Original image via Bing Creative Commons, courtesy of jobike.it
I like Idioms. I always have. Before now I honestly never gave them much thought and never quite noticed how they can be difficult for a person not from our country to understand them. Some of them, if you took them word for word you would be left wondering, what’s that supposed to mean?
Have you ever twisted them up?
I’m a NCIS fan. I miss seeing Zeva David on the show. She used to mess up the idioms we use all the time in our country. Some might find it annoying, but I always got a big kick out of it. In fact, I like this more than Tony’s constant quotes of movies. These are quirks of character that I have found myself paying attention to more and more since I have begun writing. Some of the best character quarks can be found in the weekly TV series we watch.
For example, Zeva tried to use the haystack idiom. It didn’t come out quite right. This is an example of what she might have come up with; the cat lost its tongue?
When I want to add a little bit of humor to my stories, I try to switch up idioms with my characters. I believe I did this more so in Witch Book than any of my other stories.
In the future, I will be attempting to do this even more.
ROW80 Check in:
Kait is calling for us to look at our goals once again and adjust them if need be.
I think my goals are going to stay somewhat the same.
I need to write as much as possible. It does not matter as to whether it is my blog posts or my work in progress, just as long I am working on something that has to do with writing.
I’m not making word count goals this time around. Instead, I want to make writing time goals as in 90 minutes a day. This can be either plotting, writing, researching, or editing. My words per minute, when it comes to typing, has gotten pretty high since I began in 2010. So, if I’m spending the right amount of time working on the work in progress, I’m sure my word count will reflect this.
I will log my word count on my blog counter once a week instead of daily. This is so I will stop focusing on word count and more on the actual doing of the writing. I’m hoping for a longer novel this time around that will be slightly influenced by The Game of Thrones. Why?
Because I like how in that story, everyone wants something, they all have some sort of secret, and I want to use the secrets and wants for the coming book. Enough! I can’t tell you anymore, or it will spoil the story, besides the part where I will be trying to get most of the cast in this book, even if it is in the mode of a guest appearance.
As you can tell, the plot is pretty much set in motion. I have my inciting incident that has carried over from Witch Book and Aaron and Keja. I even made a rough draft of a map to help me out.
Witch Book was written in 90 days as a first draft. It had a strong plot outline for me to follow. This is one of the most crucial things I need to have in order to write fast.
What about you? How do you go about your writing? Do you plot or punster? Do you use maps or charts? Cast outline or Character sheets or both?
Please share, I’d love to hear about your writing habits.
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Linda Nelson 
Linda,
I love idioms, too!
Star Trek has been my source for the misunderstood idiom. Spock was a master (even when he did understand!). In Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home, the loss of much of his memory led to some delightful ones: ‘if we play our cards right…’ “How will playing cards help?” ‘changing one’s mind’ “Is there something wrong with the one I have?”
Enterprise takes it to a whole new level with T’Pol (unlike Spock, she’s not half human, and most of her time on Earth was spent in the Vulcan compound, which I imagine would be, quite logically, idiom-free). But then she becomes involved with a human, Chief Engineer Trip Tucker, and the misunderstandings go deeper.
After Trip has survived what looked to be an impossible situation, he wants to know if what T’Pol feels for him is as real as what he feels for her, so he asks her if she’s ever been in a situation where death seemed inevitable, and all she could do was think. She mentions a time when she was commanding the ship during what seemed to be a suicide mission (already clearly not the same; there were many decisions to be made, and she was the one assigned to make them).
Trip asks her what she thought about. As a human, it was clear to me that he had thought of her, and wanted to know she thought of him. too. Her response was that she had wondered whether an adjustment to the warp core would be useful.
Trip takes this to mean that he’s not very important to her after all…
The problem is that she’s a Vulcan. She’s committed to logic, and she takes duty very seriously. Responsible for over 80 lives, with a vital mission to accomplish, she couldn’t allow herself to get emotionally entangled in the life of the man she (I want to say ‘loved’, but I’m pretty sure Vulcans would have a more specific set of words for that knotty concept) cared most deeply for.
Watching it, a part of me wanted to say to Trip, “Hey, buddy. She’s VULCAN. Just ask her if she’s invested in your connection…don’t try to test whether she is.” And another part wanted to take her aside and say, “You know humans are seldom motivated by logic, and often by emotion. He’s afraid of getting hurt, and needs some assurance that he’s not foolishly investing himself in a romantic relationship with you. Offer him some token that he’s important to you, and he’ll be able to relax.”
Not that the characters on TV ever listen when I tell them these things….
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I to so wrapped up in Trip and T’Pol, I forgot to mention that that kitten up there has to be the cutest of these memes I’ve ever seen!=)
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Thanks for stopping by. I had forgotten all about the idioms used in Star Trek and how Spock used to interpret them. My favorite was the movie where they went to save the whales. I loved how Spock had dressed himself in a robe with a grapevine crown. The Vulcans were always so serious, that they made the series funny.
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That is a good tip particularly to those new to the blogosphere.
Simple but very precise information… Thanks for sharing this one.
A must read post!
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