One of the themes of The Quiet One is the power of culture. Another theme is communication in a city with millions of people speaking millions of different languages.

So far, as the treatment in progress currently stands, I’ll be developing five alien languages – the one belonging to the main character will be fairly fleshed out, the rest only need to hold for a few lines of dialogue each.

There’s also two writing systems to design. One of the writing systems – the main one in the universe, the one everyone understands which acts as a visual interlanguage – is ideographic. It is a writing system with no actual spoken counterpart, similar to something like Blissymbolics. The other writing system is an abugida which is used by the main character for making notes.

It seemed like the best way to start designing the abugida was to just sit down with a pen and draw characters randomly and see what I liked. This quickly became a test of willpower and self-control because I kept overthinking it and silently stressing out about it: What if I draw a kanji character? What if I draw something I don’t like? What if I draw something that doesn’t fit with the rest of the characters I’ve drawn?

What if. What if. Fear doesn’t quit, even when you’re just writing random cool squiggles down on a piece of paper.

Eventually, I happened upon a working rhythm: I drew a line of characters, sometimes keeping to a constraint (only three strokes allowed, only two strokes and two dots allowed), and once the line was done I let myself have an onion ring or a swig of ginger beer. Then i drew the next line. Once I was done I had 237 more springboards for further investigation.

Most of the time I was drawing these little experimental graphemes I could feel my inner critic fighting, trying to take control, trying to shut down the drawing part and say no you’re doing it wrong stop it you drew that already waaaah just stop and look at it just stop. It was difficult to let go of that tension and say look just shut up and let me draw whatever comes out and I’ll let you pick the ones you like afterwards jesus you’re a pain in the arse leave me alone you intolerable backseat driving wanker.

Such is creativity: make all the things fearlessly, then critically separate out the good bits to develop them further.

I don’t know what he’s afraid of, that inner critic. Maybe he just doesn’t like the idea of doing stuff in passes – I guess that’s partly down to sheer laziness and impatience. I don’t know. But I’ll keep fighting the good fight. I’ll have to if I ever want to get this done.

That said, I probably shouldn’t be jumping the gun into developing the languages while the treatment is still being written… or at least, now that my curiosity is mostly satisfied, I should go back to writing the treatment. 🙂

Also isn’t abugida a great word? I think so.