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McAnally's (The Community Pub) => Author Craft => Topic started by: Roaram on April 05, 2008, 07:17:18 AM
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I have never seen this really addressed in the boards, so I thoought I would bring it up.
when writing a story set in a fantasy world, or reading, how do you do common knowledge stuff like measuring time, or days of the week. or distance. and how much gold/silver/copper/seashells does it take to buy a horse anyways? I have seen it done a lot of ways, but I find that my friends and I differ a lot with how we like to read it. for example I would be completely thrown off if some arcane text told the wizard hhe would need to open the portal to the demon plane TUESDAY after next(unless humor was the object) while at the same time I hate it when armies march for ten leagues, because leagues is so over used in actual distances I never know if its a mile or three or something completely different. and if you do create something different, how should you catch the reader up without making the characteers discuss plain knowledge? any thoughts
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I've always liked it when it is introduced gradually, through the reader's intuitive conceptions of measurement.
Seventy four fartlekks to the Demesne of Doom? Hmm, I'll need an overnight bedroll, pink fodder for my purple horsey and some biltong.
You have the silver direwulfskin and the spiderspit laces, why can't I have my two-toed boots before next Sidesun?
The sun moved steadily to the apex. I held out my forepaw and saw I had maybe three and a half Knuckles until the eclipse. No time to finish the stinkfish now, I had to get to shelter.
Mind you, that only really works for essentially modern-world analogues. If you want to introduce something wacky like Mesopotamian systems of 12 and 60 and multiplication by fractions, it's going to take an an archpriest or a schoolmarm figure.
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"three days hence" and "my eyes popped out at the cost" :D
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A lot of fantasy worlds are fairly closely based on something real, so my problem isn't so much with 'leagues' being overused but with it feeling out of place because the author hasn't the faintest idea of what other measurement terms go with it. If I'm going to suffer through 'league' every five minutes, I'd better be seeing 'cubit' or 'furlong' or 'ell' or 'fathom' or any of those other nifty archaic terms, and I want the author to understand how and why the measurement system works. For example, a league is the distance you can walk in an hour. In some versions, it's the distance your horse can walk. (And if you're going for strictly Medieval Europe, you should be aware that these "hours" are probably canonical hours and not modern hours.) Measurements for cloth are often the length of the merchant's forearm. Other distances might have to do with how far you can plow or the length of your arm span. These aren't random measurements: they all relate directly to things in the environment, and most of them are quite inexact. Used properly, I think they could add a lot of depth to a fantasy world.
If you're writing a fantasy world based on Ancient China or nearby parts of Asia, I would honestly be rather disappointed if you didn't include the Chinese calendar and local measurement systems. But again, you'd have to know the systems inside and out and know exactly why you were using them. As you say, it's no fun to just have random terms thrown at you out of nowhere.
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when writing a story set in a fantasy world, or reading, how do you do common knowledge stuff like measuring time, or days of the week. or distance. and how much gold/silver/copper/seashells does it take to buy a horse anyways? I have seen it done a lot of ways, but I find that my friends and I differ a lot with how we like to read it. for example I would be completely thrown off if some arcane text told the wizard hhe would need to open the portal to the demon plane TUESDAY after next(unless humor was the object) while at the same time I hate it when armies march for ten leagues, because leagues is so over used in actual distances I never know if its a mile or three or something completely different. and if you do create something different, how should you catch the reader up without making the characteers discuss plain knowledge? any thoughts
Have characters there to whom it is logical and appropriate for some of this stuff to be explained. Foreigners, children, and people from other worlds show up in fantasy a lot because they make this easy.
in a first-person narrative, you have the option of the narrator explaining things directly, though it's much harder and more fun to slip the things in so they are obvious as needed.
I don't, myself, favour the long infodump unless you happen to be Neal Stephenson, which very few people are. Cluing things in can be a pain, though. I have one story setting which is a quasi-medieval tech-level lost colony on a planet around a blue-white sun. I've done the sums to figure out how hot the blue-white sun is, and how far out the planet needs to be in order to be habitable, so their year is two and a bit Earth years; this is of course not a comparison they generally have, but one way of getting that across in conversation was a character realising she was pregnant and thinking what time of year the baby would be born, combined with it being clear what time of year it was when the scene was actually happening.
Units of measurement tend to come from fairly basic human things that people have from way back in time. A mile comes from the Latin word for "thousand" meaning a thousand paces, for example. I have considered "mansheights" as a unit; the thing is, words that get used a lot tend to be abbreviated over time if they are not short and snappy, and two syllables is as much as you can reasonably expect to see used colloquially IMO, which does not leave you that much space to make the derivation clear.
On the other hand, you can just snark about it. There's a lovely line in one of Steven Brust's fantasy novels to the effect that "Fortnight was an Eastern word, though why they needed a word for a chunk of time one day shorter than three weeks is beyond me"; which tells you that either fortnights or weeks in this world are not what you expect them to be.
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I have never seen this really addressed in the boards, so I thoought I would bring it up.
when writing a story set in a fantasy world, or reading, how do you do common knowledge stuff like measuring time, or days of the week. or distance. and how much gold/silver/copper/seashells does it take to buy a horse anyways? I have seen it done a lot of ways, but I find that my friends and I differ a lot with how we like to read it. for example I would be completely thrown off if some arcane text told the wizard hhe would need to open the portal to the demon plane TUESDAY after next(unless humor was the object) while at the same time I hate it when armies march for ten leagues, because leagues is so over used in actual distances I never know if its a mile or three or something completely different. and if you do create something different, how should you catch the reader up without making the characteers discuss plain knowledge? any thoughts
In my opinion this is one of the biggest mistakes in fantasy. Take the Battlestar Galactica route ad try to bring in as much realism as possible. What, the system of measuring "feet" wouldn't exist on this world? Neither would the word "measuring." There are languages no which have no articles, no "a," "an," or "the,"
and that's on our planet. Just don't name the months and days after our pagan gods (unless those gods exist in your world).
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On the other hand, you can just snark about it. There's a lovely line in one of Steven Brust's fantasy novels to the effect that "Fortnight was an Eastern word, though why they needed a word for a chunk of time one day shorter than three weeks is beyond me"; which tells you that either fortnights or weeks in this world are not what you expect them to be.
A Denarian Dragaeran week's five days in the Taltos books. The Easterners hold on to Earth traditions.[/tangent]
Edit: Ack! Been reading too much of this other, hack author. :P
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A Denarian Dragaeran week's five days in the Taltos books. The Easterners hold on to Earth traditions.[/tangent]
Edit: Ack! Been reading too much of this other, hack author. :P
I know that, and this is true and in elsewhere in the series; I was just pointing at this specific sentence as an example of communicating part of that information very precisely and elegantly.
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And to make you wonder at the role of the Jenoine in early settlement.
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Just put a glossary in the back of the book. It worked for Jordan and Herbert.
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Just put a glossary in the back of the book. It worked for Jordan and Herbert.
Well, that is guaranteed to make me not buy your book, because it says you can't be bothered to make the text work well enough on its own ground and you need to prop it up. I hate that almost as much as I do maps.
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Well, that is guaranteed to make me not buy your book, because it says you can't be bothered to make the text work well enough on its own ground and you need to prop it up.
even if (hypothetical author) uses it for backstory venue, and a complete cross-volume index?
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even if (hypothetical author) uses it for backstory venue, and a complete cross-volume index?
Backstory that matters should be in the text. Indexing... I have mixed feelings on.
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I generally read novels too fast to pick up on all the little world building things such as measurements of length. I really enjoy when a fantasy book has a comprehensive glossary, since then I can simply look something up rather than having to flip through hundreds of pages to look for a reference, such as happens in the Wheel of Time.
If important information came up in the story randomly and was only included in the glossary, thats not good. But has a tool, it helps me out.
*edited because I had multiple redundant examples of redundancy.*
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Well, that is guaranteed to make me not buy your book, because it says you can't be bothered to make the text work well enough on its own ground and you need to prop it up. I hate that almost as much as I do maps.
See I rather like them, especially when the have little tidbits of information in the that the author just couldn't reasonable fit in. But then again I also buy DVDs because I like the special features so....
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I gotta chime in and say I love glossary info. I agree its not good when they are used as a crutch, but I like it when I can use them to get up to speed on info I forget. I read too much to keep straight the small details, and a cheat sheet is great. for example, I read wheel of time books, and completley forgot that the main characters village was callled two rivers.
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I think I read about 9 of those and the only thing I kept forgetting was the loose ends.
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Well, that is guaranteed to make me not buy your book, because it says you can't be bothered to make the text work well enough on its own ground and you need to prop it up. I hate that almost as much as I do maps.
I love maps. They show at a glance what the author might describe in dozens of paragraphs without the reader being able to picture or remember as much as which country was north, east, west.
But maps are dangerous in that they reveal the author's worldbuilding at a glance. Some maps / imagined worlds just look so silly I would never buy the book. Say, one single country at the tip of a continent, and a circular reef around it to cut it off from the rest of the ocean, and a wall to the north. Wow. What about the rest of the world. Anyone out there? No. I suppose the country has been created in a vacuum.
I don't mind glossaries either, though I am usually good at picking up details. I also love a cast list at the beginning, especially in big volumes with loads of characters -- for the Tolstoys among the fantasy authors.
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But maps are dangerous in that they reveal the author's worldbuilding at a glance. Some maps / imagined worlds just look so silly I would never buy the book. Say, one single country at the tip of a continent, and a circular reef around it to cut it off from the rest of the ocean, and a wall to the north. Wow. What about the rest of the world. Anyone out there? No. I suppose the country has been created in a vacuum.
The thing about maps is, they very very rarely aren't spoilers. Maybe for the fantasy equivalent of Harry Flashman sitting down over dinner arguing about a campaign he fought in thirty years ago and telling how all th generals got it wrong it's approrpriate to illustrate the details with a map, but for your standard quest-fantasy shape of the prince-raised-a-swineherd in a little village going out into a world he does not know and having exciting adventures while discovering it, it breaks the pacing of discovery for the reader to be able to go "ah, yes, heading west out of Hanser's Reach he's got a forest full of gamme dragons to cross next".
I also love a cast list at the beginning, especially in big volumes with loads of characters -- for the Tolstoys among the fantasy authors.
I hate these with even more hate, actually. If you can't remember to tell the characters apart, that means the author is failing at making them adequately memorable.
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The thing about maps is, they very very rarely aren't spoilers. Maybe for the fantasy equivalent of Harry Flashman sitting down over dinner arguing about a campaign he fought in thirty years ago and telling how all th generals got it wrong it's approrpriate to illustrate the details with a map, but for your standard quest-fantasy shape of the prince-raised-a-swineherd in a little village going out into a world he does not know and having exciting adventures while discovering it, it breaks the pacing of discovery for the reader to be able to go "ah, yes, heading west out of Hanser's Reach he's got a forest full of gamme dragons to cross next".
Sure, it is a spoiler for the cooked-down scenarios of villains and NPC being bound to geography.
I will provide the classic counter-example of the Emyn Muil on a map certainly not spoiling the interaction between Frodo and Gimli.
I hate these with even more hate, actually. If you can't remember to tell the characters apart, that means the author is failing at making them adequately memorable.
Always thought those were overwrought stylistic conventions, and justifiable only for highly dialogued writing where not all characters could be relied on to use the handle most familiar to the reader.
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I hate these with even more hate, actually. If you can't remember to tell the characters apart, that means the author is failing at making them adequately memorable.
I like them--I'm always getting names mixed up, especially if they start with the same letter/are made-up names, or worse, when the character is referred to by two different names (the Denerains like that had me flipping like crazy ;D). I can separate the personalities; I just can't place them with a name. Maps I never look at until I'm finished with the book. I will get annoyed if there are multiple maps, however. It seems excessive.
Anyway, one of my favorite series of books simply listed the names of the months and weeks in the front, and left everything else to be explained by the characters. I think money was introduced by a market scene, which was very helpful.
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I like them--I'm always getting names mixed up, especially if they start with the same letter/are made-up names, or worse, when the character is referred to by two different names (the Denerains like that had me flipping like crazy ;D). I can separate the personalities; I just can't place them with a name.
There's at least one set of Alexandre Dumas historicals where the characters are various members of noble families with titles by seniority, such that when a senior person kicks the bucket several other people move up a notch so that the same set of titles now refer to different characters, and about 75% of them have the personal name "Henri" anyway. Dumas writes well enough that this is not in the least confusing.
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I've read some of Dumas' works, and while I love them, I do get the names consistently confused, and the titles are worse. But then, I'm horrible with names of real people too. For me, at least, it doesn't have much to do with the quality of writing, but more to do with the way I process information.
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The thing about maps is, they very very rarely aren't spoilers. Maybe for the fantasy equivalent of Harry Flashman sitting down over dinner arguing about a campaign he fought in thirty years ago and telling how all th generals got it wrong it's approrpriate to illustrate the details with a map, but for your standard quest-fantasy shape of the prince-raised-a-swineherd in a little village going out into a world he does not know and having exciting adventures while discovering it, it breaks the pacing of discovery for the reader to be able to go "ah, yes, heading west out of Hanser's Reach he's got a forest full of gamme dragons to cross next".
yeah, like that damned atlas I have. all those places I have never been to where something bad will happen soon. ;)
(OTOH, my school atlas is from 1989 and not really that spoilery...)
No, actually I'm with meg-evonne on this. Having to cross reference some index all the time blocks the reading flow. That's why I prefer urban fantasy and alternate history over fantasy, cause I usually know the places from a real map and can relate to the measurements they use.
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hamiltond Just put a glossary in the back of the book. It worked for Jordan and Herbert.
Well, that is guaranteed to make me not buy your book, because it says you can't be bothered to make the text work well enough on its own ground and you need to prop it up.
I hate that almost as much as I do maps.
I tend to agree that having random sayings and measurements is annoying.
Having explainations worked into the story is great - But, I also like to have a Glossary (Indexed when possible) so that I don't have to try and find a single thing that I am interested in the books, since I don't want to get caught up in trying to re-read the entire book/series for it.
Makes me forget what I was looking for, and why.
As for maps, I love them. But then I love making and building my own Worlds as a DM.
While reading the books this is mostly because if the Writer tells us in one place that the Character or Party is near “Randomville” and then the Writer turns around and has the Person/Group being chased across the Planes - and the map says Randomville is in the middle of a large “Forested Hills” region, this peeves me off!!!
As for measurements, so long as there is some consistency to what the Writer is doing, I'm ok.
I mean what exactly did “3 hours as the crow flies” mean?
What, did someone (a scientist) watch a crow flying from one place to the next and time it – and then get someone else (another scientist) to do the same with a crow in another area – and they both came up with the same amount of time?
- Or, did this mean that it would take that long to walk/ride there if you could go over the terrain like a bird?
Even in “Urban/Modern settings”, if the Writer is using Imperial instead of Standard – or God Help Me the Writer switches back and forth – it can throw me off.
I tend to end up rounding things off in US Standard. Thinks like Meters = Yards, even though I know that a meter is 3'3” and a bit; and it takes about 3 Kilometers to make a Mile.
I mean, why is a US Mile 5,280 feet? Why not stop at 5,000, which would work for your everyday average person?
That way, when someone says "It's a quarter mile over that way." The person can quickly think "That's 1,250 feet."
Although to this day, I can see a Sign that says "Next Mile 3/4 miles away" and not try to figure out how many feet that is (3,960). while I'm driving!!!
So long as it's consistant - Close Enough works for me.
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I tend to agree that having random sayings and measurements is annoying.
Even in “Urban/Modern settings”, if the Writer is using Imperial instead of Standard – or God Help Me the Writer switches back and forth – it can throw me off.
There is an ongoing loony theory among readers of Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman books that she's saying things about ethnic orgins of different cultures in her future by who uses imperial and who metric, so there are specific clever things that that can be clues towards.
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There is an ongoing loony theory among readers of Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman books that she's saying things about ethnic orgins of different cultures in her future by who uses imperial and who metric, so there are specific clever things that that can be clues towards.
Then this would not bother me, since she is being consistant with the using of who is using what, and placing it in the writings.
Also, if each side knows about the other's measuments, there can be some fun RP between two Merchants talking to each other, and each trying to figure out how far the other is talking about, while they are trying to throw each other off!!
New books added to the To Be Read List. Cool.
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As for measurements, so long as there is some consistency to what the Writer is doing, I'm ok.
I mean what exactly did “3 hours as the crow flies” mean?
What, did someone (a scientist) watch a crow flying from one place to the next and time it – and then get someone else (another scientist) to do the same with a crow in another area – and they both came up with the same amount of time?
- Or, did this mean that it would take that long to walk/ride there if you could go over the terrain like a bird?
"As the crow flies" means "in a straight line". That's it. It shows up more commonly with absolute expressions of distance like "three miles as the crow flies" (as opposed to three hours). That means that it's three miles from here if you go in a straight line, which naturally you can't. I'm fine with people using this one since it's just a normal idiom in English and not some made-up fantasy novel thing.
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Then this would not bother me, since she is being consistant with the using of who is using what, and placing it in the writings.
Yes, but my point, I think, is that sometimes what looks like random can just be subtle consistency.
New books added to the To Be Read List. Cool.
They are excellent books on many levels, though taking some time to come out.
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They are excellent books on many levels, though taking some time to come out.
(Note to self: Stop posting to underwear threads, or live with a chronically polluted brain.)
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Yes, but my point, I think, is that sometimes what looks like random can just be subtle consistency.
Humm. I suppose that it depends on how "subtle" it is - if it is too far out, then I would have that confusion thing going.
And a Glossary/Index would really help. Especially to be able to switch from one type to the another quickly.