Writers' Corner

[Róisín]

Also there was that thing in Japanese writing of brevity and implication. Have you ever read a short poem called 'The Jewel Stairs Grievance'? It's very short but not a word is wasted, and the whole story is implied in brief descriptions.

Edit: I keep thinking of that particular poem as Japanese, but it is in fact Chinese (Li Po, I think). Probably confused because the guy who translated it into English was himself working from a Japanese translation, and it shows! But same idea with a lot of Japanese poetry. It's very minimalist!

[princeofdoom]

A lot of Early Japanese culture did have its base in borrowings from Chinese culture. So depending on the period that's from it would make a lot of sense.

I'm working on clothing ideas right now for a humanoid species with different ideals of appearance for three separate sexes/genders and while I have some inspiration from certain cultures, I don't have anything concrete yet.

Then again, concrete clothing would be EXTREMELY heavy, so that might be for the best.

[Róisín]

Definitely not garb in which to go swimming!

[Mélusine]

... I have no idea. I'm the person who wrestles the crocodiles into fertilizer for my garden outside my new building...

Interesting way to define yourself ^^

[Asterales]

A lot of Early Japanese culture did have its base in borrowings from Chinese culture. So depending on the period that's from it would make a lot of sense.
I'm working on clothing ideas right now for a humanoid species with different ideals of appearance for three separate sexes/genders and while I have some inspiration from certain cultures, I don't have anything concrete yet.
Then again, concrete clothing would be EXTREMELY heavy, so that might be for the best.

Oooh, three genders?

Also there was that thing in Japanese writing of brevity and implication. Have you ever read a short poem called 'The Jewel Stairs Grievance'? It's very short but not a word is wasted, and the whole story is implied in brief descriptions.

Edit: I keep thinking of that particular poem as Japanese, but it is in fact Chinese (Li Po, I think). Probably confused because the guy who translated it into English was himself working from a Japanese translation, and it shows! But same idea with a lot of Japanese poetry. It's very minimalist!

Spoiler: show

I know Li Bo/Po (Bai, as they start calling him now that classical pronunciation is not even worth guessing at anymore).
I think there is rather a lot of interpretation involved in translating classical Chinese texts of any kind. At least, during Li Bo's lifetime, compound words had already started to emerge and become relatively popular. But classical Chinese is notoriously difficult to translate, as you probably know, because it's rather tricky to find out if a word is a noun, verb or adjective, it might be a compound word or, more traditionally, one character per word and there might be misspellings or intentionally misspelled/replaced words in there too, because of taboos the emperor had pronounced (for example when a character was used in their name, it couldn't be used in any other context), not to mention that there aren't usually any pronouns or subjects in the sentence. PLUS no inter punctuation! That was added by later scholars and so the meaning created by it might be completely wrong.
So, while certainly no words are wasted and the language is very beautiful, the meaning is usually not all that clear.
Li Bo was also influenced by Daoists, who are notorious even among their old Chinese contemporaries for being vague and difficult to understand, so I'd be very careful of the meaning of, lets say 'Jade' for example.

I think translating classical Chinese takes a lot of research and guts, so chapeau to everyone who does it.

That's not a bad quality to have at all, actually, even if it does hinder the writing process. Knowing your facts and how things work can be crucial for creating something believable. A friend of mine once made me read a hilariously bad novel that was set in supposed Heian era Japan, and it had a scene where a noblewoman screamed something akin to "I - can't - STAND - this - anymore!" and dashed out of the room.
[snip]

Spoiler: show

I can just imagine!
A personal pet peeve of mine (because it is very common) is customized clothing being made in one night or a few days - if the author is being generous - even though all the stitches have to be done by hand, there is embroidery and lace involved and everything is really rather extravagant

Thank you for cheering me up a bit I'll have to kick my butt this fall and participate in NaNoWriMo!

[Róisín]

Oooh yeah, translating poetry from any language to any other language is a most fraught task, since ideally it requires a poet who is fluent in both languages and both styles of poetry. Even then what you sometimes wind up with is a poem that says the same thing, if you've done it right, and retains the tone and cadence of the original, but is in no way a word-for-word translation. Certainly that has been the result of even the best of my feeble attempts. I guess the important thing is to fully understand what the original poet was trying to say.

And as for hidden meanings: you have the kennings of Nordic and Saxon poetry, to understand which one needs at least a basic understanding of the culture behind the language. It's a little difficult, for instance, to work out how 'the hawk's land's fire' equates to 'gold', but it makes sense once you do work it out. Then there are the verbal ellipses of the Old Persian Sufi poets, or the over-the-top descriptive rants of Gaelic poets like Brian Merriman.

I think understanding how a lot of this stuff works broadens and deepens our understanding of language, and thus makes us better writers.

[Asterales]

Róisín, too true! I wish I was more versed in poetry, or even world literature in general. There are so many books I have never read and it makes me feel lackadaisical in my attempts at becoming a 'proper' writer.


Q: While we are (still somewhat) on the topic of clothes, how important do you all think different clothing styles are to a setting? In terms of distinguishing cultures/ethnicities? Do you think it might be an overused technique or is it actually an effective way to make a point?

I like to use different styles for different cultures, but at the same time I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be nicer (and more realistic) to have disputes between groups of people that dress the same and prefer  the same kind of housing and generally share a culture.
Culture can be a fount of dispute, but who says cultures don't start do develop only after a group has split?

[Mélusine]

I'll have to kick my butt this fall and participate in NaNoWriMo!

Yes ! Join us !

[Róisín]

Clothes. And hairstyles. And jewellery/ornamentation/tattoos. I think these can be important indicators for all manner of things, from social position to how careless a person is, to mental state of characters. You can say a lot about a character with how they care for their clothes, for instance. Can you imagine,say, a middleaged and poor Emil still being meticulous about his patched and shabby clothes? What my grandma would have described as 'shabbygenteel'. A detail like that can describe the mindset of a character without the author having to write in a lot of exposition.

Details of clothes can illustrate how one character feels or felt about another. I remember one of Gene Stratton Porter's American novels from early last century, in which a young woman is trying to persuade a young man, who was abandoned as a baby, that his mother loved him and did not leave him voluntarily. She does this by tracking down the orphanage where he was raised, and the baby clothes in which he was found. The baby clothes look as if they have been remade from the fabric of a once-good dress, possibly a wedding dress, and are hand-sewn with tiny, delicate, careful stitches and fine seams, and she uses this detail to persuade him that he was not carelessly thrown away.

The writer tells the reader a lot of things with actually spelling them out: the mother was poor but had not always been so; she was probably married or widowed, which mattered in that time and culture; she was a careful and meticulous person; she was skilled at sewing; she was prepared to commit time and patience to getting ready to welcome her child. Hence by implication she loved her child, which is what the young man needs to know at the time.

A little detail like whether someone's shoes are polished or their socks are darned can tell the reader if the character is still trying or has given up hope.

Edit: And I realise I didn't even mention clothes etc. as indicators of wealth/poverty, military rank, social standing or lack thereof. Or of the esteem in which people are held by whoever makes the clothes.

[Aierdome]

Q: While we are (still somewhat) on the topic of clothes, how important do you all think different clothing styles are to a setting? In terms of distinguishing cultures/ethnicities? Do you think it might be an overused technique or is it actually an effective way to make a point?

I like to use different styles for different cultures, but at the same time I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be nicer (and more realistic) to have disputes between groups of people that dress the same and prefer  the same kind of housing and generally share a culture.
Culture can be a fount of dispute, but who says cultures don't start do develop only after a group has split?

I'd say clothing is important for worldbuiding and the like. It can tell you a lot about the culture people come from without actually spelling it out loud for the reader. Compare people in simple clothes vs people wearing ornate robes and dresses, or note people who base their "fancy" suits on military uniforms - it's a huge tip about what their culture is like, and you don't have to say that X glorify simple life, Y are all about shock and show, and Z are heavily militaristic. It can also underscore the feeling of not fitting in and give the other characters - "NPCs", so to put it - first impressions of your character. The Y person would feel horribly out of place and overdressed in X's town, while Z folk would find Y too garish and perhaps kind of silly.

As for discussions between different groups, I agree that you don't necessarily have to have two different cultures to provide a dispute, and in-culture schism is also a fascinating subject. And I'd say you're on point about development of a culture. I've always thought that while subcultures can develop within one group, to call something a "culture", it's probably not part of the same "main group" anymore longer.

[Asterales]

Hmm. Convincing arguments, Róisín and Aierdome

I can agree with you on all of them.
 
I think enemy stereotypes are often far to clear cut. I don't like the feel of otherness or exoticism, that tends to go on in Fantasy a lot. Sometimes so much so, that you think the only reason an author chose a clothing style, is to veritably scream in the face of the reader: "There! Take that! It is refreshing and original and so different from the protagonist's culture! Do you feel the mysterious aura, the titillation?!"

Maybe, what makes me dislike it so much is not only that it can feel forced on the side of the author, when taken too far. It is also what we expect to find in novels, so it might be interesting to see something different for once (although, of course it is this prevalent in literature, because it is quite natural in real life, too).
The most annoying is, that clothing styles are usually generalized and then apparently uniformly applied to all members of a group, when really, it should be used like in the examples you gave above, Róisín - to individualize, characterize and give insight into the personality of one person, even if that person also belongs to a certain caste.

*thinks about this some more*

[Róisín]

A modern author who deals well with the trope of 'different culture - different clothes' is Lois McMaster Bujold, a science-fiction writer whose most well-known work is probably the Miles Vorkosigan stories and their peripheral novels. There are three main cultures and subraces of humanity involved (not counting the Quaddies, who are very thoroughly genetically engineered from human stock, and because they live in zero gravity, have four arms and no legs, and have a culture oriented to 'work', tend to get about in shorts and tshirts and not worry about status of clothes).

However, the three races that do worry about such things tend to express their cultural differences through dress. One, which has a militaristic, survival-oriented culture, has uniform-like patterns even in civilian clothes, and the hero, who lives there and is military, needs to have his clothes tailored to him to conceal his birth defects, because that culture is also extremely paranoid about mutations.

His mother's culture is much more exploratory, less insular, and has few of the rigid social and gender divisions of the first. They tend to unisex clothes, mostly sarongs, but use jewellery, as some of this world's cultures do, to express relationship status, gender orientation and willingness to interact with other people.

 The third race is older, somewhat decadent, and use clothing as a way of demonstrating wealth and culture. Their aristocratic women never cut their hair, and regard this as a mark of status sufficiently ingrained that when, in one of the novels, an elderly woman is restrained by having her hair locked into something, it never even crosses her mind to hack it off. 

All this detail is built up gradually as part of the storytelling, not lectured about by the writer. She also uses the technique of exposition through briefings, debriefings and occasional courts martial, for the military characters. All different ways to build background without beating the audience over the head with it.

[Unwary]

Hmm. Convincing arguments, Róisín and Aierdome

I can agree with you on all of them.
 
I think enemy stereotypes are often far to clear cut. I don't like the feel of otherness or exoticism, that tends to go on in Fantasy a lot. Sometimes so much so, that you think the only reason an author chose a clothing style, is to veritably scream in the face of the reader: "There! Take that! It is refreshing and original and so different from the protagonist's culture! Do you feel the mysterious aura, the titillation?!"

Maybe, what makes me dislike it so much is not only that it can feel forced on the side of the author, when taken too far. It is also what we expect to find in novels, so it might be interesting to see something different for once (although, of course it is this prevalent in literature, because it is quite natural in real life, too).
The most annoying is, that clothing styles are usually generalized and then apparently uniformly applied to all members of a group, when really, it should be used like in the examples you gave above, Róisín - to individualize, characterize and give insight into the personality of one person, even if that person also belongs to a certain caste.

*thinks about this some more*

Well... I confess I haven't done much with clothing. But this feel relevant to a story of mine, about a small religion whose adherents can swap minds. The protagonist decides to leave home, and essentially swap with the furthest person they can find. And so, from a secluded winter highland, where almost everyone is in the religion, she finds herself in a massive trading town that fancies itself the hub of the world. It's Mediterranean, and cosmopolitain, and there are very few walkers, very few people who understand the sheer amount of distance across cultures she travelled. Plus she finds that the previous occupant of her body was involved in the local politics, something completely beyond her grasp.

Anyway... that was a tangent. But one of the first thing she notes is that the people here not only wear different clothes from home, they also wear different clothes. Back at home there wasn't as much focus on the body or clothes, as those were all things that could change at a moments notice. Plus it was cold enough that well... there's only some many variation on 'wool,wool, and more wool' that can be accomplished. But here, there are people with tattoos, people wearing almost anything. And it's all rather confusing for her. In this case I'm I've got the 'strangers all wear the same clothes' thing back to front. She's coming from a homogeneous clothes culture and I can expresses both her confusion and shed light on her upbringing by describing these clothes and her reaction to them.

Okay, here's another question. Does anyone else here have massive worlds, harking back to the crocodile hunter, a real big'un, that they have been thinking about for months or more, trying to figure out the ramification of the central idea? (/me raises his hand.)

[Aierdome]

Róisín - hello, fellow Vorkosigan Saga fan! Yes, this was one of the books I've been thinking about when writing about clothing. Good examples.

Asterales - I know that annoyance at "because it looks cool" exoticism, but I think much of the problem with it stems from the fact that the writer is going for pretty looks without considering whether something like this could reasonably develop, or what the practical implication of such clothing, hairdo and others are. A good example would be Jane Lindskold's Firekeeper books. One of the cultures there has a "thing" of wearing complex face-paint, Polynesian-esque face tattoos and heavy, ornate robes. In this case, it's not explained, but this serves the story itself, as a huge part of the mythos is that people are descendants of old colonists whose original cultures are virtually unknown. However, Lindskold uses the exotic cultural trappings in many different ways: a character is shown to be adopting the culture by starting to wear robes and face-paint; the MCs are instantly noticed everywhere they go because they dress too lightly; a character running away from the culture has troubles disappearing because of his tattoos; and of course a girl wearing comfortable trousers catches up with member of the culture running away from her in no time. So I'd say there's nothing bad in exoticism itself as long as its implications are considered and applied.

Unwary - yes, I do have one such crocodile. Some half a year back, I've made a world where I had everything figured out. And I do mean everything. I had all the species described in detail, including cultures within them, biological stuff, longevity, social castes and relationships with other species (a friend of mine said my "dwarves" don't deserve the name, as I tried to figure out "biologically correct" humanoid with dwarven "qualities" and it ended up as an amphibian with sharp claws, pale skin, no beard, gecco-like fingers, huge eyes and a third eye on the forehead, glowing infrared. Likewise, elves ended up having talons-like nails, empty bones and feathers on their heads and backs). I had international politics, all the countries mapped out, rough political situation in all of them, seven different religions and a magic system I could perfectly understand. I had history, cults and secret societies. And when I tried to put all this in one "master file" for quick reference, I clocked at 50 pages written in font TNR 12. And I wasn't finished.

It was about this point that I realized I'm not writing a novel, I'm writing a bloody RPG corebook, and I still didn't have good motivations for main characters or any sort of coherent plot. So right now, the whole master file is sitting on my computer and pendrive waiting until I either become a good enough writer to tackle it or decide to turn the whole thing into actual RPG, because it'd be, honestly, a pity if all that worldbuilding of mine was to go to waste.

[Sunflower]

I got into an interesting conversation on the bus the other day.
It was about OC culture versus the writing culture before the internet. I tried to break it down as follows.

OC culture sprung up collaboratively, based on the freedom of the internet, and tend to be completely character driven. The characters often have intricate back stories, as a result of all the narrative they have participated in. When newly created their backstories often tend to be referential, whether to some common standard so that they are 'compatible' with as many other OCs that share that standard, or refering back to other events in the creator's narratives. Often there is much greater projection of the author onto the OC, and they grow organically through interaction with other authors and characters.

By contrast, traditional writing is far less character focused. The plot tends to be first to be created, though a character may serve as inspiration for a plot. The characters are designed to fit the story, and are often much more specialized than a comparable OC, as the character isn't necessarily designed to be transportable. The character will have as much back story as the author wants, including less than the minimum needed for an OC, which has to be able to stand somewhat separated from it's world. The character tend to grow, but along the lines of the story. Adapting more to the plot, than the plot to it.

To summarize, OCC is about the joy of telling A story, making something together that is more than the sum of it's particpants.
TW is about telling THE story, perfecting a narrative to the best ones abilities, with as great a control and finesse as the author can muster.

That was the definition/comparison I proposed, and I have been thinking about it a lot. For one thing, like most things, it's probably a lot less binary and more of a spectrum. For another, I haven't really done much in the OC style, so I'm speaking as outsider/observer, and would appreciate feedback.

So, thoughts and opinions? where do you fall on this spectrum?
(Personally, I think I'm about 5/8 traditional writer, because I tend to create in this order. World-building and large scale plot, characters, and their personal story arc through the major events of the world.)

Wow, this is a great analysis!  It encapsulates a lot of concepts I'd been fumbling towards (as you've seen in the Shared Story Skype discussion, Unwary).  I have a very deep background in reading and analyzing traditional writing, and your distinction between a more plot-based style vs. a character-based style in the OOC world rings true for me. 

Note that this distinction is stronger in so-called *literary* fiction, where there is relatively little carry-over of characters and settings from book to book.  It's weaker in so-called "genre" fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, detective stories, thrillers, etc.), which are much more series-friendly (for various economic as well as intrinsic reasons), as well as in pop culture (the whole Marvel universe, Star Wars, and other 'verses where the format -- novel, short story, TV episode, movie, cartoon, comic, Webisode, etc. -- is relatively unimportant). 

I'm fascinated by this kind of theorizing and discovering whole new channels for creativity.  So given that I'm just a literary *observer* as opposed to a full-on creator, I hope to spend more time and attention here.