More Fun with Words

Since I put in a few thousand words today, I'm allowing a little break to blog. Don't worry; I'm keeping this one light. We're all entitled to a little venting here and there, but fixating on it is poisonous. Get it out, let it run its course, get back to what moves you to make the world a better place.

My current book is a challenge in that I not only threw in a mute bard that found magical ways to communicate (I discussed that he was why I was playing with bracket use HERE), but there are also other creatures and characters that needed special ways to announce their thoughts. Communication is something we struggle with in its simplest forms, so how do you create special differences in creatures that speak with their minds or other languages or even different emphasis.

Sometimes your big dumb guy gets all CAPS when he talks. Because only your grandma who can't see the screen (teach her how to zoom the screen with accessibility options, you ungrateful offspring) and egotistical morons on Twitter use all caps, it stands to reason that maybe the ones that aren't so good at volume control would too.

I know some people enjoy integrating fantasy languages they make up, but I'm really not trying to assume anyone is trying to commit that much to reading a book. A new language is risky. Often, I might ease this burden by italicizing the conversation in two languages under certain conditions: 1) No one else can understand what one of them is saying. 2) It's communicated in a way that no one else can hear it (minds or inaudibly). This person is speaking the common tongue, this one the other-- one understands the italicized language, but the other speaks so that anyone overhearing would only understand the non-italicized language. In this way, I use font styles to communicate very specific events that the reader can pick up on. 

Many people wonder about the strengths and weaknesses of using different media and this is one way that books have an edge over other media. I wouldn't advise getting too creative with alternating fonts if you're going to use digital (keep in mind unless it's fixed format, the user gets to mash it all into the font of their choice-- if you do use different fonts for the print, I'd advise double-spacing the unique font into its own isolated paragraph, maybe even with indents removed, so it still stands out even in flex format. This applies to font size differences-- those might also be stripped in ebook flex formats). The best way to play with language appearance, is to stick with your chosen font (usually one of three defaults-- please look at your publisher's preference before you end up with a mess to reformat). Remember, if you're using italics, make sure you're not switching font types or those could get removed by your word processor and you'll have to hunt them down again. One way to make it easier to relocate any italicized sections-- use a symbol within your chosen fonts that you will not use anywhere else in the document and CONTROL/COMMAND+F that symbol to check your italics. When you're done messing with fonts, just make sure you remove those symbols before publishing.

I don't want to make it sound too technical here, since I do have posts for that. It's mostly my intention to open people up to some of the many ways you can style your manuscript for ideas that might get too complex in the description of them. Making a concept simpler is one of the many skills an author should endeavor to strengthen. If you don't know if it works, get someone to read it and offer suggestions. I'd make sure you keep the original copies and any changes and have future readers read each sample. If you find there's confusion anyway, you might want to attach some notes in the foreword explaining the usage. Tread lightly with that even-- you don't want to info-dump a 'how to read' section. Ouch. Big no. Some people will be able to follow it just fine. Even a little glossary in the back might be a useful addition, but also be aware that some people will just bail if you make too much homework for them. Your primary goal is still being an interesting storyteller. You may just have to approach it differently altogether if it doesn't take.

Sometimes a thing hasn't been done or isn't popular for a reason. It's great to be ambitious but when you're having fun with your ideas, ultimately you want the readers to have fun too. Reading is an escape, and one that is even losing its appeal with video games and movies and shows becoming so visually stunning. This is why bestsellers tend to be simplistic reads, quick, easy, done. It's wonderful that some writers go bigger and more complex and those can certainly succeed too, but this can be very dependent on genre and your storytelling abilities.

Do you have any fun ways of working with styles and words?

Do You Even Bracket, Bro?

One thing I provide as a public service is my ability to butcher popular slang and quotes on the regular. However, my cringe-worthy post heading has another purpose: utilizing all those little keys that aren't as worn on my silicone keyboard cover.

Not talking hot key shortcuts, function keys, the arrow keys or even the poor redundant Tab key that fell out of use when word processor formatting favored auto indents. Nope, I'm talking... *whomp whomp* brackets. I guess there's no mystery there...

It seems to be a personal mission to torment myself with making certain challenges towards communicating my ideas. UnNamed was about the concealment of names mostly (and the creative use of pronouns and descriptors in absence of names) and UnSung is no exception.

Aiden is mute. I am not. I don't pretend to know what it's like to be so this was not a book based on an issue I can relate to. However, I do know what it's like to desire to communicate or the exhaustion of that effort leading to isolation. In Aiden's case, he finds that his own efforts do not go unrewarded. He greets all of those moments of breakthrough with exuberance. He finds two unique ways to communicate with two of the women in his life, one through a language he created through music, one through a magical link.

Before I go into what this has to do with brackets, this wasn't an attempt to mask a disability with a superpower. That's not what this is, since the two people still aren't going to afford him the same sort of 'voice' that people who can speak have. Aiden still finds the limitations of these 'break-through' abilities and still endures the frustration of having to depend on someone's ability to want to understand him at all. As a point of reference, my granddad turns off his hearing aid when my grandma starts arguing with him, causing her hurt, frustration, rage and impotence with communicating-- that he can just 'turn off' when it doesn't suit him is always a one-sided solution that never benefits her. It would be like learning ASL to debate with a deaf person, then closing your eyes or looking away when you're done. It's worse than hanging up the phone on someone because you are right there still, negating someone with an advantage they can't use.

So, brackets. When Aiden uses his language, I knew I wanted to deviate from just italics. While his 'thoughts' are still italicized, italics are also easy to miss when spread out in a conversation and since he is speaking through these thoughts, it deserved something as important as a quote. Not these ( ). No, parentheses are a side note, often serving the purpose of injecting a secondary idea. Not these guys either { }. I'm never quite sure where those brackets are used but they're too busy. Quotation marks are clean and quick so I wanted Aiden's voice to have a similar simplicity. I dug these guys out from my high school days: ⎡⎦

Yes! L brackets! These remind me of the ¡! deal you get with exclamations in español. As you can tell, I know my way around the optional symbols on a keyboard. Other favorites are © ™ and … Yes, yes, you can make an ellipsis with Option + : (colon) on a Mac (because three periods are more work than two simultaneously pressed keys maybe). Here's the thing-- I also have to make sure that the choose-your-own-font capabilities of an ebook doesn't warp my precious L brackets into some OTHER bracket or worse-- the 404 equivalent of character nullification: the random wing-ding symbol. And no, I don't have that stupid rectangle's hot key combo memorized. I'm rather partial to this choice so I will conduct ridiculous amounts of research to make it happen.

I suppose it would be my designer training that makes me so enthusiastic about utilizing fonts to communicate effectively in a novel. No matter how complex my ideas are in planning, I always stand by the mission to deliver these ideas with all of those complexities combed smooth for sharing. I'm not going to be using ASCII art (although you should do yourself a favor and see how awesome this endeavor is), but I do work to be sure that my punctuation and style choices are the best choice possible.

Even if you don't use special characters outside of the basic set in the body of your writing itself, I bet that many people, from time to time still end up pulling one of these: 

--~~{@ TITLE @}~~--

You can't deny that a nice little bit of dressing for those headers isn't at least a little bit tempting. There use to be some serious excitement when you told people those look like roses. That was before the excitement of using eggplant emojis as penises. It's okay if you don't remember...

 And that's what matters most.