skipping madly about with the rapid scene changes of a disjointed dream and likely to end abruptly with a stoic, “˜”Here ends this story.”

The mythology is peppered with impressive spirits with interesting names. But aside from a name and a job description there’s little else to go on. So when I decided to write ALAANA’S WAY, an epic fantasy series about the first female shaman in an arctic world based on Inuit myth, I had my hands full. As shaman it’s Alaana’s duty to negotiate with the great spirits, and they all became colorful characters in the story. Their appearance and personalities were entirely up to me.

Another problem. A nomadic lifestyle, the vagaries of a mostly oral tradition and a fractured tribal system leave little agreement between different versions of the same story. Even the most established figure, Sedna, Mistress of the Sea, owns multiple conflicting origin stories. One version claims she was the daughter of two giants with such an uncontrollable urge for flesh that she tried to devour her parents in their sleep. Another tribe insists she was a young beauty forced to marry an elderly neighbor who turned out to be a monstrous carrion bird, leaving her no route of escape except a plunge into the salty depths. Or perhaps she was a poor orphan girl mistreated and cast into the sea by the other children; her fingers, chopped off as she clung desperately to the side of the kayak, fell into the water to become the walruses and seal. I had to tread carefully here. I decided, in a flash of Solomon-like insight, that all of them were true. I supposed that in the Beforetime, where dreams were reality, she was all those things, lived all those lives. But here and now she is simply Sedna, the Sea Mother who controls all the animals in the ocean.

Another established figure is Tulukkaruq, the Raven, who always represents a mischievous spirit in Native American folklore. The Inuit Raven is impressive indeed, having been credited with creating human beings and bestowng the gift of fire on us as well. But really, this one was easy. I gave him the personality of the Dark Knight’s Joker and urged him to plague both my shamanic heroine and her villainous nemesis in equal measure.

But what about the rest? Interpreting an entire pantheon is a daunting task, but I never flinched. I’m a fantasist. This is what I live for.

Consider Tornarssuk the guardian spirit of the polar bears. The name spoke to me. I pictured an enormous shimmering white bear with starry eyes. He would be fierce and deadly but also benevolent and wise, with a soft spot for human beings as well. Tekkeitsertok is the guardian of the caribou, so a tawny-furred man with cloven hooves and an impressive rack of antlers. I figured he was an old and docile spirit, more interested in sleeping than fighting, but he does get into at least one good brawl before the series’ end. The Whale-Man may appear as a gigantic black bowhead or a Poseidon-like man, and let’s make him the estranged lover of Sedna for good measure. I wrote a scene in book four where the two have a torrential undersea battle, her sharks on one side vs his whales on the other.

What about Erlaveersinioq, the Skeleton Who Walks, a terrifying spirit who loves murder and death above all things? I guess we can chalk him up in the villain’s column. Sila, spirit of the Wild Wind, was a wild card but in the southern tribes he is also the spirit of justice. Let’s put him with the heroes, but leave some question as to whether he’ll really show up to help. As for the snowy owl who leads the souls of the dead across the great divide, she should be petite and cute, with a light as bright as sunlight on fresh snow. Narssuk, who controls the weather, is an insane sky baby who lets down his caribou skin diaper to issue a stormy blast of thunder and snow.

Somewhere along the line I found mention of the Tunrit, a race of people who lived in the arctic before the Raven created human beings. A race of prehistoric supermen. I could find nothing more about them except for the name of the tribe, but that was enough. I had found my villain. A promethean figure among the first men, who had wrestled sabre-toothed tigers and brought the sun from the other side of the sky, and who turned to sorcery to atone for that terrible mistake.

So are my versions of these mythological figures accurate? Probably not, since they came mostly out of my own imagination. But they might be. And that’s an important point. In dealing with a cultural belief system, albeit an archaic and disfavored one, I felt a duty to be respectful. My books sit proudly on the shelves of the Toronto Public Library and in a home for wayward Inuit boys in Nunavut, Alaska. In correspondence I’ve received from Inuit people reaction varies from praise for giving these mythological figures new life, to a stoic acknowledgement of the fact that at least I didn’t contradict anything.

That last is not entirely true. A pivotal figure in the series is the Moon-Man. Many Inuit tribes posit the familiar Native American myth that the lecherous Moon-Man chases his sister the Sun across the sky each day in hopes of an incestuous liaison. This didn’t fit in with my elderly, romantic Moon-Man nor my version of the Sun as an extraterrestrial spirit. What to do? I decided to have my shamanic heroine Alaana ask the Moon-Man, on one her soul-flights to his realm, if the story was true. “Oh no,” he says, “that’s just a story people tell.” So at least the contradiction comes right out of the mouth of the Moon-Man himself. Who could argue with that?

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Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.