News flash — just in: Beaver surges in popularity…
Today’s pop culture has a way of being tomorrow’s trivial pursuit. Does my title when spoken refer to an old sitcom or a misspelling of the name of the young man who drives tweenies crazy? Or, a new meat in your grocery store you’ll find next to the buffalo burger? Fiction writers today have to be knowledgeable about old and new culture—the trend is to mix them together. The modern author needs to recognize that not all readers will recognize the words he or she uses.
An added complication is that young and old borrow from each other. The young can be into “classic rock,” heavy metal, Tony Bennett, and Madonna. So are the old. Boomers enjoyed Rocky and Bullwinkle. Their kids watch it too. Same for I Love Lucy episodes. Hollywood seems to remake more old films than create new ones. It even turns old comic books I used to read into blockbusters.
If sixties are the new forties, twenties are often the new fifties. Call it nostalgia for the old, rediscovery for the young. The old clash of generations continues, but cultural lines are blurred and it’s often not clear what the clash is about. Society—in particular, American society—is made richer via this phenomenon. Fiction writers can benefit or suffer from this cultural ambiguity as it spreads across the generations. On one hand, I might have a reader that is young enough to be my own child. On the other, there could be an old security guard who makes it through the long night hours of his job via the adrenalin rush received from one of my sci-fi thrillers.
Nevertheless, a writer has to be careful. If I refer to strange things like LPs, bellbottoms, or maryjane, I might lose my young readers. If I refer to chat rooms, speed, or ICE, I might make an old-timer scratch his head. Specialized vocabulary like this creates all sorts of problems as new words are created and old words acquire new meanings. Are BTW, LOL, OMG and other acronyms from the texting world valid additions to a fiction writer’s vocabulary? Are the names of new countries and new U.S. government agencies, together with their acronyms, known to most readers? Can everyone rattle off the different coffee sizes now found at Starbucks?
Just from these questions, one sees that today’s fiction writer faces an impossible task if he or she wants to appeal to a very large reading audience. Slang and street lingo fluctuate with demographics even within the U.S. Matching the fact that Hispanics now form the largest minority in the U.S., for example, is an increasing influx of Spanish terms into everyday language. Language purists can’t resist this because English evolves. [Another news flash: apparently the fastest growing minority is Asians. I expect words from Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, and Tagalog to start creeping into U.S. English.]
Genres help the author solve these problems. With the exception of “literary fiction,” that catch-all genre that might as well be called “miscellaneous” or “Pulitzer wannabes,” an author limiting himself to one or two genres often defines what specialized terms he can use and his readers should know. I might become lost in a vampire-romance because I never read them. However, as an author who writes sci-fi thrillers, I can reasonably expect my reader to know what BOLO and DHS mean.
Unfortunately, the specialized terms also change in function of the English-speaking country. I finally finished Ian Rankin’s Edgar-winning mystery novel Resurrection Men. It was a struggle. Just like I challenged myself to write a YA novel (see The Secret Lab), I would like to challenge myself to write a real mystery. You’d think Rankin’s opus would be a good place to learn by example. But he clearly writes for British readers—or even Scottish readers. Here’s an example of a not-so-specialized term that gave me fits: caravan. Maybe the Brits reading this blog know that we call that trailer or motor home in American English (and “trailer” here is also a film snippet or even a book ad). I failed to find the British meaning by googling “caravan.” I had to google “caravan & british english.”
This brings up an interesting point. We Americans, baby-boomers and younger, have become accustomed to instant gratification. A reader used to stop his reading and look up a word if he wasn’t sure what a word meant. Many Americans no longer do this (I don’t know about the Aussies, Brits, Canadians, Scots, and Welsh—have I forgot anyone in the UK?). They are missing out on adding strange and wonderful words to their vocabulary. A few of us still do crosswords, but, if you do, you’ve probably noted that even those from the venerable NY Times often attain their difficulty via pop culture words and phrases and not long or erudite words that are fun to annoy people with. They serve the purpose of keeping your mind sharp perhaps, but they don’t build your vocabulary as much as they used to.
Knowing what to expect from your reader, his ability to understand what you write, is something easily learned, though, even when writing for non-dictionary users (that’s most of us, when we consider just the genres more focused on entertainment). Every author who writes in genre X must be an avid reader in genre X. You might never read your own works, but you definitely should read others from that genre. That is the only way to learn what readers want, because other authors, especially successful ones, often have an intuitive feel about their readers’ likes and needs. Moreover, a writer should write in the genre where he reads the most.
Plot, characterization, setting, POV, etc, are more important to a work of fiction than mere vocabulary. Nevertheless, the words an author uses must communicate his or her ideas to the readers. It’s probably better to be cautious with your word choices and/or their parenthetical explanations. You must strike a balance between insulting the intelligence of your reader and confusing the hell out of him. Sci-fi complicates that balancing act even more because your readers will have varied scientific and technological backgrounds.
I have found that a policy of minimalist writing works best in all these cases. Lengthy or repeated explanations of terms or concepts tend to make a traditional sci-fi novel longer than other fiction works (again, with the exception of that bastard genre “literary fiction”). Thriller novels are often terse in their prose (compare a Lee Child novel to an Umberto Eco novel). A sci-fi thriller is somewhere in between. In a good thriller, the reader doesn’t want to be distracted by an erudite use of words; if the book is sci-fi, though, there has to be some technical or pseudo-technical explanation. The author of thriller and sci-fi stories cannot rely on Hollywood special effects “to explain away” confusing language like the screenwriter can. Both writers, of course, have fun—and that’s what it’s all about!
In libris libertas…
