Inventing a language to enrich your fictional world

by guest author Lauren H. Salisbury

Tolkien deployed invented languages to enrich his fantasy.

There’s nothing better than opening a new book and being swept away into an imaginary world. I love discovering fantastical realms peopled by strange races and bizarre creatures. I also enjoy the sense of immersion that comes from comprehensive world-building, one of the hallmarks of my favourite speculative fiction.

Using an original language is often part of this. Just as little details add a sense of realism to a setting, even a couple of words or phrases can make a huge difference to the overall impression of an unfamiliar culture or species. In fact, where there’s no unique terminology, I often feel like something’s missing, which can disconnect me from the narrative.

I wanted my own worlds to be as authentic as possible, so I invented languages for each species. My process was reasonably simple and involved the following three stages:

Sounds

I started with the overall sound I wanted my languages to have, whether to make them guttural, lyrical, harsh or soft. Did I want clicks or glottal stops? Based on this, would they use or omit any specific letters?

This was influenced by the general image I wanted to create for each species. For instance, Esarelians are ambitious and politically astute, making alliances and continually plotting. Baketags are a warrior race with a strict honour code, and Oeals are empaths known for manipulation. I chose soft sounding consonants and glottal stops for the Esarelians while Baketags have hard, clipped sounds, and Oeals use mostly vowels in their speech. This gave me a pool of letters from which to draw when naming characters and inventing specific words.

Grammar

Once I knew what sounds I wanted, I thought briefly about how complex the grammar should be for each language. Things like word length, whether they’d use prefixes and suffixes, whether adjectives and adverbs went before or after nouns. I didn’t want to go too deep into this area, as I only wanted a taste of each language, but it helped me build the words I did need.

For example, Baketag words have only one syllable with adjectives forming suffixes. Their words also join together to form longer single words and don't include articles, determiners, auxiliary verbs, etc. The name Baketag—people (bak), warriors (et), leader (ag)—translates to “people who are warriors under the ultimate leader.” Their planet, Vobaket is “planet of the people who are warriors.”

Specifics – Names and Phrases

With the sounds and basic grammar in place, I was able to create specific words and phrases that would imply cultural references and make each species more authentic. For instance, Esarelian names have two syllables, and the second often denotes class. I was able to play with this principle in the first book, having a character’s suspicions regarding another’s rank confirmed by her name, which made the scene much more interesting and nuanced.

As for the number of alien words I incorporated, that was more intuitive. I started with the names of the main characters, a handful of animals and plants, some foods, and a phrase or two that would fit the story or act as a species’ motto. After that, I added more as I needed them. For Conviction, this included an Esarelian game of strategy and a term for suspected assassination.

I only use alien words and phrases where they’d appear naturally, and I’ve tried several means of explaining their meaning. These methods range from a simple definition following the term, i.e., “As the Ra’hon, the ultimate leader, of the largest known Empire, Ashal needed to…,” to an integrated explanation. Here’s an example from Conviction.

I also found that having a clear idea of their language influenced the way I wrote the narrative in scenes from their viewpoint. I avoided contractions and stuck more rigidly to grammar rules than I did in scenes with a human viewpoint. This reflected their formal speech and helped distinguish them as an alien species.

Several readers have specifically mentioned the way I balance the alien and familiar in my novels, and including parts of their language was one of the main ways I accomplished that.

I hope sharing my process has shown that constructing languages doesn’t have to be difficult or complicated to be effective. However, I’m by no means an expert, and I highly recommend reading around the area, especially if you want to invent more than just a few phrases and names. There are a lot of great resources out there, but a good place to start would be the Language Creation Society at conlang.org.

Thank you for taking the time to find out a little bit about me and my writing, and have fun!

About the Author

Lauren H. Salisbury was an English teacher for sixteen years with an MA in Education. She is now a writer who dabbles with tutoring and lives with her husband and a room full of books in Yorkshire, England. She likes to spend winters abroad, following the sunshine and becoming the seasonal envy of her friends. When she’s not writing, she can be found spending time with family, reading, walking, crafting, or cooking. The Legacy Chronicles is her debut series.

Website: http://www.laurenhsalisbury.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gillascourage

Email list sign-up form: http://eepurl.com/djCo0z

About the Book

Conviction
The Legacy Chronicles 2
Christian speculative fiction

Can two people with opposing principles overcome their differences to be together?

Than has spent his life ostensibly having fun while secretly fighting for his people’s freedom. A member of the underground resistance, he is only ever serious around his comrades and his family. When an injury forces him to step down from active duty and his reluctant nurse sparks his interest, Than finds himself in uncharted territory. The fascinating woman will have nothing to do with him.

Menali’s past has taught her to keep her head down and trust that God has a reason for allowing the human race to suffer on U’du. When Than explodes into her life, he refuses to take no for an answer and challenges all of her preconceptions. He soon has her re-evaluating her priorities and wondering what life with someone like him would be like.


The Legacy Chronicles available here:

Courage: http://amzn.to/2ItzMl4

Conviction: http://a.co/doeQtkg

Giveaway

Use the Rafflecopter below to enter Lauren's giveaway, a Conviction swag bag, which contains character pictures, a themed greeting card, a cross stitched bookmark, a stone necklace and a signed print of the passage it's taken from.

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Q4U: How have linguistic details enhanced your favorite spec fic books? 

Any questions for Lauren?

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Editor on call: using then/than and lose/loose

Today I'm addressing two pairs of "spelling challenge" words a reader asked me to discuss. These pairs perplexed me a bit, because they aren't actually homophones. But because they are "kissing cousins" so to speak, pronunciation-wise, you might have gotten mixed up somewhere along the line about which word is which.

Then 

Pronounced then (voiced th, short e like in elephant); rhymes with pen, when, den, wren.

adv. - at that time; soon after, following; in addition, besides. In that case; according to that, as may be inferred; as it appears; as a consequence.

Examples
Just then, an ambulance hurtled past.

First Bill arrived, then Frank did.

You're not going to pay me, are you, then?

Mnemonic
THEN is WHEN it HAPPENS.

For more guidance on using THEN in "and then" constructions, see my post "And then...derailment at Conjunction Junction."

Than

Pronounced than (voiced th, short a like in apple); rhymes with man, pan, ran.

conj. - connector used to compare an inequality between subjects; function word used to express difference in kind, manner or identity. Often used in a pair with rather (rather...than) to indicate preference.

Examples

This project is more trouble than it is worth.

Liesl is older than Louisa.

I would rather go swimming than sit on the hot beach

Mnemonics
STAN is more of a MAN THAN you are.

Use THAN to COMPARE APPLES to APPLES.

For more guidance on constructing comparisons using THAN, see my post "Compare with Flair."

Lose

Pronounced lUz (long U sound like used, voiced s / zuh like in laser); rhymes with use, ruse, booze, snooze,  choose.

This one is tricky, because its spelling is a bit counter-intuitive. 

v., trans. - to misplace; to suffer deprivation or loss; fail to keep control or allegiance of; bring to destruction or ruin; to wander or go astray; fail to keep in sight or mind; to free oneself of

lost,  losing

Examples
Do not lose this key, or we can't get back inside.

James tends to lose his temper easily.

Did he lose his ship on that terrible reef?

Helen seems lost in daydreams.

Max, Leo and Parker all hope to lose weight.

Mnemonic
The O sounds like OO, the S sounds like Z;
Make it four-letter LOSE, or LOSE the spelling bee!

Loose

Pronounced lUss (long U like used, unvoiced s, like soup); rhymes with juice, truce, moose, goose

adj. - not rigidly tight or securely fastened; not tight-fitting; detached or disconnected; slack; flexible or relaxed.

v., trans. - to release, untie, detach or discharge.

loosed, loosing

Examples
Tendrils of hair slipped from Harriet's loose ponytail.

Megan knew her diet was working when her old jeans fit loosely.

Desmond used a loose, flowing brushstroke in these paintings.

Don't let the goat loose, it will eat Mama's petunias!

Jake is constantly loosing his biting tongue on his enemies.

Mnemonics
Don't let the GOOSE LOOSE with the MOOSE; they would SOONER fight than call a truce.

OO-whee, LOOSE and free!

Do these near-miss words trip you up? Any other almost-homophones you'd like me to address in a future post?

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E: Eye and Tooth

by Robert Lowell (1944-77)

photo by Sebastian Ritter, wikimedia commons

I chain-smoked through the night,
learning to flinch
at the flash of the matchlight.

Outside, the summer rain,
a simmer of rot and renewal,
fell in pinpricks.
Even new life is fuel.

My eyes throb.
Nothing can dislodge
the house with my first tooth
noosed in a knot to the doorknob.

Nothing can dislodge
the triangular blotch
of rot on the red roof,
a cedar hedge, or the shade of a hedge.

No ease from the eye
of the sharp-shinned hawk in the birdbook there,
with reddish-brown buffalo hair
on its shanks, one asectic talon

clasping the abstract imperial sky.
It says:
an eye for an eye,
a tooth for a tooth.

No ease for the boy at the keyhole,
his telescope,
when the women's white bodies flashed
in the bathroom. Young, my eyes began to fail.

Nothing! No oil
for the eye, nothing to pour
on those waters or flames.
I am tired. Everyone's tired of my turmoil.


Lowell's use of sound patterns assonance really makes this piece sing. Note the assonance (repeated vowel sounds), like the a in flash...matchlight and the oo in tooth / noosed. I also admire the ch, j, sh consonance repeated in the stanzas (blotch, hedge, sharp-shinned, reddish) and the textural interplay of dryness and wetness in the imagery.

What lines or images stand out to you?


Like poetry? Enter to win my collection!

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Muddy-Fingered Midnights

by Laurel Garver

Giveaway ends April 17, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

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Stolen from poets: ramp up emotion with vowel power

I've asserted in previous posts that studying poetry will make you a better writer, no matter what genre you aspire to master. Poetry uses a number of techniques that I believe are quite transferable to other kinds of writing.

Today, I'll begin a short series called "Stolen from poets" that explores some of those techniques and how to use them in your own writing. I'll try to keep these brief and focused, tackling one technique at a time.

Sound devices, part 1: Assonance

The thinking behind sound devices is often onomatopoetic; the sound and meaning are linked.Today I'd like to focus specifically on assonance--repeated vowel sounds--and how they can carry emotions.

morguefile.com

Consider these examples. Say them aloud. How do they make you feel?

1. John groped for his coat in hopes the Tylenol bottle hadn’t dropped through the hole in his pocket.

2. Lisa worried they'd think her rude if she cooed at their cute baby, so she chewed her lip while brooding on his tiny blue shoes.

3. Wading deeper into the creek, Ross felt the coldness seep through his sneakers. Shining eyes seemed to peek through the reeds. A cheeping frog sent a shriek of fear streaking up his spine, but he ground his teeth. Must stay silent. Must not be weak.


In my first example, Can you feel John's inner ache? The repeated oh, oh, aah, ahh,make the passage seem to moan and groan on the page. The repeated O sounds (both short and long) make you verbalize John's pain response.

In my second example, Lisa's entire inner monologue does coo at the cute baby, even if she refuses to do it aloud. The repeated long U sound carries it. This is an excellent, subtle way to add layers of meaning to your character's thoughts. Characters might consciously deny something while the sounds in their words convey a deeper, hidden, unconscious desire for the denied thing.

In my third example, the creepy feeling is reinforced by a series of little shrieks, like one might hear upon having a bug scurry over bare skin: Eeek! Ross is screaming inside, even if he's being tough and silent on the outside.

Your turn:
Chose an emotion you want to convey and think of the most primal sound you associate with it, such as Os for groaning with pain, Es for screaming with fright. Write a sentence, paragraph or scene in which you repeat the sounds.

Hint: a rhyming dictionary will help you identify words with the vowel sounds you need.

How might you use this technique today to improve your writing?

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Tips for avoiding the dreaded label "purple prose"

Today is my final installment of my series on "Reducing Bloat / Revising Overwriting."

Overly elaborate diction is what most think of when they hear the term "overwriting." I'd argue it's just one facet of a tendency to go thick, lush and heavy-handed when drafting. The trick is to identify and correct it during revision.

Advanced vocabulary
Your characters' word choices show us who they are, so it's important to be accurate. Generally word choices should be consistent with a character's age, level of education and socio-economic status. Just as a fifth grader wouldn't discuss post-feminist hegemony, a college professor wouldn't call his enemy "stinkypants."

There are exceptions, however. You might sprinkle in words like "indubitably" and "elementary" to show that your fifth grader fancies himself an amateur sleuth like Sherlock Holmes. A social climber might adopt fancy lingo but misuse it. A grade-skipping child prodigy would wield her vocabulary like a weapon.

As you revise, be willing to question your word choices. Advanced vocabulary can communicate some things you don't intend. It gives the impression that you, the writer, are insecure or a bit out of touch. It can also taint your characters with a popular stereotype: the evil genius whose intelligence is paired with heartless ambition, or the socially awkward hopeless nerd whose head is stuffed with useless knowledge.

Literary devices
As I wrote in this post, sound devices can be an effective tool to make your work sing. But if you're too heavy-handed, it sounds silly or just plain annoying. Generally assonance (repeated internal vowel sounds) is less jarring than alliteration (repeated initial consonant sounds) or rhyming, so you can be a little freer with it.

How heavy is too heavy? I don't have a hard and fast rule. If sound is a big piece of your style, you'll have a hard time identifying overkill. Ask three or four trustworthy readers who get your intent to help you trim all but the best of your devices.

Metaphor and simile can quickly become overdone. Beware of the tendency to describe every detail through comparisons. Watch out especially for inept comparisons that don't fit the character or situation. Stephanie Thornton posted some hilarious examples of simile gone awry.

A whole-work "controlling metaphor" or motif is often fine, however. If done well, it can unify and strengthen your work. Sarah Dessen's Lock and Key, for example, uses the motif of doors, keys, fences, houses to examine what makes a place home, and people around us family.

Allusion can be an effective way to say a lot in a small space--your reader will pour in all the context without your needing to explain. But if the book, film, song or historical event you reference is too obscure, it hinders rather than helps your reader. A character whose thoughts are filled with allusions to pop culture will come across as shallow and lacking original ideas of his own.

Name dropping brands is another type of allusion that becomes irksome quickly. Call your fleece jacket a "North Face" once, then stick with generic terms like fleece or jacket in subsequent reference.

Dialect
Take extra care when presenting a character whose regional accent isn't mainstream. The best way to handle dialect is through word order, cadence, grammar, and word choice. But go lightly, especially with regionalisms like "youse guys" or "blimey" or "y'all." And as much as possible, stick to standard spellings. If you've done your research and can imitate the cadence and use the right lingo, your readers will "hear" the dialect without the tortured spellings.

Which of these diction areas trips you up? Any other helpful hints to add?

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Forgotten greats: Hopkins and sound sense

Gerard Manley Hopkins is something of a poster-boy for misunderstood artists and "born out of time" poets. Now considered one of the greats of the Victorian era, none of his best-loved poems were published during his lifetime. His style was too radically different from his contemporaries, so his work didn't come into prominence until the nineteen-teens, decades after his death. Hopkins earned his living as a Jesuit priest and a college professor. You can read more about his life HERE.

What I love most about Hopkins's work is his use of sound devices. He of course has a great deal of end-rhyme [ends of lines have a sound-alike pattern], like most Victorians. The first full poem I quote below has the following rhyme scheme [pattern of rhyming lines, with a letter assigned to each new sound]: ABBA ABBA // CCD CCD. [The double slash, "//", indicates a stanza break.]

But Hopkins doesn't stop there. He also uses internal rhyme [rhyme within a line], such as "All the air things wear." His lines seethe with sounds sliding against each other in sound patterns called alliteration [repeated initial sounds], consonance [repeated consonant sounds within a word] and assonance [repeated vowel sounds]. I'll give a few quick examples below.

In these two lines are full of alliteration and consonance: there are a plethora of Ws at the beginnings of words and Ls within:
"Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales,
All the air things wear that build this world of Wales; "

This line repeats the assonant "ah" sound (if you read it in a British accent):
"Being mighty a master, being a father and fond. "

Without further ado, here is some Hopkins magic to brighten your Monday.

In the Valley of the Elwy
By Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)

I remember a house where all were good
To me, God knows, deserving no such thing:
Comforting smell breathed at very entering,
Fetched fresh, as I suppose, off some sweet wood.
That cordial air made those kind people a hood
All over, as a bevy of eggs the mothering wing
Will, or mild nights the new morsels of Spring:
Why, it seemed of course; seemed of right it should.

Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales,
All the air things wear that build this world of Wales;
Only the inmate does not correspond:
God, lover of souls, swaying considerate scales,
Complete thy creature dear O where it fails,
Being mighty a master, being a father and fond.


Pied Beauty
By Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.


God's Grandeur
By Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Have you ever played with sound patterns in poetry or fiction?

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Giving life to peripheral stories

Writing a novel usually involves generating an extensive amount of imaginative material--mentally and perhaps on paper as well--that will never appear directly in the book itself. This includes character sheets, freewrites, voice explorations, backstory and failed scenes.

Before you touch a match to these reams of paper, consider how some might find second life. After all, you know and love these characters. Some of the events of their lives may not fit within the story arc of your novel, but it doesn't mean those events aren't worth telling. Consider spinning them off as short stories or poems.

Short story
If you despair of having no publishing credits, consider how you might be able to convert some of your peripheral material into short-format fiction and place the stories with magazines or e-zines. This could be a microfiction format such as dribble (50 words), drabble (100 words) or flash fiction (500-1,000 words) as well as standard short story (1K-9K words). See my March 2010 post Spotlight on Microficiton for more information.

Like your novel itself, your short story needs to have a dramatic arc--inciting incident, conflict, rising action, climax, denouement. Often the denouement section will be very, very condensed or merely hinted at.

Perhaps some past event is hinted at continually in your novel, but dramatizing it would only slow the story down. Here's your chance to explore that event fully. Perhaps you had to axe an entire plot line when you eliminated a secondary character. Go find those notes a write that story as a stand-alone.

Short story format is also an excellent way to test out your story world on an audience and build a fan base for your work.

Poetry
Converting peripheral material into poetry is a somewhat different animal because it's more extreme genre-switching than going from one fiction category to another. Poetry has its own rules that you need to know to succeed.

Many beginners either write sing-songy metered and rhymed pieces, or think that line breaks alone are enough to make prose into a poem. Alas, this is not so.

Poetry needs to have layers of meaning, to juxtapose images in intriguing, new ways and to use literary devices such as allusion, assonance and consonance, onomatopoeia, metonymy, metaphor, simile and other forms of figurative language and symbolism.

Yesterday I mentioned turning an excised scene into a poem that was featured HERE. The main reason this material never worked in the book is because it was too much like poetry in the first place. My protagonist was having a trippy dream in which she drew events from her life and they became active, like the video of Ah-ha's song "Take on Me." As I got sucked into Dani's dream, the layers of images and sound play became more important than how well material fit the story. The scene didn't really fit the story tone and brought the pace to a screeching halt. Yet the "Moving on" portion had a full arc with conflict, climax and denouement/epiphany. It was begging for a life of its own. I kept tweaking the language to strengthen the dirty/clean and dry/wet dichotomy through image and sound. The hissing, dusty S and scratchy K sounds give way to wet Ws and onomatopoetic drip-like clicks of T. In other words, the process was more complex than adding line breaks to prose.

Poetry writing is a great way to get at the heart of a life-changing event in your character's past and explore what it means to her. The images it conjures will help you build a symbolic lexicon for this person that can be brought to bear on the novel. For example, she might associate dogs with danger or with loyalty or carefree joy, depending on her early experiences.

You can also place poems with magazines and contests to build a fan base.

Do you have any excised material you want to give new life? What format will you try?

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Top 7 of 2010: #5 Poet secrets

On we go with my countdown of the most popular posts of 2010 here at Laurel's Leaves. Today's repost originally appeared in April, National Poetry Month.

= = = = = =

I've been hesitant to blog about this topic, because it's one of those things I hide in my writing, there to be found by those who look for it, but I hope not so jarring that it draws attention to itself. But every once in a while one of my critique partners will come across a passage like this in my work:

Snippets of my life appear between arty shots of hydrant rainbows and sullen subway riders. Wide-eyed child watches a huge Snoopy balloon soar past in the Macy’s parade. Skinny kid with braids pokes puddles in Prospect Park. So-serious teen perches on the Public Library steps and sketches lions.

Then come the blinks and the questions: "what is this, poetry?"

Um, yeah. See, I almost can't help myself. I'm terribly addicted to the sound toys of poets, assonance and consonance. Assonance, for those of you who've avoided lit classes, is a repetition of vowel sounds; consonance, of consonants. Alliteration is sometimes used as a blanket term for both, though it is often applied only to repeated initial sounds. Assonance and consonance are repeated sounds from anywhere in a word--beginning, middle or end.

I've decided to come clean about my addiction because A) it's national poetry month; B) I hope others find poetic devices cool rather than hopelessly nerdy; and C) I believe these devices can make anyone's writing more musical.

The thinking behind sound devices is often onomatopoetic; the sound and meaning are linked. If you want to convey a sense of something sliding, for example, you'd choose hissing, sibilant words containing "s", "sh" and "sw." For example, "In her rush, she slipped sidelong, smearing grease along one sleeve."

Have a character in pain? Choose words with lots of O sounds (both short and long) to make the passage seem to groan on the page. For example, "John groped for his coat in hopes the Tylenol bottle hadn't dropped through the hole in his pocket."

I'm not always so calculated about how I choose sounds to achieve a particular effect. It's very easy to overdo it. But I do find that playing around with word choices can yield a more aurally pleasant experience.

In the passage I quoted above from my current WIP, I paired "child" with "wide-eyed" and "kid" with "skinny" rather than the reverse because of the shared vowel sounds. The Macy's parade balloon could have been any cartoon character. I chose "Snoopy" for the double blessing of the "oo" assonance to match "huge" and "balloon" and the "s" consonance to match "soar", "past" and "Macy's". The last two sentences in my example pop with a plethora of "p" repetitions (as did that sentence. See? I can't stop myself!).

Is writing like this crazy time-consuming? I suppose it could be if you aren't attuned to the sounds of words. And if you push the technique too far, you can end up with incoherent sound experiments that seem like bad James Joyce parodies. (Does the world need another Finnegans Wake or Ulysses?)

If you'd like to try incorporating sound devices in your prose, here's what I recommend:
~Study the greats (Plath and Ginsberg are two who come to mind).
~Go lightly.
~Choose lingo that's natural to your character.
~Find ideas in a rhyming dictionary (especially for assonance).
~Play.

See if some word choice changes can make a plodding passage begin to sing.

How about you? Do you like sound devices? Never notice them? Find them gimmicky? Are they something you'd like to try in your work?

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Poet secrets

I've been hesitant to blog about this topic, because it's one of those things I hide in my writing, there to be found by those who look for it, but I hope not so jarring that it draws attention to itself. But every once in a while one of my critique partners will come across a passage like this in my work:

Snippets of my life appear between arty shots of hydrant rainbows and sullen subway riders. Wide-eyed child watches a huge Snoopy balloon soar past in the Macy’s parade. Skinny kid with braids pokes puddles in Prospect Park. So-serious teen perches on the Public Library steps and sketches lions.

Then come the blinks and the questions: "what is this, poetry?"

Um, yeah. See, I almost can't help myself. I'm terribly addicted to the sound toys of poets, assonance and consonance. Assonance, for those of you who've avoided lit classes, is a repetition of vowel sounds; consonance, of consonants. Alliteration is sometimes used as a blanket term for both, though it is often applied only to repeated initial sounds. Assonance and consonance are repeated sounds from anywhere in a word--beginning, middle or end.

I've decided to come clean about my addiction because A) it's national poetry month; B) I hope others find poetic devices cool rather than hopelessly nerdy; and C) I believe these devices can make anyone's writing more musical.

The thinking behind sound devices is often onomatopoetic; the sound and meaning are linked. If you want to convey a sense of something sliding, for example, you'd choose hissing, sibilant words containing "s", "sh" and "sw." For example, "In her rush, she slipped sidelong, smearing grease along one sleeve."

Have a character in pain? Choose words with lots of O sounds (both short and long) to make the passage seem to groan on the page. For example, "John groped for his coat in hopes the Tylenol bottle hadn't dropped through the hole in his pocket."

I'm not always so calculated about how I choose sounds to achieve a particular effect. It's very easy to overdo it. But I do find that playing around with word choices can yield a more aurally pleasant experience.

In the passage I quoted above from my current WIP, I paired "child" with "wide-eyed" and "kid" with "skinny" rather than the reverse because of the shared vowel sounds. The Macy's parade balloon could have been any cartoon character. I chose "Snoopy" for the double blessing of the "oo" assonance to match "huge" and "balloon" and the "s" consonance to match "soar", "past" and "Macy's". The last two sentences in my example pop with a plethora of "p" repetitions (as did that sentence. See? I can't stop myself!).

Is writing like this crazy time-consuming? I suppose it could be if you aren't attuned to the sounds of words. And if you push the technique too far, you can end up with incoherent sound experiments that seem like bad James Joyce parodies. (Does the world need another Finnegans Wake or Ulysses?)

If you'd like to try incorporating sound devices in your prose, here's what I recommend:
~Study the greats (Plath and Ginsberg are two who come to mind).
~Go lightly.
~Choose lingo that's natural to your character.
~Find ideas in a rhyming dictionary (especially for assonance).
~Play.

See if some word choice changes can make a plodding passage begin to sing.

How about you? Do you like sound devices? Never notice them? Find them gimmicky? Are they something you'd like to try in your work?

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