Category: inspiration

Some shiny needles I found in the haystack of internet research

On By leiossIn inspiration, research, writingLeave a comment

I’ve spent quite a lot of time doing research, lately. I’ve been working on one of my novel projects, still in its very early stages, which is based in 18th century London. This is an era I’m reasonably comfortable with, but – damn – there is still a whole lot of research to be done. I’ve spent the last couple of days in 2nd hand bookshops, and now I’ve got an interesting haul, including one book on the Bedlam Asylum, which I’m dying to get into. But – of course – I kicked off my search for information to build my world on the good ol’ internet.

There’s nothing wrong with starting with Google or Wikipedia. They are great for finding useful threads of info to follow along. (And rabbit holes to disappear down for hours…) They rarely tell you the whole story, though, and you need to be wary about taking what they say for granted. But still, they’re a great place to start for pointing you in the right direction so you can work out what you need to find out more about.

In my travels through the internet, I’ve found a couple of sites that I thought were worthy of a mention here, in case anyone else is looking for similar information.

Firstly, this one: mapco.net

London1868
London 1868

This is a fantastic FREE site that provides access to “high quality scans of rare and beautiful antique maps and views”. The site focuses on 18th and 19th century maps of London and the British Isles, and 19th century Australia, but there are maps from the 16th and 17th centuries available as well. When I say fantastic, it is really, really fantastic. The resolution on the scans is incredible. I can’t tell you how useful I’ve found it. The website is run on a not-for-profit basis and is really worth a visit.

Secondly, if you’re investigating London in any period, it is worth paying a visit to the conservation areas page of www.cityoflondon.gov.uk.

Each of the conservation areas in London (there’s 26) has its own character summary, which gives you a pocket history of the area going right back to Roman times. It describes how the use and character of each of these little patches of London has changed over time and identifies key significant features. These documents are fairly recent (I’m writing this in December 2014) and make for fascinating reading.

Finally, here’s a really useful post from over at Jane Austen in Vermont, on travel in Regency England. I say travel, because that’s what the title of the post says it’s about, but it’s full of useful stuff, like a county map of England (where exactly is Derbyshire in relation to Hertfordshire), how fast different modes of travel were (Mr Darcy vs the stagecoach) and a really good economic overview of Regency England.

Awesome words: penultimate

On By leiossIn awesome words, inspiration, wordsLeave a comment
Candle Flame by Simon Howden, courtesy of www.freedigitalphotos.net
Candle Flame by Simon Howden, courtesy of http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Penultimate: second-to-last

This is an awesome word mostly because it sounds even more awesome than ‘ultimate’, to the extent that sometimes it gets confused with a non-existent word that means ‘even more ultimate than ultimate’.

Apparently the ‘pen-‘ comes from the Latin paene, meaning ‘almost’.

The fear of not being original

On By leiossIn community, ideas, inspiration, writing7 Comments

On Wednesday night, at the monthly Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild general meeting, we had a fascinating presentation from author Russell Kirkpatrick. I’m gonna say it was about story shape, because that’s what he said it was about. But that’s kind of like saying Lord of the Rings is about hobbits.*

Somehow Russell talked us through sculpting the shape of a story using an analysis of wave files from his extensive and eclectic music collection, with a particular focus on prog rock. I’ll just leave that there.

One thing that really jumped out at me, though, was a point he made at the very beginning of his talk. This was: don’t let the fear of not being original stop you writing your story. He illustrated this with clever 1 second grabs from three wildly different songs. This showed how a particular element that has current, on-trend appeal might get picked up and used, not just in different songs, but across a range of music genres, either because it is currently looping in the common creative consciousness, or, if you’re more cynical, to deliberately broaden the appeal of a song. Probably even both. And what’s more, they get resurrected, as samples, years later for new works, by new artists in new genres that didn’t exist back then.

This struck a chord with me (see what I did there?), because earlier that day I had been thinking about an online news headline I’d seen. This is it, complete with the pic that accompanied the story:

A curious Ohio boy who sneaked into an abandoned house over the weekend discovered a mummified corpse hanging inside a closet, unnoticed for nearly five years

A curious Ohio boy who sneaked into an abandoned house over the weekend discovered a mummified corpse hanging inside a closet, unnoticed for nearly five years.

You can see the appeal, can’t you? There is story there. Layers of it. I spent my entire ride, both to and from work yesterday, immersed in it.

Imagining the boy: a bundle of trepidation and curiosity, creeping through the dusty, creaking, damp-ridden dark; peering into empty rooms, lit only by murky shafts of light leaking through boarded-up windows. Seeing the cupboard, wondering if there was anything interesting inside…

Or thinking on the story behind the guy who died – a homeless man who had bought the house for cash after inheriting a sum of money from his mother. What was it about finally owning a place to live that drove him to such despair that he took his own life?

And that’s just based on what was in the news article. There are endless possibilities for making stuff up from there. What about the police officer who had to attend the property after the call from the boy’s mother? Did she see something off-kilter that lodged in her mind and had her waking up in the middle of the night months later, wondering about the verdict of suicide?

Or…is there something else entirely? Something lurking under the floorboards of the house, scuttling through the roof space. Something bitter and steeped in spite that talks to you in your sleep and leaches the peace from your waking hours. Or perhaps it is the house itself. What happened there that sank into the fabric of the peeling wallpaper? That spreads across the sagging ceilings like black mould, and taints the very air with a grief you breathe from the moment you step inside?

The scope is endless!

But, it’s hardly original, is it?

Despite the fact that this one actually happened, I reckon you could probably find a dozen crime novels built around the premise of “Curious Kid Discovers Body In Abandoned House” without trying too hard. And probably another dozen each of psychological thrillers, horror stories, kid’s adventures and paranormal romances to boot.

And you know what? They’ll all be different. Some will be great. There will be memorable characters, sadness that stays with you and killer twists. And some will be pretty ho hum.

But at the core of each of them is that same identical 26 word hook (or one-second sound grab). Because the potential for story here is just so immense.

So, yeah. Maybe there’s a thing in your story that’s not so original. Write it anyway. Make it good. If it’s good enough, it probably won’t matter that we’ve seen it before. We can just lose ourselves in it all over again. The frisson of familiarity might even be what makes it for us.

Madonna’s Express Yourself v Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, anyone?

 

*Russell is from New Zealand. I kind of had to mention hobbits.

Parsley tongue

On By leiossIn castle-in-the-air, inspiration, words, writing, writing goalsLeave a comment

So today I went to add “parsley” to the shopping list on my phone, and autocorrect (or “Auto Percy” as it apparently likes to be called – another autocorrect, um, correction) changed it to “parseltongue”.

So now I have another castle-in-the-air writing goal: to one day have one of my made up words enter popular usage to the point where it is added to a mobile phone autocorrect (sorry, Auto Percy) dictionary.

Parsley
Image courtesy of Simon Howden/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Awesome words: revenant

On By leiossIn awesome words, inspiration, wordsLeave a comment

Les-SpectresRevenant: A ghost or returning spirit.

This word has been lifted as-is from French, and means ‘ghost’ in that language. It is related to the French word ‘revenir’, meaning to come back or return.

For me, the sound of this word evokes other other words that give ‘revenant’ a heightened sense of macabre loss. Such as:

Remnant: something incomplete. This makes me think of a ‘revenant’ as a shade, or a scrap of soul torn away.

Reave: an archaic word evoking unnecessary violence in times long past. From the Old English, reafian,  to rob, and related to the Old High German, roubon, to rob, and Old Norse, roufa, to break open. (Source: Dictionary.com)

Bereaved: deprived and made desolate by death.

These are my own associations; nothing I read in researching the origins of ‘revenant’ suggests any relationship between this word and any of the others I’ve listed above. In fact, the word ‘revenant’ literally means ‘return’ in French. But, even so, I love words that evoke others. For me, this add layers of meaning and richness to prose.

Awesome words: dreadnought

On By leiossIn awesome words, inspiration, wordsLeave a comment

This first referred to a 41-gun galleon in the English Navy Royal, launched in 1573 (according to Wikipedia), and has since been used to refer to a number of things, including 20th Century battleships and acoustic guitars.

Literally ‘fear nothing’.

But, somehow, this word creates its own frisson of fear.

It’s probably a combination of the fact that something that ‘fears nothing’ is going to be a pretty big, scary thing itself, and the combination of the actual words dread + nought.

I mean, ‘dread’ isn’t just fear, it’s fear levelled up some.  And ‘nought’ is a nice, tasty, archaic way of saying ‘nothing’, which gives the term a certain historical weight.

Yum.

Making up words

On By leiossIn creative process, inspiration, what not to do, words, writing2 Comments
Want made up words? Lewis Carroll got made up words!
Want made up words? Lewis Carroll got made up words!

In 2011, when I decided to ‘get serious’ about my writing, one of the first things I did was book myself into a Year of the Novel course with the very knowledgeable and generous Craig Cormick, through the ACT Writers Centre. One of the very first exercises he got us to do, was describe our favourite kitchen appliance in one sentence, without mentioning what it is. I came up with:

When it’s packed, the mess is gone, and I can go and write.

(Can you guess?) Then, of course, we had to condense it down to one word. One word? The man is crazy, I thought. Then he uttered the magic phrase… “If there isn’t a word, you can make one up.” (Or something like that.) Awesome. It came to me almost straight away.

Squared-awayness.

Now, I could have gone with ‘neat’ or ‘clean’ or something like that . But none of those words conveyed the sense of satisfaction I have at achieving a kitchen that doesn’t have dirty plates and used saucepans scattered over every surface. For some reason, if my kitchen is messy, I feel like my mind is cluttered. Words like ‘tidy’ give you a sense of the end product, but they don’t describe the journey. My word conveys (to me, anyway) a sense of my active participation in achieving that state. And there’s the rub.

If you’re going to go making up words, you run the risk of creating something that’s meaningless to other people.

Words like ‘squared-awayness’ probably don’t carry that kind of risk, because I’ve picked something that already carries meaning and just levered it into a grammatical convention that makes it one word instead of two. But, especially if you write speculative fiction like me, which often involves making up worlds and cultures, you might want to make up new words, just coz they sound cool, or there isn’t quite the right word to convey what you want. In this case, you’re going to have to rely heavily on context to get across your meaning, or you can leverage off existing words that sound similar. ‘Frack’ as a pseudo-swear word is a good example of this, although thanks to the Australian coal-seam gas mining industry, that word now has a boring and slightly depressing, well-understood technical meaning.

So there’s your second risk. You might end up with a word that means something different to other people, to what it means to you. Here’s a couple of examples from one of my works in progress. This has a late-medieval-ish setting and a lot of the characters are peasants, or common household or forest-dwelling fairies loosely based on various bits of British folklore. I’ve tried to create a kind of vernacular for the story to give it a certain feel. But, here are two of the inadvertent missteps I’ve made along the way.

Lumpen

What I meant: a variant of lumpy, but with a more colloquial sound to it.

What it actually means:  (according to Dictionary.com) of or pertaining to disenfranchised and uprooted individuals or groups, especially those that have lost status. It can also mean stupid or unthinking (how’s that for irony?) and comes from the German word for vagabond.

Welkin

What I meant: something daft or stupid. I totally made this up. I just liked the sound. I think I derived it from whelk, which is a hilarious-sounding shellfish. (I don’t think you get whelks in forests, though.)

What it actually means: the sky. From the Old English welcn and related to the German word Wolke, which means cloud. Who knew?

Well, one of my sharp-eyed, German-speaking beta readers, that’s who.

Obviously, I should have done a bit more due-diligence. I remember reading about J K Rowling Googling the term ‘Horcrux’ when writing the 6th Harry Potter book.  (Now there’s a woman who’s great with made-up words.) She says she was so relieved to find no Google matches on it at the time, because she really liked the word and desperately wanted to use it. (Try Googling it now!)

So the moral of this story is: be creative! Make words up. But you might want to double check to make sure you’re using something that, well, means what you think it means.