Re: probably a bloody obvious question...

On Sun, Aug 20, 2000 at 03:59:31PM -0400, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
[snip]
> Hey, anything's good.  Culture/location is almost automatic, since any
> conlang I make is going to be intimately tied to a story, and
> culture-building *is* something I take time with.
[snip]

True enough... I find that designing a language is so much easier when you
have a cultural backdrop to help you make linguistic decisions. Without a
conculture to go with it, a conlang can easily become an ad hoc mosaic of
arbitrarily-chosen linguistic curiosities, often quite incoherent.

But as for stories... I have the problem that I can create storylines well
enough, but I can't *write* a story in an interesting way... (yeah, what
*am* I doing on this list, eh? ;-) One idea I had to get around this
problem was to actually write the story in the conlang itself, or at least
present the story as a collection of manuscripts, book excerpts, recorded
dialogues, etc., all written in the conlang, that gives a somewhat
detailed picture of the conculture and its history. In fact, by carefully
choosing what to include, the collection may well become the "story"
itself.


T