Archive for the 'Worldbuilding' Category

Creating The World Within Which You’d Like To Live

Constance Ash February 25th, 2007

The following pull comes from today’s NY Times’s Art section, in an article about the photographic artist, Justine Kurland.  You can find the article here, with a slide show of some of her work.

[ “There’s something political about creating a world that you want to exist,” she said. And in a sense these new works also relate to the aesthetic of late 19th-century landscape photography, which “was really about this idea of projecting an idealism onto a landscape,” she said. “It was a way of settling the West.” ]

Her vision of past, present and idyll, is an interesting companion to the ideas raised (yet again! you’d think BY NOW, primatologists, at least, would get it, that the female of our species never was a passive beggar at best to great big alpha males hunting to get the food to feed herself and children) in the article about chimp mothers creating hunting weapons and tools.

However, most of all, I was struck by Kurland’s statement, “There’s something political about creating a world that you want to exist.”  Not always, but often, this would fit those of us who make worlds that don’t exist, as a matter of course.  It states succinctly, as well, why we make worlds like Sherri Tepper does, for instance, that are our deepest terrors.  Without political advocacy and activism, we cannot avoid the worlds that are our terrors, or bring into existence worlds that are better than a world of terror.

Kurland is a photographer, not a fiction writer.  This is something else I liked about her statement.  It shows us all that fiction is not the only path to envisioning worlds within which we could live comfortably, with our children, other creatures and each other.

Love, C.

Devil in the Details Redux: China Dolls and Chandlers

Kevin Andrew Murphy February 11th, 2007

Blame National Geographic.

When I was twelve or so, staying over at my grandparents with a cold, I read an issue of National Geographic which gave the history of gemcutting, the history and provenance of the various cuts–the emerald cut, the sapphire cut, the diamond cut, the rose, the brilliant and so forth–and I happily commited all this to memory, along with the rough dates of when each was developed and became popular.  Which of course some years later totally ruined a television show for me, “The Wizard,” 1986, because while I could deal with the concept of a four-foot-tall mad inventor MacGuyver type, when he pulled out the ancient Incan emerald and it was not only faceted but cut in the brilliant cut that wasn’t invented for diamonds until about the 19th century?  And it was the size of a baseball but flawless which is likewise impossible for an emerald?  The suspenders of disbelief were snapped.

Yes, I know, we’re supposed to look the other way and not raise our eyebrows.  No one seriously believed that Yul Brenner was Thai either, no matter how much tape he put on his eyelids.  And Al Jolson was not really black.

That all said, there’s a big step between “Imagine if you will” theatricality and simply getting stuff wrong, and in a big way too. Continue Reading »

The Devil in the Details — Descriptions

Kevin Andrew Murphy January 27th, 2007

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about descriptions — what works, what doesn’t, and what resonates down to a deeper level of truth.  It’s an author’s job to notice things, and to use what they notice in service of their story, details as keys to unlock the reader’s imagination and memory and let them experience the world.

The smallest things are often the most important, touchstones to memory.  When I was thirteen, my grandmother taught me how to make a pie crust.  Everything was fairly basic and straightforward, if tricky, until there came the moment to finish the pie.  My grandmother took a knife and drew three wavy lines down the crust, almost joining at the bottom, then used the knife to cut vents on each side of them, angled to make them look like three feathers or waving shafts of wheat.  She explained that this was the pattern her mother had taught her, and her grandmother before, and all the ladies in the neighborhood had used this back in the day.  It looked old and beautiful, something that wouldn’t look out of place in a pioneer woman’s hands, or a colonial kitchen, or an old Dutch master’s still life or even before.  Cutting that pattern a couple days ago, I couldn’t help but remember my grandmother.

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Gummit Mandate: Superhero Registration

Constance Ash January 3rd, 2007

Spider-Man lassos White House in his web

The latest The Amazing Spider-Man comic (#536):

[ In Marvel Comics’ — ahem — “Civil War” story arc, the U.S. government passes the “Superhuman Registration Act” after hundreds of innocent American men, women and children become collateral damage in a superhero-related tragedy (the president of the United States even swings by the disaster site to assess the damage). The act mandates registration of all superheroes with the government. Spider-Man initially supports the act but then grows suspicious after discovering that unregistered captives are being held without civil rights at an off-shore prison called “the Negative Zone” (oh, and the prison was built with a no-bid contract). Detainees will remain there for life if they don’t register.

Now, to the present: In this latest Spider-Man comic, America’s favorite swinging web-slinger takes to New York City’s airwaves to publicly denounce the act.

“I’ve seen the very concept of justice destroyed,” Spidey begins (as written by J. Michael Straczynski). “I’ve seen heroes and bad guys alike — dangerous guys, no mistake, but still born in this country for the most part, denied due process, and imprisoned, potentially for the rest of their lives. … But there’s a point where the ends don’t justify the means, if the means require us to give up not just our identities, but who and what we are as a country.”

David Cassel, a Spider-Man fan and editor of 10zenmonkeys.com, said in response, “In thirty years of reading Spider-Man, I’ve never seen an attack so direct.” ]

Is this Good Advice?

Madeleine Robins October 3rd, 2006

Over in LiveJournal-land, Anna Genoese (my current editor at Tor) is answering random questions. I adore Anna, but I think she missed the boat here; the question, regarding historical fiction, was:

And how accurate do the facts have to be in such works (I’m not talking dates — more like making up motives for people’s actions.

and her answer was:

People are people are people. If their motivations don’t make sense, no one is going to want to read your book. If the characters are stupid, silly, one-dimensional, and boring, and they seem to do things for no reason at all other than to move the story forward, you will get a form rejection really quickly because it means your book is bad, whatever the genre.

I generally think it’s a mistake to over-research, or at least to leave too much of your research on the page. Whether it’s SF, fantasy, or straight historical, wading through pages of the author’s attempts to demonstrate how much more she knows about the setting than her readers will ever know is a distinct turn off (unless it’s John Fowles, who could sit there and lecture me for hours, and I would lap it up happily–but Fowles manages that with tone and voice, not endless exposition). On the other hand…

I am equally irritated by a story in which the motivations of the characters are out of tune with the setting. You cannot write (for example) a novel set in 16th century Italy in which the behavior of the characters is not influenced, in one way or another, by the presence of the Catholic Church, by the lack of reliable birth control, by the laws regarding women and property. That’s not to say you can’t write a novel in which a character goes against the grain of her society, but you have to build in convincing reasons for her to do so–and you have to remember that (when your heroine becomes Pope and decides to establish ecumentical ties to Islam and Judaism in 1450) that not everyone around her is going to be thrilled. In many historical periods and places, women were rarely given political or temporal power; women who had casual sex would face consequences, anywhere from shunning to stoning (not to mention pregnancy); romantic love was a literary construct, and marriage was often a matter of economic expedience. To elide over these facts and consequences is not only cheating, it’s boring.

So, it’s not that I disagree with what Anna said; I just don’t think she was complete enough. Some would-be writer is going to read her comment as “Hey, as long as the motivations make sense, you don’t need to do any research.” Motivations are motivations, and people are people. But if you don’t inform those motivations with the mores and laws of the setting, you’re cheating the reader and you’re cheating your story.

At the Walls of the Last City

Madeleine Robins September 9th, 2006

One of the world-building games I play with myself (and played with my class of 8th graders when I taught world building) involves asking a deceptively simple question: In an “after the apocalypse” scenario, you come to the walled city where the last vestiges of civilization have gathered. You have to persuade them to let you in. What skills or talents can you offer to convince them to admit you?

The rules are:

1) you need to know something about what the city is like, so that you know what they need (and no tailoring the city to skills you already have).

2) you can only offer skills or talents or knowledge that you actually have (in other words, if you don’t know how to perform a field amputation, you can’t say that you do).

Some valuable questions to ask yourself:

* How long since the Dire Event are you showing up at the wall asking for entry?
* Have most perishable stores–by which I don’t just mean canned peaches and gasoline, but manufactured goods like shoes and socks–been used up?
* Are source materials available? by which I mean, for example, cloth, yarn, leather for shoes, wood for building, etc.
* where is this walled city? What sort of wildlife, both aquatic and land-dwelling, might be available for food or resources?
* what level of technology remains viable? This ties into the first question; if it’s three months since Dire Event, maybe your city has enough solar power to keep refrigeration going–but they sure could use engineers who know how to keep the solar cells working.
* what is the world outside the walls like? is it utterly blasted, or is agriculture possible?

Once I decide what kind of world, and what kind of walled city, I’m positing, I can think about what skills I can offer. My list usually includes the following:

* cooking
* baking
* sewing
* pattern-making
* knitting
* laying a hardwood floor
* making herbal liniments, etc. (see cooking, above)
* weaving
* stringing a four-hettle loom
* basic carpentry
* organization

I could probably come up with more. The question is: what’s your walled city like? and what’s on your list?

Love Letters

Kate Elliott September 2nd, 2006

Many - most - maybe even all of us here at Deep Genre write character-driven fiction (I qualify that statement only because while I would like to presume to speak for the others, I can’t quite).

For myself, I can say that every one of my novels has its genesis in a vivid, visual, scene of a Character in a Situation. The landscape and the plot grow out of that original image and emotional tone.

Sometimes characters emerge organically out of the evolving narrative, sometimes they walk in from my unconscious and hit me over the head demanding to be included, and sometimes I will “build” a character who is needed due to the exigencies of the plot. In general, though, characters are who they are; in a perfect world, they are discrete individuals whose lives are intertwined with the landscape they “live” in.

Some among us now and then may invest a character with a bit of wish fulfillment. I’m not immune to this urge, and at times I indulge it cautiously and with (I hope) restraint. At the extreme, this is called writing a “Mary Sue” story, a subject that has been discussed earlier on Deep Genre here and here by Sherwood.

But there’s another kind of personalized character development that I want to call “The Love Letter.”
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11 Things in Fantasy/SF That I Don’t Promise Not to Use (or Keep Using) in My Writing

Kate Elliott August 15th, 2006

1. Saving the World

Because the stakes don’t get any bigger than this!

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6 More Things I Could do Without in Fantastic Literature & I don’t plan to use except to make fun of

Kevin Andrew Murphy August 14th, 2006

Just read Scott Lynch’s Eleven things I will serve my best never to put in a fantasy novel unless I am trying to undermine them, and in fact could do without entirely from now on, thanks.  It’s a great list and I agree with all the items on it.  But there are some I’d like to add, at least for myself:

1. Monsters that don’t eat children.

I’m sorry, but I have to ask–what’s not to like about children?  They’re small, tender, slow-moving, and are easily lured into gingerbread houses–how hard can it be?  Yes, fate, in the form of the author, may conspire against you, but that’s no excuse for not offing at least one child, even off stage in the past.  This goes double for horribly evil dark wizards who lead reigns of terror across the countryside only to have it all blow up in their face when they try to kill even one baby.  (Yes, this means you, Lord Voldymort, and tell the so-called “Wicked Witch” I said “Hi”).

Same problem, different day, with ancient evils, devils and demons who seem to be fans of The Godfather, starting out on their reigns of terror by killing family pets, then boring family retainers or dull recluses who no one would miss much anyway, then working up to the adults and still never quite getting around to the kids.  Hello, you’re supposed to be the Forces of Hell, not uptight Italian Catholics still vaguely concerned with getting into Heaven.

When the average nursery bogey has a higher bodycount than you, how do you expect anyone to take you seriously?

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Defining Story

Laura J. Mixon August 5th, 2006

Greetings, all, and thanks to the web hosts and my fellow authors for inviting me to play in this great sandbox. For my first contribution to this forum, here is an essay I recently wrote on the nature of story.

At its simplest, a story can be defined as a character in a setting with a problem. These are story’s subatomic particles, if you will. You’ll find exceptions, as storytelling is a highly subjective and idiosyncratic artform, but stories without a character, a setting, and a problem are about rare as anti-hydrogen.

Good stories both entertain us and have characters whose problems we care about. Great stories linger in our minds long afterward – because they strike a chord that resonates with us. That chord that rings in us when a story moves us — that gut-deep feeling, that “aha!” when we have read or watched something that just feels right somehow — is tied to its theme.

A theme can be expressed by a single sentence — a truism or cliche, even — that summarizes what the story is about. “Love conquers all.” ‘The best laid plans go oft awry.” “You can’t take it with you.” “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Chris likes to give the example of the Eensy Weensy Spider, a thirty-eight (!) word story whose theme is “Perseverance furthers.” A story whose theme can’t be summarized in a single sentence has no clear theme, and I can pretty much guarantee you that it’s a story that flounders. (Don’t worry if you don’t know your theme when you start out, however; writers often don’t know what it was about till after they’ve finished it…but if you have a completed or mostly completed work, it’s a useful exercise to see if you can work out its theme — or take some of your favorite works, and see if you can boil their themes down to ten words or less.)

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