Plus assigning special names to everything just seems a little fannish… giving everything clever names is what amateur writers do in lieu of having a real story, and I don’t think that’s the kind of flavor you want to taint your writing with.
You’re not the first person to say something vaguely akin to this; as I recall, a comment I got years ago on an unfinished draft complained about Ranea having species names separate from fox, wolf, cat, and so on; the commenter said something extremely close to, “We don’t have separate names for ape and human,” without apparently understanding he’d just made the best rebuttal to that which I could hope to on my own. The concession to the human (and particularly furry, granted) reader is using fox at all rather than only sticking with Vraini and trying to give the reader enough details to puzzle it out. Calling a Melifen a “cat” or a L’rovri a “wolf” would really logically be like, well, calling a human an ape: not something likely to make the speaker very endearing. In fact, thinking about it just now, I should really have to make the case in the story as to why so many Raneans think of the bats as bats rather than as Derysi; in “Wounds” it’s said the name isn’t that well-known, but I don’t see any obvious reason why that would be so.
…don’t go off on a lot of exposition about how things are or how they work, when you can hint at it through natural character actions or through narrative references strictly relevant to story, and let the reader put the pieces together themselves.
Well, I’d certainly try not do to that. The problem with some of the Ranea stories in their existing form is actually that they don’t give enough of the background, even through hints. While magic in Ranea shouldn’t be anything like magic in The Lord of the Rings or a D&D campaign, for a place that’s supposedly using it as the equivalent of the steam engine, it’s pretty invisible most of the time in the stories. My mental conception of Ranea is as existing in sort of a Victorian-era state with respect to technology, with magic something that’s always been there but has just in recent times started to be, in effect, industrialized, although Ranea would just be at the cusp of its equivalent of the Industrial Revolution (if indeed there’s going to be such a thing at all).
There’s a kind of fan writer that I think you’re tacitly responding to who does a lot of world-building but falls down on the storytelling. I think if I have a sin in writing, it’s somewhat the reverse — after a quarter-century of Ranea, I could tell you how many countries there are in the Empire (ten) but I doubt I could name more than half of them. (Right now, Raneadhros, Garanelt, Rionar, and Orinthe are the only ones that come to mind, and I doubt there’s more than one or two others that have ever been given names at all.)
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2008-02-13 03:40 (UTC)You’re not the first person to say something vaguely akin to this; as I recall, a comment I got years ago on an unfinished draft complained about Ranea having species names separate from fox, wolf, cat, and so on; the commenter said something extremely close to, “We don’t have separate names for ape and human,” without apparently understanding he’d just made the best rebuttal to that which I could hope to on my own. The concession to the human (and particularly furry, granted) reader is using fox at all rather than only sticking with Vraini and trying to give the reader enough details to puzzle it out. Calling a Melifen a “cat” or a L’rovri a “wolf” would really logically be like, well, calling a human an ape: not something likely to make the speaker very endearing. In fact, thinking about it just now, I should really have to make the case in the story as to why so many Raneans think of the bats as bats rather than as Derysi; in “Wounds” it’s said the name isn’t that well-known, but I don’t see any obvious reason why that would be so.
Well, I’d certainly try not do to that. The problem with some of the Ranea stories in their existing form is actually that they don’t give enough of the background, even through hints. While magic in Ranea shouldn’t be anything like magic in The Lord of the Rings or a D&D campaign, for a place that’s supposedly using it as the equivalent of the steam engine, it’s pretty invisible most of the time in the stories. My mental conception of Ranea is as existing in sort of a Victorian-era state with respect to technology, with magic something that’s always been there but has just in recent times started to be, in effect, industrialized, although Ranea would just be at the cusp of its equivalent of the Industrial Revolution (if indeed there’s going to be such a thing at all).
There’s a kind of fan writer that I think you’re tacitly responding to who does a lot of world-building but falls down on the storytelling. I think if I have a sin in writing, it’s somewhat the reverse — after a quarter-century of Ranea, I could tell you how many countries there are in the Empire (ten) but I doubt I could name more than half of them. (Right now, Raneadhros, Garanelt, Rionar, and Orinthe are the only ones that come to mind, and I doubt there’s more than one or two others that have ever been given names at all.)