A good style of Toki Pona writing
In this web page, I would like to talk about a really neat style of writing in Toki Pona that was shown to me by jan Lute. I've been using it in my own Toki Pona writing and have found that it helps me immensely in writing stories that are easy to read.
The style (what I will now be calling nasin Lute) is pretty simple. The scene takes place between a speaker and a listener. The speaker describes the story, and the listener occasionally interrupts to ask questions or make comments.
The purpose is to break up periods of long, high-focus description with short, low-focus dialogue. This way, the reader isn't straining to read through complicated description.
The best example of this is, of course, ma by jan Lute. This was the example they showed when they were explaining this to me!
This is also a very extreme example. If you allow some non-dialogue descriptive prose, you get a weaker but more nuanced and versatile style (what I will now be calling nasin Lute lili). The ideas are the same as nasin Lute, but now, the descriptive prose takes up the role of the speaker and the dialogue is the listener, interrupting the description.
The main difference between this and normal writing is the balance of prose and dialogue. In typical English writing, for instance, prose is often a majority of the text in the story, especially in fantasy or sci-fi writing. In nasin Lute lili, prose is closer to half of the text, with dialogue comprising the other half. I believe that it works best when the prose is kept to a minimum and the dialogue provides implicit description, such as characterization or plot.
Thinking about it in terms of high-focus and low-focus also helps with structure. If you find that your prose is winding on for too long, you can throw in some dialogue to break it up and reinforce it. In the story I am currently writing, I often have the characters repeat small parts of the prose in order to give more weight to the description and give insight into their feelings.
Two examples of nasin Lute lili that came to my mind are tu kuntu and linja pi pini ala tan jan Lapate. I think that there are others that I haven't read. These texts, as well as the previous example, stand out to me as being very fun to read compared to the description-packed style of nasin Lanpan or the fantastical style of mi en waso Kaka.
If you are struggling with writing easy-to-read stories in Toki Pona, I would give this a try!