Focus

Summary: choose wisely the necessary "difficult" words that you need to set the tone, the style and the setting, and avoid all the others.

The absolute basic is that any story can be told with a bare minimum of words. Many suggested reading books for language beginners are abridged versions of literary masterpieces, based on reduced dictionaries of a few hundred words.

Any word beyond the bare minimum should have a purpose. Typical purposes are: setting the tone, coherence of style and setting. One can use archaic words to evoke a sense of solemnity, or to indicate to the reader that the story is set in the past. Similarly, one could stick to exact scientific terms rather than their vulgarized counterparts to communicate competence.

From the OP there are two issues at play: the use of foreign words, and the use of main language words that are unknown to the reader.

The former is easier to address. Of all the foreign words you are planning to use, pick the top ones that are better at communicating the setting or that would occur more often. For instance, "muleta" does a great job at establishing the setup in a bullfighting scene, possibly Spain in the region of Valencia. "Don", is also a good choice, while maybe a bit too generic, you may be giving a Spanish flavour to both the dialogues and the narration. In contrast, "Hola" is a poor cheap choice, as it does not establish setting, and definitively does not improve style, and thus it could be easily avoided. Keep the number of foreign terms low. The few ones that you pick will stick out, thus becoming memorable and in so doing they will render an even greater service to your short story.

Do not worry about explaining these foreign words. If a muleta occurs in the plot, then it should come automatically from the writing that a "muleta" is red. And a few sentences later, that it is a piece of cloth. And that the toreador is holding it in front of the bull. The reader will piece all these things together.

The other issue is that of words that are unknown to the reader. This is a much deeper issue. In principle one could write in the style of an abridged book for language beginners. That would be not very satisfying. I am of the opinion that if the reader does not know the word "hilt" in their own language, then they should go and learn it.

That being said, it is also true that "hilt" may occur in sentences where no "hilt" is needed. unless you are describing how beautiful a sword is, "from the pommel to the tip", then consider the following changes:

• "he clenched the hilt" -> "he clenched the sword"
• "the hilt hit the dirt" -> "the sword fell to the ground"
• "the hilt broke right under the crossguard" -> "the sword snapped"
• "only the hilt sticking from the bull's skull" -> "the entire blade was deep in the bull"

In general, you can probably replace most occurrences of hilt with either "sword" or with describing what the rest of the sword is doing. Or you could drop it altogether. In the austere economy of the number of words of a short story, it is easier to make cuts to long winded descriptions, and precise terms, while keeping the plot and MC's thoughts going.

Finally, focus. I have the same issue as you do, until I remind myself that a story is about the plot and the characters, rather than an exercise in showing the rarest items from our bag of words.

posted about 5 years ago

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_X_‭

420 reputation 20 121 65 1

Realism is just a style --you're trying to give readers the feel and the flavor of this character, not give them an exact transcription of what his actual thoughts would be. That gives you several possible ways to attack this question:

• Present him as though he was consciously addressing an audience unfamiliar with bullfighting, or in other words, as if he was telling this story to a representative of the probable readership.

• Shift to 3rd person. This allows you to use his words but also to explain them.

• Start with enough full immersion to give the feel and then rapidly transition to presenting it in a way your layperson audience will easily understand --with the implication that he's still using the proper terms, you're just not inflicting them on the audience. (This can be tricky --it used to be when authors did this they felt the need to explain it explicitly to the audience, as clunky as that is, but it's become enough of a convention that a lot of writers just skip the exposition and leave it implicit.)

• Just sigh and write it in a way that will sound wrong to you, but right to the audience. Unless you're writing specifically for an audience of bullfighting aficionados, your primary responsibility is to your reader --and not to the imaginary panel of judges in your head who will chastise you for using the wrong words. Keep muleta as "muleta" and a sprinkling of other terms for flavor, and lose all the rest --without regrets.

Look at it this way --if you having an ordinary conversation with a friend who knew nothing about bullfighting, you wouldn't overwhelm him with specialized jargon you knew he wouldn't understand, would you? Hopefully not. You might drop a few technical terms into the conversation, but you'd explain them. Otherwise you'd come across as a know-it-all jerk who was more interested it being heard than understood. You owe your audience at least as much consideration.

posted about 5 years ago

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Chris Sunami‭

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This is the same problem that experts always have when trying to explain their field to the general public. My advice is: don't be such a purist.

I develop software for a living. Computer systems are complicated and we have lots of technical terms. But I avoid using technical terms when talking to people who are not computer savvy. I don't say, "we scan the BTREE index using a pre-order traversal to find the records with matching GUIDs, retrieve the designated control intervals, and parse the records". I'll say something more like, "we get the customer's order information". Is the first "the right terms"? Sure. When I'm talking to another computer person, I use technical terms to avoid ambiguity. But when I'm talking to a non-computer person, they're just confusing.

I've routinely heard the piece of red cloth that a matador uses referred to as a "red cape". Ok, so that's not the technically correct term. But readers know what you mean when you say it, rather than having to figure it out.

If I read a story and come across some specialized word that I didn't know, I often think, huh, so I learned a new word. But if there are dozens, it just gets daunting. It's too much work. I'd use common, descriptive words. If you find yourself screaming "but that's not the RIGHT word", I'd say just grit your teeth and do it anyway. :-)

posted about 5 years ago

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Jay‭

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Focus on contextual usage and descriptions, and consider the process behind how you learn new words.

How often have you learned a new word by opening a dictionary and reading definitions at random? [If you answer 'never' then you're probably not a geek, and if you answer 'frequently' then you're far geekier than I am...]

Now how often have you learned a new word by being shown something, and having someone say something about it?

"First we begin the procedure by using [insert medical technical jargon]..." as said by a doctor holding the described object, which we are then guided through the use of and given any relevant and useful details of as fitting for the scene: And most readers will have no issues understanding what that [random medical technical jargon] meant without having known it before coming across the word in a book.

Despite what the internet may suggest, humans are generally fairly smart. Avoid excessive worry about them not being able to understand while writing: Deciding whether or not something truly works or needs rewritten is really up to test-readers anyway.

• Write what works well for you while writing, edit what proves problematic while reading.

posted about 5 years ago

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TheLuckless‭

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I separate my narrator from my main character's voice. I do not write in first person, I write in 3rd person limited, with a deep POV. (Deep 3PL). Meaning, for those unfamiliar, my narrator knows the thoughts, sensations, emotions and memories of my one main, POV character, (that's "deep") but "Limited" means the narrator has knowledge of ONLY this one character: So the reader doesn't learn the thoughts and feelings of any other character, which in writing has the advantage of allowing my POV character (and reader) to be deceived, or to not know secrets of other characters, etc.

The 3rd person separates the narrator from the POV. So the reader reads

Lisa ran her standard route. Half mile to the post office, three quarters to the Walmart, back by way of Grantham Pass, she liked the houses there. Like running through a manicured park. Couldn't afford them. Ever. But today the houses and landscaping didn't even register, she ran automatically, her mind occupied by Roger's transform equations. She wanted them to work, they had to work, but there was something missing, just out of her grasp.

The advantage of this approach (to me) is the narrator can describe what the POV character is thinking, in a way that (IMO) no person would plausibly think about themselves. I can describe the kinds of visual memories that accompany our experiences. Your character picks up the muleta, then we need no technical description of what it is, just her brief flash memories of how it is used, when she was taught how to hold it and yield it. She must get ready for this fight, I imagine. There must be moments of the fight where she thinks about what she is doing, and the narrator can explain why, what is going on in her head, and how she learned it.

Those are the advantages a deep 3PL offers. Your narrator voice doesn't have to reflect either your POV character's inner voice or outer voice, if those differ. For example, in one of my stories, the POV character was raised in a religious system that uses an older form of English, she thinks (we see her thoughts in italics) and speaks (in dialogue) that way. But my narrator does not. The narrator relates the tale in normal English, and has their own voice, a wider vocabulary, more eloquent and descriptive than any character in the book. (I do avoid the narrator using anachronistic analogies or metaphors for my settings, e.g. they can't compare something to a pocket watch if those don't exist in the world.)

This makes the narrator capable of translating the thoughts of the POV character. I seldom do that directly, but the translation can be done using how the POV character understands something:

They were harvesting apples, forty pound bushels for the adults, and a quarter that, pecks for the kids. Marie had a fond memory of that, one of her first, struggling to get her peck to the presser, only able to carry it about four feet at a stretch. She'd been so proud to finally get it there. but her favorite job at harvest had been picker, at ten she was light and small enough to navigate the thin limbs, to reach and disconnect the further apples with her long picker's fork, to a catcher below. It was death-defying, and thrilling.

The point of this immersion is the narrator can casually define in context things the reader may not be familiar with, like bushels and pecks. Also the job titles, presser, picker, catcher. You know pretty much what a picker's fork is without me describing it in any detail; obviously it is long stick, forked at the end, used to push an apple and break stem from branch.

But also, by tying this to memory and Marie's emotions, we get a micro-scene so the definitions are not just a list of dry terms to memorize. The relationship between Bushels v. Pecks is Adults v. Children. Pickers are around ten, old enough to climb, light enough to not break branches. If Marie did not have personal experience harvesting apples, I'd give her a foil, somebody to answer her questions.

You can do the same thing for your matador; or some combination of methods, memory and explanation to a foil new to the game, or an outsider unfamiliar with the terminology: Friend, lover, acquaintance, a kid, their own kid.

The trick (I think) is tying the delivery of this information in with emotions. In the first example, Lisa is pre-occupied, but the narrator doesn't have to be, her normal enjoyment of Grantham Pass is described, even though she doesn't experience it in this scene.

Likewise in the second; Marie's memories tell us what is happening, the 3rd person narrator defines terms, but the whole thing may take a single second as these memories flash through her.

I find these things difficult and awkward in first person. in Deep 3PL we can still get all the advantages of first person, through directly stated thoughts or dialogue. I use both. But I'd give your narrator their own voice, so they can slip in the clues the reader will need to understand the terminology.

posted about 5 years ago

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Amadeus‭

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