World Building Gotchas

In my WIP, set in a mountainous kingdom nowhere near the ocean, I've had to edit out common English phrases used by my MC (first person) that pertain to tides and ocean-going vessels. He simply wouldn't know anything about that kind of stuff.

My MC visits another world that treats magic as a science and is a highly technological society. I didn't want him to be "gosh-wow" about that technology all the time, so I got around it by giving his world magically-driven horseless carriages, some limited electricity, and other stuff like that. It actually ended up making my MC's world more interesting.

It's all part of the fun of creating a new world. Your world, your rules. The main thing is to be consistent with the rules that make the world work. If you have characters who cannot/refuse to be healed magically, and you have demonstrated the reasons behind this, then that's ok.

I am still wrestling with the ability to learn magic in my world - is it an inate ability, or can anyone learn it if they try hard enough? So far, I'm going with #2. Option #1 gives off too much a Jedi-chosen one vibe for me.

But yes, world-building will drive a person crazy. The map alone will lead to endless nights with brightly coloured pencil crayons noodling around with graph paper.

Not that I would ever do such a thing...

Karen

Swear words are an interesting challenge to me, because it requires careful thought about what the society I've created holds sacred and profane. My current WIP is set in a culture where the concept of marriage doesn't exist. This is a problem because my MC is very fond of the word "bastard," and I have to keep telling her that she can't use it. She also likes hell and damn, which she also can't use because her religious system doesn't include any concept of damnation.

For me the gotchas right now are more relating to gods. Religion plays a large role in my WIP. But I don't want to just copy other systems from either fiction or mythology.

As for the original post "derailed" might work because rails have been used a long time in mines, I believe anyway. But it would depend on the area and character background.

I recall a Victorian mystery by Peter Lovesy where a character expressed her opinion not with "That seems reasonable, sir," but with "It scans."

That's when I stopped reading his stuff.

Sheesh!

yeah, anachronisms like that can be jarring. I've given up on expecting authors to know that "Hello" didn't predate the telephone, but I still laugh when people quote shakespeare in novels set before his time.

LeeFlower said:

She also likes hell and damn, which she also can't use because her religious system doesn't include any concept of damnation.

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Ungh, been there. My comic involves a protagonist who's society thinks gods are nuisances to be avoided. So she can't use "hell" and she really shouldn't use "damn" but when I got my advance copy of volume 2 in the mail yesterday and flipped through it, there it was, "damnit," two or three times. Arrgh!

It's so annoying to find that some idiot has screwed up, and that idiot is you.

She really would like to say "hell," too. "Oh, hell..." is practically her mantra. And my attempt to replace, "Oh, hell," with "Oh, man," jars the reader, because the heroine's not human. (But "Oh, wombat," would be much worse, so I make do.)

There's only so far you can go with cutting out the improper language, though--when you get stuck between the RIGHT word and the CORRECT word, the mental anguish almost isn't worth it.

Ursula, you might try looking for another swear word to replace it with, such as "Oh bollox" or "Oh crap." They don't have quite the same ring as oh hell, but they might come off better than "oh man."

For my MC, I've convinced her that "sot" is an acceptable substitute for 'bastard' because her culture does have a taboo about public inebriation.

My only advice for replacement swears is that I try to stick to real words. Finding a real word, whether we'd consider it profane or not, tells readers a lot more about the culture than just making up a word would.

For swearing, I tend to stick to the current norms -- but that's because one of the worlds -- and its representative character -- is a close enough parallel to Earth that I can get away with it.

However, for other worlds and characters, I've standardised a few phrases that are recognisable as swearing. These phrases also double up as exclamations. They aren't profane, but they can carry that effect depending upon circumstance.

One thing that rather bugged me, until I figured out a partial solution was a species that seemingly had No weaknesses -- they were too powerful. Apparently. Then again, that's a good worldbuilding challenge: how do you defeat an 'all-powerful' species? The simplified version of my solution: allergies and destroying the physical body from within.

But, sheesh, trying to find the weaknesses when my characters were so adamant that I wouldn't find them, was occasionally frustrating. Heh. But, all to the good. Such challenges make for a more intersting background.

UrsulaV said:

Ungh, been there. My comic involves a protagonist who's society thinks gods are nuisances to be avoided. So she can't use "hell" and she really shouldn't use "damn" but when I got my advance copy of volume 2 in the mail yesterday and flipped through it, there it was, "damnit," two or three times. Arrgh!

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For what it's worth, I didn't find this jarring. I just assumed that from Digger's point of view, damnation is even worse because it's being at the mercy of those annoying gods.

Hell, would bother me more.

Annnyway. I have this problem all the time. The worst yet: I went and let my characters have a base-eight numbering system, and now I have to figure out how to explain numbers...
oops.

Well, it was one of the masters who said "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." (Arthur C. Clarke) It would make sense that, as the real world advances technologically, the lines become blurred between the real and the magical.

How do you describe nature in fantasy books? Are your trees oaks or do you give them some native name relevant to your story-line? Where do you draw the line between staying true to an exotic story-line and creating familiarity with your audience?

LimeyDawg said:

How do you describe nature in fantasy books? Are your trees oaks or do you give them some native name relevant to your story-line? Where do you draw the line between staying true to an exotic story-line and creating familiarity with your audience?

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Shmeerping, or re-naming things that already have names in the English language, is one of my biggest pet-peeves as a reader. If it's an oak tree, I'd rather see an author call it an oak tree than make up some name for it in an effort to sound 'alien.' If it turns out it's some kind of crazy magic tree the fruits of which grant wishes, cheers-- call it a Joitref Tree or soemthing. But if it's just an oak tree, making up a new name for it is just going to pull the reader out of the story while they figure out that you're referring to an oak tree.

The worst (and unfortunately also one of the most common) example of this is science fiction's fondness for the phraze "Wrist/Wall chronometer." It's a watch/clock. There's no discernable difference between it and a watch/clock, so please Dear God stop renaming it. Especially in dialogue. Having a main character utter the phraze "let me check my wrist chronometer" does not make them sound like they're from an advanced civilization. It makes them sound like they're from a scifi channel movie that had a jail-break at the noun factory.

Alien words aren't going to make a world alien; good writing and original ideas are.

Swearing and Shmeerping?

You pick and choose what to 'shmeerp,' and what kind of word is THAT, as the creator of the world to make it "yours." And to make the reader want to adopt it as "theirs."

I created a creature peculiar to this new world & it needed a name, so that was that. No need to re-name stuff unless it's pertinent to the story/plot/character. I also created a new system of measurement based, sort of, on a morph of the metric system/archaic so the story wouldn't be linked to a particular time period or such. A "span" is like a man's hand spread out. A "centime" is like an inch. I seem to do this alot -- to blend known things into a new one.

Swearing: I thought I was being clever with this - the kingdom is a string of islands on a lake, so I thought saying 'oh, pikers!' (like the fish) was cool. Then found out it is an actual slang word, I think, in Brit. Figures.

Maybe I'll have them using earth or dirt for swear words. Referring to their enemies bad traits or body parts might work. Hard consonants sound "meaner" than soft ones.

But you have to watch overkill or readers just get numb and have no frame of reference - our job is to GIVE them one, thus the WB.

My biggest challenge is with their military, where I seem to call everyone a "warrior" or a "guard." Call the imagination police & arrest me!

Gillhoughly said:

I recall a Victorian mystery by Peter Lovesy where a character expressed her opinion not with "That seems reasonable, sir," but with "It scans."

That's when I stopped reading his stuff.

Sheesh!

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That's not an anachronism. It ultimately comes from poetry, which the Victorians had in plenty. If something "scans," it fits the rhythm of the piece--in other words, it's what you'd expect to find, which seems to be exactly what was meant.

This usage has been around since at least the 1500s. Now shoo--go make up with Mr. Lovesy.

bylinebree, James Blish is the one who coined the term "shmeerp." Orson Scott Card addressed them in How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy:

"Nothing is more tacky thant to have a bunch of foreign-sounding words thrown into a story for no better reason than to have something that sounds foreign. James Blish called these needlessly coined words 'shmeerps.' If it looks like a rabbit and acts like a rabbit, calling it a shmeerp doesn't make it alien.

If 'mugubasala' means bread, then say bread! Only use the made-up stuff when it is used for a concept for which there is no english word. If your viewpoint character thinks that 'mugubasala' is nothing but bread, then later discovers that it is prepared through a special process that releases a drug from the grain, and that drug turns out to be the source of the telepathic power that the natives are suspected of having, then you are justified in calling the bread mugubasala. It really is different, and deserves the added importance that a foreign name bestows...."

"Your invented languages should have concepts that just can't be translated, not so that you can toss in cool-sounding phrazes...but rather so that you can develop--and the reader can understand--the cultural and intellectual differences between cultures."

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To me, the examples you listed are situations where it's perfectly acceptable to come up with new names. If it's a new animal, it has no English translation. And if it's 'like and inch' but not an inch, calling it one would be a misnomer.

I'm all about using foreign words for proper nouns and words we have no translation for, but when it's something we already have a word for, I feel like it's more likely to pull the reader out of the story instead of into it. When I come across shmeerps, I find myself sitting there going "Wait, what's a-- oh, it's a rabbit. Ok." In the handful of seconds it's taken me to figure it out, the author's lost the fourth wall. If they'd just said rabbit, it wouldn't have even registered.

LeeFlower said:

Ursula, you might try looking for another swear word to replace it with, such as "Oh bollox" or "Oh crap." They don't have quite the same ring as oh hell, but they might come off better than "oh man."

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*grin* I find myself using "Oh, bugger" fairly regularly, too. The problem is that "Oh, hell," is just an awfully versatile phrase, and it seems to take two or three others to cover the neccessary range of emotions. If that makes any sense...

UrsulaV said:

The problem is that "Oh, hell," is just an awfully versatile phrase, and it seems to take two or three others to cover the neccessary range of emotions. If that makes any sense...

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Yeah, "hell" is a very general term; it covers more territory, and context tells us how intense it's meant to be. Other, similar words are rather more specific. The problem is a general one; linguisticaly speaking, there's no such thing as an exact synonym. So word choice just can't be as simple as selective avoidance.

Having said that, I do like "blood and shale"

TheIT said:

Does anyone else find themselves subconsciously creating magical equivalents for modern technology?

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I do an' I don't. I have some magical mumble-handwave contraception, and some magical mumble-mumble healing; neither works as well as modern medicine does, but they solve some problems that would just kill my society, given the problems that magic creates in my world.

But I actually avoid making my magic too much like modern tech, because I find the constraints of lower tech levels interesting. For example, if messages take forever to get from one place to another, and there's no TV, people in the city can utterly disbelieve what those ignorant people say in those villages way off over there.

TheIT said:

Another example is choice of language, especially slang. For example, my fantasy world is pre-industrial, so every time I find myself writing a phrase which involves modern uses of electricity I have to find different words. Phrases like "switched on" or "pushed a button" wouldn't make since in the story world's society. Even "derailed" is iffy since that implies they have railroad tracks.

Has anyone else encountered "gotchas" like these, and how do you find them?

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I fought one just hours ago. In my fantasy wip I described two characters sparring and wrote that one "telegraphed" her attacks. I changed telegraphed to heralded, and plan to depend on my betas to tell me how well that works or not.

UrsulaV said:

Ungh, been there. My comic involves a protagonist who's society thinks gods are nuisances to be avoided. So she can't use "hell" and she really shouldn't use "damn" but when I got my advance copy of volume 2 in the mail yesterday and flipped through it, there it was, "damnit," two or three times. Arrgh!

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I don't see anything wrong with that. I think gods are nuisances to be avoided too, and I say 'damn' and 'hell' all the time.

Taurus Rising said:

In my fantasy wip I described two characters sparring and wrote that one "telegraphed" her attacks. I changed telegraphed to heralded, and plan to depend on my betas to tell me how well that works or not.

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I don't think that's all that bad, honestly. Obviously we're trying to get into our characters' minds, but we're also trying to communicate to our readers. Having someone "herald" a feint to the left doesn't make as much sense as telegraphing one does. As long as you don't have a character say "telegraph" I think it's fine.

Probably the worst example I can find of this kind of mistake is in Blue Moon Rising, a fantasy novel by Simon Green, where he describes someone "taking off like a bullet." Beyond that anachronism, however, it was an awesome book.

JimmyB27 said:

I don't see anything wrong with that. I think gods are nuisances to be avoided too, and I say 'damn' and 'hell' all the time.

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I think the difference is, Ursula's character comes from an entire culture that thinks gods are nuisances. So that cultural characteristic should affect their language, leaving them unlikely to use blasphemy to swear.