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nah gently caress commas I love his stuff. Though I got told off in thunderdome more than once for my run-on sentences e: talking about Cormac McCarthy
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Jan 27, 2023 23:25
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c'mon, faulker does the bear better: Eric the Mauve posted:Pictured: An excerpt of prose that would never in a million years get past a modern publishing-house editor if they didn't already know Cormac McCarthy wrote it. 
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Jan 28, 2023 04:17
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You can follow a colon with an em-dash???
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Jan 28, 2023 07:16
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ultrachrist posted:c'mon, faulker does the bear better: So the McCarthy is unbearable?
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Jan 28, 2023 08:44
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Nae posted:You can follow a colon with an em-dash??? Faulkner playing the long game, waiting a century for the cock-and-balls emoji to come into play.
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Jan 28, 2023 09:01
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Eric the Mauve posted:Pictured: An excerpt of prose that would never in a million years get past a modern publishing-house editor if they didn't already know Cormac McCarthy wrote it.
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Jan 29, 2023 10:39
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I have kind of a weird question: So this novel that I'm working is kind of high concept. One of the ideas I'm playing with is the idea of noise in text. In universe, this is represented by a mysterious sound my protagonists encounter. Now, I want to represent this textually in some way. A friend of mine who is Armenian recommended I use the Armenian script, as it has interesting graphetic properties. I've been doing that so far for the draft I'm working on. Additionally, some stuff I'm concerned about with this work is highlighting the conceptual-tracking (or lack thereof) that happens when you translate a sentence from one language to another and back again, so I've been bouncing my written work through google translate for Armenian and having my friend double check the translation, and then translating that into English. It's an interesting technique that creates interesting versions of what is ostensibly the same sentence. Recently however I've begun to worry that I might not be ethically correct in using this technique. My friend speaks Armenian as a second language, and I don't speak it at all. Am I accidentally doing some kind of linguistic colonialism? I'll admit that a big draw for using this language is the way it looks (purely aesthetically speaking) on the page. But I also do combine English sentences, machine-translated Armenian sentences, and my friends original translations, frequently in one paragraph. I'm not trying to use the Armenian script to "other" the Armenian population or draw false equivalencies between other language speakers and cosmic horrors. I'm more trying to explore the concept of noise on a variety of levels both in fiction and in text. I could do a conlang thing I suppose, but the point of all the translation tennis is to highlight conceptual similarity or dis-similarity across languages, and I feel like conlangs just aren't going to have the depth that real languages have. Wonder if the thread has any thoughts about it. I feel a bit dumb, but this quite literally just occurred to me.
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Jan 31, 2023 05:49
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I don't think you should use a real language to suggest alienness.
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Jan 31, 2023 05:52
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It's an incredibly stupid concern. First off what are you even doing, if the text represents noise then saying you're trying to track the shifting of meaning between recursive translations is nonsensical. Does the Armenian text mean anything or is it purely aesthetic, if it's aesthetic than use it or use your own made up script or hell use a dead script. If the text means something than what is it's function in the story, are we supposed to understand it, are the characters, is it supposed to be decipherable and if so at what level of diligence are we supposed to approach it at. Gaius Marius fucked around with this message at 06:11 on Jan 31, 2023 |
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Jan 31, 2023 05:52
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HopperUK posted:I don't think you should use a real language to suggest alienness. But I'm not suggesting alieness, I'm using it to suggest the sonic concept of noise at a textual level. The graphetic equivalent of say, a distorted wave form or feedback, because one of the questions I'm trying to explore is how to write that kind of sound without just mashing together onomatopoeia. But the second point is that I'm using different translation techniques to highlight the conceptual loss that often times happens during translation of a source language to English and back again. If I had written something like "oh yeah these aliens are called <armenian word> and they're unknowable cosmic horrors" then yeah, you'd be right. But to the best of my ability I'm explicitly trying not to do so. I do see the concern however. That's kind of why I'm on the fence.
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Jan 31, 2023 06:06
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Gaius Marius posted:It's an incredibly stupid concern. Let me try and clarify: 1). The script, graphetically speaking represents noise in the text, but also in the fiction. That is to say, the reader will know the characters have encountered the sound in fiction by the script showing up in the text itself 2). An in-fictional consequence of the characters being exposed to this noise is conceptual fuzziness, represented by the translation tennis which shows up in the text itself as cue for concept loss or change or whatever 3). I'm not sure about what level of diligence because I'm still writing the story itself, and playing around with how to write "noise" in an interesting way. That's why I posed the question to the community re: does this work if I'm trying to do my due diligence to avoid the Lovecraft trap of foreigners = scary, because I've been thinking about this subject and I'm not sure what to think. Hopefully this clears things up.
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Jan 31, 2023 06:24
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magic cactus posted:But I'm not suggesting alieness, I'm using it to suggest the sonic concept of noise at a textual level. The graphetic equivalent of say, a distorted wave form or feedback, because one of the questions I'm trying to explore is how to write that kind of sound without just mashing together onomatopoeia. But the second point is that I'm using different translation techniques to highlight the conceptual loss that often times happens during translation of a source language to English and back again. If I had written something like "oh yeah these aliens are called <armenian word> and they're unknowable cosmic horrors" then yeah, you'd be right. But to the best of my ability I'm explicitly trying not to do so. I do see the concern however. That's kind of why I'm on the fence. Let me challenge you with your own admission: you're using the Armenian alphabet because you like the way it looks. What are your feelings about people who get random phrases in Chinese or Japanese tattooed on themselves because they look cool? Second, having varying degrees of proficiency in a number of languages both living and dead, I'm well aware of the difficulties of the conceptual loss in translation. (I originally learned Ancient Greek to read Plato in the original, for example, to mitigate these difficulties.) To be frank, your experiments with Google translate and a friend for whom Armenian is not even a first language seem vaguely patronizing. Why not come up with your own different translations of a given piece of alien text/sound/etc.? Why do you have to use a specific real-world language to filter it? Edit because you posted while I was writing: re your point 1: This seems like it might be extremely distracting to the reader unless it's done very well, and I'm not sure what that would look like. Not saying you can't pull it off, but maybe workshop a chapter or two featuring it to neutral audiences and see what they say. Admiralty Flag fucked around with this message at 06:32 on Jan 31, 2023 |
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Jan 31, 2023 06:28
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Even discarding that I don't think the way your going about it is going to have the intended effect. People when reading are searching for coherence, seeing something they cannot make sense of doesn't prompt aesthetic consideration so much as cause the eyes to glide to the next coherent text. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24726801 Pound tried to use Chinese characters to express himself and it is not held to be that successful and that was poetry not prose If you're intended effect is noise I'd say perhaps use a typeface that resembles latin but the characters are just so warped as to be unrecognizable, the simlish of Latin text. Or the true answer that everyone here has simply been too afraid to confront you with, the elephant in the room, the cause and solution to all scriptural problems, Wingdings
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Jan 31, 2023 06:40
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Admiralty Flag posted:Let me challenge you with your own admission: you're using the Armenian alphabet because you like the way it looks. What are your feelings about people who get random phrases in Chinese or Japanese tattooed on themselves because they look cool? Well see, that's the question. Originally, my Armenian friend was the person who suggested I use the language. So I did. Now after thinking about it, I don't know if I'm in the right to do so, but I also recognize that I have tunnel-vision here. The "random Chinese phrases" objection is one I've been thinking about as well. My answer to that is I'm explicitly not slapping words together willy-nilly ala "this character says peace but actually it means something entirely different." I'm taking care to make whatever words I use be as accurate as I can get them, and taking care to have them make sense in the text itself. However I recognize that I am not a professional translator and neither is my friend, who speaks this language at home, albeit as a second language and not at native level. The problem with the conlang route is that I'm not sure that it conveys the relevant information in sufficient depth. Real human languages have a conceptual depth that most conlangs (with the exception of Tolkien, maybe Magma) don't seem to have. Tolkien, being a linguist, is the exception. You can learn several dialects of elvish as fully featured languages. I personally don't have the linguistic background to be able to whip up such a feature-rich language, I imagine most people don't. The tl;dr as to why I don't whip up my own conlang is that I don't think I can make it as feature rich as an actual spoken and written language, and thus won't be able to adequately illustrate the concept loss that comes with translation from a source language to another target language.
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Jan 31, 2023 06:46
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Gaius Marius posted:Even discarding that I don't think the way your going about it is going to have the intended effect. People when reading are searching for coherence, seeing something they cannot make sense of doesn't prompt aesthetic consideration so much as cause the eyes to glide to the next coherent text. See that is actually something I'm interested in, the fact that the readers search for coherence when confronted with something that doesn't make sense textually. That's the kind of thing I'm interested in exploring through the text of my story. I actually did try Wingdings in an earlier draft (and the Zalgo "spooky text") or whatever. I settled on Armenian because graphetically it resembles how I tend to perceive text in my dreams, and dream experiences are a pretty strong example of conceptual "fuzziness" or "weirdness." Also Admiralty Flag posted:Edit because you posted while I was writing: re your point 1: This seems like it might be extremely distracting to the reader unless it's done very well, and I'm not sure what that would look like. Not saying you can't pull it off, but maybe workshop a chapter or two featuring it to neutral audiences and see what they say Yeah I've been thinking a lot about this point too. It's difficult for sure, and frankly I don't know if I have the skill to do it, but I haven't read much else exploring these issues in the way I want( if you know of anything fictional that works with those ideas, please let me know, I'd love to have more references.) If I get laughed out of the Feedback thread in CC when I post or whatever that's fine, but I'd rather give it a shot. magic cactus fucked around with this message at 07:07 on Jan 31, 2023 |
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Jan 31, 2023 06:53
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fwiw I think it's a cool concept. The other posters are probably right that you shouldn't use a real language as a signifier for "weirdness", but it's hard to say for sure without seeing an excerpt.
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Jan 31, 2023 09:40
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You can acknowledge it's Armenian in the text, and say "Oh, yeah, we get random fragments from Armenian cookbooks around here. The next town over gets ice fishing advice in Swahili."
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Jan 31, 2023 09:45
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magic cactus posted:Well see, that's the question. Originally, my Armenian friend was the person who suggested I use the language. So I did. Now after thinking about it, I don't know if I'm in the right to do so, but I also recognize that I have tunnel-vision here. The "random Chinese phrases" objection is one I've been thinking about as well. My answer to that is I'm explicitly not slapping words together willy-nilly ala "this character says peace but actually it means something entirely different." I'm taking care to make whatever words I use be as accurate as I can get them, and taking care to have them make sense in the text itself. However I recognize that I am not a professional translator and neither is my friend, who speaks this language at home, albeit as a second language and not at native level. As someone who is both working with a conlang (heavily based on Ancient Egyptian to get that real-language depth), AND also using real Egyptian Arabic dialogue (occasionally) for modern Egyptian characters in my novels, I think using Armenian text like this is definitely a bad idea. A compromise might work where you don’t use Armenian script, but instead make a new font that gives you the same feel. But ALSO using your back and forth translation technique to come up with the new phrasing used in this not-English script. If I’m getting your process right, you’re doing the back and forth translation and sticking the Armenian translation directly into the novel in Armenian script? If that’s the case, adapt your process so you’re going the extra step to convert the Armenian into the bad English translation and then display it in the strange font. That way you get the depth from translating from one language to another without obviously using Armenian in a possibly offensive way. I‘ve done something similar with the original Conference of Birds, where a character tries to quote it in the original Persian in an attempt to be erudite and fails miserably because no-one’s translators understand Classical Persian, and the mistranslations are based on it being mistaken for Arabic (due to my character’s accent) and the Ancient Egyptian conlang. I went to the trouble to convert the relevant passage into both and pick out the lines that almost made sense in funny ways. Thing is, I’m working with Medieval poetry here.
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Jan 31, 2023 16:22
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Use da wingdings
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Jan 31, 2023 18:10
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Sailor Viy posted:fwiw I think it's a cool concept. The other posters are probably right that you shouldn't use a real language as a signifier for "weirdness", but it's hard to say for sure without seeing an excerpt. So I actually haven't implemented this idea yet beyond a brief proof-of-concept, because I want to get the actual story down before I start experimenting, but here's a short snippet The source is my writing ---> armenian ----> machine translation "excerpt from draft" posted:
Obviously, it's quick and dirty but it should get the idea across. magic cactus fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Jan 31, 2023 |
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Jan 31, 2023 18:58
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magic cactus posted:So I actually haven't implemented this idea yet beyond a brief proof-of-concept, because I want to get the actual story down before I start experimenting, but here's a short snippet The source is my writing ---> armenian ----> machine translation Yeah, I don’t think you should use a living language’s script for that. What’s the idea here though? Are the words in the script gonna always appear below the script for the reader like that or are you footnoting it or hoping they stick it in google translate to check or what? quote:Coils of light in his eyes like dandelion seeds that absorb resonance, each moment intensifying on the knife edge of sound and silence. Can be rendered in a made-up script and all you’d need to do is change it to a normal font to see what it actually says. Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Jan 31, 2023 |
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Jan 31, 2023 20:24
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Stuporstar posted:Yeah, I don’t think you should use a living language’s script for that. I'm still sort of playing around with it as a concept, but the idea is the translated text will follow the script. The script is more of a textual marker for the noise in-fiction. A consequence of being exposed to this noise in-fiction is conceptual decoherence or fuzziness, represented in-text by the machine translation. If you're a fan of noise/drone/shoegaze at all, a big part of what is personally motivating me to write this is I want to try and capture the essence of how those genres sound to me in text, beyond just onomatopoeia and description. You can think of the script as like, a jolt of feedback you weren't expecting. It's kind of jarring, and the machine translation is sort of like a delay chorus pedal or something, where it's the same "note" (text), with a different "sound" (words, sentence structure etc.) the analogy breaks down because sound and text are different things fundamentally, but my medium of choice is writing and not music so I'm trying to figure out how to capture the texture of those genres through the medium I can sort of work with. I've been playing around with different techniques to capture those properties. Right now I'm messing around with just running my textual corpus through a cut-up program and doing some Burroughs style stuff, but this feels a little too artificial, too much noise. Using the Armenian script (until I thought about the ethical implications) was a good compromise because it was connected with the machine translation that follows. Having taken some time to think about it though, I think you're right and it's better to just invent a font/script to cover the machine translation. I don't think I actually need to use Armenian itself. I can create an empty script that should get the job done (I mean, I don't know anything about font creation per se, but it's possible.) magic cactus fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Jan 31, 2023 |
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Jan 31, 2023 20:48
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Honestly reading that paragraph I just looked at the text I couldn't read long enough to know I couldn't read it and skipped to the next word I *could* read. It could have been anything.
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Jan 31, 2023 20:56
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HopperUK posted:Honestly reading that paragraph I just looked at the text I couldn't read long enough to know I couldn't read it and skipped to the next word I *could* read. It could have been anything. Yeah that's kind of what I'm getting from the thread feedback, it doesn't have to be Armenian script, just scriptlike. Like trying to read in a dream. Thanks very much for the feedback and resultant course correction, I would have ended up with egg on my face.
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Jan 31, 2023 21:00
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magic cactus posted:Having taken some time to think about it though, I think you're right and it's better to just invent a font/script to cover the machine translation. I don't think I actually need to use Armenian itself. I can create an empty script that should get the job done (I mean, I don't know anything about font creation per se, but it's possible.) I think you could get the right effect with a zalgo-like script so the reader could see the distorted English underneath the strange squiggles. It would make the reader try to read the off-translation through the noise rather than just skimming over a huge chunk of unreadable script. You’d have to learn to make a font or commission one, but it’d be worth the extra effort. Also if you’re using machine translation, but not another language in the text, you can run it through a few different languages to enhance the effect.
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Jan 31, 2023 21:10
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Stuporstar posted:I think you could get the right effect with a zalgo-like script so the reader could see the distorted English underneath the strange squiggles. It would make the reader try to read the off-translation through the noise rather than just skimming over a huge chunk of unreadable script. You’d have to learn to make a font or commission one, but it’d be worth the extra effort. I don't know if you read the previous posts but I mentioned trying Zalgo and Wingdings as alternatives. My problem with Zalgo is it's been over-used in internet creepypastas and such, plus as I was experimenting with it I set some sliders high enough to capture the effect I wanted it ended up breaking my word file unfortunately. Wingdings felt too far away from "real" language. It captured the "weirdness" or "noise" or "glitches" fine, but only as a surface aesthetic, which is not exactly what I'm trying to do. But maybe the graphitic qualities of Armenian script (not the script, just the way it is written) with the addition of Zalgo is the way to go here. It's a starting point at least, thank you for the suggestion!
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Jan 31, 2023 21:19
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magic cactus posted:I don't know if you read the previous posts but I mentioned trying Zalgo and Wingdings as alternatives. My problem with Zalgo is it's been over-used in internet creepypastas and such, plus as I was experimenting with it I set some sliders high enough to capture the effect I wanted it ended up breaking my word file unfortunately. Wingdings felt too far away from "real" language. It captured the "weirdness" or "noise" or "glitches" fine, but only as a surface aesthetic, which is not exactly what I'm trying to do. But maybe the graphitic qualities of Armenian script (not the script, just the way it is written) with the addition of Zalgo is the way to go here. It's a starting point at least, thank you for the suggestion! Yeah, I don’t mean Zalgo specifically, but combining what you like about the aesthetic of Armenian and layering that on English text instead. A lotta South Asian scripts have an even more flowing form that you could also study for inspiration.
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Jan 31, 2023 21:46
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magic cactus posted:Well see, that's the question. Originally, my Armenian friend was the person who suggested I use the language. So I did. Now after thinking about it, I don't know if I'm in the right to do so, but I also recognize that I have tunnel-vision here. The "random Chinese phrases" objection is one I've been thinking about as well. My answer to that is I'm explicitly not slapping words together willy-nilly ala "this character says peace but actually it means something entirely different." I'm taking care to make whatever words I use be as accurate as I can get them, and taking care to have them make sense in the text itself. However I recognize that I am not a professional translator and neither is my friend, who speaks this language at home, albeit as a second language and not at native level. Maybe it's a bit out there, but it is possible to hire someone else to make a conlang for you. Look into the Language Creation Society. They can let you put up a post on their job board.
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Jan 31, 2023 23:19
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Okua posted:Maybe it's a bit out there, but it is possible to hire someone else to make a conlang for you. Look into the Language Creation Society. They can let you put up a post on their job board. I think I'm just going to go with creating a unique font for now, but it's a back pocket idea for sure.
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Feb 1, 2023 00:36
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Write it in papyrus that's a cool font
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Feb 1, 2023 04:08
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Wungus posted:Write it in papyrus that's a cool font Is this not unsaid that everyone is doing this already
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Feb 1, 2023 04:10
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magic cactus posted:I think I'm just going to go with creating a unique font for now, but it's a back pocket idea for sure. If it's a weird mysterious noise the characters are hearing in the background, what about, possibly with the help of a sound designer, creating/synthesizing the noise, recording it, and representing it with a straight up oscillogram in the text? Then your most dedicated nerd readers can extract the audio and hear what the mysterious noise actually sounds like (or you can troll your readers and use oscillograms of fart noises or something). Or you could make a font script that resembles oscillograms in some way.  Speaking of conlangs, I'm reminded I need like...four of them for the thing I'm working on, including one in detail that has its own (weird) script. I can do histories, religions, cultural customs, architecture, and fashion no problem (thanks design school!), but I can't do languages for poo poo.
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Feb 1, 2023 06:04
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Every time you need some dreamlike, unintelligible speech, just find a video of the Sims talking and transcribe their surreal gibberish as best you can. It’s the most perfect ‘not-quite’ language I’ve ever heard.
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Feb 1, 2023 07:55
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Turnkey conlang generator: https://www.vulgarlang.com/
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Feb 1, 2023 12:28
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Nae posted:Every time you need some dreamlike, unintelligible speech, just find a video of the Sims talking and transcribe their surreal gibberish as best you can. It’s the most perfect ‘not-quite’ language I’ve ever heard. There's also a (fan-made) simlish font 
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Feb 1, 2023 23:55
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Nae posted:Every time you need some dreamlike, unintelligible speech, just find a video of the Sims talking and transcribe their surreal gibberish as best you can. It’s the most perfect ‘not-quite’ language I’ve ever heard. commonts nala?
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Feb 2, 2023 00:05
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I feel like an imposter writer because all I write is fan fiction.
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Feb 7, 2023 13:40
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samcarsten posted:I feel like an imposter writer because all I write is fan fiction. I mean if you want to write other things then do, but don't stress it imo
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Feb 7, 2023 13:49
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samcarsten posted:I feel like an imposter writer because all I write is fan fiction. A lot of really good stylists write fanfic (and sometimes only fanfic). You are……..valid
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Feb 7, 2023 14:21
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Just change the names to Schmedward and Schbella and publish it.
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Feb 7, 2023 14:30
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