(Part 1 can be read here)
(Part 2 can be read here)
Long-distance communication is an important topic for writers to grasp. Stories are moved by conflict, and most of that conflict—from grudges to international political rivalries—are interpersonal. What’s more, those conflicts aren’t always going to be in the same locale. So, if a writer hopes to tell varied, interesting, or large-scale stories, then long-distance communication will eventually make an appearance.
To that end, we’ve been exploring the theory behind long-distance communication in the pre-electronic and pre-digital age, focusing on:
- What kinds of messages can be sent,
- Who might send them,
- And how the needs, environments, and resources of the people using them affect their development and adoption.
I know I’ve said this twice, already, but let’s say it again: any discussion of communication has to start by breaking communications technology up by the complexity of the messages it sends. Complexity determines how the message can be sent, how the environment can be surmounted, and, thus, who can use this technology. As such, it serves as our starting point. We separated long-distance communication into three categories:
- Binary and pre-arranged signals, which are limited but easy to use
- Simple and coded communication, which is more flexible but complicated and restricted to certain people
- Complex, nuanced messaging, which has all the flexibility of regular written or spoken language
Our first article covered binary and pre-arranged signals, and the second explored simple and coded communication. However, when most writers think about long-distance communication, they’re thinking about complex, nuanced messaging. It’s the kind that best captures the subtlety of human conflict and the complexity of our relationships. Political treatises, love letters, and the entirety of the literary field falls under its purview, which may explain why writers tend to focus on it, perhaps too much.
In this, the final article in this series, we’ll be talking about complex, nuanced messaging, starting by refining the line between it and simple/coded communication.
A Nuanced Discussion of Nuance
In the previous article, we mentioned the West African “talking drum,” which might be the coolest thing I’ve ever had the pleasure to research. To recap; drummers could manipulate the pitch of the talking drum to produce a workable facsimile of human language and relay messages at hundreds of miles an hour. While that sort of long-distance work was usually utilitarian, the talking drum was also capable of being used for storytelling, poetry, and its own varied forms of “oral” literature.
That, of course, means that the talking drum is capable of both simple and complex communication. I mentioned in the first article in this series that the lines between these categories aren’t hard and fast. Rather, some forms of communication can jump around depending upon the ingenuity of the user, the message being sent, and the environment.
Which is a good segue to an important question: where’s the line? How do we know—especially when it’s being sent through the same medium—when a message moves from one category to the other? What separates complex, nuanced messaging from its simpler cousin?
I would argue that it’s that “nuanced” bit. To fall into this category, the messages being sent must be able to reasonably convey ideas with depth and detail roughly equivalent to spoken language. This can include emotional content, complex ideas and agreements, or long-form arguments. To do that, they require an incredibly well-managed and well-understood system of communication, which is limited mostly to written language and advanced use of devices like the talking drum. On top of that, these messages are often longer in order to maintain the depth and nuance of spoken language and human ideas. This means that, up until electricity and the digital age, there weren’t many technologies in place that could manage this level of complexity. Those sorts of complex messages either had to be carried by an oral messenger or written down and delivered.
Bookkeeping + Time – Math = Literature
So, let’s give a brief, absurdly simplified overview of the development of writing. Generally speaking, writing originated as a means of record-keeping. Bureaucrats or merchants would get to a point where they were handling too many goods and would start carving symbols on stone or clay, or tying them into knots or embroidering them in cloth or… well, there were a lot of ways to do it. Anyway, certain symbols would refer to numbers, items, people, or sounds. The longer this went on, the more standardized it became. Eventually, this standardization evolved until the system of record-keeping brought in verbs, adjectives, and other forms of sentence structure. Then, before you knew it (or, you know, five generations after you died), you got a writing system that captured the depth and nuance of spoken language or, sometimes, brought in their own levels of specificity or complexity that gave them advantages over the spoken word.
Before we move on, I want to remind you: writing systems don’t have to be singular written alphabets on paper. Japanese, for example, uses three different scripts; two are syllabic (Katakana and Hiragana: representative of specific syllables, one for “foreign” words and one for Japanese words), while the other is logographic (Kanji: representative of words or morphemes). Single symbols in that logographic script, by the way, can have multiple phonetic readings. As a result, the Japanese written language has an insane amount of depth and flexibility, sometimes more so than its spoken counterpart. And if you want to go way into left field, Charles C. Mann posits that the Inka (to use his spelling) had a “writing” system based around knots and threads called the khipu or quipu [1]… which would make a lot of sense, given that those were complex societies in an environment that wouldn’t have been friendly to stone or paper writing.
See, while environment and history are important in the development of other forms of communication, they’re especially impactful on complex communication. Japanese writing is the result of a constant cycle of isolation and aggressive internationalism [2] and could be said to represent a stark cultural differentiation between “Japanese” and “foreign.” And the khipu used by the Inka could be the result of living a place with better fiber resources than, say, stone or paper… or just a different technological focus that they straight-up lucked into. Hell, their cloth armor beat the dogshit out of European steel armor to the point that some Spanish conquistadors ditched their steel armor in favor of cloth [1]. When coming up with writing systems for your cultures, pay close attention to their surroundings and history, and keep your mind open.
But, regardless of what kind of writing system is developed, long-distance complex communication in the pre-electronic and pre-digital age had one major restriction: it had to be delivered. These were long-from messages meant to convey the full breadth of the spoken word and, thus, couldn’t be “reduced” and sped along like simple messages. As a result, there were only two options: tell the message to a “runner” who would zip to his destination and relay it, or “write” it down, hand it off, and have it delivered.
Horses, Legs, and Roads
That delivery is, with a few exceptions, tied directly to human transport. The speed at which a message could be delivered was largely determined by how fast humans could get themselves from one place to another.
Again, we find that terrain and environment have a huge effect on long-distance communication. Someone delivering a message through temperate plains on horseback is going to have a much easier time than someone traveling through a desert by camel, or through jungles and mountains on foot. More importantly, the environment directly affects the transport and delivery methods available to you. Not every environment has transport animals, and even those that do might be bordered by areas the animals can’t traverse. Spanish conquistadors, for example, were hobbled by the South American terrain, despite the presence of well-made roads that worked perfectly fine for the South American peoples [1]. Why? Because those roads were vertical. Llamas and the like could handle them without a problem, but Spanish horses couldn’t, and apparently the conquistadors’ constant bitching didn’t solve the problem. Big surprise, right?
Likewise, the presence of rivers, waterways, and snow could increase or hobble message delivery depending upon the transportation technology available to you. A canoe could zip downstream, a steam-powered barge could plow upstream, and a team of sled-dogs could whisk a message across a snowy landscape. But, without some way to make use of the environment, those obstacles could be as good as hundred-foot-high walls.
Which brings us to another variable: established lines of communication. The best thing about written communication is that anyone can deliver it. This means that, assuming you have the money, you can pay to have the message slipped from hand to hand until it reaches its destination. In fact, this is usually faster (if less reliable) than entrusting the message to a single courier who will eventually have to rest. In worlds with interconnected economies and lines of commerce, it’s easy enough to rely on those pathways to get the message from point A to point B… and that’s if they don’t have a dedicated postal service that handles this in the first place.
Some animals can also be trained enough to carry messages over great distances. Homing pigeons are a well-known example that dates back more than 2000 years. They were carried away from home to another location in cages and when a message needed to be sent, it would be attached to them, they’d be released, and would promptly fly home with the message attached. It could even be possible to train smarter animals for more complex deliveries. Ravens, for example, are extremely intelligent, and George R.R. Martin used them to great effect. That’s to say nothing of animals created specifically for your own world.
Delivery across a city opens up quirkier options. Pneumatic tubes, while never used on a city-wide level, use air pressure to shuttle messages very quickly from one place to another. If you’re building your own world, you could think of similar systems using water, air, or gravity. In this case, I encourage you to be creative, but to make sure you know why such a system was put in place and how they pulled it off.
There’s a pattern, here: the more organized, interconnected, and wide-spread the societies in your world are, the more likely they are to have fast, effective methods of message delivery that overcome or even utilize the idiosyncrasies of their environment, and the more likely they are to be available for the general public.
Who Can Read This?
With the how established, now we need to handle the who and why. One of the greatest benefits of complex communication is that it can be used casually and by a general public… assuming that public is educated, of course.
Literacy was uncommon until the modern age. In fact, even as recent as 1950, only about half the world was literate. Most people don’t learn to read or write unless they have a need to do so or the luxury of free time plus an interest in learning. Unless your world is vaguely analogous to our modern age or your characters are aristocrats, then most probably won’t know how to read or write. In that case, they would have to pay scribes to write letters for them, on top of the money they’re already paying to send them.
Regardless, the system is no longer limited to experts, artists, and utilitarian messaging. At the same as it opens the door for casual letters, it allows for complex contracts, literature, political intrigue, and personal, emotional messaging. Everything from brief letters from your son a village away to a thinly veiled threat to a political opponent two nations over can be included in this form of communication, allowing for layers of intrigue and interest. In other words: you can send a message for just about any reason you want, assuming it’s worth the coin it costs to send it.
With one big caveat: delivery is hard. Dangerous, even. While you could, potentially, pay someone to deliver a message (with an understanding that they’ll receive the rest of their pay upon delivery, to ensure that they actually follow through), established “postal” networks, usually made up of rider or runner relay networks, weren’t available to the general public. They were integral to most every ancient empire and early civilization, but their use was restricted to political, military, or high-end economic correspondence. Regular civil postal services were unavailable ‘til much later. In Britain, for example, it took until the mid-1600’s.
Still, the fact of the matter is that, if you wanted to send a letter, the option was there. Binary and pre-arranged communication would’ve been useless, and simple or coded communication was restricted to the powerful. Complex communication, even if it’s through scribes, allows your characters to get up to all sorts of mischief and opens up massive webs of conflict for any writer interested in telling wide-reaching stories.
Every Worldbuilding Choice Has Consequences!
Woo. Three articles later, you’ve got a good idea of what questions you need to ask about your world to ensure that it’s got the right kinds of communication channels in place and you don’t have anything funky going on.
But, before we go, I would like to note something: it’s easy to look at all of this, shrug, say “that’s too complicated,” and throw in a magical equivalent of a cell-phone so you don’t have to deal with it. If that is genuinely justified and sensible in your world, go right ahead… but remember, that storytelling choice has massive consequences. The rate at which our world changes is largely determined by the speed of the communication channels available to us. So, if your characters can clap back at each other in minutes from a continent away, then your world needs to be made with that communication speed in mind. Don’t just say “because magic” and leave it at that. Look at the consequences of that storytelling choice. For example, if this communication speed is the result of a magic inherent to few people (your main characters, maybe), then those people suddenly have massive value. Will they be forced to work for the public? Will they capitalize on this skill? What will happen? If you don’t explore these questions or at least indicate that you, the writer, have given them some thought, then the reader will ask them and be pulled out of the story.
On the other hand, the answers to these questions might, at the end of the day, be what moves your story forward.
In other words, put in the work. I don’t say this just because I’m against laziness, but because I’m for good storytelling with compelling conflicts.
See, each of these forms of communications has their own strengths and weaknesses, and a great way to ramp up tension in a story is to weaken lines of communication between allies and introduce the possibility of miscommunication. It’s much more compelling to see a spy lost in the wilderness with no means of communication than it is to see one who can just magic up his buddy to tell them where he is.
When thinking over communication in your world, don’t just look at how it mechanically fits into the world at large; think about how it can be used in the story and how its presence (or absence) has affected the worldview of the characters.
Worldbuilding isn’t just about creating a world full of cool ideas; it’s about exploring how those additions and subtractions affect the people living in that world. In a sense, it’s all one giant game of “what if?” I discuss this in greater depth in an article on Terry Pratchett’s The Light Fantastic.
With that in mind, I hope you’ve enjoyed this short series. Happy writing!
Featured image courtesy of Nicole!
[1] 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann, 2011
[2] Understanding Japan: A Cultural History, by Mark J. Ravina, 2015 (Audiobook)
