• Welcome to the Fantasy Writing Forums. Register Now to join us!

Utilising familiar symbols

Braveface

Scribe
I was doing a bit of world-building and had a thought to use the symbols associated with alpine skiing slope ratings in one of my worlds where I need to show an increase in difficulty.

The symbols are: Green Circle, Blue Square, Black Diamond and Double Black Diamond.

I feel perhaps Black Diamond is a bit too familar. It's a little detail so I didn't really want to introduce unnecessary unfamiliarity with new names for everything but neither did I want it as basic as Beginner, Intermediate, Hard. It's an educational setting so there is no real relation other than it is representing increasing difficulty. I'm wondering is this a good way to have things the reader needs to remember for a while sink in easily, but then be disposable enough when its purpose has been served...because it is already more strongly associated with something existing.

Thoughts/comments are more than welcome :)
 

Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
Spontaneously I'd say that it's almost always good to root the reader in familiarity. Regardless of what you're writing it's good for them to have something to relate to.
Keep in mind that when you do this you also set expectations and they will need to be handled. You will have to either live up to them or deviate from them in a way that's interesting enough that it doesn't disappoint or confuse the reader when you do.

In this case I think it might make sense to use difficulty grading like from ski slopes. I'm curious though, what's it for? Is it a difficulty setting for some kind of game where it's harder to survive in a Black Diamond area or is it something else?
 

Braveface

Scribe
Nah, much more mundane than that.

It is to do with education, so I wanted a symbol for difficulty of courses to add more competition. Work is allocated based on performance in education. If you don't specialise, everything you've passed gets 'averaged' and you get put into the most suitable work or else forfeit your priveleges as a Citizen.

I won't be explaining it like this, that's why I wanted a fairly intuitive use of symbols that could be easily combined (e.g. '5 greens, two blues and three blacks') so that it could be discussed easily and used as a measure of social ranking, cause of concern/stress and a path a character follows that others can easily relate to (before it starts to get really wacky).
 

Edankyn

Minstrel
e.g. '5 greens, two blues and three blacks'
Honestly I think even just the description you provided is enough. I don't think adding shapes in addition to colors makes it any more clear than the colors alone. For some reason my mind wanders to the book Divergent; something like the color scheme used there is more than sufficient.
 

DavidJae

Troubadour
The symbols seem to work fine, but is this world similar to Earth. If it isn't, why are they using those symbols? Why not call them glyphs or something, and just have them graded by colour, green, yellow and red. That's a common colour language.
 

Braveface

Scribe
The symbols seem to work fine, but is this world similar to Earth. If it isn't, why are they using those symbols? Why not call them glyphs or something, and just have them graded by colour, green, yellow and red. That's a common colour language.

Ahh...I'm so bad at keeping on top of threads. But yeah, that's pretty much what I went for in the end.
Trying to keep things simple, red, yellow and green do the job just fine for what it is.
 
Top