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Ender's Game Orson Scott Card

Time to get another pocket sewed on your pants to put you money in. Congratulations.

Memphis

stogie

baggage

Congratulations. I bought the book, but haven't had a chance to read it. I may be the only one.

Memphis Trace

Relevant in what way?

My opinion is that Dirk B. should capitalize God pronouns in his story because by doing so he will win the hearts and minds of folks in his target audience who think it shows respect for God to do so. Few, if any, readers will rush to the Bible or recent literature to determine that Dirk's creation of a minuscular Christian god is, in fact, respectful.

Dirk's main job is to get the folks who buy religious oriented books to read his book believing the author is respectful of God. I seriously doubt that he would offend anyone who felt God's pronouns shouldn't be capitalized. Indeed, I think readers favoring the minuscular would fondly embrace Dirk B. with the thought Gee, I know more than the author, but I'm glad he is being respectful of God!!!

Capitalization (or not) of the Deity is a human convention. As such, those who wrote the Bible determined that capitalization (or not) was respectful.

Memphis Trace

Thanks.

Memphis

Shakespeare didn't invent catastrophe in the sense he used it in the King Lear referred to in Marilyn's citation https://www.dailywritingtips.com/30-wor … akespeare/ :
catastrophe: disaster, the dramatic event that begins the resolution of the story
And pat! he comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy. – King Lear

According to Merriam-Webster catastrophe—a Greek word borrowed almost letter for letter from Greek—was first used as Shakespeare used it in King Lear in 1540, 25 years before Shakespeare was born.

It is possible that Shakespeare's simile in King Lear may have been the driving force for our modern meaning of the word, but he hardly invented the word as he used it in King Lear:
When English speakers first borrowed the Greek word catastrophe in the 1500s, they used it for the conclusion or final event of a dramatic work, especially of a tragedy. By the early 1600s, "catastrophe" was being used more generally of any generally unhappy conclusion or disastrous or ruinous end. By the 18th century, "catastrophe" had come to denote truly devastating events, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Finally, it came to be applied to things that are only figuratively catastrophic - burnt dinners, lost luggage, really bad movies, etc.

All that said, as writers we should celebrate and emulate Shakespeare's creative impulse to shape the language by adapting commonly used meanings of words to more forcefully communicate our stories.

Memphis Trace

Unless you are lifting passages from source material, I doubt that you are legally required to acknowledge your sources. It never hurts to be thankful, though.
Memphis Trace

Looks good. Thanks.

The following is the picture I saw when I read streamers:
noun
plural noun: streamers
a long, narrow strip of material used as a decoration or symbol.
"plastic party streamers"
synonyms:    pennant, pennon, flag, banderole, banner
"streamers fluttered from every post and pole along the parade route"
If they are the streamers you mean then reflected is the word you want.

Memphis Trace

I don't agree that this thread should fade away. Aspiring writers processing their critical thinking, struggling to explain themselves is the very best kind of thing that happens in these online workshop sites.

Follows an essay I posted 9 years and 3 days ago—the good old days?—in the TNBW forums (¿If I'm not mistaken, it may have been a response in a conversation you participated in, John Hamler?):

Verisimilitude

Verisimilitude in writing dialogue and dialectal dialogue is a topic of great interest to me.

A few years ago in a workshop, I was made aware of the thinking of Flannery O’Connor, a brilliant southern writer, who held the theory that dialect should be delivered in a modified way not so heavily laced with phonetical reality. She posited that readers given the hint of the speech patterns of the characters would tune their inner ears to “hear” the dialect sufficient for their purposes.

Mark Twain, who to my ear was a master of dialect, probably was more rigorous in his work to deliver a “real” dialect than was O'Connor. At least that is my view after having read his scathing comments about James Fenimore Cooper’s writing. Twain derided Cooper mercilessly for having Natty Bumpo talk in one passage like an ignoramus and in another passage like a high-toned society matron.

I find myself coming down firmly on both sides of the question. On the one hand, I find some of the dialogue I read that sounds like actual speech to be aggravating and have the feeling of being contrived. For instance, when I encounter sounds in dialogue that actually occur in real life: throat clearings, simple ‘Yeses’ to a ‘Yes or No’ long question, ‘Ahcoos’, etc. it causes me to think I will put down the book without reading further the next time I encounter such speech in the story. I believe it is incumbent upon a good writer to have responders in a dialogue move the ball down the field much more efficiently than verisimilitude permits. My all time favorite ugly verisimiltudinous writing is reading one side of a telephone conversation and being left to figure out what questions the POV character is blurting out answers to.

When I write dialogue heavily laced with “true” dialect, I worry about how good I am at the dialect. Once I made the mistake of asking the best storyteller I ever heard in person, one of my hillbilly uncles, to read a piece I wrote, which was always heavily laced with the dialect I grew up speaking. Uncle Willard was also a master workshop-type critic: He started off his critique with the positive view of my story that “he liked it” as if he’d been attending all the same workshops I’d been going to. Then things turned ugly and often: Uncle Willard concluded his critique by pointing to my brilliant dialectal gems and said, “… ‘n futhermore, Memphis, you need to larn some spellin’.” What Uncle Willard pointed to, of course, was my physical representations of the sounds I “heard” coming out of his mouth. He didn’t hear what he sounded like, much in the same way I don’t recognize my own voice when I hear it coming from a tape recorder.

I suspect also that my representations of hillbilly speech sounds may have bruised Uncle Willard’s feelings some but I didn’t press the issue—city slickers were bragging on me something fierce for my dialectal offerings.

If I were heavily into writing novels with a lot of black dialect in them—or some other minority dialect (Latino, Arab, Boston, etc.)—I’d do so with even more caution. I would open myself up for even more cogent scorn than Uncle Willard’s from those among readers who took umbrage to the fact that I didn’t truly “hear” their dialect.

What to do? I’ve been trying to get good enough at exercising Flannery O’Connor’s counsel to modify dialect and dialogue (direct and indirect) to capture the essence of the speech and thought of the characters without subjecting readers to the chore of translating my efforts. I guess this is the sort of enigmas we condemn ourselves to when we take up the pen to use symbols to create pictures and sounds.

I recently read Kieron Smith, Boy by James Kelman, a Booker Prize winning author. The novel was written from the POV of a 10-year old Scottish lad in Scottish brogue. To my inexperienced ear and eye, at least, the language of the book was a new language. I managed somehow to endure the read long enough to learn the language and by the end of the book I was really gratified and proud that I had persisted. At the end of the book, I felt like I saw a glimmer of why some critics were calling it Kelman’s masterpiece and learned a bit about the courage required to write masterpieces. I wish I could recall now what it was I learnt without having to go back and read the book again.   

I sometimes believe if this writing thing weren’t so hard, hard working writers would have given up a long time ago.

Memphis