Have you ever wondered how the British use a word like "pavement" or "jumper"? In fandom, non-British writers with such questions can get their fic Brit-picked, and that's a terrific idea. But Brit-picking has its limitations. What if you consult several British fans and they disagree? Who's right? Would a British person really use a word in the way you want your character to use it? How can you tell?

You can do what professional linguists do: consult the British National Corpus. Maintained at Oxford, the BNC is a 100 million word searchable database of spoken and written British English. The general public can do free web-based searches for a word or phrase. If you search, for example, for "pavement," your search will return the number of times the word appears in the database (1,263), plus fifty randomly-chosen sample sentences containing it.

As an American trying to grasp the subtleties of a British expression, I've found it invaluable to see fifty instances of the expression all in one place. Here, for example, is one of the hits for "pavement."

I ran into the road, did a Highland fling and ran back on to the pavement.

If an American performed the same rash action, she'd say: "I ran into the street, did a Highland fling, and ran back onto the sidewalk." (There are only 79 hits for "sidewalk" in the BNC, and most of them seem to come from novels about American characters.)

The database has its limitations. It's descriptive, not prescriptive: it merely reports the words and phrases that British writers and speakers use, telling you nothing about whether these words would be perceived as correct, as Americanisms, etc. Also, the database extracts the sample sentences from their context -- though you can click on a link to see a bibliographic reference for a quote, so you can deduce approximately what the source text is about, and perhaps take a guess at other important facts like the age of the speaker, his or her regional dialect, etc.

With all those caveats in mind, the BNC still strikes me as both useful and fascinating. It's like a snapshot of British English from the mid-nineties (when the database was collected). And it decisively and objectively answers the question of whether British writers and speakers use a word, and how often.

Oh, and one of the samples entered into the database was a selection from Tom Shippey's The Road to Middle Earth, so many of Tolkien's characters and places have been recorded for posterity. The word "hobbit" appears in the database fifty-nine times. :D

ETA Oooooh! As darius has pointed out in the comments, there's an equivalent database for American English here. Perfect for British writers seeking to have their SGA or SPN fics -- what's the equivalent word? American-picked? In-stated? De-britted?

Here's a weird question: what is it, exactly, that paragraphs do in fiction? I ask because I just came across a theory that strikes me as intuitively right but hard to work out in detail. It appears in a book by Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17 (fascinating sixties sci-fi about the power of language, go read), where a character remarks, apropos of very little, that "the emotional unit in writing is the paragraph."

The emotional unit in writing? Hmmm. First of all, this put a picture in my head of paragraphs sulking in their rooms, wearing black nail polish and writing bad poetry about Life, while more sane units in writing, such as sentences and sections, try to ignore them and hope that they are just going through a phase.

Then I thought about this for a minute and suspected that Delany deserved to be taken more seriously. For one thing, he comments elsewhere that his character borrowed this idea from Gertrude Stein. Whether that makes the idea more attractive or less depends on your opinion of Stein, but since Delany fanboyed her, that tells me he probably meant to endorse what his character was saying. And his character modifies Stein's claim in a way that broadens it considerably. Stein said "the paragraph is the emotional unit of the English Language" (emphasis mine), but Delany makes his character (a poet who speaks and writes seven languages) talk not about one language but about writing generally. (Not speech; I'll get to that important distinction in a second.)

That's a big theory, and in a very cool essay Delany says a writer can best apply it in practice if, when she reads over her work, she

can forget the emotions that impelled the writing and respond to the modulations in the emotions the words on the page actually evoke.

Okay, important qualifier here: this isn't about the writer's emotions, but what the words on the page do to readers, and the fine art of anticipating that. This isn't a writing principle based on Being Emo -- just the opposite, in fact. Delaney is claiming that in order to write effective paragraphs, writers have to disassociate themselves from their own feelings -- it sounds kind of zen, doesn't it? -- and listen to the "modulations in the emotions" produced by the flow of their narrative, by the stream of experiences happening to their character.

And if the paragraph breaks happen in the right places? Then readers will be better attuned to these modulations too. It's as if readers get the opportunity to listen to the author read her story aloud (Delany doesn't say this, but I think it's a reasonable extension of his idea). The paragraph breaks are writing's substitute for the pauses for breath and changes in tone that would shape the narrative if the writer were in the room, reading to us. They're not just a mechanical convention of the written word; they're like the story's heartbeat.

It might help at this point to look at an example. In the columns below, I quote two short, non-spoilery paragraphs from a recent (and excellent) fanfic, first the way they were written by the supremely talented author, and then re-paragraphed to show (by comparison) just how splendid the author's original choices were, and how powerfully our understanding of the story is shaped by these choices.

( It really does matter where you put those paragraph breaks. )

This year I've made one of the World's Most Embarrassing New Year's resolutions. Most of the time my New Year's resolutions involve personal faults that I'm not afraid to admit in public, or at least to my friends, who tend to know about those faults already. It's impossible to know me for more than a week, for example, without realizing that my relationship to chocolate unhealthily resembles the tormented star-crossed love story in Doctor Zhivago. But for the past few years I've come to realize that I have a guilty secret, a habit I've developed slowly but surely without even noticing, a habit that I'd be absolutely aghast to admit in public (so let's just pretend that I'm talking in this post about someone other than myself) --

You know what? For the past few years? I haven't been reading all that many novels.

This snuck up on me because I read ALL THE TIME. For one thing, I do a lot of reading for work. Much of that reading involves writing so bad that you can feel it leaching intelligence and aesthetic sensitivity from your brain, like a sort of life-sucking vampire made out of polysyllabic jargon. Still, it's reading, so when I think back on a week's activities I think: Gosh, reading again, maybe I should get out of the house more often? And then of course there's the internet. Apart from LJ, which for me is simultaneously a place to chat with other people and a source of good stories, I do spend some time reading . . . I dunno, the things you read on the net. All those things: political blog posts, newspapers you wouldn't have physical access to, Digg, Boing boing, Slashdot, um . . . stuff.

So yes, I do spend more time nowadays reading on the net. But I thought of that as an addition to my reading life, not something that had changed it. I still thought of myself as someone who sits around on long summer days with a novel in hand, slowly and steadily communing with a book. And of course (thought I) I do that with lots of novels, pro and fan, all the time.

Only, not. That wasn't happening, or at least it wasn't happening nearly as often as it used to do. Two things brought this change home to me. First, I saw several of you mentioning an LJ community called 50bookchallenge, dedicated, as the name suggests, to encouraging people to read fifty books a year. And I thought, the first few times I saw this: of course I don't need this community, because I read way more than fifty --

And then I stopped, and did a little review in my head of how many books -- particularly pro novels and novel-length fanfic -- I've read recently, and realized: my novel-reading? It's PLUNGED. I still read novels. But nothing like as many as I used to do.

The second thing that brought the change home: I got a Firefox extension that tracked for me my internet time, and reported exactly how many minutes a day I spent on the net, and where I spent it. The results, frankly, shocked me. I expected and found a lot of time on LJ and other fanfic-reading sites, which didn't bug me at all, because fanfic is one of the joys of my reading life. But what stunned me was just how much time I spent elsewhere. Five minutes here, nine minutes there -- and before you know it, the daily total? We're talking hours. Every day.

And since there are only so many hours in a day . . . well, you do the math. More political blogs. More quickie articles about how to make a bedspread out of gumwrappers. More adorable kittens on YouTube. That takes time -- a LOT more time than I thought it did. I still have work and family and friends and housekeeping, and those commitments can't be broken, so what's fallen by the wayside? Novels.

( Is this shift in a reader's time allocation a problem? According to Ursula K. LeGuin, yes. )

Are you a book person or a movie person? In the Tolkien fandom, that's a question that often leads to virulent arguments -- something I always try to avoid, because life is short, and in my old age my tolerance for wank has gone down from zero to less than zero. The book/movie argument is one I'm particularly eager to sit out, because I find myself, as I often do, cowering in an uncomfortable no-man's land somewhere between two sides. If there were a Kinsey scale for Tolkien media preferences as there is for sexual preferences, I'd probably come out solidly in the middle of it.

So call me a bimedia Tolkien fan. I swing both ways. Some of the changes in the movies I liked quite a lot (the changes to the Eowyn plot line so that Theoden recognizes her when he dies in her arms). Other changes weren't my cuppa (Denethor), but were not, at the end of the day, a deal-killer in films that showed me magnificent visual interpretations of scenes I'd dreamed about for years.

For that reason I squeed as loudly as a car alarm in a thunderstorm last night at the news that finally, FINALLY, Peter Jackson has settled his differences with New Line, and there's a Hobbit film -- two films! -- in the offing. For me this has the potential to be unambiguously good fannish news -- but that's not to say that I don't sympathize with the people who are a little nervous. On the whole, I have faith that PJ has the capacity to make a good movie out of this book - but I also think the Hobbit is in some ways even MORE challenging to adapt than The Lord of the Rings. Here's why. (Massive spoilers ahead for anyone who hasn't read The Hobbit.)

Challenge number one: All those dwarves: Bilbo leaves Bag End with thirteen -- count 'em, thirteen -- Dwarvish companions. To what extent will or should the films try to differentiate among them as individual characters?

In the books, I don't think that Tolkien tries to do this much. Let me hasten to exempt Thorin from this generalization. Thorin is a fascinating character, one who works, I think, as a dwarvish variation on Aragorn's plot arc in LotR. He's a true dwarvish hero who starts in poverty and aims to revive the fortunes of his people against overwhelming odds. He's interestingly flawed in particularly dwarvish ways: mistrustful of outsiders, a little too entranced by the works of dwarvish hands (for that's what treasure is in the dwarvish mind as opposed to Smaug's mind: a thing wrested from the earth and made beautiful).

The entire action of the narrative (as planned by Gandalf) challenges Thorin's preconceptions; he's forced to rely on an outsider, and to sacrifice the treasure that he'd always thought of as his heart's desire. As an adult reader I've thought the final scene between Bilbo and Thorin is one of the most touching things in all of Tolkien's work.

( So hurray for a complicated Thorin! But what about the rest of the Dwarves? )

(  Challenge number two: Explaining Gandalf's disappearance, and how this will affect the structure of the story )

( Challenge number three: should the Ring be the almost-innocent magic Ring of the Hobbit, or the dark, immensely powerful engine of destruction we know from LotR? )

True confession: I hate December. It's dark, where I live. The sun comes out about once every two weeks, looks around, thinks the better of it, and then goes away again. December's also cold, and very frequently icy/snowy/slushy/slishy/bone-breakingly slippery yech. And did I mention that it's dark?

At times like this I turn to comfort reading -- books, fics, movies, whatever that not only keep me entertained but make me feel better about the universe. There's a great example of this kind of reading in C.S. Lewis's Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Lucy has just learned something hurtful and she's understandably upset. Fortunately she happens to be reading a magician's spellbook, and the next thing she reads is a spell "for the refreshment of spirit." Lewis's description of it always makes me smile, because it captures so perfectly what reading your favorite book is like:

"Before she had read to the bottom of the page she had forgotten that she was reading at all. She was living in the story as if it were real, and all the pictures were real too. When she had got to the third page and come to the end, she said, "That is the loveliest story I've ever read or ever shall read in my whole life. Oh, I wish I could have gone on reading it for ten years. At least I'll read it over again."

Unfortunately Lucy finds the magic spellbook can't be reread -- but we're luckier than she is, and can reread our favorite anti-December books whenever we want.

What makes for a good anti-December book? Many of you gave me a good idea last week: in comments on a post about books that revolve around hatred, you pointed out that many books include characters who feel hate at one time or another but who eventually, as hyel put it, find themselves "letting go of pain and anger." These are NOT little-goody-two-shoes stories that pretend we don't have problems or don't feel rage. These are books, instead, that are explicitly ABOUT what Lewis called "the refreshment of spirit." That means the characters often are very angry at the beginning -- or sometimes, and this is even more interesting, they're just bored -- bored in that deadly way that's a prelude to depression, to that dark, Decembery condition where everything looks gray and blank because you just can't see the universe any more.

These books, stories, and movies understand the dark December of the mind -- understand it, and show people who learn to extract themselves from it and see again. A lot of you gave me suggestions about books/movies/fics like that in my post last week, and then I thought of a few more. I thought I'd make a list. Here they are, in no particular order: anti-December stories. I'd love it if you could tell me about any more that spring (so to speak) to mind.

( Beneath the cut: books and stories by Norman Juster, Neil Gaiman, C.S. Lewis, Terry Pratchett, Dorothy Sayers, Ursula K. Leguin; movies by Miyazaki and others )

What makes for a page-turning story? What's the engine that makes a narrative speed along like The Little Engine that Could? I've got a suggestion, one that I think works for at least some stories: hatred. You start out by drumming up a little hatred in your readers for the protagonist's enemies (like every single Harry Potter book does with the Dursleys and with the Magical Enemy du Jour -- Draco, Gilderoy Lockhart, Umbridge, Voldemort). Then let the hated villains torment the protagonist for a while, so the energy of readers' hatred builds and builds and builds. Then, when readers can't stand the strain any longer, BOOM, ZAP, BANG -- punish those enemies! Kill them off (Voldemort), or, if you're really sophisticated, let them live, humiliated (Umbridge), defanged (Lockhart), or continually forced to acknowledge the protagonist's supreme good fortune and general all-around coolness (Draco).

Oh, yeah. It may be politically incorrect to say so, but this splenetic plot line seems to underlie a lot of stories. J.K. Rowling has a black belt in the Literature of Tooth-Grinding Resentment, but she certainly didn't invent it. Think of Cinderella triumphing over her step-sisters (in the original version, the sisters have to dance in red-hot shoes until they die). Think of the Death Star blowing up at the end of the first Star Wars. Back in the olden days the theater erupted in cheers when that happened, despite the fact that yeah, the Death Star had a lot of people on board. But those were the bad guys, and the movie had just spent a lot of time teaching us to hate them. So: watching those pestilential scum flame out to their death? Oh, yeah. It felt GOOD. Zap! Bang! Yum.

True, some hated villains get to be redeemed (Darth Vadar, Snape). They also get to be conveniently dead. What a sad coincidence.

I've been thinking about this question a lot recently because I've just finished rereading a story that tries to do without hatred as much as possible. There are villains, sure, but not very many of them by Harry Potter/ Brothers Grimm standards, and the hero's life is remarkably -- almost eerily -- free from conflict. Harry Potter hates hates hates HATES his family; this kid loves his and gets on with them remarkably well. Harry Potter wants nothing more than to escape into a realm of magic entirely separate from the sad pedestrian world where he grew up. This kid also has magic thrust upon him, but right at home, which he has no desire to leave. This kid doesn't escape on a train to an isolated magical school; instead, the world shimmers, and the dearly loved landscape of home reveals previously hidden depths. It's strange and marvelous and sometimes terrifying -- but it's still home, and worth protecting for that reason.

Okay, well and good. Maybe there are stories about hatred and stories about love, yay! Only, not quite yay, and here's why. Harry Potter, the series, is wildly popular. This other book is loved by many, but is much, much less popular. In a recent attempt to make it into a movie, it was seen as so inherently defective that just about everything I've just said about it was changed.

I'm referring to Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising, and for me, its relative obscurity raises a disturbing question: is it true that stories that depend on hatred just work better for more people? ( Do stories need that nasty little explosion of oh-fuck-you at the beginning to get the action going?  )

Do you throw out books? Let me hasten to say what I mean by "throw out" here: recycle, in the case of books that you've destroyed with aggressive reading (broken the spine, written indignant notes in the margins, etc.), or sell to a used book store, or palm off on your hapless friends/relatives/students, or give away to an appropriate hospital etc. etc. etc. So I guess my real question is this: are you a book hoarder -- someone who keeps forever the vast majority of the books she buys -- or a book selector -- someone who keeps some of her books but gets rid of a pretty good portion of them sooner or later? When you buy a book, is it marriage, or is it just a getting-to-know-you date?

I ask because I'm a natural book hoarder who is trying to become a book selector. My book-hoard had taken over my living space, and that wasn't working for me psychologically. I can't have my living space turn into a cave where I curl, Smaug-like, on top of my hoard of books, emerging only to kill sheep and destroy the occasional village. The fact is that while literature is my life and soul and being, I need space too -- need, as in a psychological need for light and air and a general sense of openness. More pragmatically, I need to be able to find the floor. I need to be able to find the cats. I need to be able to find my tax forms from 2003. In an apartment crowded top to bottom with books, vital records have a habit of disappearing, along with the cats, houseguests, and most of my flatware.

So book-culling has to happen once in a while. Unfortunately, I find culling to be about as easy as deciding which kitten to murder (no, I haven't ever done that, really: culling books is bad enough). See, a book-hoard is, yes, a problem. But you can't magically wave a wand and reduce your book-hoard by a third. (Well, I suppose you could hire someone to vandalize your apartment, but I haven't reached that stage of desperation yet.) No, you have to decide which books to cull ONE AT A TIME, and that means encountering each book in all its individual blamelessness -- for it's not the book's fault that it constitutes part of a hoard. You have to look the book in the eye (and yes, you'll find that books suddenly seem to develop eyes when you confront them in this way), and say: "sorry, you are just NOT GOOD ENOUGH to occupy my space, and no matter how much you pout, I am exiling you to bargain bin at a used bookstore."

Oh, the agony. ( How can you make this decision? )

So, how do like your villains? That is, how evil (or not evil) should they be to make for a good story? Do you prefer vast impersonal forces of doom (like the distant, unutterably alien forces in HP Lovecraft)? Or do you like your villains to be flawed, misguided creatures who have at least the potential for some kind of redemption, even if they never get there (Gollum in Tolkien, and maybe now Snape in HP)?

Maybe this is a question that only comes up in fantasy, science fiction, and supernaturally-based horror. In everything else, your villains are human, and there are no malign supernatural influences to make them stop being human. In fantasy and sf this won't necessarily be the case. In these stories we can imagine humans confronting beings totally unlike ourselves. Cybernetic beings with no individuality, like the Borg in Star Trek, or the Daleks in Doctor Who. Supernatural forces that are by nature malign and have nothing in common with humans, like demons. Creatures that see humans as their natural prey, like the Wraith in SGA.

And that's cool, in a way, though there are a lot of people who don't appreciate that and who therefore don't like science fiction and fantasy. One argument against fantasy as a genre is that it allows us (hostile critics say) to indulge in sloppy moral thinking. If you start thinking about other human beings as purely villainous, the argument goes, you're oversimplifying other people, treating them like things. If you demonize other people you're more likely to make bad ethical decisions. Thinking about vast uncaring forces doesn't help you deal with ordinary living, where most of the conflicts we face have to do with people who have problems rather like our own.

So, okay, yes -- but fantasy and sf, when they go into their Vast Uncaring Forces mode, can help us consider the possibility that there may be stuff out there in the universe that really, truly, does not care about us at all. Are human values the same thing as the universe's values? Are human beings, erm, a good idea? From whose vantage point?

Vast impersonal villains can help us think about that kind of dizzying question. It's kind of funny, then, that fantasy and sf use them so rarely -- and when they do, the stories often undergo a process of reverse demonization -- of humanization. I've come to call this process the Borg Progression, after the Star Trek villains of the same name. Every single villain I named in the list above has undergone some form of the Borg Progression.

( In the Borg Progression, even the scariest of villains slowly becomes warm and fuzzy, and I'm wondering whether that is or isn't a good idea. )

So, I spent far too much time watching SPN eps last night, and am left with the following questions:

Who is cuter, Sam or Dean? (Just ignore that, it's a senseless question, like trying to choose between breathing in and breathing out.)

1. With all that traveling, do Sam and Dean ever eat at a McDonalds (or some other recognizable fast food chain)?

2. With all that traveling, do Sam and Dean ever stay at a major hotel/motel chain?

3. With all that traveling, do Sam and Dean ever drive on a major six-lane superhighway? I do a lot of driving (bad experience in a plane, ugh), and if you want to get across the country fast, that is the way to do it. Avoiding the cops? Back roads aren't the answer. Two words: speed traps.

4. In the crappy back-road motels where Sam and Dean usually do seem to stay, how on God's green earth do they always seem to get reliable, fast internet access? I mean really. Europeans will be amused to hear this, but you can't even get fast internet access reliably at fancy hotels in this country, and when you can, you have to pay for it with your first-born child, a lien on your future earnings, and sexual favors best left unspecified.

Okay, I guess there's one pragmatic answer to most of these questions. Sam and Dean don't stay at a Red Roof Inn or eat at McDonalds because that would get the show all caught up in product placement, and maybe the show's producers don't want to do this. And (ETA!) yes, yes, they're filming in Canada, but why show small local places rather than big generic ones?

This interests me because there's a cultural effect of leaving out the superhighways and the big chain motels and restaurants. The other star in Supernatural -- besides Sam, Dean, and the Impala -- is America, and it's an America that I both do and don't recognize. Supernatural is a show about places: about demons and ghosts and memories that haunt particular localities and make them unique. So I guess it makes sense that the America you see on the show simulates an America that's rapidly disappearing -- an America where places are, in fact, still unique. That's an America without Walmart. It's an America where every town has its own identity: its own stores, its own funky bars, its own funky motels. It's not the generic Mall America where most of us actually live and work and travel. It's Eat At Joes rather than The Olive Garden or Benigans.

And yet mysteriously these crappy local motels have the internet. My guess is that the target demographic for the show usually stays at big hotel/motel chains that do provide net access (sort of). The kids in the target demographic can't imagine life without the net, so there it is.

It's funny. This show is nostalgic. It's not just the music that's twenty or thirty years out of date. It's the whole damn thing. The America in Supernatural is its way just as much of a culturally conservative fantasy as the England in HP. I wonder why so much fantasy/sf turns out to be like that?