Tag: world-building

Brainstorming and development

One of the things I’ve been working on lately is developing the idea for my next novel. I had such a great time writing my last project and was so pleased with how it came out that, while I want to do something different, I still want to take the magic of that forward with me.

Typically when I start a new project, I spend time brainstorming, often with a big whiteboard where I can use different colored markers to daisy-chain ideas as they evolve. After I feel I’ve come up with a workable world, characters, and a plot rich with potential conflicts, I start on an outline. I work and rework that outline for awhile and then begin the first draft.

This time, though, I decided to try something different. Before moving on to outlining, I started playing around with different characters, backstory events, and world-building elements by writing shorts. It’s been fun and also extremely illuminating.

Characters that looked fantastic on the whiteboard aren’t coming to life once they’re thrust into a narrative structure. Other characters are stealing the show. Since the novel will be science fiction, putting future technology into scenarios where it has to work and feel real has highlighted problems as well as seeded new and better ideas. Bringing events to life that are meant to be part of the novel’s backstory is helping me refine and hone the novel’s present.

Some of the shorts actually work as shorts, but plenty of them don’t. That isn’t the point, though. The point is to build and explore the ideas, improving them in advance of actually drafting the novel. This approach has afforded a low cost medium to experiment and further develop plot ideas and characters before I invest in the novel itself.

Plus, fun!

Overwriting: the curse of academia

Overwriting is in my blood.  If I can use six words rather that two, I’ll do it.  When revising, I sometimes realize entire paragraphs could probably be reduced to a single sentence.  Being an overwriter is burdensome.  I’ve given rather a lot of thought to where the problem came from, and I think I’ve zeroed in on the culprit:  academia.

My background is as an archaeologist.  By and large, this has enriched my writing, especially with respect to world-building.  But overwriting is the dark side to the marriage between academia and fiction.

Drilled into you again and again in academic writing is this:  don’t write for the general case, be specific.  Academia is a little like a shark tank, in which the sharks have been deprived of food for months.  When you throw a new paper in the water, it’s like the most delicious chum ever.  So, as an academic writer, you have to armor your paper with clauses and footnotes and awkward words and phrases that make it SUPER CLEAR that you’re talking about one, tiny, specific thing, and that thing only.

An example from a paper I wrote a few year ago, in which I define the term “ritual”: “I focus on the role of ritual in identity constitution.  Rituals are repetitive practices that, under certain circumstances and in particular contexts, have the power to generate the sentiments of affiliation underlying specific identities.  Rituals are also highly material, and thus archaeologically observable, in that they rely on the bodily movements of a performer, the physical space in which the ritual is conducted, and the objects through which the rituals themselves are enacted.”

Setting aside the special joy of the incredibly long sentences, my personal favorite bit here is “under certain circumstances and in particular contexts”…but, in the end, I include this snippet to illustrate just how much academic writers have to lay out every possible nuance of what they’re talking about.  That may be a necessary evil in academia, but it goes down like malt balls covered with lead in fiction writing.

When writing fiction, less is generally more.  You want to leave the reader room to let their imagination pick up what you’ve written and breathe their own life into it.  If you overwrite and didactically spell out every detail, you take the magic out of your writing (not to mention making the story twice as long and boring).

Of course, overwriting is more than just over-specificity.  There’s all those adverbs and adjectives, redundancy, info-dumping, and plenty more besides.  Not all of these are evils carried over from academic writing, but when you heap the curse of academia on top off the big pile of overwriting no-nos, well…it can become a pretty big mountain to climb.

Of course, knowing you have a problem is half the battle.  Curing yourself is another matter entirely, requiring practice, mindfulness, and the patience of your writing group.  So, while I’m very grateful to my academic background (after all, it gave me incredible experiences, a fabulous husband, a bunch of great friends, and tons of fodder for writing interesting stories), I do sometimes feel it’s set me a nasty handicap.  Guess it’s time to go out and buy the 10% Solution.

What about you?  Do you suffer from the malady of overwriting?  If so, where did yours come from and what methods do you use to eradicate it?

The Undiscovered Country

The novel I’m currently revising revolves around a culture I based on the ancient Aztec.  So, when I heard about Aliette de Bodard’s “Servants of the Underworld,” a sort of fantasy detective story that takes place in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, I had to read it.

One thing Bodard really gets right is the different cultural outlook and worldview of this non-Western culture.  At first it was almost jarring, as the characters weren’t thinking or acting in a way that made sense in my personal worldview.  This, of course, got me thinking about how perilous writing other cultural perspectives can be — how hard it is to do well, how great it is when done right, and how infrequently one even sees it attempted.

There’s a well-established (and justified) stereotype about fantasy novels being set in the mythic “lands of the west” (firmly based on western cultural traditions).  And, while this stereotype exists for a reason, in just five or ten minutes I was able to think up a pretty long list of novels eschewing the trope in whole or in part, including:

  • earlier works, like Roger Zelazny’s “Lords of Light,” with it’s Indian influences
  • “Across the Nightingale Floor” (and the other books in Tales of the Otori) by Lian Hern, which are set in feudal Japan
  • “The Secret History of Moscow” by Ekaterina Sedia
  • “Who Fears Death” by Nnedi Okorafor, set in a post-apocalyptic South Africa
  • most of Nalo Hopkinson’s books, with their Caribbean roots
  • Ian McDonald’s “Dervish House” set in Istanbul
  • Paolo Bacigalupi’s “Windup Girl,” set in a post-global warming Thailand.

And that’s, no doubt, leaving out a lot of other great examples (in fact, please share your favorites in the comments below).  I wonder, then, if it’s  fair to start declaring the death of the stereotype?

But…not so fast.  As I started the post out by saying, it’s rare to find a novel that really captures the outlook of a non-western culture.  There are plenty of books set in less oft-explored times and places, but how many of them have protagonists with distinctly non-western viewpoints?  Bacigalupi’s book, for example, provides non-Western perspectives from several characters but centers on the narrative of a westerner.

Maybe one reason protagonists (or, even entire casts of characters) aren’t often “cultural others” is because authors may fear:

  • the inability to represent another cultural viewpoint authentically
  • presenting  a hurdle to prospective readers who crack novels open with (rightly or wrongly) preset notions of the cultural rules that will govern the characters’ and actions.

The former concern seems more justifiable to me than the latter, and still (I think) can be overcome through immersive research.  But, in the end, effectively deviating from reader expectations about culture can be a great challenge for the author.

What do you think?  Is this issue something we should be concerned about as writers?  Is there a need for more speculative fiction told from the perspective of non-western cultures?  And what are you favorite examples of this type of writing?

Writer’s Conundrum: Experience vs. Imagination

The age-old maxims states:  “write what you know,” and, indeed, many of us do write from experience.  This is true even within the genre of speculative fiction.  In fact, it may be especially true in speculative fiction.  The more fantastical our worlds and characters, the more important it becomes to ground them in something that feels, if not real, at least possible.  We might be writing about lovelorn giant squid or misunderstood zombies, but we often base them and their worlds around people we know or places we’ve been.

So, it stands to reason that  in order to keep our imaginations fresh, engage our readers, and seek new fodder for characters and world-building, we must continue to have new experiences.

A small example that set me thinking about this:  a few weeks ago I participated in my first-ever poker game (I know, I know…I need to get out more).  During a hand where I’d folded and was waiting out the action, I started pondering how I might write a story about a game of poker without it actually being about people sitting around playing poker.  The next day I wrote a draft of a tale that follows a high stakes poker game unfolding across the entire landscape of a post-apocalyptic, magic-shrouded Manhattan.  The experience of playing poker for the first time inspired me to write something new.

But here’s the rub:  while some new adventures are free and can be worked around or into our busy schedules, most of them aren’t (even the game of poker cost me a buy-in).

Another example:  I’m currently working on a novel set in the high plateaus of central Mexico.  Though I’ve spent a lot of time in other parts of Central America, I’ve never been to Mexico.  Sure, I’ve done research, found images and descriptions, listened to recorded sounds of native animals, and talked to my archaeologist friends who’ve done work in the region.  But that isn’t the same as experiencing the landscape firsthand.  I don’t know how those deserts smell, or what they look like at different times of day, or how sounds carry across the dry, open spaces.

Of course, this is where imagination in comes in.  And imagination can take you a long way, but still…those experiences are what help bring our writing to life.

So how do we prioritize?  Is it better to spend our time and money on sword-fighting lessons and books about military strategy to improve those battle scenes, or would a trip to the region where the novel is set pay bigger dividends?  Do you need to pay the money to shoot guns at a firing range in order to write a realistic gun fight?  Can another person’s words help you write a description of the Himalayas that exhilarates the reader even if you’ve never experienced that exhilaration yourself?

What’s the balance between creativity, imagination, and experience?  How important are new sights, sounds, tastes, and smells to nourishing our writing?  Or do you think it’s all bunk and a writer can get everything they need from research, interviews, and the rich soil of their own mind?

What do you think?  And what are your tricks for accruing experiences without emptying your bank account and getting fired from your job?

Yes, but is it realistic?

Lately, I’ve been pondering the role of grit and realism in the fantasy genre.  How little is too little?  Is there such a thing as too much?  And what does “realism” mean when it comes to fantasy, anyway?

It’s Joe Abercrombie’s “Best Served Cold” that got me thinking about this in the first place.  For those who haven’t read it, or who aren’t familiar with his excellent First Law series, Abercrombie populates his tales with characters real enough to make you despair for the fate of humanity.  Whether they’re obsessed, driven, or shiftless, his characters are pretty much all self-centered, deeply flawed, and prone to violence.  Their adventures make for good, if sometimes bleak, reading, but his books have also made me wonder if there’s such a thing as too much realism.

If Tolkein’s misty elves and noble kings-in-exile are at one end of the “realism” spectrum, then Abercrombie’s characters fall at the far, far distant extreme.  You may get pulled along by his stories, immersed in his highly believable worlds, and even come to root for certain of the characters, but there’s little chance you’d actually want to spend time with any of them.  They are, by and large, not nice people.

This very fact, of course, is what makes Abercrombie’s characters so human – they’re jealous and petty and do spiteful things.  They act against their own interests because they just can help it.  They almost never change themselves for the better and almost always resolve their problems by running away, stabbing someone in the back, or just stabbing someone, period.  We read about them and we recognize the baser, less lovable parts of ourselves.

This kind of writing, let’s be honest, is rare in the fantasy genre.  I mean, most of the stuff out there falls into the “brave band of heroes” camp, without reflecting much on who the heroes are slaughtering (after all, they’re the good guys, so it must be justified).  So, there’s an important place for Abercrombie’s kind of fiction.  But sometimes I wonder if he’s left out the most human elements of all from his characters.  Sure, his books have a smattering of forgiveness and loyalty, the occasional shred of redemption, and even a rare hint that people are capable of loving someone other than themselves.  But such aspects of human nature are few and far between.

Is that realism?  I don’t know, but I really hope not.  Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Abercrombie’s books and I will continue to devour them when they’re released.  But I don’t think they’re realistic.

I guess some people might find it odd to pair the ideas of “realism” and “fantasy” at all.  By definition, fantasy is the unreal, is that which we imagine.  But the best fantasy strives to make its imaginary worlds feel like they could be real places and its characters act in the complex and often contradictory ways that real humans do.

Consider George R.R. Martin’s Songs of Ice and Fire.  Here are characters that (to me) feel realistic.  The conniving and murderous are still capable of love, even if that love is twisted.  The honorable and brave can be stubborn and blind, their nobility dooming both themselves and others to death.  Jealousy can lead to kindness, love to betrayal.  Nor are these characters free of the mundane realities of being living animals.  They eat and vomit and shit and suffer and screw–and Martin’s descriptions of these acts leave nothing to the imagination.  You believe his characters are experiencing what they do not because he tells you, but because he shows you with unrelentingly realistic prose.  Martin, of course, is not alone in writing this kind of fiction.  Of the things I’ve read recently, both Steven Erikson’s Malazan series and David Anthony Durham’s “Acacia” both come to mind.

Personally, I’m of two minds about how to incorporate realism into my writing.  On the one hand, I have a generally low opinion of humanity as a whole.  Our history reflects poorly on us, unless war and violence against the weak is what we’re striving for.  And yet, we’re obviously capable of creating beautiful things, too.  Plus, on an individual level, people may be cruel one minute and commit breathtaking acts of self-sacrifice, kindness, and love the next.  We engage in both groan-inducing predictability and devilish unpredictability.

It’s possible that we err in focusing only on characters here.  This may be as much about world-building as character-building.  Perhaps our worlds should better reflect the rapaciousness of humankind and our characters better embody the contradictory and stutter-stop urges towards a more noble ideal.

What do you think?  Are Martin and others like him hitting the right notes of realism for you, or do you prefer Abercrombie’s grittier fare?  Can our characters have some good sprinkled in with their bad and still feel real?  Do we need to be careful of over-emphasizing nuanced “realer than real” characters at the expense of building honest-feeling worlds?