In fact, this is happening all the time in language use: the rise of comput-
erisation, for example, has produced considerable linguistic change. Look
at the way we talk about accessin g files—it’s a new usage which has arisen
with the widespread impact of computers.
Other ways of making up your own language can be found in Chapter 8.
Topography and location
You might want to think about the topography of this new world, its
layout and its geography. Does it have roads or routes, volcanoes, craters,
buildings and so on? How would you map it? It may help to build up a
sense of how things look, smell, feel and sound in the world.
How detailed your descriptions of the place are, and what form they
take, will depend on your objectives. You may want to create a concrete
impression of a place, or alternatively construct a more dreamlike atmos-
phere for it. Or you may want to mediate between the two possibilities as
the Italian writer Italo Calvino does. In his Invisible Cities , locations are
created which are allegories for desire and memory.
The section ‘Cities and Memories’ is about a fictitious place called Isidora:
Example 7.7
When a man rides a long time through the wild regions he feels
the desire for a city. Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where the
buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where
perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner
hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where
cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the bettors.
He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora,
therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference.
The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at
Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old
men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them.
Desires are already memories.From Invisible Cities (Calvino 1978, p. 8)Isidora is not a ‘real’ place: it is a city which is an allegory for desire. It sug-
gests that fulfilment lags behind desire itself. The descriptions of the
staircases, telescopes and violins are visual and sensory, but do not give us
an integrated, detailed or normalised impression of a place. The descrip-
tion therefore has a double effect: it seems both a physical reality, and also
‘the city of his dreams’.
152 The Writing Experiment