Writing in tongues. (Part 2)

I recently read an interesting article about fantasy writing on the BBC magazine site. 

The article, titled ‘Why are fantasy world accents British?’ looks primarily at TV shows and film, and explores the peculiar phenomenon of why most fantasy characters speak with Brittish accents, but its arguments and logic can equally as well be applied to the written word.

The article gives examples of the ‘Game of Thrones’ TV series, taken from the books of the American author George RR Martin, and the blockbusting ‘Lord of the Rings’ and upcoming ‘Hobbit’ films in support of its argument.

I think it does make a compelling case for appropriate regional accents, and it goes someway towards explaining why America audiences in particular, and the world in general, seem to like British-English voices in their fantasy fiction.

I read this article not long after receiving the news that one of my own short-stories written in my native Scottish vernacular (that I posted about before) is likely to be published in an upcoming anthology of ‘Scottish Voice’ stories. On reading the article I was reminded of the overwhelmingly positive response a draft version my own story got from American readers when I posted it to a critique site...

The lean, meme, writing machine...

I've been reading a book titled 'Epic Win for Anonymous' by Cole Stryker recently.
It's a, sort of, history of the Anonymous Hacker group and their rise to... notoriety, lets say... through the 4chan image-board network.
The book is a decent read if you like this type of thing, but that's not what this post is about. You see the first few chapters of this book explore memes in general and internet memes in particular.

  

Anyone heard of LolCatz? 

That's probably one of the most widespread Internet memes 'alive' today, and it was birthed from the rather fetid hive-mind that is 4chan.

Please don't be too tempted to go have a look though, as there are certain things you just can't un-see...


Anyway all this talk of memes got me thinking about how much our current memes are imbedded in today's writings, especially fiction writing. I think a lot of modern memes are present both in the finished stories and in the way we are now taught, or told, to write.

Anyone can be a writer!

...Or at least that's what a lot of the 'How To' books would have you believe. 
I read in the blurb of one such book that 'anyone who can write a letter can write a Novel.' But after looking at the ever-increasing pile of rejection notifications and  'one star' reviews I think most wannabe writers could be forgiven for being little sceptical of this advice.

Writing is a craft, and crafts can be learned and mastered. So in one real sense anyone could become a writer, that isn't a lie. But I don't think it necessarily means that anyone who can compose a decent letter can write a Novel. It's like saying anyone who can drive a car could become a top formula 1 racing driver. Maybe in theory they could, but unless they have the drive, not to mention nerves of steel, they won't get far in practice...

Is there anybody out there?

I've just noticed a rather drastic drop in my monthly page-view count this month.
For the last eight months it's mostly been a good few hundred posts over a thousand, and never fallen below.
last month it was only just over 200! Has something changed with blogger, or with any major site that links on to posts in blogger?

Surely my blogs can't have got that bad that quickley?
Anybody else noticed a drop in their page-views last month? Have I missed something?

Writing-aide applications, are they any good?

I was reading thorough some blogs and forums lately and noticed a few people talking about some of the programs they use to help with their writing. From what I made out there are two main types of programs, the ones that are intended to help with the technicalities of your writing and the ones that let you store and organise both your writing and your ideas.

Now, the only application I’ve ever used to help with my writing is MS word, and the benefits of that ‘helping’ are dubious at best. Ok, so the built-in thesaurus is sometimes worth its weight in gold, and I do use the spell-checker... but I’ve learned that I should definitely not rely on it. I’m not too sure about it’s concepts of grammar and punctuation ether. And that leads me into the programs purporting to help with your technical writing. Now, suffering from a touch of dyslexia, as I do I was quite interested in context sensitive spell checking software, although I was also a bit dubious. Would it detect ‘theme’ instead of ‘them,’ possibly. But how about ‘bed’ instead of ‘bead’ ... probably no so much. Anyway I decided to have a look and begun some on-line trawling for example/demo applications.