religion... helps?

[pauraque_bk]

Nano total: 15721.

I was stuck, then I read the bible for a bit and then wrote my characters discussing the bible.

This pretty much works with anything.

Comments

[muridae-x.livejournal.com]

It's trickier to have all your characters sitting around discussing religion when one of them only knows a handful of words in the others' language.

Although, come to think of it, the one word she keeps hearing but doesn't have a translation for yet is religious. And the other two characters have been discussing religion quite a bit, all unbeknown to her. So yes, I guess I did that yesterday too. ;-)

[pauraque]

I was actually pleased when I read that your characters had a language barrier, and I'm always irked when sci-fi and fantasy writers cheat at that. Why make them all speak English, you're skipping the most interesting part!

I usually incorporate languages into my (non-fanfic) writing. Then I get terribly distracted writing a grammar of the languages involved. I promised myself I wouldn't do that this time, and it worked for a while since the characters only speak English and Spanish, both of which are fairly well documented languages already.

Then of course I managed to decide that one of the minority groups in this setting spoke a Spanish-based pidgin, and oh dear... there I go again. :P

[muridae-x.livejournal.com]

Oh dear, indeed. :-( But I've always been wildly impressed by your language building skills. I could really do with some level of proficiency at that myself for what I'm doing here, but even pulling vocabulary from an existing (if obscure) language is a major time suck.

I knew my characters were going to have a language barrier before I started. It was one of the few bits of prep work I did in advance. It's incredibly good fun, having one character struggle to communicate, with no way of properly comprehending what she's seeing. She's misunderstanding certain things in a pretty major way.

[pauraque]

One of the candidate ideas I thought about using for Nano, but didn't, was an old story I never finished about a human who has immigrated to an alien planet. And somewhat like in your story, he lacks the resources to make it easy -- it's not like he's a visiting diplomat, he has to learn the language and culture by immersion, and he has to do it in order to survive.

I think part of the reason I'm fascinated by language barriers and culture shock is that living in an extremely diverse area, I see it in daily life all the time. In London you probably experience the same thing.

I saw someone on the Nano forums suggest that if you get caught up writing about the languages, pull a Tolkien -- make it an appendix and add it to your word count. :)

[muridae-x.livejournal.com]

There are two completely different ethnicities just in the immediate area where I live, both of whom talk in their own language in public places and get aisles of the supermarkets devoted to them. If you widen the net about five miles, you can pull in three or four more. So yes, you get used to living in the midst of babel on a daily basis.

I also grew up in a town with a high immigrant population. English speaking, it's true, but it does mean that differences in dialect are something that I've been conscious of all my life.

if you get caught up writing about the languages, pull a Tolkien -- make it an appendix and add it to your word count. :)

Excellent plan - that's another 50 words, even with just the few words I've scattered through the story so far.

And now I must stop procrastinating and go and write some of the thing. :-)