Musings on clichés and archetypes

[velvetpage]

Probably the most interesting thing about setting this book underwater, in a dolphin realm, is that many of the clichés of speech that we take for granted simply don't work. I'm hesitant to use words like "territory," "homeland," or "house," for example. I've kept "territory" because I can't think of a suitable replacement, but "homeland" has become "homesea," which my spellchecker doesn't like at all, and my dolphins don't live indoors so "house" is not really a problem.

I've been trying to create new clichés and mottos that fit dophin society. "Revenge is a dish best served cold" has no meaning in a place where food is not cooked, so I changed it to a rather clumsy reference to fat fish being more nourishing than thin, young ones. I'm going to have to tweak that a bit, but the basic idea is right. My characters don't say, "What on earth," they say, "What under the sweet green sea." They don't talk so much as sing to each other, and while I use the word "said" for ease of use, I also use the word "sang" from time to time, and more melodic synonyms liked croon, hum, intone - all of those I use often.

At the only writing workshop I made it to at Anthrocon, reference was made to the fact that senses are different when your characters are animals. You can tell a good writer from an amateur by the volume of scent referents in their books. I don't think I was consistent with this in "Dreamcarver," though it was there at least sporadically. This probably has something to do with thinking of my characters as humans more often than not. Having changed milieux entirely, though, I'm forcing myself to think of my characters as dolphins. I have to make up mannerisms of speech and body language that fit creatures who live in three dimensions, who have no legs and therefore no waists or hips, and for whom light versus dark is less important than sound versus silence. And I have to couch these mannerisms in language that my readers will automatically associate with the clichés and archetypes with which they are already familiar. My characters have to come across as simultaneously human and dolphin - dolphin for the purposes of plot but human for the purposes of character.

I suppose that's the soul of anthropomorphic writing, right there.

Comments

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Dolphins' eyes are on the sides of their heads, and the eyes can track separately, which human eyes mostly can't. However, in other ways their eyes are not too different from humans. It appears from recent studies that their brains process sight information in much the way ours do - taking information from both eyes and creating one main image out of it, made up of many layers of images piled on top of each other. It would be much harder to describe insect vision than dolphin vision - I'm just picturing it as very sensitive to changes in light, capable of seeing more with less light, and about 300 degrees of visibility.