Guilty :-)
Friday, August 11th, 2006
Okay, so I said I was going to go interview Travis, the character I’m having so much trouble understanding. And I did. A little. Got side-tracked for a few days though.
When I bought Holly Lisle’s Create A Character Clinic, I also downloaded her Create A Language Clinic. I admit it freely–I’m a sucker for foreign/made-up languages. Tolkien was a genius at that, and I love reading the appendices of Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion and drooling over Angerthas Daeron and Tengwar runes and Numenorian vocabulary.
I too have a fantasy series I’m (slowly) writing. And I’d already created my own language for it. Vocab, cases, tenses, syntax, an alphabet–everything. Over the past 7+ years I’ve been toiling at it, reading dense tomes on how language develops, perusing my collection of dictionaries (let’s see, I’ve got: Welsh, German, Russian, Vietnamese, Indo-European roots, Arabic, Polish, Scots, Irish, and a few more I can’t think of off the the top of my head), and pulling out my hair trying to keep everything realistic, but not copied.
So I sat down with Ms. Lisle’s excellent book, and in the course of a couple evenings had all my notes and scraps of paper organized into a nice, neat, useable notebook. It pleased me that I had on my own come up with much of the stuff she explained how to do. But she gives a quick and concise roadmap to follow, while I had explored all that territory on my own, stumbling blindly through blizzards, getting lost in deserts, and falling off cliffs.
Now that I’ve gotten the primary language of Yma down, I’m itching to start into some of its offshoots. But I really should be doing characterization and rewrites and actual getting words down on paper. And I can’t wait until the other two clinics in Holly’s Worldbuilding series come out: Create a Culture and Create a World.
I know I’m not the only writer out there who gets so enthralled in Worldbuilding that s/he forgets to actually write. What sucks you in the deepest?
Ak’lasiano susotzw!
(Arghhh. I just spent 45 minutes trying to get that phrase to sound right. Had to come up with a command marker and a verb for “to write.” Not Ms. Lisle’s fault–I just don’t have a large enough vocabulary list yet.)