Shouts From Down Under

Who's taking a pot shot at improvement tweaks?

How genuine do you write it? To what extent do you go to ensure you have authenticity and correctness in your plot? What makes believable dialogue, terminology and atmosphere? Who do you trust for the right colloquial expressions, native slang, "local" aliases, indigenous definition?



Tonight, someone who has been to Uluru, here in Australia, said that it isn't until you are there, standing looking up at it that you understand the sheer size of it. Maybe when we create a world, peopled with folks out of our imagination and doing things that go beyond normal everyday mediocre life, we as authors don't quite get what it's like for the reader. We don't fully understand that they are standing (or sitting) in front of the world we built, and they see the sheer size of it, only then. But to us authors, we've only seen it in tiny bits. By the time we've written it, rewritten it and edited the toolbox out of it, re-crunched every bit a hundred times squared, then we've lost any fresh approach, any big picture view, any first time reading experience of our work.

Moving on to a detail in my current work in progress. I have had to research a tiny detail to find one word. So I decided to write a blog entry about it.

What was a slang term among potheads for marijuana around 2000-2005 in Australia?

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pot

Pot has several Australian slang meanings:

1. (noun) - marijuana. There are already a million definitions here, but it is worth mentioning that pot is considered a bit old-fashioned these days. Your old man would call it pot or grass. More commonly called weed, dope, hash by most.
2. (noun) a toilet, and really only used in the phrase in the example below, meaning to hurry up and do something or bugger off, as long as you get out of the way.
3. (noun) the standard sized beer glass used in pubs in the state of Victoria. Holds 10oz or 285mL.
4. (noun) a cylinder in a car engine, usually preceded by the number.
5. (verb) to score a goal in football. Snag is another. Probably stolen from snooker.

1. Are you kids smoking pot in there???
2. Either crap or get off the pot.
3. I sank 15 pots at the pub last night.
4. I don't know what Holden were thinking when they put an eight-pot donk in a Torana.
5. Paul Chapman potted 4 goals for the Cats today.

Excerpt- Chapter 8 - Control Freak, The Influence Gene

Yuri seemed oblivious to the riveted attention of his educator, and his brush kept dipping into the blood red, white, and black blobs of acrylic sitting like limp coiled cat’s turds dotted around the plastic throwaway food container lids Mr. Brown liked to use for palettes.
The #2 bristles liberally coated patches with a rhythmic scratching noise on the stiff unsealed paper in apparently unplanned strokes that looked somehow like knife slashes in flesh. They seemed to flash like a forensic examiner’s camera recording a multiple homicide, until Mr. Brown felt the slashes on his own body through his thick alpaca pullover, its homespun organic appearance suddenly punctured to show his pale chest being stabbed and stabbed and stabbed and…
Mr. Brown finally cleared his throat and remembered to breath, his heart still thumping. He turned away before he said something really stupid, and then he mumbled to the students about feeling unwell. While he could still see clearly, he walked quickly out of the classroom and aimed for the closest amenities block. His head felt like it would burst.
He returned without explanation twenty minutes later, having lost his lunch and wondering if he’d been sold a bad batch of recreational. Damn hormonal insecticides and carcinogenic crop sprays!

It seems that nobody calls marijuana "recreational". That was a term I plucked from my head that seemed to fit. My daughter pointed out that a word, though small, can make all the difference in a story, the difference between a researched plausible and believable plot, and a sham, a fake, an obvious concocted failure.

I mean, there is the impostor syndrome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome) but there is also lazy, hasty, incompetent corner cutting.

My writing combines all of these things. My aim is to improve things, to build authentic worlds with real people who say timely, meaningful and relevant stuff, who have conversations that propel the reader further into immersion, saturated with being there, enveloped in escapism.

After all, that's why we read isn't it? Escape from whatever it is holding us in misery. At least for a short, enjoyable interval.

https://www.420magazine.com/forums/general-420-talk/35062-aussie-marijuana-slang...

"dealer-my supplier
bong-what i smoke out of
cone piece-like a bowl only metal and smaller. its cone shaped
cone-a hit
pot-what i call weed most of the time
yandi-marijuana only used when talking about plants
gone to get on-gone to get pot
green out-pass out from too much pot
light weight-person who cant handle much can also refer to alcohol tolerance
orchy bottle-homemade bong since, in my town atleast, most are made from orchy bottles as they are a good size with wide top.
sesh -session of smoking pot
stick -a gram, what most ppl buy but u can get more
3 for 5, fitty -3 grams at $50, only done if u have a nice dealer
quart -1/4 ounce
smoko -smoking pot, a smoko to non smokers is a short break at work so i reakon this came from ppl smokin during their smoko cause only older ppl tend to say it
stoking -scraping out the cone peice as it sometimes gets blocked
dero -ppl who smoke pot and do nothing with their lives like losers"

What if your characters need to eat? Need to do stuff people do every day. All those things that give our story inhabitants a plasma to live upon, give them a medium with which to go about the activities in the story that matter, to conflict, to converse, to co-exist, to consist of.

In the tiny experience I have had with writing, there are a few things, lessons, I have learned. You can make your protags and antags and tag-alongs too real. Too good. Too perfect. Too messed up. Too ordinary. Too writerish.

But we can worry too much as well. Sometimes anxiety can be paralysing. I'm experiencing that with my work life at the moment. If someone asks me what it is that prevents me from doing my duties, I can hardly define it, cannot speak convincingly of any particular feature that obstructs me physically, or mentally. Yet it is there as surely as Mount Everest.

Someone recently told me to stop feeling guilty at myself. To stop feeding my energy into a "guilt motor" that doesn't do anything for anyone, least of all myself. I need to grasp that everyone is like a battery. By the end of the day, we are drained. Whatever it is we do. And every person eventually, MUST, be recharged somehow.

Nobody is bullet proof, or Chuck Norris tough forever. And the ailments, the opposition, the debilitating FEAR soaking into our waking minds, hours, can be so invisible that people don't understand how big the problem is. A bit like Uluru (Ayre's Rock).

Life isn't simple, mostly, usually, sometimes, whenever, possibly, if ever.

Our writing is extending into a future. Will we foresee things and invent something that is not yet imagined, nor possible now?

The reader doesn't care. They just want to enjoy their coffee, or Milo, warm their wriggling toes in front of their glowing wood heater, hear the wind rattle the window panes, the rain shhhhhing on the tin roof, and fall in love with something you've written.

When you write, the reader will know it's authentic if they feel themselves there, with you. But you'll be invisible. And that is how it is here right now. The heater is glowing. The wind is gale force, and the rain is tumbling down onto a corrugated iron roof. It's easier to describe things if we are there. For the rest, we need research, and wisdom. And to use our brains.

Sparky