On Eating Frog Legs and White Asparagus by Jennifer Brozek

“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:

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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Threadbare, the first novel in my Storm Fronts series, gets a mass market edition and hits physical bookstores this month. It’s the realization of a lifelong dream, to see my work on an actual shelf in an actual store, to pull it from the others and turn it face out so everyone can see this thing I’ve created. Every time I walk into a Books-A-Million or a Barnes & Noble or some wonderful independent bookseller, I’ve imagined being able to point at a novel’s spine with my own name on it and say, “Look at this! I made this! I’m the person whose name is on this cover!”

And with this moment fast approaching, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the influences on my work and how Threadbare and the other novels in the series came to be, and specifically all the pieces and parts that went into the protagonist, Vick Corren. Vick is a lot of kickass and a lot of emotional hot mess with some identity crises and self-esteem issues thrown in for good measure. Add in her bisexuality and there weren’t a lot of characters I could draw from as templates, at least not when I was growing up.

I’m dating myself, but when I was a preteen and teenager, finding strong female role models was a challenge, and finding ones who weren’t heterosexual much more so. There were competent, intelligent, accomplished women on TV, but they generally weren’t the leads. So the rare shows like The Bionic Woman and Wonder Woman were eye-opening. And when Princess Leia snatched the blaster away from Han Solo during her own rescue and got all of them out of that Death Star corridor by blowing a hole in the trash chute and demanding that Han get inside, well, I knew I wanted to write women just like that””women who could rescue themselves, with some help on occasion, but still, women who acted rather than reacted, women who didn’t sit around helplessly awaiting the hero but rather women who were the heroes.

This was where my character, Vick Corren, got her roots. If you read Threadbare you will absolutely see the influence of Jamie Sommers and Leia Organa. Vick has an AI in her head, a sentient computer that makes her stronger, faster, and a lot more resourceful than the average human, much like Sommers’s bionics. But she’s also got Leia’s attitude. Don’t mess with Vick. She’s definitely no-nonsense.

However, I also wanted her to have a softer side. It’s important to me that my characters not seem too impervious, too perfect, too invulnerable. Vick might look like she has it all together when she’s on a mission for her organization of mercenary soldiers, but when the battle ends, when the action stops, when she starts having feelings for someone beyond friendship, she’s just as insecure and confused as anyone heading into their first real romance.

Who could I draw from for those character traits? Well, Leia again, for one. Her resistance to (and inevitable falling for) Han Solo are still some of my favorite scenes to watch over and over again. Battlestar Galactica had some wonderful episodes in which Athena and Cassiopeia put Starbuck in his place. (Yes, his. The original Starbuck was male””dating myself again.) And much like Leia, Colonel Wilma Deering of Buck Rogers fame was another great character displaying both professional competence and romantic insecurity, especially when it came to her relationship with Buck.

Not to say all my influences were from television and film. I was an avid reader from a very young age, and it didn’t take me long to gravitate to the female protagonists of books by Anne McCaffrey, Elizabeth Moon, and Tanya Huff, to name my favorites. These amazing authors showed me how to write characters who could be both strong and sensitive, not necessarily at the exact same time, but at just the right moments, with a balance of each.

And yet, Vick Corren still felt to me as if something was off.

I wrote an entire novel for her, Assassin’s Nightmare. It earned me my first agent representation, but don’t go looking for it in bookstores. It never sold. And I firmly believe the reason for this is that the character was trying to not only tell me something about herself, but teach me about my self as well. Vick Corren is bisexual. So am I.

It took me way too long to figure that out about both of us, but once I did, things really took off. I set Vick aside for a while and wrote my first published novel, Vicious Circle, featuring a bisexual female protagonist. By now, I’d discovered Xena: Warrior Princess, and that was a game changer. Here at last was a character who was obviously bisexual, whether the network executives wanted to state it openly or not. Here was a character with significant flaws striving to redeem herself and admit to herself that she was worthy of love. If you read Vicious Circle or Threadbare, you will definitely see that influence in both main characters. We even marketed Vicious Circle as “Xena: Warrior Princess in space with the subtext as the main text.”

Shortly thereafter, another major influence, author J.A. Pitts, and his Sarah Jane Beauhall series beginning with Black Blade Blues proved that a lesbian blacksmith protagonist for a series could sell to a major New York publisher. (There were probably others, but that’s the one I was aware of in 2010. Got recommendations for me to read? I’m all ears. Toss them in the comments!) With that discovery, I was ready to give Vick Corren another chance, and another novel””Threadbare. No, I didn’t crack New York publishing, but it’s out there in the world, one more book for women who share my orientation and interests to find themselves in, one more role model proving that women can lead adventures of their own.

Final thoughts? Whatever it is you want to write, write it. Listen to your heart. If you write from there, the emotions will come across on the page, and your writing will find its market. Keep hunting until you find your role models. Learn from those who have come before you, the ones who make you feel. And finally, if you can’t find what you’re looking for on bookstore shelves… go create it, so that your work will be there for the next reader who feels just like you.

Bio: Elle Ire writes science fiction novels featuring kick-ass women who fall in love with each other. Her first novel, VICIOUS CIRCLE, released from Torquere Press in November, 2015, and was rereleased in January, 2020, by DSP Publications. Her second novel, THREADBARE, the first in the STORM FRONTS series, was released in August, 2019, by DSP Publications followed by the sequels PATCHWORK and WOVEN in 2020. Her work is represented by Naomi Davis at the Bookends Literary Agency.

Chat with her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ElleEIre or Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ElleE.IreAuthor/

Learn more at her website: http://www.elleire.com.

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