Writing exercise: Communities of practice
Hello again!
It’s almost fall, and the weather is suddenly acting like it.
Book progress
I think I’ve written all the words that need to be in the book. I’m going to let it sit a little bit before giving it another read-through, but I think everything is in there. Then next month, I get to figure out all the publishing and layout stuff. Whee.
Writing exercises
One of the comments on the reader survey requested writing exercises or how to apply the info to writing. So let’s take the Community of Practice model (the nerd girls article) from a couple months ago and apply it to writing. This is a brief summary of a chapter in my book, so I don’t have to think too much.
People perform acts of identity creation, known as identity practices, all the time. An identity practice can be positive (choosing to do something to reinforce the identity you want to display) or negative (rejecting the practices of an identity you don’t want). These are most easily seen in styles of dress (wearing Doc Martens, ripped jeans, and a leather jacket; wearing a button-down, khakis, and loafers), but language is another important way people create their identity.
The nerd girls, recall, had positive identity practices of using words with Greek and Latin origins and hyperenunciation and negative identity practices of not using contractions or popular slang.
Different subcultures (communities of practice) will have different identity practices, linguistic and otherwise. All of us belong to at least one community of practice, whether profession-related or a hobby. I’ll use myself as an example: I’m a science fiction writer, a nerd, a roller derby person, a crocheter, and a queer person. I can display my identity as a nerd and science fiction writer by wearing nerdy shirts. When I’m in writers’ spaces (forums, etc.), I use the semi-specialized vocabulary involved in writing, like crit group or POD. In roller derby spaces, I use specialized roller derby vocabulary, which I had to learn when I joined, and I had to learn a few different names for the same things when I moved to another league. About half my wardrobe currently is roller derby t-shirts, so that part of identity display is covered, too.
So, your characters are also going to belong to a variety of communities of practice, and they’re going to use the identity practices of these communities to fit in. Because that’s how people work. Now, how can you use this in your writing?
The first step in the process is going to be making a list of the COPs they belong to. What’s their profession? Is your character a starship pilot, a knight, a waiter, a mechanic, a blacksmith? Their job will come with a set of norms they’ll be expected to follow (by other people in their profession and by people observing them), and there will probably also be some specialized vocabulary that goes with it. Do they belong to a religious group? What norms and language belong to the religion?
What about hobbies or sports? Does your character have time for any hobbies or sports? These activities will also be communities of practice. Is your character a member of a minority or minoritized group? That will also play a role in the way they talk.
Families and friend groups are also COPs.
Step two is going to be figuring out how the different COPs are going to talk and what sets them apart from the general or standard way of speaking. When your starship pilot is talking to other pilots, do they talk differently than when they talk to the ship’s mechanic or to a civilian? Does the person who belongs to a minority group talk differently with their fellow minorities than with the majority group?
What are the features of these different ways of speaking? Are there differences in grammatical structures or only in vocabulary? What do people outside of these communities think about these other ways of speaking? Readers from the US are probably aware of African American English and the stereotype that it’s “bad grammar” and “incorrect,” even though it’s actually a different dialect with its own set of rules.
If you’re stuck on this, think about characters in movies, where you have the working-class New Yorker or the surfer or the mobster, and how they talk. It’s stereotyped, to be sure, but you get the idea. Think about your friends and family. Do they use shorter sentences or longer; regular vocabulary or SAT vocabulary? Does their dialect have particular grammatical variations (like levelling the present tense of verbs to I/you/she/they go (or goes; both are real-world variations))?
Tools
This is the writer’s toolkit from the chapter “Creating Identity” from my book, which comes at the questions from a slightly different angle, because in the book I haven’t introduced the COP model yet, and I’m aiming for general applicability. I’ve developed these toolkits as a starting point, not a checklist, so if a bullet point isn’t relevant, feel free to skip it.
Make a list of the (sub)cultures in your setting.
Describe how the (sub)cultures interact with each other.
Which of these groups has/have institutional power?
Are the groups without institutional power permitted to freely use their language/way of speaking? Are there laws against using it?
Is using the language/way of speaking of a powerless group stigmatized? What are the consequences of using it despite stigmatization?
Do groups use language to include or exclude others? How?
Do people use language to show membership in the group? How?
etc.
How do individual characters relate to their own language(s)?
Do they speak a stigmatized language despite the consequences?
Do they change the way they speak depending on whom they’re speaking with?
How consciously aware are they of stigmatization and other linguistic prejudices? Have they experienced discrimination/Have they discriminated against someone because of their language?
etc.
Create a “style guide” for your characters and/or setting.
List a few notable linguistic features for each of the (sub)cultures you listed above. Is it word choice? Grammatical differences? Code mixing (using more than one language in the same utterance)? Something else?
Come up with a handful of example sentences that illustrate these features. Write the same sentence using each style so you can easily see the difference.
Try it out.
Write or rewrite a scene using your characters and your style guide. It doesn’t have to be one that ends up in your final product — it can be a warm-up or a throwaway. The goal is to think about how your characters speak and think.
How did it go?
Hopefully it was a fun exercise and one you’ll be able to use in the future. Let me know how it went!
Media recommendation
I hesitate to call this section “recommendations,” because sometimes I just want to say that I liked something, but this time, yeah.
I don’t remember if I mentioned this already, but I’m watching Slow Horses on Apple TV, and I just love it. Gary Oldman plays the (crude, greasy) head of the department of MI5 fuck-ups based in Slough House, and a younger British actor plays the chief fuck-up, who happens to be the grandson of a big-time Cold-War-era MI5 agent. It’s based on a series of books (which I’m told are great, though I haven’t read them), and if you like spy stories, you should definitely check it out.
Until next time!
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