Orion (he/him)#ScribesAndMakers Are you starting any new projects this month?
Good god, no. I need to work on the project I've been nursing for three years.
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#ScribesAndMakers May 2: When you finish a project, do you tend to feel that you have everything just the way you want it, or is it more like 'good enough'?
"Good enough." A project is done when I can't think of anything else to improve and when I've done a reasonable round with beta readers. I figure, someday, if I ever have an actual editor, there will be a couple more passes, but I'm a hobbyist.
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#ScribesAndMakers May 3: When you see the word 'read', is your first instinct to read is as present tense or past tense?
I just heard it in the present tense when I read that prompt, so there you go.
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#ScribesAndMakers May 4: How many songs are there where you know all the lyrics by heart?
So many. I was one of those kids who loved memorizing songs.
Most of them by Weird Al Yankovic.
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#ScribesAndMakers May 7: When did you think of the idea for your current project?
I was contemplating the implications of the Force in Star Wars, and it occurred to me that it's basically a curse. You have to wrestle with psychopathic urges for the REST OF YOUR LIFE.
The Jedi aren't heroes. They're a holding pen for potential monsters.
Monsters that can be exploited.
To kill the monsters you don't abduct and force to learn to be killers.
Oh wait. :)
#ScribesAndMakers May 8. Leviathan?
I'm good. I had a big breakfast.
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#ScribesAndMakers May 9: How likely are you to embrace changes to language usage?
It's a push/pull thing for me. I love innovations like "y'all," and the English language is far from perfect, but stuff like "wanna" and "gonna" bugs me because it seems like we're transcribing people phonetically instead of acknowledging that it's a slurring of words: want to, going to. Ultimately, I'm not in control of the language, though. English will never ask my permission to change, and that's *good*.
Walter Thinman@orionkidder that's interesting. Is your approach to leave it to the reader to interpret the slurring, or do you have other ways of communicating informal pronunciations?
@saposcat I leave it to the reader. I write in standard spelling and imply character and voice through sentence structure.
The reason for that is most of the time alternative spellings like "gonna" are used by authors to indicate non-standard English--I've seen English writers use it for Irish people, but also white Americans use it for Black Americans--and that to me is problematic bc it implies their English is debased when it's actually just another kind of English.
@saposcat Unless there is an existing alternative *written* version of the language, it's really insulting, IMO. And if there is an alternative written language, like Scotts or AAVE, you shouldn't try to write it unless you actually speak it and know its grammar. AAVE has distinct grammar. White people "talking Black" are going to screw it up (unless they were raised with it or actively learned it, I guess?). I believe the same is true of Scots.
@saposcat What's your approach?
@orionkidder I do usually use things like gonna for people speaking informally, but I try to avoid using it in a condescending, or as you mentioned, racist way. I go back and forth on it a bit, but I often find writing dialogue formally feels a little like typing out rock and roll. I guess that's why your comment struck me as interesting, because it's something I'm a little uncertain about.
@saposcat My tactic is to do that through sentence structure, but even then, presenting non-white people or working-class people speaking "broken" English strikes me as problematic.
Like, I'm confident I can reflect the way a Cantonese-speaker speaks English bc I grew up around it, and I don't consider it to be a lesser form of English. It's entirely coherent to me.
But a white guy writing a Chinese accent? I start to get the "no" feeling.
Colorblind Cowboy@orionkidder @saposcat Huh. Personally I use “gonna” and “woulda” and even drop the g from gerunds (“waitin’”), for some characters.
But that’s also how I speak much of the time. It’s how my rural relatives spoke, and I think there’s a poetry in it.
@colorblindcowboy @saposcat I'm certainly not here to tell other people what to do, and if you're representing your own accent(s) or dialect(s), then it's not for me to say how you should represent that.
As a white man with a "standard Canadian" accent, I just try to step really lightly when it comes to other people's speech.
@colorblindcowboy @orionkidder I tend to write that way too, although apparently I have a tendency to be formal when I speak. My wife found it to be an amusing, and I suppose endearing, thing about me when we were getting together. I think I've come around to speaking casually most of the time, but sometimes I make a conscious effort.
@saposcat @colorblindcowboy Not to generalize, but a tendency towards formal expression--through syntax or pronunciation--is a really common neurodivergent/autistic thing.
I'm not trying to speak for you or tell you what you are--how could I know?--and to a degree, I'm describing myself (ADHD over here), but I do find it fascinating how much "neurodivergent" overlaps with "nerd."
@orionkidder @colorblindcowboy yeah, that's something I've been trying to figure out lately. Apparently there's a meme that goes something like, 'sure, you're the one neurotypical when all your friends are neurodivergent.' Because I don't struggle with a lot of the things that the neurodivergent people around me struggle with, and I don't experience all the same things they do, it's easy for me to think it must not apply to me. But there are a lot of things about neurotypicals that I don't relate to either, so I've been wondering, and more and more thinking I might be somewhere on the spectrum. Somehow spectrum feels like too linear a term for me to figure out where I fit. If I had to put myself on a scale I suppose I would describe myself as divergent-leaning, but it doesn't seem accurate. It's more like some of my traits feel very divergent and some very typical, but I don't feel like they cancel each other out and put me in the middle of the scale. It's more like I'm simultaneously on both ends or something.
Elyse M Grasso@saposcat @orionkidder @colorblindcowboy I once told a supervisor:
"I may not be on 'the' spectrum, but I'm a couple bubbles off plumb on SOME spectrum."
I suspect some neurodivergent commonality may be due to similar post-traumatic defenses, not necessarily similar underlying traits.
@saposcat @orionkidder @colorblindcowboy Thanks. Sometimes the words just come... not sure from where.
I wonder what I was reading or watching right around then? Seems a bit Western and male-coded for me. I might have been bingeing Longmire, or that Metis detective series set in Montana ...
@ElyseMGrasso @saposcat @colorblindcowboy I didn't know there *were* Metis in Montana! They moved there after the rebellion. Fascinating.
@orionkidder @saposcat @colorblindcowboy I found out about the Montana Metis by coming across that mystery series, and then going down a few online rabbit holes.
@saposcat @orionkidder I’m like a bad radio, and my mode of speaking switches. Sometimes I talk like my uncle when telling a story, sometimes like an English professor.
Likewise my stories have a lot of voices. The first story has someone with rural inflections who’s deluded and vindictive. My last story has a character who speaks academically (pretentiously) who is worse than the first. And there’s a whole range in between.
Analog AI... I agree. If someone is going to have another dialect in their story (film, game, book, ...), and they are not a native speaker of that dialect, then they should do as you do, or at the very minimum have some proofreaders who *are* native speakers of a dialect, and absolutely respect how the native speakers say it should go (and if there is much dialog, probably give them some credit too).
I'm sure many story tellers have done this well enough with out doing so to pass my test -- but only because I'm working with the same prejudices they are. On the other hand, I've see examples of dialects that I don't really speak that I can tell are wrong (even with my limited knowledge) and it feels really cringe to me.
@Retreival9096 @saposcat This is how I feel when a white writer tries to do AAVE. Even to me, it feels flat, and that's probably because it's not being written properly.