Not my thoughts, for once - I subject you to more than enough of those in the Tuesday blog posts. No, this Saturday I wanted to share with you an article Brandon Sanderson wrote in response to his recent, and unprecedented, Kickstarter campaign.
Fewer Words, Longer Books
rigorous, quantitative analyses to confirm the trend, so what I really have is a suspicion based on inference, internal logic, and anecdotal evidence; however, it struck me as a sufficiently interesting observation that I should desire to share it with you. The trend is this: the English language is losing words (ironic, considering our post about word creation), and is using more of them to compensate.
Origins of Language Article
This is just a quick post to share an article across which I recently came. It was published in the Wall Street Journal, and since we often discuss linguistics in our posts it seemed worth sharing.
It’s a Not-So-Small World
couple of days, and I will get to my destination quickly, with readily available food, shelter, fuel, and other resources readily available in familiar forms all along the way. I can get in an airplane and fly anywhere in the world with a minimum of effort and time expended. Even more remarkably, I can take out my phone and conduct a live video conference with people in a dozen different countries, and we’ll hardly notice a delay.
Overpowered Characters
It is worth noting that “overpowered” cannot really be defined on an absolute scale. Rather, it is more useful to discuss characters being overpowered on a relative scale. If you make your hero a goddess, and all of her enemies are mere mortals, you don’t have much of a story, but if all of her enemies are also gods and goddesses, then that character is no longer overpowered. This raises the interesting intellectual exercise of trying to write an interesting story about the relationship between two omnipotent and omniscient beings, but I don’t think tiny human brains are adequate for such a task.
Art of Rhetoric Review
I was a little worried, going into my reading of Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric, and subsequently The Poetics, that these classic texts might also fall into that category, where they are lauded for their continued relevance mostly because they are so general that they can hardly fail to be relevant.
Training Montages
if you haven’t heard the phrase “training montage,” you’ve probably encountered one. They are pervasive in modern storytelling, especially in speculative fiction, to the point where the only techniques that might be more overused are prologues and flashbacks. Like prologues and flashbacks, they are overused for a reason, serving several valuable purposes in the narrative process, but so many of them have been done, with only mediocre execution, that the technique itself has become tiresome.
Youth Characters
realistic, sympathetic, capable, and not-terribly-annoying youthful characters, of which the failure of Wesley Crusher (from Star Trek: The Next Generation) as a character – good in concept, but poor in execution – is emblematic. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about recently because I’ve experienced several poorly done youthful characters in recent media I’ve consumed, and because I’ve been thinking about a character in Fo’Fonas (Wraith/Revia, for those few of you who have read the rough draft). I was even thinking about it enough to read a book on parenting, but more on that in this week’s review.
Dialogue Versus Conversation
So I did that. I spent weeks, even months, walking around the school, making mental notes about the ways in which people spoke to different people, how it was different depending on the person and the relationship involved, the different dialects and slangs and jargons that were employed, the patterns to the words. Then I sat down, and in my first serious attempt at a novel length work (which I still intend to finish one day), I sought to incorporate what I had learned about conversation into my dialogue. When I’d written the first sixty thousand words or so, I sent out the rough draft to a few people, and asked for feedback.
Essays
e’ve posted essays here on the site, but we’ve never taken the time to define what separates an essay from a generic blog post. Is this post itself an essay? How is an essay different from an article? Are my book reviews essays? The context will have some influence on what constitutes an essay, but these days I consider an essay to be a long-form, written analysis or reflection on a particular topic that can be primarily expository, but should have an element of persuasion or assertion. It need not have five paragraphs, it need not have a precisely formatted first paragraph with a thesis as the last sentence, and it need not have all of the points the essay will cover neatly laid out therein.
