Short rules for art, mainly fiction, and that, mainly of the "speculative" variety.
- If a work is alleged to be science fiction, then unless explicitly stated otherwise, the laws of physics as currently understood are canon, so it doesn't matter how "internally consistent" a violation is.
- Secularism, as a theme in fiction, is cliché. And if you've never known anyone who can tell you the precise landmark where his gods live[1][2], you don't get to write about "nature" religions, either.
- Shonen Jump discovered the three themes necessary for adventure-romance: Hard Work, Friends, and Dreams. Hard work and friends without dreams is not an adventure; friends and dreams without hard work is having the world handed to you on a silver platter; and hard work and dreams without friends is Ayn Rand.
- Rock is an excellent vehicle for love songs and drinking songs (which is what "rock anthems" actually are), but it is a lousy vehicle for hymns, whether political or religious. Thus, there is essentially no Christian rock or political rock that is worth a damn. And punk is just political rock that is deliberately performed badly.
- Just because you think a theme is true and/or important, doesn't mean that a work you like is about that theme. A work where humans are mainly disliked because they got too awesome too fast, and they end up saving every other sapient being in the galaxy, is not about how humans are nothing special.
- There is absolutely no reason that a pattern-welded sword can be enchanted but a gun or computer can't. Put another way, Abe no Seimei's Law: Magic is a technology.
- Fantasy stories where the "monsters" are oppressed have, by now, become so cliche that having them be straightforwardly evil is downright edgy.
- If "funny little words dragged from the tomb" do some service a normal word doesn't, use it. If it does the same job as a less obscure word, use the less obscure word. "Ichor" (used to mean the stuff that supernaturals bleed) is a valid word choice; "squamous" is not (it just means 'scaly', apart from a technical medical usage).
- Up till the end of the 20th century, research was difficult and time-consuming. But now, we have Wikipedia. There is no excuse.
- Odds are very good, you could get anything you wanted out of a time-travel story without having time-travel. Terra Nova could've been a space-colony, Terminator could be set a little further in the future, with Skynet wanting to kill Sarah Connor because it's calculated the probability of her son being the rebel leader (an SF version of the "prophesied nemesis"/"Nice Job Breaking It, Herod" plot). Unless time travel is the whole point, like in Back to the Future or Bill and Ted, it is a waste.
- The F-word dates to Old English ("fuccan"—yes, now you can drop feoh-bombs), as do the S- and B-words and the cruder words for the naughty bits. The religion most of our cussing comes from isn't going anywhere, either. Inventing a future-profanity is simply reinventing the wheel—and generally going with an octagon instead of a circle.
- Not only a reference to the greatest manga ever written but an absolute rule for speculative fiction, "Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To gain anything, something of equal value must be lost." Post-scarcity economies and no-cost magical systems are, thus, ruled out of bounds.
- Most of the really old "cliches" are actually facts about the world, expressed symbolically. E.g., snakes are nearly always evil because the damn things are poisonous. Darkness is considered bad because we're a visually-oriented species, and need light to live—"the silence" might be a symbol of evil for a nocturnal one. If you think you're better than those ideas, you're actually just admitting that you are shallow, ignorant, and probably a racist (the Navajo consider all poisonous animals to be evil, and cannot even be in the same room as a snake).
- "Deconstructions" of elves are, by now, far more common than elves "played straight". This is a variation on 7, above—you're the opposite of as original as you congratulate yourself on being.
- Swords are not heavy. An arming sword weighs 3 pounds, a short sword half that, a longsword maybe twice that. Similarly, well-made armor is extremely easy to move around in (actually the worst, comfort-wise, is chainmail, since it all has to hang off your shoulders).
- There is never a reason to have a person from this world go to a fantasy world—if you can't make a person native to that world relatable, you are not creative enough to be a writer in the first place.
What, like an ordered list can't be numbered in hexadecimal?
5 comments:
Hear hear! Writers should have this forcibly tattooed on their bodies.
Snakes aren't poisonous, they're venomous.
Venom is defined as "poisonous fluid secreted by animals". So snakes aren't poisonous, they just have poisonous secretions...?
If you're going to try and show off by correcting people, be sure it won't have the opposite effect.
The venom is poisonous, not the snake. Snakes inject venom, they don't make you sick when you eat them.
Every biologist distinguishes between the two.
You assume that the conventions of biological literature hold outside that field. They do not, and no biologist (who was not mentally ill) would pretend that they did. The actual lexemes in a language have multiple meanings, however much specialists may restrict those meanings for the purpose of clarity in their own writing. Those artificial restrictions, however, are in no way normative upon the wider language.
You do not want to argue the provenance of words with me. I actually have a background in linguistics—and this is a linguistic question, not a biological one. But tell me, how many corpuses of which kinds of literature have you indexed to arrive at your conclusion that I am misusing this lexeme?
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