No one can pronounce your character's name.![]() This applies to titles as well. Do you know how to pronounce Eochaidh? Me neither. If you loved a book by that name, could you spell out the title for a friend? What a chore! I believe Tolkien is at least partially to blame for the slew of Aerdhwyns, Eidiolains, and Akeuyadels. His Elvish language was inspired by real-life Welsh, and since Tolkien’s rise to fame, young would-be writers have mined the ancient languages of the British Isles for creativity. Welsh and Gaelic seem to be the most popular choices, but they create a conundrum for the modern reader. Pronunciation guides do help, but referring to them again and again during the course of the story can be frustrating. At least, it is for this reader.
0 Comments
![]() The first chapter of William Zinsser’s On Writing Well highlights the difference between the “serious writer” and the “hobby writer.” When Zinsser was asked to attend a school discussion and talk about writing as a vocation, while a Dr. Brock, “a surgeon who had recently begun to write and had sold some stories to national magazines...was going to talk about writing as an avocation” (p. 3). vo·ca·tion: a strong desire to spend your life doing a certain kind of work (such as religious work): the work that a person does or should be doing av·o·ca·tion: an activity that you do regularly for enjoyment rather than as a job The students began to question Dr. Zinsser and Dr. Brock relentlessly.
1. Write as much as possible, and repeat yourself indefinitely, until you have entirely exhausted not only the subject, but every possible redundancy upon the subject that you can contrive, and until your reader’s eyes nearly drop out of his head with boredom, thus proving that most of what you are saying could be said in about a quarter of the space, but why should you keep your discussion brief and concise when there are so many ways to say the same thing, to prove that you’re a writer by filling up an otherwise useful blank sheet of paper, and to construct a thought pattern that is so long that both you and the reader forget what you started out to say in the first place.
|
Yaasha MoriahI write YA/adult fantasy & sci-fi that explores fantastic and interconnected worlds, with stories that burn through the darkest realities with hope and redemption.
Learn more here! Categories
All
Archives
March 2021
|