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starfishstarSo, as I'm gently pondering What to Write Next, there's still this idea in my head about drawing on the mythology of selkies... Possibly for my young-Sherlock-and-Mycroft-mythical-AU idea, or possibly for some original story yet unknown.
Or maybe it won't end up being selkies, maybe I'll try to learn more about Icelandic folklore while I'm there later this summer, and look for inspiration there? Or perhaps something else that I haven't even thought of yet will emerge, as I'm on the lookout for fascinating fantastical creatures?
All I know is that I'm intrigued by the idea of doing something along the lines of the capaill uisce in Maggie Stiefvater's "The Scorpio Races" – drawing on folkloric traditions, but with a modern twist. (Like J. K. Rowling did, too – all those magical beasts, boggarts and hippogriffs and all, she didn't invent those, she drew from existing mythology.) Although, I think I like even more the idea of creatures that are sort-of-human-sort-of-not – like werewolves, or selkies, or even the dragons-that-can-disguise-themselves-as-humans in Rachel Hartman's "Seraphina."
However – as a Rachel Hartman or a Maggie Stiefvater proves – creating a richly imagined and culturally respectful inspired-by-mythology original work doesn't happen overnight. In fact, generally it happens through years of research. (And brainstorming and world-building and trying and failing and trying again...) Which I guess leads me to my question:
Any thoughts about how to go about this sort of research? I don't mean by reading novels, though those could be good too, if they're well and accurately researched. But I'm more thinking nonfiction – actual academic books on the history and traditions and origins of Scandinavian folklore, or maybe Celtic folklore... I would want to get well beyond the superficial read-it-on Wikipedia level – but I'm also not sure how committed I would be to reading dry-as-sandpaper academic texts. Is there nonfiction out there that's engaging? Is there fiction that's so well-researched it could serve as a source to learn from?
What do you do, writer friends??
Or maybe it won't end up being selkies, maybe I'll try to learn more about Icelandic folklore while I'm there later this summer, and look for inspiration there? Or perhaps something else that I haven't even thought of yet will emerge, as I'm on the lookout for fascinating fantastical creatures?
All I know is that I'm intrigued by the idea of doing something along the lines of the capaill uisce in Maggie Stiefvater's "The Scorpio Races" – drawing on folkloric traditions, but with a modern twist. (Like J. K. Rowling did, too – all those magical beasts, boggarts and hippogriffs and all, she didn't invent those, she drew from existing mythology.) Although, I think I like even more the idea of creatures that are sort-of-human-sort-of-not – like werewolves, or selkies, or even the dragons-that-can-disguise-themselves-as-humans in Rachel Hartman's "Seraphina."
However – as a Rachel Hartman or a Maggie Stiefvater proves – creating a richly imagined and culturally respectful inspired-by-mythology original work doesn't happen overnight. In fact, generally it happens through years of research. (And brainstorming and world-building and trying and failing and trying again...) Which I guess leads me to my question:
Any thoughts about how to go about this sort of research? I don't mean by reading novels, though those could be good too, if they're well and accurately researched. But I'm more thinking nonfiction – actual academic books on the history and traditions and origins of Scandinavian folklore, or maybe Celtic folklore... I would want to get well beyond the superficial read-it-on Wikipedia level – but I'm also not sure how committed I would be to reading dry-as-sandpaper academic texts. Is there nonfiction out there that's engaging? Is there fiction that's so well-researched it could serve as a source to learn from?
What do you do, writer friends??
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Date: 2016-07-11 04:57 pm (UTC)And yes, I share your love of etymology. :-) "where words come from, why and how." – I can drink that stuff up forever! I believe you about the word "hell" coming to English from Finnish, though I'm happy to hear sources if you want! But that seems totally plausible to me, especially since the Norse gods – and thus surely to some degree Norse worldview – still have such an influence. (Even being our names of the days of the week for example – I once wrote an essay on that, for a history of English course!)
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Date: 2016-07-27 09:24 am (UTC)ugh, the jkr thing. she really needs to stop. v.v
i'm curious, what is your degree in, if you have one?
i meant to say earlier and forgot: it's really important that you don't get stuck researching for years. worldbuilding and setting is great, but... don't blow all your steam off on that. start writing as soon as you can - you can always fix things and do more research later. we aren't all tolkien. :p my favourite thing to do is worldbuild as i go (and then take notes on what new element i just came up with is so that i won't forget later). for example, in this trilogy thing, what's important for me to know (but not necessarily put into writing) is setting. i have a crazy spatial awareness (never get lost, always know where i am in relation to X or Y, etc), so i need to know where all the major geographical points are and i need to have at least a rough idea of what the city the plot takes place in is like. on a microlevel, i need to know which side of a house faces south (for example), if that house is important in the story. else i can't move my characters around if all the map in my mind has are blank grids, to put it simply. so that's always something i do first. BUT! other stuff i can do as i go along. which brings me back to the point i set out to make. for example, i wrote a scene in which i had a character stopping by to get coffee before a meeting. it's likely not going to be in the novel, it's more of a character study (he's just going to show up to the meeting with his take away cup), but i wanted to know what kind of customer he is, and by extension what kind of person he is. the coffeshop (and this is something i came up with as i wrote, not something i decided beforehand) is a chain called taikahvia, a compound of taika and kahvia, the words for magic and coffee in finnish respectively, and they do charmed coffee. so the barista asked my character if he wanted a good luck charm on his latte, 20% off on to-go-cups, today's special offer. so now i suddenly have a world in which magical coffee is a real thing and people can add on charms like they add on flavoured syrup. (probably the charms wear off after a couple of hours, idk.)
so, you know. research is good, but don't do it for years. the only reason why i said i've been doing it for six months is because i did it alongside my thesis - but i didn't do it every day. all put together, i suppose the research i've done for this thing is maybe 10-12 days, and i don't mean full days, just the amount of days i definitely looked up something specifically for the trilogy and didn't just make a note when i came across something useful when doing thesis research. writing is the important thing. get to know your characters and you'll get to know your plot better and as you get to know those things, the world builds alongside it all.
honestly i'm not an expert on the sagas, but i know they vary in genre and format. i've not read them all. some are translations of european literature (i read an excerpt on something about charlemagne i think, i don't remember).
the guy who discovered the hell thing is adam hyllested. his phd thesis was about language contact and some of the things he found out was that words previously believed to be loaned into finnish/fenno-ugric languages couldn't have been, and he found evidence that it was the other way around. the article about hell is in danish, his phd thesis only briefly mentions it in one single paragraph. :P his thesis is really interesting reading though! it's available online, here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5n0zqfuny4jgt80/Trykklar_PhD_Adam-TO.pdf
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Date: 2016-07-28 12:26 pm (UTC)My degree is in linguistics, nominally, but with the focus on translation of literature. So I did a bit of "proper" linguistics stuff here and there, and one really fantastic class on the history of English, but mostly it was about translation theory, and actually doing translations (mainly from German).
I guess the thing for me is, I need to do some research (or at least some more reading) to even know what I want to write in the first place! Right now at least, I'm not at a stage where there are lots of ideas already existing in my head, jostling to get out. It's more about the input I take in, like, I read something interesting and think, ooh, I'd like to explore more of that. That's why I feel like I need to take in a lot more input before I'll at all have something write about.
Ooh, so your trilogy is set in a present-day world, but with magic? I really like stories like those, that blend magic/fantasy with recognizable modern/real-world elements. (It's part of what I liked so much about the one Stiefvater book I've read so far.)
And yes, I completely agree about writing extra scenes, for background or character development, that don't necessarily belong in the final story – they're just there for you, the writer, to get a full enough sense of the character to then be able to write them in a fully rounded way when they do appear in the story. That was something I had to learn early on as a writer, that the first scene I write, even if at the time I *think* I'm writing the opening scene of the story, is very likely not actually where the story needs to start in its final version. Often a whole bunch of the beginning is just me getting to know the character/figuring out the scenario, but the real "story" starts somewhat later on. (Or, perhaps, earlier.)
That stuff about Finno-Ugric loan words into Indo-European languages (and how it had been assumed by default to always work the other way around) is really interesting!
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Date: 2016-07-31 01:06 pm (UTC)I can totally understand that. :) good luck figuring it out!
Yeah, more or less. It's a fictional planet and all, but yeah - I'm tired of the "European medieval age" type of fantasy. There are some really good books out there, but the ones I like best have been primarily Russian inspired (Leigh Bardugo - the Grisha Trilogy + Six of Crows which takes place in the same universe) and Polish inspired (Naomi Novik - Uprooted), which is so refreshing. So tired of things being located in medieval "France". So I'm going for a modern (solarpunk!) inspired world with most of our modern technology, but with magic. And the influences will be primarily Finnish (with a side of Norse culture). It could be interpreted as "what if the industrial revolution just never happened and people went straight from the Renaissance to solarpunk?" I suppose...idk, I'm still working it out.
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Date: 2016-07-31 05:47 pm (UTC)Yeah, your world for your trilogy sounds awesome! I, too, am so ready for fantasy stories that are not set in pseudo-medieval-western-Europe. I mean, I'll still read the occasional high fantasy story of that type if it's a really good one. (For example, I guess "Seraphina" by Rachel Hartman technically falls into that category, but it's brilliant. And the world-building is so great and original.) But, yeah, more stories that break out of that mold, please! I've heard N. K. Jemison praised as someone who writes fantasy that's not medieval-Europe-based. I recently checked out a couple of her short stories and they were great; she's high on my list of books to read next. She's apparently good on POC-representation, too. Have you read her?
And since you mentioned "Six of Crows" – that's a title I've been seeing EVERYwhere since I started working in a library, but I still don't really know anything about it. Do you recommend it?? If so, I'm going to add it to my to-read list.
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Date: 2016-07-31 07:26 pm (UTC)I have Rachel Hartmann (seraphina + shadow scale) and n.k. Jemisin (the inheritance trilogy) in my shelf just waiting for me :) I'm especially excited about n.k. Jemisin because a good friend of mine recced her to me for not only good poc representation but also good lgbtqa rep and amazing non-Eurocentric fantasy stuffs :D I was planning on making it my summer reading, but here I am on the last day of July and haven't yet finished reading the ballad of sir Benfro (a four book series, I'm a little over halfway through with the fourth book). I haven't decided what to read next really, I have so many options and August is a blank ! I mean, in September the fourth book in the gentleman bastard sequence comes out (I've preordered it) and I want to reread the first three in anticipation, but until then... I don't know. It's like I forgot August existed, haha. And I have a pile of unread books in my shelves...
I HIGHLY recommend six of crows! You don't need to have read the grisha trilogy to read six of crows, but it does take place in the same world not long after the events of the grisha trilogy, so there will be spoilery things re: events of the grisha trilogy. None of the characters from the trilogy show up in six of crows though (btw there's a sequel to six of crows coming out this fall, it's called crooked kingdom and I've preordered it). Also I'm not sure I'd have enjoyed six of crows as much as I did if I hadn't read the grisha trilogy first - it's pretty awesome in its own right even if book one has some First Book problems + internalised misogyny, that stuff all went away in book two and book three was all around just wonderful and I spent the last hundred pages or so of it in tears. Also in book three there's a lesbian couple. Six of crows is better in poc rep and disability rep, it also has lgbtqa rep though slightly more understated than book three of grisha (I'm fully expecting the gay ship to become 100% canon in the next book, in soc there is flirting and some admitting of intent/feeling, but neither has acted on it yet). Also it's about thieves and I love heist stories :D (it's also about murderous children, heh. Everyone is like 17 and the head of the group (Kaz, the one with the disability (he is also ace, I believe)) will do absolutely anything. He has zero scruples. it's very interesting to have a protagonist like that I have to say.
To further entice you towards six of crows, Kevin wada, one of my favourite comic book artists (he does mostly covers, but also commissions, fanart and other stuff, also happens to be Asian and gay) made official art for soc. This is the most recent, a set of posters: http://lbardugo.tumblr.com/post/147818773540/lbardugo-all-of-the-character-art (that last one with the two faces in one poster? You'll understand once you've read the book. Don't ask me about it, it's spoilery :p) ETA: I managed to find the first official art he did, here: http://kevinwada.tumblr.com/post/123470543176/lbardugo-well-be-giving-away-this-limited this is what originally convinced me to pick up the book tbh (and the trilogy while I was at it, and then I decided to read the trilogy first because I'd heard soc was in the same verse, so figured I'd best read what came first, first...)
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Date: 2016-08-04 01:41 pm (UTC)Okay, so if I want just one recommendation of a book to start with, would I read Six of Crows, or the first book of the Grisha trilogy? I don't have a huge amount of patience for series right at the moment, just because there are SO many other books I want to read so it's hard to commit time to a whole series. And if the first book is weaker than the others, it might not draw me in enough to read the whole series... So should I read Six of Crows even though it's a bit spoiler-y for the other books (given that I may or may not even find the time to read the other books)?
Re: translating, which language pairs would you work with? One of the others in my language course right now is a translator (not of Scandinavian languages, though) and she's learning Icelandic partly with the idea of maybe eventually being able to translate from it. She seems to think there's a well-paid market for that, right now. So given that you speak Icelandic AND so many other Scandinavian languages AND English, it seems like you could be quite well set up to work as a translator in that area.
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Date: 2016-08-05 08:24 am (UTC)hmm, if you want just one to start with, go with six of crows. it's not THAT spoilery in regards to the grisha trilogy (as i said, none of the characters from that make an appearance) and it takes place in completely different locations. the spoilery things it refers will likely make little sense out of context and you'll just forget about it, or it might be just the thing that when you get to the grisha trilogy will make you confused as you can't work the information into the story (until much, much later, when it actually happens). it works as a stand alone story in away that the first book of the grisha trilogy doesn't. that being said, the grisha trilogy is a light and fast read and i read it in the span of about five or six evenings. (the first book isn't that weak either, did i make it sound like it's awful? it isn't, or i wouldn't have finished it, much less continued reading the rest of the series...)
they're also completely different stories, in that six of crows is about murderous teenage thieves pulling a massive heist, and the grisha trilogy is more akin to your standard "girl discovers she has powers and chosen to save the world" narrative. the magic system is really interesting, with magic being something inherent (there are genetic explanations) and then there being different "versions" (or as some see it, castes) of magic. one of the characters in six of crows is a heartrender (means she can kill you with the power of her mind pretty much. there are two types, heartrenders and healers.) who was part of the war/resistance that took place in the grisha trilogy.
i can translate from pretty much anything into danish, and even though english isn't my native language by far, i can translate into english too but ofc nobody would hire me to do that :P although if there's a serious lack of icelandic -> english translators i might look into that...
anyway, i'm basically looking at: icelandic, finnish, english, swedish & norwegian -> danish. what i should be focusing on is finnish -> danish because...well, that's my degree. but finnish is Hard and time consuming, whereas the other languages i don't have to first suss out what the sentence means before i translate it, i just have to translate it. i can also do german -> danish, but i would prefer not to as german tends to give me headaches. (i can't deal with the capitalised nouns and the verb-comes-last sentence structures, it's like trying to find a needle in a rainbow coloured haystack. the grammar and vocabulary on the other hand, not an issue. no wait, that's a lie. i hate the german conjunctive with a passion and it's 110% related to the fact that i never managed to master it in use because it's too damn complicated. is it called conjunctive in english? i mean stuff like "sie habe", like...like if you're in a court room and rattling off a list of things a person allegedly did, you'd use "sie habe" about a woman allegedly doing things. if i recall correctly, anyway...)
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Date: 2016-08-14 10:43 pm (UTC)Unfortunately, I have no idea how market demand for Icelandic-->Danish is. Or any of the other languages to Icelandic, for that matter... Icelandic-->English I would guess would be mostly in the realm of literature? And maybe the geothermal/energy industry? My translator friend who's feeling out the possibility of learning Icelandic well enough to translate from it (!!) translates into French, and my only real expertise is German-English, so I'm pretty uninformed about translation between Scandinavian languages – I do know one guy who translates from German and Danish to English. But then, there's always more demand into English, right? :-P
Ha, yes, the German "Konjunktiv I"! Luckily, you're pretty much okay as long as you can passively understand it in writing; you rarely really have to say it, when just going about your colloquial, spoken life unless you want to be perfectly correct.
Man, though, I'm glad I learned German in school, when I was still reasonably young. If I were trying to tackle Icelandic grammar now, as an adult with a less flexible brain and without the German background already firmly rooted, yikes!
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Date: 2016-08-16 10:29 am (UTC)i'm also really glad that i learned german in school when i was younger, i don't think i'd have learned it otherwise. knowing icelandic didn't really help actually :P it might be in part because i hadn't learned much grammar before i left iceland, i hadn't quite reached that stage of schooling. but nothing is impossible! i didn't start studying finnish till my twenties and it's been going well. :)
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Date: 2016-08-22 02:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-08-23 11:27 am (UTC)