Fiction Rule of Thumb

"Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."

Don't let fantasy fans see this one…!

Well, remember that the curve approaches but doesn't touch zero. So while it may be improbable that a novel with a gazillion made up words is good, it's possible.

So Tolkien is covered.

Anyway, in the LOTR and the Hobbit Tolkien generally doesn't make up words, except for place names (Mordor, Gondor, etc.) and of course people names. There's a few beasties he makes up (orcs, hobbits) but largely his world is constructed with English words that most everyone knows.

It's the BAD fantasy novels (and Lord knows they are legion) that make up words by the boatload.

It should be noted that on the actual XKCD site the mouseover text exempts Lewis Carroll and Tolkien.

Like Picasso, who was trained in classical technique, you have to understand the tradition to tweak it or even turn it on its head. Same thing goes for language. You have to understand the real ones first before you can make up your own. Also, this making up of words for its own sake (which is what I think Stampdog is talking about here) reminds me of Coleridge's distinction between "fancy" and "imagination." For Tolkien and Carroll this activity was an integral part of an imaginative whole, whereas in bad writing it is just "fanciful" window dressing to dress up a thin work to "look like" it actually has some imaginative weight.

It's true across the art forms that busting the rules only works after you have shown that you understand why the old rules were ever formed. This has not only been the case recently but in earlier epochs of art. Beethoven had to master the forms established by Haydn before he could innovate with them. Debussy mastered the post-Romantic idiom and post-Wagnerian style of the time before rejecting it. It's a common and often dangerously oversimplified complaint about modern arts that they don't know what rules they are breaking but there is something to it. What some of the more pious cranks don't always appreciate is that some of the farthest out in, say, the musical avant garde, came from the Orthodox and Catholic traditions (e.g. Webern, Messiaen, Stravinsky, Penderecki). Penderecki could employ all the harshest devices in the musical avant garde and have it make sense because he used it to narrate the passion of Christ–the breaking of the musical rules at every level worked because he was not breaking any narrative arc depicting the depths of suffering Christ endured for our sake. Confronting the depth of our capacity to harm each other is why Bach's Matthew Passion and Penderecki's Luke Passion are both worth regularly revisiting.

Jeff, I vaguely remember that South Park episode but it's a dim memory compared to Woodland Critter Christmas.