posted
I've never been much for watching team sports. Participating, sure, but watching sports has never been my thing. But I grew up in a totally sports-crazy town, and one of the things I love to do is listen to people *talk* about sports. I pay no heed to the content of sports talk, that would drive any sane person around the bend. No, what *I* like is the way it *sounds*. It's the way everyone considers himself a sage and expert armchair general in this one special area of knowledge.
When I write I try to make the characters sound recognizable, like people I might actually meet. And so occasionally the characters talk about sports or encounter sports talk, although not necessarily sports known on *this* world.
It's more than decoration, sports talk sets apart hometowners from outsiders, or splits a town into different tribes, like Yankees vs. Mets fans (Milwaukee stole our Joe Sixpack NL baseball team in '52, only to lose it Atlanta). Which sport you follow says something about your class, as does whether you attend in person or listen on the radio. And then there's the uncomfortable imposture that sports-indifferent oddballs are sometimes forced to resort to.
A universe where a character can inhabit a great city or spend time in a military barracks without navigating sports talk doesn't sound credible to me.
Am I the only one who feels this way? Do your characters ever discuss sports? If so, care to share a sample?
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posted
For whatever it may be worth, I'm not much of a sports fan at all, but Katherine Kerr's POLAR CITY BLUES, which involves baseball (as I recall), really worked for me as a story.
I agree that discussing some kind of sport would go a long way to making characters more real. And the kind of sport and how it's discussed would do a lot for characterization.
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posted
I think sports talk has limited exposure in science fiction for several reasons. Audience appeal might be a principal reason. Science fiction's association with persons who have limited interests in sports in general might have bearing. Sports talk is an idle pastime generally, unless another feature causes it to be dramatically relevant; writing a dynamic sports dialogue is challenging from how such discourse might be relevant to a story, a plot, or milieu. Sports talk I recollect off the top of my head in science fiction I've read generally orients on futuristic sports, not often contemporary sports and is part of the drama.
On one hand, sports talk is taboo like politics, religion, and weather because in inappropriate circumstances unwinnable arguments ensue. On the other hand, sports talk among like minded fans is not taboo. Including sports talk, though, may be appropos for painting a realistic milieu, for intrinsic or extrinsic relevance to plot, or as motifs that only influence dynamically rounding out event, character, and setting development.
I've read sports-themed narratives in workshops. I hestitate to call them stories, dramas, or plotted. They generally lacked antagonism, causation, and tension from having no discernible dramatic complication. Their writers were passionate about the sport on point. Being pure sports talk about a given sport that mattered to their writers, workshop audiences generally found them lackluster due to lack of shared interest. Snow, board, and martial arts sports were common. Music passions also had the same limited appeals.
I'm also thinking about crime dramas, sometimes including locker room, tavern, garage, sports venue settings. A milieu I'm recollecting that involves sports talk in a number of genres also involves gambling, like horse and car racing and boxing, and organized crime. Needless to say, mainstream sports in and of themselves and chatter about them are also common to a degree: football, baseball, basketball, soccer, racing, swimming, dance, booster clubs, etc., set in dramatic backdrops like prisons, racial, gender, age, ethnicity cauldrons, extraordinary circumstances like handicapped athletes, impossible odds of winning, other imposing obstacles like deserts, waterways, etc., great distances, or grueling and daunting circumstances.
Sports talk, though, has one certain feature for an approriate milieu: authenticating a narrative's meaning space. As Ms. Dalton Woodbury notes, for purposes of realizing realistic character portraits, but also realizing realistic milieus. The science fiction sports sorts I recollect off the top of my head included features of the sport that were intrinsic to the plot. Rollerball arena, low gravity flight, zero gravity contests, water sports in low or no gravity, spacecraft and vehicle races, big game manhuts of the fox and hound variety. I could go on. Each, though, also included other personal character dramatic complications that enhanced the drama, if not upstaged the sports motifs. Whatever competition, though, the drama and outcomes of the contest parallel the personal drama and outcomes. Therein is where in which sports talk fits.
posted
There was the old joke: "What do people really want? Sex...except for those baseball perverts."
Now, I've followed sports all my life at a couple of removes---like, I suspect, many SF readers and writers, I wasn't any good at doing it---and along the way absorbed a great deal of information about what goes on and how it goes on. The idea of a sporting event or sports talk in a science fiction or fantasy story doesn't hold any terrors for me, either as a reader or a writer.
But I can't think of anything I've written, offhand, that includes sport in this way.
Posts: 8809 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Robert Nowall: But I can't think of anything I've written, offhand, that includes sport in this way.
I'll give you an example of how I used sports in my current WIP. Two young teenagers are having a conversation that is supposed to be private, but they know that a cop who's been harassing them is eavesdropping. After feeding the cop a load of false information, they proceed to mock the cop's beloved "snickball" team for making a trade widely expected to cost them the league championship:
quote: “So, catch the playoff opener?”
“Me and Marco watched most of it through the basement window over at Jaeger's pub,” Triggo said. “Then a lousy cop came and rousted us. Right when Bane was called off for illegal snicking, too.”
“Too bad,” Digby said. “Didn't come to nothing though. Tigers blew three straight penalty shots.”
“Tigers!” Triggo spat. “They need a forward who can drift. Their manager's got to be mental, trading Chumbers so late in the season.”
“They still got Larby,” Digby suggested.
“Larby!” Triggo scoffed. “He's got a glass arm. Everyone says so. I can throw harder than Larby.”
This is what baseball or hockey sports talk sounds like to me when I "squint my ears". The general situation should be recognizable: Tigers management has made an unpopular gamble that they can squeeze one more postseason out of an aging, injury-prone star, and the gamble isn't paying off.
The details of "snicking", "drifting" and "penalty shots" don't matter. What does matter is that the kids are deliberately rubbing salt in the detested cop's wounds.
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posted
Belatedly remembered I started a story last year about auto racing on Venus...never got past the first page...
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