Poetry for Worldbuilding

        At Boskone I presented a workshop on how poetry is a great tool for worldbuilding, both in the sense of helping the creator create the world and in the sense of helping the reader be more immersed in the world.  I thought I’d post my main points here today.  Let’s start with a reminder about how pervasive poetry actually is in the real world, something people often don’t seem to notice.  You can check out previous posts Poetry is Everywhere Part I and II.  Think about all the different forms poetry can take: songs (including lullabies, hymns, love songs, ballads, drinking songs, work songs), riddles, epics and historical lays, casual snippets, advertising jingles, laments, children’s games, prophesies, mnemonic lists, psalms, satires, proverbs, challenges/taunts/trash-talking…

        Now consider how all those different forms of poetic language can gives clues about culture

- by referring to gods, historical or legendary figures, or pop figures

- by showing what metaphors are meaningful

            what images are striking

- by hinting at what’s an insult, what’s a compliment, what’s amusing

- by highlighting what’s important

            what everyone recognizes and knows

            proverbs, idioms, clichés, wisdom

        Poetry is a great place to use “archaic” or untranslated words such as names of people (gods, historical or legendary figures, or pop figures, as mentioned above), strange creatures, plants, tools, etc.  Generally in writing fantasy if you lard your prose with too many of these words, it gets in the way of the story, makes things hard to understand, and seems jarring because, after all, your story may be set in another world but it’s all supposed to be “translated” into English.  On the other hand, fantasy words can be a fantastic tool for helping the reader feel that they really are in a different place and not just the everyday, ordinary world; too few strange creatures or mythic characters and the world you’ve created just doesn’t seem very magical or marvelous or different.  Poetry to the rescue, because it is a perfect place to refer to things with which the reader won’t already be familiar.  Firstly, it works because within the created world of the story, poetry is a place where archaic words and unexplained allusions really would turn up, so it doesn’t seem jarring or artificial to encounter them there.  Secondly , it works because in the meta sense it doesn’t matter if a reader doesn’t understand everything in a song or poem within the story.  The gist and purpose of the poem can be clear without understanding every word.

        Poetry can also be a great way to help establish the differences between different cultures within a world.  All the elements of poetry:

   structure – form, line length and meter, stanzas, refrains

   sound patterns – rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, onomatopoeia, repetition, parallel structure

   meaning – simile, metaphor, allegory, symbol

   image – description, senses, emotions

   register - the varieties of language that a speaker uses in a particular social context

can vary from culture to culture or from era to era.  Of course these elements can also vary widely within a single culture, but think, for example, of how Old English poetry tends to use alliteration across two halves of each line, while Japanese poetry tends to be built around stress patterns, classic English poetry loves rhyme, while modern English poetry tends to favor blank verse.  Considering how your different invented cultures might use poetry is a great discipline to help the creator to think about what’s important in each culture, what metaphors or images will be meaningful to them (and what won’t), what gods or historical figures will people allude to, and so on.  It’s also a great way to show  these things to the reader, which gives cultures much more feeling of depth.

        And finally, poetry can be used to give clues about individual characters.

What sorts of verse would this character know?

How learned are they in the history, religion, pop culture, or literature of their own culture?

How seriously do they take it?

What’s meaningful to them?

        Ultimately, what poetry requires of you is that you truly observe the world, both the physical world and the internal landscapes of people - and that’s also exactly what you need to be doing to create new worlds and the characters within them.

[Pictures: Sibyl Reading, chiaroscuro woodcut by Ugo da Carpi, between 1500-1530 (Image from the Library of Congress);

Girl Reading a Book, woodcut by Weaver Hawkins, c.1926-8 (Image from Centre for Australian Art);

Ovid, woodcut from Metamorphoses by Ovid, probably 1549, although seriously, Penn Libraries, you didn’t think to give a proper source for your own picture??? (Image from Penn Libraries).]

Character Names in Fantasy

        The names of fictional characters are significant in all genres, and the best ones always help the reader form an impression of the character while still seeming right and natural.  Names in fantasy, however, have an additional role.  Because fantasy books have to immerse readers in entirely new universes, the names of fantasy characters have to tell the reader not only about the characters, but about their entire world.  This is a heavy responsibility and leads to a lot of people having a bit of a love-hate relationship with fantasy names.  Here are some of the issues…

        Normal vs Strange - Unless the story is set on Earth, it doesn't really make sense that the characters would have normal Earth names (which in much fantasy written in English really means traditional European Earth names, although I'm happy to say this is definitely changing.)  A wise old dwarf in some magical faraway land should not be called Jim.  It would throw me out of the story.  (I get the impression that Tolkien switched horses midstream on this one by claiming that Sam was really short for Samwise and Freddie's real name was Fredegar, and so on.)  So unless they're set on Earth, fantasy names should be strange in order to give the reader clues about the strange world they're in.  But…

        Unfamiliar vs Confusing - We have no difficulty remembering long cast lists of characters with names that we recognize, but for some reason strange names, until they become familiar, just don't stick as well.  Some fantasy writers try to get around this by using "normal" names with some sort of alternate spelling or twiddly ending.  Personally, as a reader I tend not to like this.  (Robert Jordan was particularly irritating in this respect.)  The best names manage to be new and interesting, but enough unlike each other so as not to be too confusing.  There shouldn't be dozens of names starting with the same letter or having the same shape.  They should all be distinctly different.  But…

        Variety vs Ease - There are an infinite number of possible sound combinations, but only a very narrow selection of them that native speakers of English can handle.  Readers don't like names that are too long or too hard to pronounce.  But at the same time, when a book involves characters who are supposed to represent multiple cultures, yet their names all sound like the same language, the reader is getting mixed messages about the world.  How different are the cultures really if they all speak the same language and all name their children from the same pool of possibilities?  I admit that I may have an abnormal interest in those details.  I majored in linguistics in college and have an enduring fascination with the broad range of possibilities within human languages.  Different languages have different sets of vowels and consonants and different patterns of syllables, and of course different cultures have different naming conventions.  In my Otherworld Series I've given each different culture a different set of phonetic rules for name-building, so that from a character's name you can tell where they come from.  I think this is really cool - but the inevitable side effect is that I've been guilty of some names that are too long and/or too hard to pronounce.  (One of the main characters of the third book Return to Tchrkkusk is Chlukash.  The words and names of her people, the Tchrkkym, aren't really unpronounceable if you just remember that R and Y can be vowels, which is perfectly reasonable in several human languages, but just not English.  Wouldn't it be a little strange if every language in the Otherworld built its words by the phonetic rules of English?  And yet, of course, my readers are all readers of English.)  The stranger the names are, the harder they are for readers to remember.  And if readers can't remember which characters are which, they aren't going to enjoy the story as much.

        Variety vs Cues - The rules of English words and names play out in another way, too.  To speakers of English certain sounds have certain connotations.  Some names sound rough, some sound sneaky, some sound light, some sound masculine, some sound feminine…  Of course these sound associations are not universal and there's no reason that other languages of other peoples in other universes would share them.  I get a little annoyed when too many female fantasy names end in -a or -i.  (I even played with this idea a little in the fourth Otherworld book, Vision Revealed.  The [female] hero is named Svarnil, but when she travels to Minaria, the people there keep trying to call her Svarnili, because otherwise it doesn't sound to them like a girl's name.)  But however arbitrary such conventions are in reality, this is fantasy we're talking about.  The point of making up names is to give the reader an experience of immersion in another time and place.  Therefore too much "realism" is not helpful, but whatever linguistic cues the writer can give will add to the depth of the reader's experience.  But then, this all has to be balanced back again, recognizable vs exotic…

        All language is a balancing act between information and ease, and you can really see this principle at work in fantasy names.  The speaker (or writer) wants to impart as much information as possible, but the hearer (or reader) doesn't want to have to work too hard to interpret all that information.  If the writer tries to put in too much information, the reader gets bogged down.  On the other hand, the writer wants to keep things efficient and simple, while the reader wants to be told the whole story.  If the writer oversimplifies, the reader isn't satisfied.  Names are so much more than just a tag or serial number.  They evoke entire worlds.  And that's the fun and frustration of fantasy names.  Which fantasy names do you really love - or really hate?

[Picture: detail from Little Nut Tree (with name tags added), rubber block print by AEGN, 2005.]