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The first time I read Ursula Le Guin's "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie," I think I was between sixteen and nineteen (I have memories of reading it in North Carolina, but where would I have acquired it if not at the McGill library?), and I was annoyed, because I (wrongly) read it as saying:
To write fantasy well, you have to be able to write in fancy high-faluting language, and also, you need to know how to conjugate verbs properly with "thou."
This is not what Le Guin is saying (although perhaps she does think that conjugating verbs properly with "thou" is a fairly ordinary skill that everybody ought to have.) She is saying that the language of fantasy is different from the language of the everyday. Good writing in the language of fantasy may be archaic, but it doesn't have to be; it might be fancy, but it doesn't have to be; all writers have to arrive at their own solutions for putting some distance between their prose and the language of the everyday.
I loved The Boy and the Heron but the English dub did not really work for me. (I had intended to go see the subtitled version; I misread an ambiguous movie schedule listing.) I don't think that's (mostly) a voice acting thing. I think it's very hard to write English dialogue that bridges Elfland and Poughkeepsie. Heck, I suspect it's hard in Japanese as well; it's just that I don't see the awkward seams as easily.
You look at Buffy the Vampire Slayer and how effectively it used a contemporary Valley Girl idiom; it took place in a reality where the portentous prophecies and lore were always a little silly, but the relationship drama was deadly serious, so it worked as long as the contemporary characters and their dialogue felt real.
I decided after seeing The Boy and the Heron that I ought to read Tam Lin, and I think it's a bit the opposite of Buffy: Janet Carter is a person who already belongs to Elfland just a little bit, long before anything supernatural happens in the text. She reads everything. If the language is a little elevated, it makes sense for Janet as a character.
This is the big problem that I've had with the neverending WIP. I want the contemporary characters to feel real and weird and a little grimy. But I also want the magic in the book to feel vivid and threatening; it's not going to work with an everyday kind of prose. I want it to have a foot in Elfland and a foot in Poughkeepsie.
I think I need to be reading more horror. This is hard; I can't really handle gore.
To write fantasy well, you have to be able to write in fancy high-faluting language, and also, you need to know how to conjugate verbs properly with "thou."
This is not what Le Guin is saying (although perhaps she does think that conjugating verbs properly with "thou" is a fairly ordinary skill that everybody ought to have.) She is saying that the language of fantasy is different from the language of the everyday. Good writing in the language of fantasy may be archaic, but it doesn't have to be; it might be fancy, but it doesn't have to be; all writers have to arrive at their own solutions for putting some distance between their prose and the language of the everyday.
I loved The Boy and the Heron but the English dub did not really work for me. (I had intended to go see the subtitled version; I misread an ambiguous movie schedule listing.) I don't think that's (mostly) a voice acting thing. I think it's very hard to write English dialogue that bridges Elfland and Poughkeepsie. Heck, I suspect it's hard in Japanese as well; it's just that I don't see the awkward seams as easily.
You look at Buffy the Vampire Slayer and how effectively it used a contemporary Valley Girl idiom; it took place in a reality where the portentous prophecies and lore were always a little silly, but the relationship drama was deadly serious, so it worked as long as the contemporary characters and their dialogue felt real.
I decided after seeing The Boy and the Heron that I ought to read Tam Lin, and I think it's a bit the opposite of Buffy: Janet Carter is a person who already belongs to Elfland just a little bit, long before anything supernatural happens in the text. She reads everything. If the language is a little elevated, it makes sense for Janet as a character.
This is the big problem that I've had with the neverending WIP. I want the contemporary characters to feel real and weird and a little grimy. But I also want the magic in the book to feel vivid and threatening; it's not going to work with an everyday kind of prose. I want it to have a foot in Elfland and a foot in Poughkeepsie.
I think I need to be reading more horror. This is hard; I can't really handle gore.