Another National Novel Writing Month has come and gone and, alas, I have little to show for it. I wasn’t even able to finish the novel that I have been working on for the past ten months– but I did get a lot of work done on it and have only about 7-8 thousand words left to go. With a little more work and maybe a sleepless night or two, I should have it finished in two more weeks.
The book I’ve been working on is called The Lives of Perfect Creatures. The title comes from a quote by Russian Mathematician and futurist, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who figured out the equation for escape velocity, making him, arguably the father of Space Exploration. Astronomy and the early Russian Space Program figure heavily in the story, but more in a metaphorical and symbolic way, rather than having anything to do with the plot, which is fairly thin.
A young woman named Sophie Andalou acquires an umbrella that becomes an object of fascination for her. Ostensibly, she is trying to find the umbrella’s owner, the Man With a Mustache, but mostly she sits around with her friends and they have witty conversations about anything but what they really mean to say to one another. It’s one of those tragicomic philosophical novels where nothing much happens. Like Seinfeld, only not as annoying.
You would think this would be a breeze to write, but good dialog comes out of a special place, where caffeine, irony and heartache are in equal parts. It’s all a ballencing act, which is why it’s takign a little longer than I had hoped to write.
I did however discover something interesting about the English language while writing this book: even in the 21st century, a lot of our colloquial expressions and phrases come laden with agrarian and pre-modern imagery. Despite the prevalence of modern slang and nelogisms, the metaphors we use as shorthand to describe our moods and psychological frames are decidedly nineteenth century romantic, if not pre-industrial. We refer to intellectually incurious provincial people as Red Necks or Yokels, implying that they are merely farm hands who spend their time out under the sun, laboring in the fields, even though most people live in cities and work in offices or stores. Someone who has a simple, honest disposition and world view is the Salt of the Earth. We refer to attractive women as chics and handsome men as studs, as if likening them to livestock really means anything to someone who rides a metro to work, buys their coffee from Starbucks and plays video games for fun.
I noticed this because I decided early on to use science or science-fictional metaphors while writing this book, not only to emphasize the space exploration symbolism, but also as a way to create unique similes and comparisons. No writer wants to use the same old tropes but it really surprised me how often we fall back on common and often repeated phrases to describe things and how, many of them have their origin in Victorian era if not classical literature.
It’s well known that Shakespeare invented thousands of words that we still use today, but he also coined phrases laden with imagery that evokes the barnyard or the wilderness, worlds that are often just as alien as Vulcan or Arakis to a contemporary audience. So why do we still use them, five hundred years later?
Now, I’m by no means saying we should dump all those animal and vegetable root phrases from our lexicon. If the server’s not down, why reboot it? But it certainly suggests that we should be more careful and creative when it comes to describing our environment and those we share it with. There’s a fine line between using traditional shorthand and being lazy and let’s face it, being lazy is easier.
