Listen instead.
A writing prompt for more immersive dialogue.
Is Your World Speaking the Wrong Language?
Picture this: You’re writing a dialogue scene between two characters in a fantasy setting.
Character 1: “Jentore, take your detachment to the rear of the caravan. These hills are crawling with goblins, and we don’t want our trailing wagons to be picked off after nightfall. These merchants paid our guild a hefty sum; let’s make sure they understand why our services are well-deserved.”
Character 2: “Ok, captain. We’ll make sure any of the scum that show their faces will regret it. I’ll sound the horn if we spot any of those cavern-rats.”
Now think about the words used in this brief exchange. Which words fit the setting? Which terms feel out of place? Are there better terms we could use, or even create to fit this setting? This is the premise of our focus today. If we are going through the trouble of creating a fantasy world, how much creativity do we want to include? What is immersive for the reader, and what reinforces a jarring sense of overlap with our modern world on planet Earth?
Immersion Breakers: When Modernity Invades Fantasy
Let’s reflect for a moment on specific terms using examples. As a fan of the Lord of the Rings films, I was checking out some deleted scenes the other day. In one of them, Gimli mentions: “He was already dead! He was twitching because he’s got my axe embedded in his nervous system!”
This is a great example of what we call an anachronism. The definition of anachronism is:
“Something or someone that is not in its correct historical or chronological time, especially a thing or person that belongs to an earlier time.”
Anachronistic dialogue in this example would be the term “nervous system.” This is a very specific term from Earth science, and while we understand what Gimli is referring to here, why would this hyper-specific word be used in Middle Earth? There are clearly other words that are more generic that can be used to describe the nervous system in this sentence. A minor tweak to reduce the level of disconnect might be to use terms or phrases like nerves, spasms, organs, etc. which have an overall less hyper-specified element of anachronism.
Beyond the Dictionary: Forging Words for Your Fantasy Realm
This brings up a delicate dance that thoughtful authors must explore: what words and terms do I use in my fantasy or science fiction setting? To refer to my earliest example with the two characters, we can highlight specific words that we would like to examine: detachment, caravan, goblins, okay, and others might be fair game in this brief analysis.
Some words might be a bit generic enough that you can get away with it without the phrase jostling your readers out of their immersion. “Detachment,” “caravan,” and “goblins,” for example, have enough of a universal understanding that it makes sense for these terms to be used as general descriptors, and can be applied to a variety of settings (a caravan of wagons, trading ships, spaceships, livestock, etc.).
Now we can highlight a more contentious culprit. Words like “okay” are pretty obvious in that they do not belong in a fantasy setting. The origin of the word “O.K.,” or “okay,” come from a very specific trend in 1830s in American society where old terms were intentionally misspelled such as “O.K.” representing the phrase “oll korrect” (instead of all correct). This hyper-specific phrase will feel very out-of-place in a fantasy setting. A lot of casual readers might be forgiving of these comments, but sophisticated readers will catch terms like this fairly easily, as with my example of Gimli’s comment on an orc’s “nervous system.”
“O.K.” is just one example of many that we may unknowingly incorporate. Other examples of these immersion-breaking terms can be found when we reflect on how ingrained certain phrases are within our English lexicon that are anachronistic. “Godspeed” and “goodbye” developed directly out of the Christian culture of Europe, to name one perspective. Exclamations are also culprits in this regard. Jeez, good heavens, Jesus Christ, ah hell, hurray, really, and yee-haw are a few others that come to mind.
A good way to challenge ourselves is to explore the concept of terms, idioms, and phrases in our world that we create. It’s helpful to reflect on the terms we use, their origins, and connect the dots for how and why these terms would be described or expressed.
I’ve recently been reading through the Foundation Trilogy, and Asimov inserts some creative thinking in his character dialogue. As this story takes place in a vast empire across the universe, Asimov uses exclamations like “Space knows who,” “galaxy/galaxies no,” and others to emphasize the focus on what a galactic-scale term might be in this setting. Even so, there is some nuance here when selecting our terms. Some words we think are going to remain in the common lexicon may become outdated in your audience, and it can be challenging to anticipate which words will fall into antiquated speech in not only our present audience, but for future readers of our work as well.
To use another example from the Foundation Trilogy, in the third book, Second Foundation, a main character is musing to herself. She is an aspiring young writer, and is dictating a story into her recording device after her father teased her about her intellectual pursuits over socializing with her peers.
She says:
“Really, Father, if you think it makes a particle of difference to me what some silly old boys think, you just -”
And then she remembers that she still had the transmitter open in her hand and said, drearily, “Oh, golly,” and shut it off.”
This is a great example to illustrate what I mentioned. Here we see some more creative use from Asimov in the word “particle,” yet in the following sentence, Asimov uses the word “golly” which most readers born after the 1950s won’t be familiar with unless they watch old sitcoms like “Leave it to Beaver.” There is of course a certain charm of reading stories from decades ago to appreciate the way terms and language has changed, but nevertheless, this excerpt highlights my point about reflecting on what metaphors and terms might be more generic compared to anachronistic.
Some other notable examples of good, creative dialogue are found in the vocabulary writing of role playing games. The Elder Scrolls video games have exclamations like “What in Oblivion?” (what the heck!), “By the Nine!” (By God!).
Dragon Age: Origins also has a lot of great emulation of religious-based exclamations such as “Maker’s Breath,” or “Thank the Maker.”
A challenge that I like to explore then, is how do we formulate an idiom or word that is used in casual conversation, but can be re-created to work in your fantasy or science fiction setting? A thought exercise could be to reflect on words we often see a lot and think about their purpose. “Okay,” for example, reflects both an acknowledgement without judgement in a single word. “Damn!” as an exclamation emphasizes frustration, but can also simultaneously include humor, surprise, or even wonder.
A habit I find helpful with creative writing is to explore new terms for characters to say. You can salvage current ones like I mentioned earlier and manipulate them to be more creative, or another aspect I enjoy when I want to come up with a term from scratch is to read up on vocabulary that has fallen out of use and contemplate how I can revise them. Old and Middle English are full of extinct phrases, for example, that could be resurrected completely in your writing, or slightly altered when you think about how a word sounds and what its meaning is. If you think this seems a bit silly, just read Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” and you’ll be surprised at how many fabricated words in that tale’s narrative seem to hold so much meaning and description when read in context.
Writing Prompt: Sharpen Your Linguistic Blade
For this blog’s writing challenge, I’d like to encourage you to test your ability to come up with idioms, phrases, or terms that are creative and connect with the following settings. Reflect on the themes of immersion and longevity in what you come up with. Focus on words you might see used a lot in common discourse today, and find ways to change them to fit the examples in your own creative way. This exercise should give you a great stepping stone to having more robust, interesting, and exciting dialogue and narration!
Setting A: A group of humans have lived for generations stranded on a garbage dump of a planet when their ship crash-landed here centuries ago.
Setting B: A community of centaurs who live in a grassy plain in a medieval fantasy world that has twin moons.
Setting C: An alien culture that consists of sentient clouds of floating bacteria that all communicate through a host mind – each cloud is both an organism and also a vast network of individual nuclei working in tandem for the good of the cloud.
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Prompts and Prose 