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Things That Are Cool - Part 6
Aug. 17th, 2007 07:41 pm6) Innocuous Adaption
This is where, as a reader, you gradually get immersed in setting until at last you hit some key phrase or plot point and you understand perfectly well what it means, but it would have meant nothing to you before you had started the story. It's the point at which you realise you really have been taken into the story.
The trick here is basically to build up the background slowly and then to judge when to leave off the explanation for the full impact. For example, you might explain at one point, in the context of a subplot, that the Cantonese word for tea is cha, and that to drink tea is "yam cha". Then, through various conversations, you might demonstrate that to ask a question you might take a statement and add the negation at the end: "eaten your dinner, mei ah?"; "watched the football, mei ah?" Then you add in at another point that a typical greeting is to ask "have you drunk tea?" or "have you eaten your rice?" And that to modify a verb to the past tense, you add a suffix like "-jo". And then, if you've done it all properly, you can have your character return at last to Hong Kong, and having searched in vain for his white-haired old friend in all his old haunts, find himself standing outside an electronics store on a busy street where the gambling dens used to be, and after being bumped from behind for the what seems like the fifteenth time that day, he turns in resignation only to see a familiar face and hear the words "yam-jo cha, mei ah?" and with a bit of luck there's no need to explain anything.
This is where, as a reader, you gradually get immersed in setting until at last you hit some key phrase or plot point and you understand perfectly well what it means, but it would have meant nothing to you before you had started the story. It's the point at which you realise you really have been taken into the story.
The trick here is basically to build up the background slowly and then to judge when to leave off the explanation for the full impact. For example, you might explain at one point, in the context of a subplot, that the Cantonese word for tea is cha, and that to drink tea is "yam cha". Then, through various conversations, you might demonstrate that to ask a question you might take a statement and add the negation at the end: "eaten your dinner, mei ah?"; "watched the football, mei ah?" Then you add in at another point that a typical greeting is to ask "have you drunk tea?" or "have you eaten your rice?" And that to modify a verb to the past tense, you add a suffix like "-jo". And then, if you've done it all properly, you can have your character return at last to Hong Kong, and having searched in vain for his white-haired old friend in all his old haunts, find himself standing outside an electronics store on a busy street where the gambling dens used to be, and after being bumped from behind for the what seems like the fifteenth time that day, he turns in resignation only to see a familiar face and hear the words "yam-jo cha, mei ah?" and with a bit of luck there's no need to explain anything.
