{"id":727,"date":"2013-10-07T14:31:28","date_gmt":"2013-10-07T01:31:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/?p=727"},"modified":"2013-10-15T13:46:36","modified_gmt":"2013-10-15T00:46:36","slug":"new-bread-on-an-old-plate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/2013\/10\/07\/new-bread-on-an-old-plate\/","title":{"rendered":"New Bread on an Old Plate"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been going through updating the (private) wiki that I use to keep track of worldbuilding, characters and so on for the Gryphon Clerks, and thought I would write a post about how I handle sayings.<\/p>\n

There are several valid ways to deal with common sayings in secondary-world fantasy. The most common is just to use familiar ones. This means that a reader like me, who’s alert to these things, may need a bit of extra suspension of disbelief when they spot a saying from the Bible or Shakespeare, or just a common metaphor from our world that isn’t in any way inevitable, but most readers will just slide on past without noticing – or having their attention distracted from the story.<\/p>\n

This is what’s sometimes called “Orwellian language”, from an article that George Orwell wrote about the difference between language that’s like a clear window (you see what’s going on through it) and language that’s like a stained-glass window (you look at the window itself).<\/p>\n

Personally, I like a bit of stained glass from time to time. I also want to give the feel of a very different, even alien world, unlike our own world, and to freshen up some tired old metaphors by communicating the same thing using a different image.<\/p>\n

How I mainly work is that if I find myself about to use a cliche or a conventional phrase, I think about the meaning of it and find another way to say it that makes sense in the setting, that sounds like it could be a cliche among the people I’m writing about. Here are some examples.<\/p>\n