Main Points (who else but by courtesy of Tanya B?)
- The Pyramid of Abstraction: with a foundation of concrete language, you can add things more abstract and still hold the reader in the scene.
- Concreteness and brevity fight each other. Adding concreteness usually adds words.
- Your goal is to come up with a few words of description that sets tone, says something about how the character sees it, is concrete and maybe even explains the setting.
- Precision moves abstract words towards concreteness.
Next up: Lecture 4 Sympathetic Characters Part 1
* The Pyramid of Abstraction: with a foundation of concrete language, you can add things more abstract and still hold the reader in the scene.
* Concreteness and brevity fight each other. Adding concreteness usually adds words.
* Your goal is to come up with a few words of description that sets tone, says something about how the character sees it, is concrete and maybe even explains the setting.
* Precision moves abstract words towards concreteness.
I love your videos, thanks a lot for posting!
This part has that very funny moment, when he says that in fantasy you shouldn’t name a dog’s breed ie. wolfhound. Yep… and he put a huge, plot-important wolfhound (described as a wolfhound) into the Well of Ascension.
(OK, OK, Cosmere has normal Earth fauna and flora as default and it probably has some reason etc etc… but still it sounds really funny.)
Wow, this thought had never occurred to me. You are right… Well at least he didn’t have any ottomans
I actually don’t find it so funny, personally. In my mind, the word ‘wolfhound’ is more a description of purpose than a specific breed’s name. Wolfhounds are any dogs bred to hunt wolves. Assuming your setting has wolves, chances are that the humans there would have also bred dogs to hunt them. Even if you do assume an Irish wolfhound when you hear the word, that’s an incredibly old breed (possibly upwards of 9000 years old) that doesn’t sound intrusive or ‘modern’. It’s certainly less evocative of our world than, say, a doberman pinscher or a St. Bernard, which would break suspension of disbelief.
Something as general as ‘wolfhound’ doesn’t carry with it a sense of place (at least not for me). If we were talking horses rather than dogs, you wouldn’t bat an eye at seeing the terms ‘draft horse’ or ‘charger’ in a fantasy setting, but you’d probably get some mental discord if you happened across a war-mage riding a Kentucky Mountain Saddle Horse, haha.
I agree. It’s the worlds that are clearly associated with our world and time that will pull you out. I think Brandon simply used a weak example. “Chihuahua,” for example, would rip you right out. “Wolfhound” and even “Mastiff” belong in the epic world. They resonate fantasy just as “ale” and “lager” resonate fantasy while “Bud Lite” does not
He says you can call it things like “wolfhound” or “bird dog”, just not specific Earth breeds, unless that’s your point.
Wow, I thought my first page of my novella was a bit of info dumpy but I was pleased at my cleverness in how I disguised it within a memory of his father. Not so clever, huh.. Haha. I thank you for these videos, I can not express how much these help. Now, to fix that description
This segment was SUPER helpful. I’ve always struggled with setting and had troubles understanding when was too much and when was too little. Turns out I was looking at the concept of setting in the wrong way. Brandon is such genius!
*such a genius* (fixed)
I agreed with Marianne. Brandon mentioned generic terms such as wolfhound or bird dog were acceptable to setting, while specific breeds were not. But I reviewed the segment again, just to be sure since so many had commented in opposition. Turns out Marianne, John and David were right in line with the same concept. So glad to know the distinction was relevant, as Well of Ascension used such terms….