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Author Topic: I can make my wine glass sing
Grumpy old guy
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Okay, in my first 13 for Daisyworld I've decided to go back to what I do best--character POV. Having made that decision words flowed like the Niagara river and reams poured forth, well a page and a bit to be honest.

Anywho, amidst all those words was the description of the sound of the background conversation: a bass line of murmured conversation, serious and filled with import, while a melody line of chatter and office gossip wove itself around it, to be occasionally interrupted by the syncopation of alcohol fueled laughter. Which is great, once I pare it down a bit. But the question still remains: How do I explain how I segued into a musically metaphorical description like that in my opening paragraph? Answer, my MC indulges in a bit of whimsey and makes her wine glass sing in the second sentence.

But can you really do that--in real life?

Five minutes on the Internet suggested that, yes, you can, if you find the glass's resonating frequency. Two tries with a wine-wet finger and a rapidly reducing volume of red wine in my glass and I did indeed have it singing.

The point of all this? Just how much personal research do you do when you have your MC do something. Ever slay a daemon or jump off a 300 foot cliff? I have actually convinced one poor fool that I could summon daemons (I was a bit of a flim-flam man at one time, long ago) and then dispatch them and I have jumped off a cliff, not with a parachute but with a rope as I abseiled down to terra firma.

Phil.

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Robert Nowall
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I'm a little disturbed that something like that had to be researched...as I recall, you can make noise with a glass, varying the pitch by varying the amount of liquid in the glass. (Doing it well, or understanding the principles behind it, would require research.)

I try to be well versed in a number of things an SF writer would need (astronomy, physics, biology, history), with notes to (1) do research if I come up with a good idea, and (2) to research something after the fact if I think of a detail to stick into the story while I'm writing.

A few years ago, I was writing a story set in 1947. (Never finished.) I don't have the list before me, but I made notes about things to find out, like what the days of the week and periods of the moon were, what radio programs were on and when, how a home hair-dye product would be packaged and would work, the ins and outs of snow removal in the era, and so on.

I've thought that getting a detail wrong would wrench a reader out of the sense of belief a writer must generate in order to make the story work---I've been jerked out of it any number of times. Some writers have advocated just "making something up," but I can't relate to it.

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extrinsic
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As a child I had regular occasion to frequent grog and pony shops. The folks partied and babysitters were money not spent on drink. Also passed many a-dreary Friday and Saturday nights jailed in the family Beetle. When allowed into the bar, a fountain coke, a snack bag of chips or pork rinds, maybe peanuts, cheese paste filled Nipchee crackers -- six tiny cracker sandwiches split four hard ways shared among four squabbling siblings was a rare treat begged for and served as a grudged concession to snivels, whines, and pleas for any goddamn way to pass the boredom. Pool tables, shuffleboards, pin ball amusements were off limits -- they came with time or per-use charges not spent on drink. Juke boxes played rhythm and blues, bluegrass, crooners, and country twangs.

This was Key West and it was the the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Jack Kennedy Assassination. The original Hemingway Sloppy Joes was one waterhole of choice, other holes in the wall, too, often a military club: the island was an armed and secured Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps fortress.

We did duck and cover drills in school as a way to frighten children about the Red Peril and nuclear war. I still think of Communist radioactive danger when I hear an alarm bell claxon drill loud and long. We bought raw, fresh, tasty-when-deep-fried shrimp from trawlers beside the submarine pens. We trapped langusta lobsters from sets along the destroyer wharfs. Our bare feet, often also flip-flop shorn, were stained by oil tar from public beaches; we were tar-heeled, towheaded unruly though well-kempt brats. Our clothes Mom handmade: matched colorful paisley shirts, khaki duck shorts with elastic waists and no pockets. Kindergarten was at the Little Flower, elementary school at the catholic school, where I was expelled from in first grade over a misunderstanding that was schmoozed over by a wink and a nod.

Bar glasssware was a toy, so long as the tumblers and rocks glasses, snifters, pilsners, flutes and such were returned whole if empty. Bartenders and waitresses had a lark serving kids soda in odd glasses: booze glasses. Never ask for and never expect water in a bar. Restricted usually to a dark out-of-sight-and-mind corner table, snuck a guzzle from an unminded beer every now and then. That was "cute" when caught red-handed.

Bored stupid, rubbed a finger around the rim of an empty wine glass. Even the cherry stem of the Shirley Temple's garnish served in it savored, masticated, and swallowed. Squeaks rubbed from ordinary glass. If the glass was even part lead crystal, the glass vibrated a tentative musical note. Purer crystal sang. Musical glasses attracted adult attention, at first, awe and wonder. Do that again, clever little child. Soon irritation and castigation was swift if even a peep of music disturbed adult tipplers.

Internet? A thirdhand proxy reality. Learned the real thing from the glasses themselves. Nothing trumps personal experience. Personal experience, though, does transcend a moment's delight and spans other imagined, invented moments. Sensation description imitates reality and covers a possibility or necessity of natural gambit.

[ January 06, 2015, 02:41 PM: Message edited by: extrinsic ]

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Kathleen Dalton Woodbury
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quote:
Originally posted by Grumpy old guy:
But can you really do that--in real life?

Look up "Glass Harmonica" and you'll see that you can indeed do it in real life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_harmonica

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Grumpy old guy
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Bravo, extrinsic. A fine example of how mastery of language usage and form can transport the reader to a time and place long ago and far away; for me at least. Also, a fine example of the use of narrative back-story; the writing style makes it interesting enough so the reader isn't bored and yet jam-packed full of milieu and character relevant information.

Salingeresque, in my opinion.

A relatively close narrative distance, and yet almost emotionally disconnected as if something hurtful occurred to the narrator.

Needs minor editing, though.

However, the original point of comment was to see how many people accepted urban myths at face value or did they go and test them for themselves. There is a huge difference between seeing someone shot for real and what you see in police procedurals and war movies. Kathleen, I know glasses can sing because I have done it. What will be so special about my character doing it is that she'll modify the tone without changing the volume of liquid. A conundrum to haunt the readers for a while.

Phil.

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Denevius
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quote:
However, the original point of comment was to see how many people accepted urban myths at face value...
In this age of the internet, "facts" are a nebulous thing. The world wide web perpetuates itself on misinformation. You could have a wine glass sing, a shot glass sing, a coffee mug sing, a jelly jar sing. I seriously doubt the average reader will goggle to find out if it's possible, or will probably even care.

How often have you submitted a story and as a point of criticism someone pointed out something that they don't know the meaning of *despite* the fact that google is as easy as opening a new window and doing a quick search?

I would like to say that editors of major publishers might be more inclined to not publish your writing if there are factual errors, except it's not uncommon to see major publications running "corrections" to stuff they published because they got it wrong the first time.

Like everything else in writing, it probably all depends on what you can get away with. If you have a sword fighting scene that lasts longer than two or three strikes, only people who've actually trained in sword fighting martial arts are going to call b.s. because they know that a real sword fight is fast. Banging steel against steel ends in a crowbar fight, not a sword fight, and then you're basically having to bash someone's skull in. Besides the fact that there's no such thing as a parry. There's a counterattack that involves a deflection of the blade on its side so the edge stays sharp enough to cut through weak spots in armor.

So if your character makes wine glasses sing in the second sentence, some people *may* wonder if this is possible, but it sounds like a minor detail quickly forgotten, and so whether or not it can actually be done probably won't cross most readers' minds. But you may get that rare reader who knows something about glass or acoustics and will be more critical of your prose if you get it wrong.

quote:
...did they go and test them for themselves.
Highly doubtful that they'd literally test it themselves. Someone who's specifically interested in the subject of acoustics may, but again, we're bombarded by too many "facts" to try them all out to see what's true and what's false. A reader who's looking for a bit of escapism probably won't be too keen on doing research on stuff they find in a fictional narrative to see if it's true or false.
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Kent_A_Jones
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How much research must an author do?

Mark Twain's advice, "Write what you know," Is an exasperating piece of very good advice. I write speculative fiction, so the advice seems incongruous; how can I write what I know when I don't know it?

Communication requires two, two of anything. I make noise that my dog interprets as a command to sit. I can make any noise as long as it has shared meaning and I don't violate the rule that I've made for him. To prove this to myself, I taught my dog to play dead by pointing at him and saying, "Bang." He interprets the gesture and/or the noise to mean the same; smart dog. So I communicated with Skipper through shared meaning.

I could point at almost any kid in the U.S. and say, "Bang," and that kid, whether she/he knows me or not, would play dead like my dog. Why? Shared meaning has us thinking alike about certain things. The closer an author is to an audience in language, experience and culture, the more shared meaning there will be.

But speculative fiction is about exploring new, fantastic or alien things that no one has any experience with. Where's the shared meaning in a singing glass? Is it in the armonica, Benjamin Franklin's invented glass instrument? Is it in the movie Miss Congeniality, in which Sandra Bullock's character "plays" wine glasses? Or is it an accidental flight of fancy that conforms with a fictional paragraph?

I believe that an author must speculate on the shared meaning that she/he has with the target audience before embarking on research. In writing, more shared meaning (i.e., the closer a piece is to reality) requires more research, more personal experience. On the other hand, less shared meaning (examples: magic, mental or physical powers, fantastic technology) requires work by the author to create the characteristics, rules, laws and parameters on which to construct the meaning to be shared with the audience (world building).

I've had a broken arm and I've been in a car wreck. Mark Twain would give me leave to create a scene in which my main character breaks her arm in a car wreck. My audience has shared experience with cars and wrecks and broken bones. As long as I remain true to what we all know, the illusion will be maintained for my audience.

I haven't transmuted lead into gold with arcane incantations. I assume that most of my audience has no experience with magic, either. But if I create the rules of magic with enough detail, and then remain strictly true to those rules, I will be able to create an illusion for my audience that they can suspend their disbelief about and immerse themselves in.

It's easy to break the rules of reality or created (un)reality. When one does, one loses the audience, breaks suspension of disbelief. An author must strive to maintain shared meaning. Tom Clancy said, "The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense."

How much research must an author do? Enough to create and maintain the illusion of reality for a perceptive audience. Always think of the audience.

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extrinsic
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quote:
Originally posted by Grumpy old guy:
A relatively close narrative distance, and yet almost emotionally disconnected as if something hurtful occurred to the narrator. . . .

However, the original point of comment was to see how many people accepted urban myths at face value or did they go and test them for themselves. There is a huge difference between seeing someone shot for real and what you see in police procedurals and war movies. Kathleen, I know glasses can sing because I have done it. What will be so special about my character doing it is that she'll modify the tone without changing the volume of liquid. A conundrum to haunt the readers for a while.

Phil.

Thanks for the compliment. Yeah, childhood was an above average sequence of traumatic crises and bittersweet for me. More than a few crises happened while in Key West.

I rarely take at face value urban myth, or "contemporary tradition" in folklorists' vernacular, who are concerned with gossip, rumor, legend, and myth transmission and function: what folk make, say, do, believe, know, share that enhances community bonds -- like fiction writing. Yeah.

I also don't take asserted facts at face value. Such motifs have a ring of falseness to them, as do scams, hoaxes, advertisements, and nefarious schemes, and not a few politicians' and other public persons' assertions. I do, though, enjoy discernment of underlaid agendas and motives behind their foolishness, if not for the sheer satisfaction, for research into character and motif basic nature, behavior, and personality situations and functions.

Writer research is similar to though different from reader research. General readers are less likely to research motifs and concepts while reading than writers who are skeptical about false premises. Readers generally research directed topics and, though may stray, resist detours. Directed writers will follow leads until a well runs dry no matter the topic.

An oral tradition about the "glass armonica," for example, asserts the instruments' musicians are negatively influenced by the aethereal sounds, caused to become melancholy and suicidal. The either/or fallacy, play or not play an armonica, of the assertion assumes the musicians were not priorly meloncholic. Glass armonica virtuoso musicians committed suicide at a higher rate than a statistical norm; therefore, the instrument was the cause. A mysterious, mystical music, a mysterious, mystical belief -- the appeal of the legend that led folk to believe the legend was true. Such legends usually have an underlaid motive: a social or other function. A "legend" because causality is the least of distinctions between gossip, rumor, and legend. Myth applies to a sacred belief gossip, rumor, or legend.

Glass armonicas were tedious instruments to manage when they were in vogue and were comparatively soft sounds next to symphonies and orchestras that were on the rise at the time. Amplification came about later. Armonicas' popularity attracted disparagement from traditional musicians and entertainer commercial interests that wished to eliminate the competition, not to mention religious opposition to armonica music and godless amusements generally.

The meloncholia legend persisted because the spooky sounds and eccentric musicians associated with the instruments attracted attention disproportionate to their cultural and social contribution and demand. The squeaky wheel got the grease and was "greased" out of fashion. Such is the progression curve of fads and scandals and controversies and "viral videos," etc.

[ January 07, 2015, 07:12 PM: Message edited by: extrinsic ]

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Denevius
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quote:
Enough to create and maintain the illusion of reality for a perceptive audience.
The flipside to this, however, is when the writer writes what they know and a large percentage of readers thinks they're wrong. You'll see this when writers are offering defenses of their work and say, "Yeah, but this is true."

I can't count the number of times critiquers have pointed out in my prose that yellow sands from the Mongolian desert wouldn't make it to Korea, when it does every spring, covering everything with dust. For a descriptive detail, I don't feel the need to explain the reasons why this happen. But for many, it breaks the illusion of the narrative for the moment because the casual reader is ignorant of Northeast Asia.

quote:
Mark Twain's advice, "Write what you know,"
I've always taken this adage to mean more than simply writing from personal experiences. When, in the 1800s, you can travel across a country as big as America, and make it all the way to Europe and the Middle East, as Twain did, "writing what you know" encompasses an awful lot, and becomes a life philosophy to change so that you can constantly access different POVs.
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Kent_A_Jones
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quote:
The flipside to this, however, is when the writer writes what they know and a large percentage of readers thinks they're wrong.
Absolutely right Denevius,
Audience opinion, especially as it differs from author opinion, is the best reason for research. Shared meaning must be shared. I think in strange ways and thereby come to different conclusions than 99% of the people I know. Part of the research process is learning how a majority of my target readers perceive and process reality.

Receiving critique is research into audience sensibilities, receptiveness to ideas, and their ability to process the actual verbiage I use. (Example: I critiqued a work recently that included the word 'mephitis,' and had to look it up; it's exactly descriptive of the author's meaning, but it meant nothing to me. I mentioned it to the author. It will be up to the author to retain the word and send people like me to the dictionary or nix it for a more common description. For that author, I am one data point.) If a majority of readers fails to understand a major idea, I ask the articulate members about the idea and how they perceived it.

Critique isn't about argument, it's about creating effective meaning for the largest number of people. It is research into reader perception, especially how and why it differs from the author's. I always count reader misperception as my failure.

So, do people who read about Mongolian sands reaching Korea know enough about the geography of the area? Do they need to be given a bit of a geography lesson? Are the nay-sayers in the majority? Is the language what they balk at, as I do (In the same sentence sand and dust seem to be interchangeable.)? Does the knowledge of a Mongolian yellow dusting matter to my story? These are the questions I would ask to determine why my audience doesn't accept a physical fact, how to effectively tell the fact, and whether or not to retain that fact.

Twain? We've boiled his advice down to one little phrase that has as little or as much meaning as one places on it. I've flirted with Uzbek girls in Tashkent, the tattooed eyebrows are stunning. I've been chased by cops in Yerevan, Armenia; they don't like it when you stay in the park after hours with your honey. I've played Nerf football under the Eiffel tower; was chased away by cops with sub machine guns. Had a horrible fish pizza in Helsinki; it's Helsinki, there's nothing to do to get in trouble over. I'm a scuba diver, rock climber, ski instructor (former), bartender (sometimes), eight-ball wizard and became a grandfather last year. I think I can write a lot on what I know. [Wink]

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extrinsic
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Two to a degree principles contradict the write what you know principle. A writer who writes about a new experience as the experience unfolds develops a rawness of emotional expression that reflects how readers receive a narrative: Write what you don't know.

The savvy fan of a musical group is the least engaging correspondent to send on such an assignment. Instead, send the correspondent who most reflects the audience's sensibilities and who is naive. Likewise, don't send the stormchaser who's covered violent weather, like hurricanes or tornadoes, for an entire career. Send the new, inexperienced reporter who's never seen a storm up close and personal; the reporter's on-air expressions and body movement reflective of the audience's and more dynamic for cautioning the audience about storm dangers and reflective of the storm, earthquake, flood, fire, battle, etc., human interest fear and chaos.

How the audience receives a narrative raises the second principle; that is, each and every relevant motif's due development emphasis, known by writing communities as mythology: the agency and transformative influences of eventful circumstances -- the "telling" details. The loess soils of Mongolia seasonally carried onto Korea, for example, are at least a verisimilitude feature, a reality imitation expression.

Nextmost, how a viewpoint persona experiences the Loess Plateau's Asian Dust wherever a narrator, agonist, or other character may be.

Foremost for mythology consideration is whether and how a spring Asian Dust event influences the dramatic action: antgonal, causal, and tensional. If the event is relevant, development of meaning is essential, and may include subjective situational awareness, fact, or even misapprehension. True fact is not per se necessary, only how personal perceptions shape a motif's meaning. If the motif is irrelevant, the motif is superfluous and ought best practice be excised or developed such that the motif is relevant, antagonal, causal, and tensional.

For example, a subtle influence of yellow Asian Dust is how explorers perceived Asian people at first contact, as yellow complected from the dust's pervasive influence upon sanitation, diet, apparel fashions, culture generally. Asians as a yellow-hued race stuck in outsiders' minds and became as entrenched in a broad range of beliefs as the dust does in everyday Asian life and culture. Never mind Asian complexions are no more yellow than any other regions' misapprehended complexion color distinctions.

What other ways might Asian Dust mythology influence a narrative's action: more locals wear dust masks during springtime, the masks perceived as, say, avoidance of transmittable diseases. For their distrust, the masks might be perceived as a social comment. Everyone else is diseased. I won't risk contact. When, in actual fact, Asian Dust's health risks is a more pertinent reason of the season.

In these above ways are motifs' mythology development relevant and essential and managed artfully -- antagonal, causal, and tensional dramatic developments, even if -- no, essentially must be personally subjective. Write what you know and what you don't know as readers will receive mythologies. The explication of Asian Dust, for example, shown through imitation of subjective personal expeience instead by its influences upon the action, not a narrative intrusion of dusty-dry fact and dreary-bland expression.

[ January 08, 2015, 03:06 AM: Message edited by: extrinsic ]

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Denevius
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quote:
It will be up to the author to retain the word and send people like me to the dictionary or nix it for a more common description.
Is this a modern concept, though?

I grew up in the 80s before computers and the internet, and my family had encyclopedias A-Z (a concept that people under 20 probably don't even understand), as well as several well used household dictionaries. I was often terrible at school, but I excelled at vocabulary because I read a lot, and went to the dictionary often. I'll always remember in high school, probably around 1993, when the kid with mild autism who was always picked on (it was the early 90s) called one of his tormenters a c**t. It's still comical to remember how it stopped the bullies in their tracks because they knew *that* they were being insulted, just now *how* they were being insulted. But at the time I was the only one who knew what it meant because, at some point, I'd read it, looked it up, and discovered the meaning.

quote:
Example: I critiqued a work recently that included the word 'mephitis,' and had to look it up; it's exactly descriptive of the author's meaning, but it meant nothing to me. I mentioned it to the author
If the author got the usage right, I'm not sure what you mentioned to him/her since you did what readers are supposed to do, and looked up its meaning. It's definitely true that some people's vocabulary is so vast that reading their writing feels a bit too much like work. But if the prose isn't coming off as contrived, or out of character/voice, or suffering from some other craft issue, then I'm not sure if the answer is to use more accessible words to spare readers who didn't do what you did and just look it up to discover its meaning.

quote:
Does the knowledge of a Mongolian yellow dusting matter to my story?
Not in the least, as it's just a description. Walking down a path in the adirondack springs at night, fireflies blinking in and out of existence around you. Someone who's never seen a firefly might picture a housefly and comment that they don't blink. Trying to explain fireflies in the text seems like it'd just be an unnecessary info dump for something ultimately trivial to the story as a whole.

But painting the scene is necessary to ground the readers. The hypnotic drone of crickets, the sound of shadows darting through the underbrush on the side of the trail.

Or the yellow dust coating the cars and caking the windows from the deserts in Mongolia.

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Grumpy old guy
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As a reader, I don't mind being flummoxed by a description or word; I first learned what a zygote was from some sci-fi book I can't remember, and what the speed of light was from a Superman comic. Then again, perhaps I am of that age--older than Denevius by a tad.

In my testing of the singing glass theory, I wasn't behaving like the guy who, when described a giraffe, said, "There ain't no such damn thing!"

I was simply testing something I had never actually seen, and suddenly found my new party trick. And, I tested it because I could; I can't test the validity of the theory of nuclear fission, so I won't. But I do have some issues with the claim that, using scanning electron microscopes we have proven the existence of the atom because we have seen them. Have we? Having done some very basic study in atomic theory, most of an atoms size is essentially taken up by empty space. And then, let's not go on about electrons.

The point is, is it necessary to research your assertions or can you create the reality yourself if it is couched in convincing language. If I say the right thing, the right way, I can probably convince you that the sky is really green, not blue.

And that's the basic premise of having magic in your fantasy stories, creating a reality that is consistent and accommodates the use of magic. Personally, I eschew magic wherever possible because I rarely ever see a story where using magic has a cost--it's usually free and deadly.

Phil.

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TaleSpinner
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"Just how much personal research do you do when you have your MC do something."

My answer is, "Enough to feel confident it's credible." or "until I get bored with research - because I think researching stuff that I and my characters are curious about is fun."

I had a story featuring guns rejected once by an American editor who knew guns better than I (an Englishman with little understanding of firearms) who said that gun dealers "wouldn't talk like that." I was miffed, because I had done much research through American gun catalogues and popular magazines featuring reviews of guns, and had not thought that people don't talk like bloggers and journalists.

Asimov was known for his dislike of flying, but excellent scientist as he was, I imagine that rather than fly into space, he did good thought experiments as research for scenes in his SF that were set in space,

Clarke too, with his communications sats.

" my MC indulges in a bit of whimsey and makes her wine glass sing in the second sentence."

I got thrown out of a pub due to a similarly whimsical experimental demo of singing glasses with curious friends, (yes it can indeed be done but takes some practice) so I hope she stops after a sentence or two, else the shrill, piercing noise will drive readers away from the story! Changing the pitch without changing the level of wine, will, in its defiance of the physics be an interesting trick and if she can use it to deliver vibrato, she might make the sound less objectionable and not get thrown out as was I.

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Denevius
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quote:

The point is, is it necessary to research your assertions or can you create the reality yourself if it is couched in convincing language. If I say the right thing, the right way, I can probably convince you that the sky is really green, not blue.

That was my point earlier. Misinformation in the digital age travels faster than factual information. Make it sound clever enough, write it in the language of the meme, and you'll have people believing they can charge their iPhone with an onion.
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Denevius
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quote:
Personally, I eschew magic wherever possible because I rarely ever see a story where using magic has a cost--it's usually free and deadly.
This seemed like a bit of a tangent, but a lack of stakes, or stakes that's not high enough, is a fundamental problem with a lot of genre fiction. It's not uncommon to read protagonist who have great power with little to no sacrifice for said power. But it's how the fantasy genre tends to operate. Peter Parker gets bit by a spider, Tony Stark is naturally gifted, Bruce Wayne is rich. Harry Potter is "The One", Bella has a natural aphrodisiac to the male preternatural species despite being kind of a *****. I could never finish DUNE, but it seemed like Paul Atriedes power just kind of came to him. Yeah, he had problems controlling it, though that was like in horror movies when the car always runs perfectly *except* when the monster is attacking. Then the car stalls.

I think, though, that besides Gandalf, the second best depiction of a magic user wasn't Harry Potter, but Raistlin Majere, whose power literally ate him alive.

I think genre adventure narratives should have a new rule: the main character has to have some type of amputation at the end of the story/series. Whether it's mental, emotional, or physical, somehow a character who engages in prolonged combat should run out of luck at some point and lose an arm, lose a best friend that they can't seem to live without, lose something that hangs like a dark cloud over them at the end of the story.

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extrinsic
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Robust and dynamic description of sensation stimulus details focuses on details that characterize events, settings, and characters. A principle of description organization reccomends a start from away to near, from large to small, from general to specific, or vice versa. Closing distance favors the former. However, a description of every iota and theta of a scene bogs down in burdensome minutia if details are non-influential.

What does an event, setting, character expressively signal naturally, necessarily, or probably at the moment of the action is a filtering question for what detail matters. More often than not, a struggling narrative overloads or short-shrifts description due to a poor grasp of a situation's essential details and a struggle reaching for meaning or skipping meaning from a missed-the-page, still-in-the mind oversight.

How to describe the indescribable challenges writers. Symbolism and similar imagery express in an economy of words the intangible, immaterial, abstract circumstances through tangible, material, concrete circumstances. A trunk loaded with expected items is a trunkload of normal, boring details. The Sesame Street learning game "One of these is not like the others" is also a version of the Graduate Record Exam's verbal reasoning section:

A train is to an airplane as a railroad track is to ______.
  1. A river
  2. The sky
  3. A bike path
  4. A runway
  5. An interstate
The expected answer is the one not like the others. Maybe that's a dull answer. An imaginative answer(s) expresses unconventional thought and characterizes the responder.

Measures of cognitive function have no right (expected) answer. Multiple-choice cognitive test questions and answers are calculated to measure a testee's abstract reasoning skills. For prose writing of sensory description, abstract reasoning offers satisfactions of descriptive detail reasoning and creative surprises.

What does a singing wine glass mean about the event, the setting, the characters of a formal reception? For drama's antagonal, causal, tensional purposes, a contest, a clash, a contention meaning is warranted.

Talespinner notes a singing wine glass is cause for ejection from a British pub, and most any U.S. or Australian bar. Natural and necessary though probably not surprising: the sound annoys revellers. What's the next natural cause of the effect of annoyance? Ejection. Ejection is rejection, which imples a rejection-acceptance conflict is afoot. I'd be surprised if no one made an overture to quash a person making a wine glass sing. Like fingernails scratched on a chalkboard. That's not as commonplace an idiom as it used to be. Chalkboards mostly were replaced by whiteboards.

So is rejection-acceptance the crisis of the moment? A singing wine glass could symbolize that complication-conflict -- a want for acceptance opposed by a preference for alienation problem, thus expressing rejection first before revellers reject. What does that say about a person? Fear of rejection, desparate want for acceptance. Glares from revellers would be a natural and necessary social castigation: the effect. One of these persons is not like the others.

Next might be a surprise of, what? That someone else actually accepts the glass musician, who, in causal turn, pushes back harder for rejection? Thus a singing wine glass becomes a symbolism motif and, though abstract (implication's engaging feature), a natural and necessary concrete sensation detail.

[ January 08, 2015, 10:16 AM: Message edited by: extrinsic ]

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Denevius
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quote:
Talespinner notes a singing wine glass is cause for ejection from a British pub, and most any U.S. or Australian bar.
This is kind of interesting in that if I read this in a narrative without knowing more about the bar and bar owner/manager, I'd call b.s.

I've been in a lot of bars in America, and a lot of bars in Japan and Korea, and singing wine glasses seems like one of the least intrusive things a person can do when drunk and/or drinking. If you're not being threatening or fighting, if you're not pissing or puking in the corner, if you're not harassing young women in the bar, if you're not passed out at the bar, if you're not dealing drugs in the bathroom, if you're not ordering drinks but never paying the bill, if you're not sexually harassing the waitresses, if you're not just being a plain bad drunk, I think you're safe.

To be honest, besides T.V. (and right now I can't remember what show/movie I saw where the actor did what I think Phil is describing), I simply find it hard to imagine with how bad people's behavior can become in bars that *this* is what's going to get them thrown out.

So, circling back to what I think Phil's point is, if he did (which I don't think he was aiming for) write a scene in which his female character (I can't remember the last time an attractive woman got thrown out of a bar for *anything*) gets ejected for playing music on wine glasses, I'd point it out as seriously suspect needing further explanation. This isn't a natural phenomena like yellow dust. This is humans coming to what seems like an odd decision for something that's rather bizarre but not exactly as annoying as a group of guys downing shots and becoming increasingly vocal.

Yes, it's possible, though if someone told me that that's why they got thrown out of a pub, I'd think that there's more to the story, and a different POV would describe the same scene differently.

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TaleSpinner
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Brits at that time liked their pubs quiet, conducive to conversation. The landlord liked his pub quiet and conversational and deemed our experiment annoying, fearing other patrons would leave. We were juvenile enough to continue with the noise and pushed his boundaries just a tad too far. So, true, it wasn't just the noise. Had it been a modern pub, our singing glass would not have gotten above the loud cacophony that today they call music. (And nobody in our party of juvenile ejecta was either female or even pretty.)

But my point in answer to Phil's question about depth of research, was that I think research can be fun in satisfying the writer's natural curiosity and helpful by informing one, (e.g. of the possibilities of being irritating to fellow drinkers), can lead to deeper insights ( we found it's not easy to set a glass off singing) and new story line possibilities (ejection from pub). I like to think that sound research, so to speak, can bring a certain verisimilitude to a story, the sense that the author is on firm, familiar ground -- but my gun story proved that idea to be flawed

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extrinsic
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quote:
Originally posted by Denevius:
quote:
Originally posted by extrinsic: Talespinner notes a singing wine glass is cause for ejection from a British pub, and most any U.S. or Australian bar.
This is kind of interesting in that if I read this in a narrative without knowing more about the bar and bar owner/manager, I'd call b.s.

Mythology, event, setting, and character development would make ejection from a public house for a trivial nuisance like a singing wine glass as natural and necessary as landing a seventeen-foot marlin stripped to the bone by mako sharks. The trivialness of the ejection itself would be a deeply emotional event for the ejectee if developed artfully. The bar district hereabouts comprises a number of settings -- their situational aesthetics range from rowdy to serene. More then a few would eject a patron for that or similar nuisances, especially, as Talespinner also notes, if combative situations and boundaries are tested.
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Grumpy old guy
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Not wanting to get all metaphysical on youse guys, but to stop you wondering about the possible purpose of a singing wine glass in a scene, I offer the following:

Originally I was looking for a simple causal link to a piece of prose using musical metaphor to describe background conversation; then had an epiphany, realising the singing wine glass is actually a metaphor for part of the main characters dramatic complication--she just isn't aware of it.

It was just a spur of the moment bit of whimsey that I thought would just add a hint of light on what will soon become a dark tale. It wasn't until I started thinking about the possible implications of this metaphor that I realised I can use it as a powerful linking theme throughout the entire scene.

One of the implications is this:

Originally posted by TaleSpinner:
quote:
Changing the pitch without changing the level of wine, will, in its defiance of the physics be an interesting trick
She doesn't defy the laws of physics, she simply has the ability to manipulate matter on a minute scale. You know, shifting protons, neutrons and electrons around.

Phil.

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Grumpy old guy
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Reading my last two posts, I seem to have sort of hijacked my own thread, lost the plot and entered La-la Land. Chalk it down to heat stress/exhaustion and dehydration--I laboured mightily in high 30's heat, centigrade that is, and 80% humidity for two days. And NO, I wasn't researching.

It's been almost 24 hours and I still haven't completely re-hydrated.

Phil.

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extrinsic
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I see self-contributions to the thread topic, astute ones, not a hijack. The use of a researched and developed motif to unify a scene's tangible and intangible meanings and artfully imply meaning is advanced writing territory, not to mention research is also an evaluation and focus process of an inspiration for aptness of its use: research and development, from which application arises.
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Kathleen Dalton Woodbury
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Consider it a kind of "brainstorming" topic, Phil.

And consider such topics encouraged by me, for one.

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Grumpy old guy
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Well, thanks Kathleen and extrinsic. For myself, I was much more interested in where the research discussion was going. In one of my novels I had a character who was severely wounded have a hot iron applied to the wound to stop the blood flow and prevent infection--cautery. But, the question I posed myself was: How hot is the iron?

Answer: white hot will boil and cook the flesh leading to necrosis and other nasties. Yellow hot, the same. Even red hot, if bright, is too hot. The correct temperature for cautery, apparently, is mid red, just hot enough to seal the wound without cooking the flesh. So much for movie representations. Btw, I tested this on a piece of fresh pork belly--whole skin on. It pays to cultivate a relationship with your local butcher if writing fantasy.

This was supposed to be the whole point of the thread: actual hands-on research, where possible, will give a writer a much deeper understanding of the real effects of what they are writing about. In the case of cautery, not only the process, but the sounds and smells as well.

Phil.

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Denevius
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I don't like doing research, so I definitely stick to the adage "Write what you know".

quote:
This was supposed to be the whole point of the thread: actual hands-on research, where possible, will give a writer a much deeper understanding of the real effects of what they are writing about.
Once again, I think it boils down to what you can get away with. Doing research on the topic I mentioned before, combat with some type of sword, is nice and all, but consumers like to see/read long, drawn out battles where blades hit blades over and over again. It's total nonsense, but it sells.

And really, that goes for most fighting scenes. I haven't been in a fistfight since high school, but they tend to go fast. Unless you're taking about professionals in a ring, most fights are a couple of hits before someone is bowling out. This was, from memory, what was so brilliant about Clint Eastwood's UNFORGIVEN. Gun enthusiasts like to imagine themselves as quickdraw sharp shooters, but in real life, people freeze, they blink, guns jam, and killing someone isn't as easy as one may be led to believe.

When Pat wrote:

quote:
I had a story featuring guns rejected once by an American editor who knew guns better than I (an Englishman with little understanding of firearms) who said that gun dealers "wouldn't talk like that."
I'm left more to believe that he couldn't get away with the dialog with the strength of the story in general for the market, then that it was really the way gun dealers speak/don't speak. What kind of silly stereotyping would that be to assume that gun dealers across America have a "way" of speaking. From New York to Mississippi to California, they all talk the same?

Though it's more for movies since films are popular, shared medias, there are plenty of sites devoted to pointing out the many themes/facts movies get wrong. I think most people only care when what they're watching genuinely sucks. Otherwise, if they're entertained, they just shrug their shoulders at everything else.

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TaleSpinner
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I think research is driven by knowing one's audience and what will satisfy them. If I wrote hard SF I'd never offer it to Analog, because I think its readers like their SF consistent with the science they think they know and that's why I don't write hard SF - my physics and maths are too weak for the research necessary. Orbital mechanics is beyond me, not that I couldn't master it, I'm not sufficiently interested.

Being naturally curious I found the research into gun culture fascinating, and wasn't surprised to find from an editor I respect that I hadn't caught the nuances of this subculture sufficiently well for his audience - I guess I had the characters vocalising things that would have been understood, or communicated with body language, not verbally. I think some of my dialogue had that "as you know, Bob" feel.

One thing I find annoying in research into topics that are new to me and have awakened my curiosity, is deciding whom to believe and whom not. With print it ought to be easier than the internet, where everyone copies something they think is authoritative like the Wikipedia entry, errors and all. In print I go for books published by publishers with a peer review process I trust. (One can do something like that on the internet of course, going to reputable university sites etc.)

But research I did recently for a novel on life in the stone age, and for a musical project on musicology (specifically: music and how it's processed by the brain) was both fascinating in feeding my curiosity, and maddening in how academics confuse their own prejudices with evidence.

I found that archaeologists too often regard ancient cultures that left no writing for them to find - despite aligning huge stones with celestial events - as primitive and ignorant, believing in gods to explain everything and sacrificing virgins given the slightest excuse, and musicologists defining "music" as "Bach and Beethoven, but neither Brubeck, Basie nor Beatles." What's worse is these academics refer to each other's work as authoritative, and an edifice of "What's known and cannot be questioned" grows: but it's an edifice of errors, like the one Einstein fought for so long in establishing Relativity. So for me, Phil, the question is not when to stop research, but whom to believe.

Pat

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Kathleen Dalton Woodbury
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Phil, that fresh pork belly test might make an interesting science project for some enterprising kid, but I find myself wondering how, since it's dead flesh, you could be sure the blood flow (no longer a thing with dead meat) is stopped and there's no potential necrosis, etc.

It seems to me that you could determine how the fresh pork belly would look after touching it with the different levels of heat, but how could you tell any more than that?

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Grumpy old guy
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Kathleen, admittedly the blood wasn't flowing but by fresh I meant, wet, runny and full of blood; less than 2 hours dead. That's isn't long enough for rigour-mortis to set in and the skin and flesh is still 'soft and pliable'. But, beyond that, I was more concerned with the sound and smell. The actual process and application of cautery is well documented in medieval texts.

Phil.

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Kathleen Dalton Woodbury
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Ah, okay, Phil. Thanks for the clarification.
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TaleSpinner
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Phil - a word of advice: don't write any scenes set in a sewage works: research could get a mite uncomfortable [Wink]
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Grumpy old guy
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Too late, TaleSpinner, I've had to clean out septic tanks--grew up way out in the bush.

Phil.

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Reziac
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quote:
Originally posted by TaleSpinner:
Changing the pitch without changing the level of wine, will, in its defiance of the physics be an interesting trick

Finger on the outside of the glass should work.
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TaleSpinner
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quote:
Originally posted by Reziac:
quote:
Originally posted by TaleSpinner:
Changing the pitch without changing the level of wine, will, in its defiance of the physics be an interesting trick

Finger on the outside of the glass should work.
My theory is that a finger on the outside of the glass would damp the vibrations (quite why the wine doesn't is a mystery to me). Of course theories are, as Phil suggests, for testing - but mind, if we test it at my local pub and my theory's wrong, we risk becoming ejecta from a fine quiet-ish conversational drinking emporium.
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Grumpy old guy
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Reziac and TaleSpinner, placing a finger on various parts of the outside of a glass does not seem to have any effect at all. I have no idea of why; my study of physics never went that far.

Phil.

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Kent_A_Jones
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Trying to create sound by rubbing one's finger anywhere but on the rim produces no sound because the increased surface area in contact with the glass doesn't allow one's dermal ridges to 'stick' to the glass. Sticking and releasing vibrates the glass.

Since the glass molecules are in a semi-rigid matrix, the glass will always resonate at its own frequency. The bigger the glass, the lower the pitch. Liquid exerts even pressure on the glass, damping vibration at whatever level the glass is filled to. In effect, the water makes a smaller glass. Smaller glass, higher pitch.

Incidentally, the energy imparted to the water causes the water to vibrate, too. However, this sound is infra-sonic, lower in frequency than human hearing can detect. But it's cool to watch the liquid form sine waves. When the glass is rubbed harder (imparting more energy), the liquid waves grow in amplitude, but they do not change frequency due to the unchanging frequency of the glass.

I did experiments similar to this for fifth and sixth grade science fair experiments, proving that water volume adhered to musical harmonics.

Shhh. Now that everyone's asleep, I think the way a person with magical or telekinetic power could change the pitch of a wine glass would be to alter the molecular matrix of the glass, raising or lowering its rigidity. In this way, the glass would continue to look the same and the volume of liquid could remain the same. [As an interesting aside, extremely high notes, representing high rigidity, would seriously lower the energy required to achieve catastrophic resonance (at some point, a finger would be able to impart enough energy to make the glass explode).]

Explained plausibly or not, it's still a cool idea.
Kent

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extrinsic
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A wine glass "song," like any sound, is affected by motion. The note changes for a listener relative to motion direction and velocity. Doppler effect, for example, raises the pitch on approach, lowers on departure. Greater pitch range accompanies higher velocities.

Distance from and reflective surface also impacts pitch. If a listener hears a note richocheted from several intervening "hard and bright" surfaces, the pitch sharpens; the reverse if the surfaces are soft and dull.

The friction of a finger on wine glass rim if fast also sharpens a pitch, from emphasizing the resonant harmonic frequency of the glass and canceling subharmonics. Slower finger motion flattens the harmonic note from emphasizing subharmonic resonances. The natural note range of a wine glass is within a quarter flat to quarter sharp note, not enough for a scale, nor for a chord or simple score.

How a person alters pitch of a wine glass such that a simple score plays may not need explanation. The mystery of it is a kind of dramatic irony because spectators will believe they know how it's done, credibly or incredibly. A wine glass musician's ability to alter pitch across a score's range need not be explained nor curiosity satisfied unless the ability is tied to a dramatic complication and its satisfaction agency.

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Grumpy old guy
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extrinsic, having experimented with various finger pressures and speed in a vain attempt to alter pitch I can report that the speed at which the finger moves seems to have no discernible effect. Increasing or decreasing pressure however results in a variation in volume; the higher the pressure, the louder the sound.

And, yes, the explanation will add to explaining what Kara's super-power is. Just not immediately, although your observation that spectators will believe they know how it's done will be part of explaining Kara's social isolation within her peer group.

Phil.

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