Everyone knows that fiction writers are liars.  It’s even a running gag in my MFA program, that has led to a series of interesting signs posted at the residency last August, but that’s fodder for another entry.  The point is, that fiction writers are telling stories, constantly making things up as they go along: characters, plots, sometimes whole worlds, technologies, magic systems, the list goes on and on.

Sometimes we even have to make up words.

Now, I’m not talking about the farcical crimes against the English language that come from slamming two adjectives together hard enough to destroy some of the letters and leave, when the smoke clears, some fool’s idea of a better word.  For example, gigantic and enormous are excellent words in their own rights, and would gain no power or beauty from some attempt to wedge them into one.

But that’s a rant I hadn’t intended to start today.

What I mean is that, especially when a story falls under a subgenre like fantasy or science fiction, a fiction writer will occasionally need a word for something that does not exist, has never existed, and might never exist.  What do you do then?

Well, what you don’t do is start appending adjectives.  Just because it looks like a snake in your mind’s eye doesn’t mean it should be called a “space snake” or a “giant space snake.”  It’s lazy writing and it will disappoint a reader.  Even if you think that the first thought of the first person who ever saw it thought, “Crikey, it’s a giant space snake!” that doesn’t work as a name.

So what should you do?  Well, there are a few ways to approach the situation.

• Look at what it does.  Consider the chupacabra, which may or may not exist in Mexico.  That name just means “goat sucker.”  This is a benefit to using other languages for names.  A name that sounds mundane in English becomes evocative to an English-reading audience if it is written in another language.  In this case, the “giant space snake” crushes ships and becomes a “titurabarco.”  Note that, if you use this approach, the language you work with should be one that could reasonably have been the language spoken by the person in a position to name the creature.  If this creature was discovered by a Japanese ship, you need to work with Japanese.
• Look for similar creatures in myth and folklore, and derive a name from them.  In this case, that leads to a lot of “sea serpent” references, which don’t help, and “dragon” references, which have been done to death.  Don’t call something a dragon unless you want the reader thinking of dragons they’ve read about already.  Dig around a little online, though, and you find kraken, which is a great word.  It’s more squid than snake, but that shouldn’t stop you from deriving a term from it.  You could add a prefix, such as “vac-“ to represent the vacuum of space, and call it a vakraken.
• Consider what it looks like.  Sure, it’s a snake, but how was it seen by the observer who named it?  Was it coiled?  Writhing?  Springing?  Again, other languages become your friend.  “Riesigwindung” would, I think, be German for “giant coil.”  Not a great example, but you see how the process works.

These are just a few approaches.  There are as many as there are ways of looking at language.  Of course, these are of little help if the story takes place in a world or time unrelated to our current world and time.  Those cases, though, require a lot deeper look into linguistics than I have time for today.

Note: for the curious, I have been delayed in posting by a death in the family.

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Submissions update:  Since my last post, I have submitted pieces to Mythium, Ideomancer, Underground Voices, Illumen, Flashquake, and Third Wednesday.

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