Style Blog #2: Lavender Unicorn Syndrome · 3:45am Mar 7th, 2014
"Lavender unicorn."
"Cyan pegasus."
"Grouchy editor."
These are all "descriptors"—phrases that describe and identify something, usually a character. To distinguish between descriptors of inanimate objects and characters, I'm just going to (probably inaccurately) use "title" for what I'm talking about. Abuse of these phrases is, unfortunately, a bit of a trope in ponyfic, where characters can be quickly identified with a color and race. This is what people mean when they talk about "Lavender Unicorn Syndrome," or LUS.
At its most basic, LUS is describing a character when using their name would be more appropriate. This is problematic for a number of reasons. Let's start with a simple example.
Rainbow Dash flew east.
(Yes, this is a reference to whatever the heck that story is. How that passes for a description is beyond me.)
It's a nice sentence as far as it goes. So let's look at another sentence that accomplishes the same thing and gives us background information!
The impulsive cyan pegasus who wanted to be a Wonderbolt but was too loyal flew east.
This is obviously a complete mess. There's way too much going on. Let's pare it down some.
The cyan pegasus flew east.
While it's certainly more readable than the unholy mess I tossed up in my previous example, it still suffers from essentially the same problem as the previous sentence: we know already. This introduces information that we’re well-acquainted with. Don’t tell us things we already know. Tell us new things.
Here’s another potential problem with that sentence: it introduces confusion. There could be other cyan pegasi. I think Soarin’s kind of cyan. It could conceivably be him. If you mean Dash, say Dash—with some exceptions.
The first is pretty straightforward style stuff. If every sentence in a paragraph involves Dash in some way, it’ll look really weird.
Dash came in for a low pass over the dragon, wings barely flapping as Dash used the thermals wafting up from the volcanic plain below Dash. Dash gritted her teeth. This wasn’t going to be easy for Dash.
In that case, you should, as a first step, replace most of the proper nouns with pronouns. So Dash would become “her” or “she,” of course. I prefer to put that at the beginning of the paragraph so that the reader knows who’s doing what as soon as possible.
Dash came in for a low pass over the dragon, wings barely flapping as she used the thermals wafting up from the volcanic plain below her. She gritted her teeth. This wasn’t going to be easy for her.
I’m not entirely happy with that last sentence still (“for her” could probably be cut), but I think we’ll all agree it reads much better than the first draft. Pronouns are your friends. Use them. Of course, it’s possible to overuse pronouns as well. My rule of thumb is that it should (almost) always be obvious who’s doing what. You should have a name per paragraph at least.
But that “almost” brings up a perfectly legitimate point, which is that the reader doesn’t always get to know who’s doing what. The most basic reason for this is that the point of view character doesn’t know the character’s name yet. If that’s the case, you should absolutely use titles instead of their name. In that case, you should be using titles basically the same way as you’d use names. Let’s look at an example.
Sure, I thought. Just another disgruntled customer? Really? I cowered behind the counter and waited for the end. It never came. Instead, the purple glow of her magic enveloped a jar of coffee beans in front of me. I waited for a moment, not making a sound. There was a loud crunching noise that lasted for several minutes—the purple alicorn was eating the coffee straight out of the jar. There was a deafening noise that sounded something like “Your princess thanks you for her morning nourishment,” and then I knew no more.
Wow. That was surprisingly involved. Anyhow, the point of view character in this case had no idea what was going on, including who it was that had visited the apocalypse upon the hapless coffee shop. Of course you’d use a title instead of “Twilight”. Using her name would break the point of view.
I don’t really know what this is, but for the purposes of this post, assume it’s what happens to your story when you break the point of view.
The other reason you can use them is when you have a specific purpose in mind, something you want to emphasize. These can be (when handled properly) a good way to handle some limited exposition. Here’s an example.
“I am a servant of the secret fire, Wielder of the Flame of Anor. The dark fire will not avail you, Flame of Udun!”
I’m fudging this a little, since this is dialogue, but here’s the point. This has a very specific set of purposes: to make Gandalf look badass as hell while simultaneously establishing how metal the Balrog is. The Descendant does this sort of thing with Celestia reasonably often if you’re dying for a pony example.
Now, while this doesn’t have to be for the purposes of making your characters look awesome. That, in fact, stands a reasonably high chance of blowing up in your face. No random guy telling me that the character is awesome is even remotely as plausible as you showing me the character doing awesome things.
Yes, I really do mean it, Rainbow Dash.
Use titles deliberately. Have a purpose in mind when you use them, and don’t waste the effect with needless repetition.
Discuss how and why I’m wrong below, or suggest topics for future blogs.
This topic was suggested by Nightwolf289.
You pretty much covered what I was thinking about. I don't like needlessly stating facts that everyone knows, but I have used it when introducing new information. For instance:
So would you call that good usage, or do you think it's unnecessary?
1904063 good to introducing new or not very often seen characters
1904063 and starting with new characters that meet old characters
1904063
That's a good use, yes.
1904153
Good, good. Nice to know that I know what I'm talking about.
Next topic suggestions:
Said-bookism--
Personally, I kind of like using a said tag with almost every line, but recently, someone brought to my attention that that wasn't the way to go. On the other hand, I have seen a story where the author used more than half of the dialogue without a said tag. That was weird and slightly hard to follow--to me at least, I could be just crazy like that. I would like to know where you think it is appropriate to avoid or embrace said-bookism
Extra content in literature--
I don't like hyperlinking webpages, music, or pictures anywhere in my stories. I don't like the immersion breaking that happens when I see a picture or have to click on a link to read about what an author is talking about. (The exceptions being chapter titles with/for pictures, and authors notes for everything else. I don't mind a picture before I start reading or whatever the author has to say after.) However, other people do not share this opinion and think that one shouldn't shy away from linking extra content in the middle of the story. When is--or is--it a good idea?
Writing accents--
Pret'y self-'splaintory. When's it good 'n all, 'n when's it not? Some people be saying not to do it, but others be doing it 'n stuff. And some ol' time authors done it so much that ah coldn't be bothered to read it anymores. Made muh brain hurts. Thoughts you be thunking?
1904274
Never a good idea. Never. Never never never never. Ever. You are 100% right.
1904524
I have very rarely seen uses of this that seemed to work for me – in cases where it was for the purposes of asides, similar to the use of footnotes by Pratchett, etc.
But far, far more often I see old stories where the links are broken, or where it's a pointless waste of time. And 99% of the time an author links a song, I find it to be distracting and taking away from the experience. Music is way too subjective to use in a medium like prose where the reader is building their own interpretation of the story's texture.
1904524
v.cdn.vine.co/r/avatars/558F531631995187850922573824_1034c4644d4.3.4_yLxI3786eVYDO0gY8zq_z2IT9zk11r0Nux4UpICuDuL00Qb2SipRP6I4TNQAW00C.jpg?versionId=YMWE6qPCB6DkIZU_JxFxBcKmYGl3IwRJ
Finally. Someone understands!
1904980
I have seen one place where a picture worked. Only one.
Read chapters one and "two".