Would you rather everything in a story was tightly explained, or are you happy to swallow some things you know would be implausible in 'real life' and just enjoy the story?

I'm writing a YA fantasy, and I'm having a bit of trouble with a certain aspect of it - namely, language. I have people from different historical times, and different planets altogether, meeting up. I want them to understand one another. I don't want to have silly written accents or ' "fzhjjjkigl!" he said,' kind of thing!

I'm loath to introduce some technobabble to explain how they all can talk English - but on the other hand, I'm worried that if I don't explain it, I'll be guilty of a major sci-fi & fantasy cliche and undermine the story.

Any suggestions, ideas, general thoughts would be much appreciated!

For this reader/writer, I need to have things left unexplained, whatever fiction I am reading. If too much is 'explained' it leaves no room for me to engage with the work.

I'm just reading The Master and Margarita, one of the classics of magical realism... which has to be a second cousin of fantasy, surely? Nothing is explained. It just 'is'.

It's all part of creating a successful fictive dream. If things need explaining, it isn't part of the dream.

vanessa

The Master and Margarita

Ooh, I'm waiting for my housemate to finish that. It looks right up my street.

In answer to the question, I think it's ok to leave some things unexplained or even better, up to the reader's imagination. Is everything in life explained? No. Therefore, I think it's fine to leave some things hanging.

JB

I had this exact problem with LGV - I really didn't want to have the characters talk to each other but had left too much unexplained. Also had to stay within one viewpoint but make the second character more real.

So I did put in some dialogue - which was awkward - and tried to suggest certain confusion of concepts but it was tricky/clumsy and I wasn't entirely happy - but good to try?

Sarah

You might not have to explain at all. Just do it with enough brio, and the reader won't even wonder: after all, we happily read a book set in France and 'hear' everyone speaking in French tho' it's written in English. Though it can be tricky when the English characters then talk in English among themselves.

I'm completely ignorant about fantasy, but you can't be the first writer faced with this problem. What do writers you admire do?

It would be interesting, though quite a lot of work, to develop very different styles of English for the different planets and periods, to give a feel of different languages going on without actually having to make it up. I'd have thought with a handful of rules based on your ideas of the different civilisations - one has very simple sentence structures, another doesn't use metaphors, a third addresses everyone very formally - you might create quite an effect of difference with minimum means. Particularly if you throw in some places where they don't understand each other, or if you develop some self-explanatory exclamations specific to the language.

It may take an outside eye - another reader/editor/friend/WW group - to tell you if you've pulled it off, though.

Emma

Check out Stephen King's Dark Tower Series, he does something very similar and it might help you form an idea.

If you yourself think it's slightly strange then so will your readers, so you could always try a bit of postmodernistic irony and have a character who actually questions all of these things.

If you try to hard to accommodate language from different planets and eras then you might end up with something that achieves the original intention but is actually bloody hard to read.

I'd agree with Emma that a few basic rules for each one can help distinguish between them. It may also give rise to possibilities of new storylines, for example a cultural misunderstanding that leads to conflict or a kind of extended zenophobia or racism or that classic of the disapproved love match between two different races/species/humaniods.

There was a great article about this in the Writers magazine last September, how alien names and such should be pronouncable and believeable or they tend to bounce a reader right out of the story.

I wish you could read it, it was rather amusing and highly informative, running along the lines of 'why would anyone be called Zzzzragurgargle?'. It asked sci-fi and fantasy writers to think of the reasoning behind names, in the same way our own human names have a meaning, or relate back to some ancestry. I think that's worth bearing in mind.

JB

Thanks for your input everyone - definately some good stuff to think about here!