Twisted Tuesdays, The Weekly Zym Options

[zymurgy]

Tuesday, July 25th, 2006

The Importance of Being G.

J.K Rowling has long since abandoned the idea that her books are for kids. Ron Weasley has ceased merely saying things “he wouldn’t if his mother were there,” and gets his French into solid print. Draco is no longer content with a mere sneer, but gets some rather brutish action in this last book. And of course, Voldemort is no longer a vague and shadowy presence.

However, Project Ferret retains its policy of child-friendly stories and posts. We may not be by kids, but we are definitely proud of being for kids. Kids with a capital K.

Now, you might ask why this is so. “JK said that in her story! Why can’t I say it?”

Because, as much as Harry Potter may have spiraled into dark times and despair, we should hope that the kids who read it have not. The point of FanFiction, as I see it, is to expand, elaborate, and sometimes straight out change what was given to us by the author.

Canon, in other words, is seen as “raw material.” Even as it is worshiped, like a lump of gold, it simply isn’t pretty enough for a smith. We’ve got to play with it, twist it around, and make something new.

And boy does JK give us a wealth to work with! We have characters, a setting, a premise, and even a time period worked out for us in advance. Simply put, the only thing a Fanfic author has to do is mix and match, adding originals as he sees fit.

That being so, why choose to use what we have, which can be put to a million uses, to write a story inappropriate for children? JK has already done that; hundreds of Fanfic authors have already done that. Why not have a bit of fun in the other direction?

None of this, of course, is to say that we should present only the happiness of Harry’s world. Clean fic is not necessarily happy, simplistic, or easy. All of Half-Blood Prince, for instance, could have been rewritten, portraying the same events, but in a way more accessible to the young – it would still be HBP, just from a different angle.

There is a place for serious fic here, for sad fic, and even for certain situations that aren’t to be avoided as canon stands. However, I don’t think there’s a place for so-called “adult” fic.

Why, after all, do we write and read fanfiction? Simply because we don’t want the story to be over – we don’t accept ‘that’s all she wrote,’ for an answer. As much as we understand that Sirius flew backwards through a veil and died, we still want to know more, to see more, to have another view.

And why have that view be one where he swears like a sailor, drowns his sorrows in fire whiskey, or commits a bloody and brutal murder of Peter Pettigrew?

Of all the angles available, the least chosen seems to be that of the first floor window we started from. And it simply isn’t fair to those of us (loosely termed ‘kids,’) who are still there, to have all the fic over our heads and beyond our reach. The stories, dangled just out of our reach, with teasing summaries or teasers, make us understandably upset.

Why couldn’t that author write the really cool story, (where Ron gets kidnapped by Death Eaters and has to escape on his own, without magic, but turns out he’s really Remus in Pollyjuice, while Harry believes he’s actually Draco because he misunderstood something he overheard in a dark corridor while he was hiding from Filch, and there’s a Basilisk who wears sunglasses so that it won’t petrify people, and Neville turns out to be a member of Arborists Anonymous… ) so that we could read it? Honestly!

Finally, the importance of being K is a question of numbers. It is better to have something that everybody can read, rather than something a few, however few they may be, cannot.





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[zymurgy]

Tuesday, April 18th 2006

Technobabble

“Quick – hand me two schleps of zickschnack syrup and a glordand!” yelled the Healer, checking the patient’s vitals.

“Stat!” shouted the nurse, scrambling for them.

A moment later, the Healer was flimoogling the glordand furiously, watching the vital numbers flash over the vlagosphere, while the nurse injected the Glottoshnizack victim with the syrup.

“We’re losing him! Start the Vivilocutor!”

I’m sure that, although half the words in this scene are made up, you had absolutely no trouble knowing what was going on – we’re somewhere in a hospital, somebody is very sick and two people are doing whatever they can to save him.

In the world of fanfiction, this sort of thing is a bit less obvious, but nonetheless fun. For instance, we could do something like this:

“I have,” said Snape, “made several revisions to the original Formula, sir. Replacing Asphodel with Grillshank for example, and reducing the amount of sminkgrass.”

or this:

“You don’t understand!” shouted Hermione. “According to the Braculus Runes, and the Megrologic Numbers in this document – you’re Magic level is higher than Merlin’s was!”

It doesn’t much matter to the plot or anything else just what herbs Snape tosses in or out of whatever it is he’s brewing. He could have simply said “changed the ingredients,” for all the good it did the plot. Hermione could have just said, “Arithmancy you can’t understand says that…” instead of babbling like this.

What you’re seeing here is what I call Technobabble. It’s merely decoration – a sort of flourish. It adds nothing to the plot or characters, it adds nothing to the understanding of the reader since its all made up, but it does add a dash of salt to the overall story.

In fantasy and science fiction it is vitally important to keep up the illusion of an otherworldly setting – it isn’t enough to have magic brooms and things that we can understand. There has to be something that so obvious to the other world, they’d never think twice to explain it to the rest of us.

For example, JK constantly shatters the illusion by having the Wizards be simultaneously so isolated from Muggle culture that they don’t know that Muggles wear trousers, and so conscious of their differences that they constantly refer to things as the wizard this, or the wizard that. It would never have occurred to Draco Malfoy to say, “the Wizard prison,” because, as far as he’s concerned, there isn’t any other prison. He’d simply say, “Azkaban? PRISON, Goyle, honestly, you’re so slow…”

Technobabble is a flashy way of avoiding a glitch like that. A character in a magical world thinks magic is normal. He doesn’t call his wand a magic wand. To him, it’s just a wand. He won’t bother to inform you that the quill he’s handing you is self-inking, because that’s obvious to him. And he definitely won’t bother to explain how anything works.

Of course, babble has to be handled with care. Too much of it is a sign of a poorly constructed plot – if it’s foundation is a maguffin, and its action is solely technoabble, your readers are constantly going to be wondering when something concrete is going to happen and be ultimately disappointed. Too little, and you destroy the illusion.

Technobabble belongs mostly in dialogue. Your characters are in the world and so they must talk that way. Pomfrey won’t say, “Skelegrow – the bone-restoring draught!” unless she’s branched out into advertising. She’d just call it Skelegrow.

As the writer, however, you’re free to explain things in description. In fact, you’re going to have to because otherwise your readers will only have the vaguest sense of what’s going on. Descriptions can be a mix of worlds, dialogue must remain in its own world.

To illustrate:

Albus Dumbledore fiddled with the large machine on his desk. “The nice thing about having a Nuisadestratus is that it depletes the amount of negative Magical Energy floating about.”

The Nuisadestratus is first described by the author as a “large machine.” Albus, of course, calls it by name – just as you would say “toaster,” and not, “boxey machine with slots in it.”

Now that we know what Technobabble is, we have the fun part: How to create some.

Some characters come with built-in paradigms for this sort of thing – Madam Pomfrey has all sorts of potions for healing. All a writer has to do is pick an illness or injury the potion is going to cure and name it. Snape has pertussis, and Pomfrey needs a potion for him.

What do we call it? To start out with, we take the word Pertussis, and try to wrestle it into a potion-sounding word. Pertuserum sounds fun! As does Sisper Salve.
Harry needs a spell to turn Voldemort’s blood into ice. Blood is a bit unwieldy, so we’ll use sanguine instead. (Here’s where a thesaurus can come in handy.) Ice is rather short and unwieldy, so we can use ‘glacial,’ instead, knit that with sanguine and add a nifty Latinesque ending to get the incantation, “sanguiglacere.” Quite a handy incantation, that!

We can modify this new-found word to get a noun, adjective, and anything else we might need: Sanguiclacerus Curse, those sanguiglacinery spells, he died sanguiglaciniously.

Of course, knowing actual Latin or another foreign language is also a great way to go about this – if “nosebleed curse,” sounds boring in English, try the exotic German “Nasenbluten Hex.”

Pig Latin is easier and makes for great fun. A blasting curse? Astblay Want to turn Snape’s hair pink? Inkpay! Want a beta? Etabay! (Et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum.)

You can play this sort of game with anything you need to name. Your characters live in a random set of cottages? Why not have it be Rancotshire?

It’s fun and its easy. As always, however, remember not to overdo it.

Good Luck.