November 2005 Archives

What's the number one thing I notice when reading Wikipedia articles about our fine traditional fantasy authors? Plagiarism.

As in "man, what a Tolkien ripoff" or "this guy played too much D&D" (Licensed products notwithstanding). Most people also seem to get stuck on that same issue everyone notices: Places and people have names that are similar to what appeared elsewhere.

Here's my take: It's hard to be completely original. For example, with Avarthrel, I could have started doing completely original fantasy stories. Yet, I felt that was not the way. When reading "original" stuff, I've frequently seen stuff that's too strange to my senses. (Example: Computer game The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Many familiar elements, yet most of the stuff in the game makes me look at that and squeal "now what the heck is that?") I wanted to use many "traditional" fantasy elements. And with that, I have to hang a plaque on my door that says "Writer of Fine Archetypical Myths".

The point is this: There's a fine line between plagiarism and using some common familiar elements from other stories. The "modern fantasy" would not have gotten too far if people had not been ripping off Tolkien to small extent; Everyone knows what elves are, yet Tolkien's elves aren't D&D elves, which aren't Elfquest elves. Nor are D&D drow really the same as Feist's moredhel, for example.

This entry was mostly sparked by one Avarthrel point - yes, I'm going to have to put elves to the next story somehow. The question is, how to avoid clichés, yet embrace them?

Also, I could go on and on and on about "name plagiarism". Try to invent, right of top of your head, a couple of dozen funny-names for fantastic cities. I bet people have used something already that's 95% same. Take something sufficiently short that sounds Elvish and rolls off the tongue and bingo, someone probably has used that already. Heck, it happens with human names. (I cringe every time I hear "Mara" used as a female name. Our previous president was a guy!)

Here's a funny thing to consider: People speak a lot in different styles, yet it somehow makes sense to write in only one style.

I'm actually in favor of older literature. In older literature, characters didn't try to be personal what comes to their voice. These days, it's suddenly all the rage to use dialectual, colloquial language - it's probably easy for the reader to then tell apart the laidback and stiff-necked, the peasants and the nobles, the farmers and the townsmen.

But I can't. I'm not a native English speaker, for starters. And even my dialectual and colloquial langiage knowledge of Finnish is somewhat limited. I could invent a whole new dialect for the stories, but that would be kind of tricky too. Yet, if you look at the older books - characters exhibit some wonderful personality even when they, superficially, speak similarly.

So I plan to get this covered what comes to wordiness, complexity and other related things.

Let's compare: Facyr is basically the boring, background-dwelling author-self-insert who just does things and won't get noticed anyway. He's not overly wordy, goes to obvious conclusions, and won't say them unless they're not completely obvious - he won't bother his friends unless they need to know something. Faira is cunning and smart, Gnedrnygr is only smart. The big difference is that Faira speaks more and Gnedrnygr ponders things a bit more before saying them aloud. Gnedrnygr knows a lot - Faira and Facyr don't know as much, but if they can somehow get the wisdom out of Gnedrnygr, Facyr can apply it practically and Faira can formulate something out of it.

And here's one of the problems I noticed in my writings: Most characters tend to be wordy. They babble and babble and babble and use complex language. Mostly because when I write random things, I tend to babble and babble and babble and use complex language. So I have to fight back - basically, if the character isn't a total geek, they shouldn't talk that much.

It's weird how when you have a fantasy world (at least part of it), and a website for it, it suddenly begs for its own graphical look and its own logo.

So here's some first reassurances: No graphics for now. I won't start even thinking of drawing stuff related to the world, graphics or even the website until I've finished the fifth short story. And even that, I'm sure, is far off. =)

A note to self and other people who write: If you think you make a good joke, hope you'll find it funny in a couple of decades. And, you may end up needing to live with it.

A good case would be Gnerdnygr Adithebadoggr. The character was first mentioned in Faira's backstory. Faira's backstory, of course, was written semi-jokingly; While I want the overall tone to stay fairly serious and realistic, I went consciously slightly over the top with that story.

At that time, I didn't think much about the character naming. Fantasy stories are always rather complicated what comes to naming of the people. After making the bad joke, it was time to get back to the reality and start rationalising this... challenging name.

I initially thought it'd be fairly simple; humans speak one language, elves another language, and Gnedrnygr is from a distant country with a completely different language. Nowadays, the languages would be Varmian, Elven and Colemian, respectively.

The real story behind Gnedrnygr's name is very simple: There's Grignr, widely known as "just like Conan but more difficult to pronounce". Then I rationalised my choice as "Okay, it's a good fantasy name. Good fantasy names are difficult to pronounce." And then I realized that hey, where Gnedrnygr comes from, there's more folks named the same way.

That's the lesson that you need to remember. Jokes may not kill you, but you end up supporting them if they get real enough!

So this is where the Colemian language starts evolving from. It's probably going to sound kind of like ancient Norse. Just that I don't know much how that sounds like, but still.

Here's some random thoughts on software. Happens to be a quite notable topic, since I've just finished installing this blogware thing.

It's weird how Ruby on Rails helps me organize all of the things that are needed to build things.

Since Nov. 11, I've used Instiki Instiki as the wiki engine that helps me organize all of the factoids, and definitely helps me build a database of Stuff that is more or less essential to get things done easily.

And this blog site, incidentally, is run on top of Typo, a weblog engine that just happens to be the best thing since the sliced bread.

Other things that have assisted me so far when writing are XEmacs and OpenOffice.org - I think I'll be using OO.o more in the future though. The story I'm currently working on is the first one written in OO.o 2.0, and so far, I think I've really liked it. Definitely one of the best word processors I've used so far. I've tried to look for a word processor, but so far, I've not had much luck with that. Modern "word processors" focus too much on layout; finding a word processor that didn't focus too much on that would be really good. OpenOffice.org Writer's approach to this is, in my opinion, pretty good: The writer has sensible defaults and doesn't mess too much with the writing process itself. And they just fixed the spell checker in 2.0 too.

Okay, this rambling officially gets disjointed at one o'clock in the morning; I'm not too good at blogging at small hours. So here's just some random rambling to help this blog get started.

Avarthrel Blog will deal with the development of the World of Avarthrel, a fantasy world that I created.

Here, you'll find some random diarylike comments from the worldbuilder and author. Hopefully, these diarylike scrawlings might explain to some later enquirer exactly why things happened the way they happened when I wrote the things.

Umm, I don't think there's anything more to say right now.