http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Holy_cow_(expression)<\/a>.<\/p>\nBut I do agree that the source of our figures of speech is likely to be our characters and the world of our story.<\/p>\n
Elodie in A Tale of Two Castles<\/i>, a farm girl who is just beginning to see the wide world, says \u201cLambs and calves!\u201d when she\u2019s surprised. In Stolen Magic<\/i> I expanded this kind of expression to other characters. Robbie, who used to live in a harbor village, says \u201cWhales and porpoises!\u201d The barber says \u201cHair and teeth!\u201d because barbers also pulled teeth in the middle ages. And the dragon Meenore says \u201cFire and smoke!\u201d Wrapped up in these examples are three approaches to expression development: a character\u2019s background (a farm or a fishing village), a character\u2019s occupation, the character\u2019s nature (a dragon). Count Jonty Um thinks, but never says, Fee fi! or Fo fum! for the obvious reason that he\u2019s an ogre.<\/p>\n
Elodie\u2019s world is an approximation of medieval, when conditions were grimmer than we have to face in our daily life, so a local adage is: Love your lice. Only skeletons have none<\/i>. Ick, but having lice is preferable to being dead, so there\u2019s that consolation. Few are rich on Elodie\u2019s home island of Lahnt, and poverty gives rise to other sayings, like, Share well, fare well. Share ill, fare ill<\/i>, which leads to another strategy: Think of the realities in your stories. Here\u2019s a prompt: Invent three proverbs that could apply to a warrior culture, three that might arise in a farming community, three for a university science department, three that might be used by fairies.<\/p>\n
I love Kenzi Anne\u2019s idea that an expression might reflect a passing emotion or a character\u2019s usual state of mind. \u201cSnarks and snizzles!\u201d is delightful. And I agree about bringing in sound to explain why an expression catches on. For example, we have the rhyming \u201cdoom and gloom\u201d to indicate a different feeling.<\/p>\n
Although \u201cdoom and gloom\u201d isn\u2019t specific to a particular culture and would probably work in a fantasy, I\u2019d stay away from it as too close to cliche. I\u2019d prefer to come up with something fresh. Same with any other common expression. But if I couldn\u2019t think of anything new, then I\u2019d just skip the figure of speech entirely and reveal my character\u2019s feelings in another way\u2013through action or thought or dialogue (minus expressions). A gloomy POV character might get bad news and feel her limbs grow heavy, for example. A secondary character might appear uncharacteristically draggy to our MC.<\/p>\n
Having said that about cliches, in a non-fantasy story, one of our characters, say Joe, might use ordinary expressions often. He might be a fountain of them and may not be an original thinker. We don\u2019t want to be cliched writers, but we can certainly develop cliched characters. In fact, we can even think of a character arc in which Joe finally comes up with something surprising and new. And in a fantasy we can have a character like Joe, one who spouts the sayings that are common in her culture. She can set off spasms of yawns in her listeners whenever she opens her mouth.<\/p>\n
Here are two prompts:<\/p>\n
\u2022 Invent three expressions for each of these emotions: pain, anger, love. Make two of the three use sound, like alliteration or assonance or rhyme, to boost their memorability.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Two of your characters, friends, swear to speak only in expressions for a day, and the expression has to fit what\u2019s going on. Cliches are fine for this. No matter what happens, they will voice an expression or say nothing. As soon as they agree to this, something unexpected happens, one or more of these or an event you make up: a tornado tears through town, someone they both thought dead shows up, aliens land, a magic wand appears on the bed of one friend. The friends don\u2019t abandon their vow in the face of the unforeseen. Write the day.<\/p>\n
Have fun, and save what you write!<\/p>\n
\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On January 14, 2014, J. Garf wrote, What’s a good way to come up with figures of speech? There are things we all say every day, and I feel like a few of these add color to a story, but some expressions just don’t make sense. For example, you can’t exactly say “what on earth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[42,43,44,45,46],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":314,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions\/314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}