From: djheydt@kithrup.com   
      
   In article <1m7cef6.xmdq701szwcksN%mbottorff@lshelby.com>,   
   Michelle Bottorff  wrote:   
   >Mostly I think I'm just wingeing, but I find that doing that here can   
   >sometimes be very helpful.  :)   
   >   
   >I have written about 50K words of this book, and I still don't really   
   >know how I want to deal with the hero's native language, which is what   
   >most everyone will be speaking for the whole rest of the book.   
   >   
   >Normally it would have come to me with the characters, but in the early   
   >part of the book the characters native to there were mostly speaking the   
   >heroines' language and speaking it very badly.   The "badly" part   
   >totally overwhelmed any flavor of their own language that might have   
   >gotten through.   
   >   
   >What few passages I do currently have supposedly in their language have   
   >the word order different, which works just fine for a few flavorful   
   >passages, but now that the dominant language of the book has switched,   
   >it's too much, and makes all my dialog go clunk.   
   >   
   >If I was at the beginning of the book, I wouldn't be fretting.  I'd just   
   >sit and write and assume that I would get nowhere until it was working.   
   >But instead I'm in the middle and the plot is pulling me forward.  The   
   >desire to keep the story going is easily stronge enough to overwhelm the   
   >desire to make it sound right.  But I know that until I've got this   
   >figured out, the more I succumb to the "move it along" pressure the more   
   >I will have to rewrite afterward.  Ack!   
   >   
   >   
   >...I'm starting to think that "writing exercises" are going to be   
   >needed.  I usually avoid those, because they feel like unneeded   
   >expenditure of energy, and I never have any energy to spare.  But I   
   >think I need find a way to get the characters talking away from that   
   >distracting forward pull of the plot.  Jump into their past and start   
   >writing a conversation there, or something.   
   >   
   Hmmm, word order.  Master Yoda's utterances have elicited a lot   
   of humorous comments, but he's just basically using Russian word   
   order, verb-final.  (You can observe this by watching _Alekxandr   
   Nevsky_ with the English subtitles that were obviously written by   
   a native speaker of Russian who didn't know English *quite* as   
   well as he thought he did.)   
      
   I'm currently writing a character of Terran descent who grew up   
   on Mars and is currently passing for half-Martian (there are no   
   other Martians in the vicinity to out him), simply by speaking   
   Terran with two Martian characteristics: no contractions, no   
   sentence fragments.  It looks all right to *me*, but I haven't   
   yet had a chance to get anybody else to look at it.   
      
   (N.B. And I was somewhere in the middle of the book when I   
   started doing this, simply because that was when the plot required   
   him to fake his identity.)   
      
   --   
   Dorothy J. Heydt   
   Vallejo, California   
   djheydt at gmail dot com   
   Should you wish to email me, you'd better use the gmail edress.   
   Kithrup's all spammy and hotmail's been hacked.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)