Thursday, February 14, 2013
Link: The Pleasures of Deviant Language in Fantastika
Here's an awesome article by John H. Stevens on the invention of words, naming, etc. in fantastika. He identifies several "pleasures" that we encounter when dealing with these words - my favorite was "the pleasure of struggle." Go check it out!
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Crafting Cultural Interactions/Linking large-scale and small-scale phenomena - a worldbuilding hangout report
First, an announcement. Due to expressions of interest by friends and online acquaintances, I'm going to start making recordings of my worldbuilding hangouts and posting them on YouTube. For the moment this is experimental, and the hangouts are intended to be rather informal (and I want to keep them that way). Our first attempt at this will be for tomorrow's hangout, Thursday, February 14th! In honor of Valentine's Day, the topic tomorrow will be Holidays - specifically, how to develop/incorporate holidays in your world. I hope that I will see you there!
For the Cultural Interactions hangout, I was joined by Glenda Pfeiffer, Kyle Aisteach, Lesley Smith and Fanny Darling. Since Kyle had proposed the topic, I offered him to give us a sense of what he was working on and get us started.
Kyle has been working in a world where he takes a character from one culture and transplants him into another. Once the character arrives there, the situation blows up because of cultural misunderstandings.
As you probably already know, I love stories involving cultural misunderstandings - particularly substantial ones rather than simple questions of table manners etc. Not enough people do this. One of the things that it requires is creating both cultures you'll be working with, and then setting up comparisons and contrasts so that you understand where the differences lie. At that point, you will have more to work with when you try to watch how those differences play out.
Kyle told us that his scenario involves a gay man from Culture A who winds up in Culture B. While neither of the two cultures is comfortable with homosexuality, each one has different attitudes toward it. The man then meets a child who is suffering an abusive situation, and the child asks him for help getting out of it.
I love the way that Kyle has set this up because there is real conflict potential here. As he himself mentioned, however, the challenge of working on this problem in a world outside our own is keeping real-world references from creeping into the situation - as he put it, Cultures A and B "turning into the Midwest versus the Coastal States."
Kyle is therefore working with a fundamental cultural difference of core values. I remarked that I had come into the hangout expecting to talk about a different aspect of cultural interactions, namely manners and speech. However, one of the things I have learned in my studies is that core cultural values are constantly reflected in speech and manners. Our assumptions about the nature of the world, and the values we hold, percolate down into our tiniest interactions.
One example of this is taboos on social speech. Who are you allowed to speak to in this culture? I think it's easy to imagine a situation in which X person is not allowed to approach Y person except in Z special context. To apply this to the situation Kyle has designed, in what kind of situation is it considered appropriate for a gay man to talk to a child? What is a safe space, and how do you set it up?
Kyle also mentioned that his situation involved different kinds of outcast groups (outcast from the main society) that wouldn't interact with each other. This is certainly a common enough scenario in our world: minorities of one variety don't necessarily interact with or support minorities of other varieties.
Kyle asked me to elaborate on my earlier point about how large-scale values were reflected in small-scale interactions. I chose to look at the question of "group orientation" in Japan. We often talk about how the Japanese are group oriented, but this large-scale trend shows on all kinds of levels. Crime tends to be group oriented - lone muggers are practically nonexistent because the mafia has such an enormous influence and forbids them. School discipline is group oriented as well, because all members of the class will be punished for the actions of a single person. Bullying is extremely common, because group punishment gives children a strong motive to discourage any deviation from the required group behavior (the expression in Japanese is, "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down"). Group sensitivity also shows up in the grammar of Japanese. The easiest example of this is the words for "this" and "that." English makes a two-way distinction, but Japanese makes a three-way distinction.
this = kore
that = sore
that = are
"Kore" means "this," specifically a thing/issue in proximity to me - but not just to me. It can also be in proximity to a group that I am associated with, like my family, or my company, or even my country, relative to others.
"Sore" means "that," specifically a thing/issue in proximity to the person I am talking to - or to any group that person is associated with, like family, company, or country. "That thing associated with you or your groups."
"Are" means "that," specifically a thing/issue in proximity neither to me nor to the person I am talking to, and to their groups. Thus, it would be something that neither I nor my groups nor you nor your groups are associated with, but something belonging outside those established circles.
You can also find evidence of status consciousness on many levels of culture in Japan. Universities are considered to be ranked (also grouped, actually) relative to one another. Employees at a company are ranked relative to one another, as are students, who are conscious of their year level as a sort of rank (meaning that students who entered earlier are higher ranked). These status rankings are important in no small part because they are reflected in linguistic honorifics. The way you speak or refer to someone is directly influenced by their status relative to yours.
My own experience studying Japan and Japanese (and living in Japan) lets me elaborate on these cultural and linguistic characteristics, but the same kind of phenomena can also be found in English. Our sense of who is more highly ranked than us, while not as concretely reflected in grammatical form, nevertheless changes the way that we speak to people. "Gimme that pen" is not something we're likely to say when borrowing a pen from a professor, for example.
My study of Japanese was one of the things that made me very conscious of speech interactions and manners, and in the fictional realm, it inspired me to create - very early on - special greetings between the different caste levels of the Varin society I was creating. That part was in fact the easiest for me, but exploring the higher levels of complexity, looking at less quantifiable objectification, for example, or institutional bias, was much more difficult - and took much more time to understand.
When you are designing cultural interactions, take your time. I can hardly give any more useful piece of advice than that. Try out a conflict situation where two people are held back by prejudice. On the first go-round you're likely to get ugly insults and serious conflict, and that kind of stuff is useful to know (it's good to know how people feel deep down). However, ugly insults aren't typically pervasive. In situations of oppression or deep inequality, most of what goes on is subtle and unconscius. You're far more likely to encounter avoidance behaviors than interaction and conflict. At first I thought about what people would say to insult my undercaste character - but then I realized that if she's going to be getting into a vehicle for a long trip, people are far more likely to pretend she doesn't exist. They don't want to raise their blood pressure over the fact that she is there, especially since there will be no way of getting rid of her until they reach their destination. If they interact once, they will have acknowledged that she's there. So they don't interact at all. It was only much later, after I had figured this out, that I realized people don't see undercaste members on the densely built main streets of Pelismara because they are expected to use alleyways between the backs of the buildings, specially designed for garbage collection and utility pipes etc. Even later than that, I finally understood how nobles would refer to undercaste when they had to speak of them, in hushed voices, trying to avoid being too indelicate. The cultural knowledge about how undercaste members use back alleyways turned out to be useful to one of my characters in my novel, because it allowed him to recognize an assassin disguised as a member of the undercaste (who couldn't be undercaste because he was walking on the main street!).
At this point I asked Fanny to take a turn telling us about her work-in-progress, because it has a great example of fantastical culture shock in it. She explained that it's a changeling story, involving a human raised in the "shadow realm" while a "hairn" child is being raised on earth. In her story, the hairn child has trouble because her glamour begins to break, and she starts to see her appearance - but because of the cultural environment, her parents think she has serious body image issues and possibly hallucinations, so they get her diagnosed with body dismorphic disorder and she ends up visiting a therapist.
Another interesting cultural issue in Fanny's story is the presence of wraiths, creatures who feed on the energy of dark emotions, and turn off their feelings of empathy when they have them, because they don't value them. She talked about how difficult it was to place herself in a perspective which does not value empathy and compassion.
[At this point we had a brief cat-related digression, which was pretty funny, but did bring up the issue of communication with animals or animal-like creatures whose language we don't understand.]
Fanny then continued by mentioning how there's a big difference between describing beliefs and dramatizing them. Her wraiths do experience feelings of empathy and compassion, but their view is that "you can't let them rule you." Given how we ordinarily talk about not letting fear or hatred rule us, I thought that was a really insightful phrasing. She also said that in the shadow realm, the hairn family cannot understand why their changeling daughter blushes, and she goes to quite a lot of trouble to explain it to them.
One point that becomes clear from this discussion, I believe, is the importance of "show, don't tell" when you are designing a culturally complex situation. As with any kind of information, social information can be conveyed through a number of means (explained by the narrator, explained by a character, or demonstrated through action and dialogue) but you will achieve greater credibility if you can demonstrate rather than explain.
I brought up the question of third culture persons. These are people who experience culture shock in two directions, because they don't properly belong to either group. The children of international marriages can sometimes experience this, as can children of immigrants, who may not be accepted in the country where they were born, yet have no experience of their parents' home country and its culture. There are a lot of complex problems and emotional experiences that can arise from situations of this nature.
Kyle mentioned that he thought that Petunia Dursley, in the Harry Potter books, was in a complex emotional situtaion - taking in a child she can't stand in order to keep him safe. The interactions between muggles and wizards can also be considered cross-cultural interaction (I think in particular of Arthur Weasley's interesting ideas about muggle technology and manners).
Glenda mentioned that there may be complex cultural interactions within one's own home culture, as is the case with clan or age stratifications. She mentioned that in her world, adults are nominally of equal status, but still engage in subtle status competition (put-downs, etc.).
The idea of cultural differences within a single overarching cultural group is an interesting one, and it doesn't just refer to the situation we have in the US where we have waves of immigrants coming in and engaging in cultural - and literal - conflict with those who lived here before. Each individual member of a culture can be considered to have a relationship with his/her own values. I also call this "not running true to type." Too often in fiction we see people justify their behavior by making reference to their cultural group, as in "I'm an elf, so I do this, because all elves do this." Think through how each person understands the cultural values they are expected to hold. Does your character actively cultivate and enact his/her own cultural values? Or does he/she feel discomfort with those values in any way?
When you are creating complex cultural interactions, a character's reactions will not grow directly out of the values of their culture, but from their own personal relationship and struggle with those values. A person who has internalized feelings of inferiority may demonstrate those or fight against them in any given interaction. A person who is deeply concerned with (I believe Kyle proposed this example) a perceived battle between communism and capitalism will tend to overapply that viewpoint to other interactions, even if they are not related. I have a nobleman character named Adon who is generally very compassionate toward members of the servant caste, and even tries to create a third cultural space within which he can fall in love his own personal servant without subjecting either of them to guilt or status pressure. However, when he discovers that (unbeknownst to anyone) his father was a member of the servant caste, instead of embracing a servant identity, he repudiates everything realted to servant and blames his servant-caste heritage for his own weakness in falling for the servant.
At this point we brought the discussion to a close. Thank you to everyone who participated! I always feel at the end of an hour that there is so much more we could talk about, but I really enjoyed speaking with all of you.
For the Cultural Interactions hangout, I was joined by Glenda Pfeiffer, Kyle Aisteach, Lesley Smith and Fanny Darling. Since Kyle had proposed the topic, I offered him to give us a sense of what he was working on and get us started.
Kyle has been working in a world where he takes a character from one culture and transplants him into another. Once the character arrives there, the situation blows up because of cultural misunderstandings.
As you probably already know, I love stories involving cultural misunderstandings - particularly substantial ones rather than simple questions of table manners etc. Not enough people do this. One of the things that it requires is creating both cultures you'll be working with, and then setting up comparisons and contrasts so that you understand where the differences lie. At that point, you will have more to work with when you try to watch how those differences play out.
Kyle told us that his scenario involves a gay man from Culture A who winds up in Culture B. While neither of the two cultures is comfortable with homosexuality, each one has different attitudes toward it. The man then meets a child who is suffering an abusive situation, and the child asks him for help getting out of it.
I love the way that Kyle has set this up because there is real conflict potential here. As he himself mentioned, however, the challenge of working on this problem in a world outside our own is keeping real-world references from creeping into the situation - as he put it, Cultures A and B "turning into the Midwest versus the Coastal States."
Kyle is therefore working with a fundamental cultural difference of core values. I remarked that I had come into the hangout expecting to talk about a different aspect of cultural interactions, namely manners and speech. However, one of the things I have learned in my studies is that core cultural values are constantly reflected in speech and manners. Our assumptions about the nature of the world, and the values we hold, percolate down into our tiniest interactions.
One example of this is taboos on social speech. Who are you allowed to speak to in this culture? I think it's easy to imagine a situation in which X person is not allowed to approach Y person except in Z special context. To apply this to the situation Kyle has designed, in what kind of situation is it considered appropriate for a gay man to talk to a child? What is a safe space, and how do you set it up?
Kyle also mentioned that his situation involved different kinds of outcast groups (outcast from the main society) that wouldn't interact with each other. This is certainly a common enough scenario in our world: minorities of one variety don't necessarily interact with or support minorities of other varieties.
Kyle asked me to elaborate on my earlier point about how large-scale values were reflected in small-scale interactions. I chose to look at the question of "group orientation" in Japan. We often talk about how the Japanese are group oriented, but this large-scale trend shows on all kinds of levels. Crime tends to be group oriented - lone muggers are practically nonexistent because the mafia has such an enormous influence and forbids them. School discipline is group oriented as well, because all members of the class will be punished for the actions of a single person. Bullying is extremely common, because group punishment gives children a strong motive to discourage any deviation from the required group behavior (the expression in Japanese is, "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down"). Group sensitivity also shows up in the grammar of Japanese. The easiest example of this is the words for "this" and "that." English makes a two-way distinction, but Japanese makes a three-way distinction.
this = kore
that = sore
that = are
"Kore" means "this," specifically a thing/issue in proximity to me - but not just to me. It can also be in proximity to a group that I am associated with, like my family, or my company, or even my country, relative to others.
"Sore" means "that," specifically a thing/issue in proximity to the person I am talking to - or to any group that person is associated with, like family, company, or country. "That thing associated with you or your groups."
"Are" means "that," specifically a thing/issue in proximity neither to me nor to the person I am talking to, and to their groups. Thus, it would be something that neither I nor my groups nor you nor your groups are associated with, but something belonging outside those established circles.
You can also find evidence of status consciousness on many levels of culture in Japan. Universities are considered to be ranked (also grouped, actually) relative to one another. Employees at a company are ranked relative to one another, as are students, who are conscious of their year level as a sort of rank (meaning that students who entered earlier are higher ranked). These status rankings are important in no small part because they are reflected in linguistic honorifics. The way you speak or refer to someone is directly influenced by their status relative to yours.
My own experience studying Japan and Japanese (and living in Japan) lets me elaborate on these cultural and linguistic characteristics, but the same kind of phenomena can also be found in English. Our sense of who is more highly ranked than us, while not as concretely reflected in grammatical form, nevertheless changes the way that we speak to people. "Gimme that pen" is not something we're likely to say when borrowing a pen from a professor, for example.
My study of Japanese was one of the things that made me very conscious of speech interactions and manners, and in the fictional realm, it inspired me to create - very early on - special greetings between the different caste levels of the Varin society I was creating. That part was in fact the easiest for me, but exploring the higher levels of complexity, looking at less quantifiable objectification, for example, or institutional bias, was much more difficult - and took much more time to understand.
When you are designing cultural interactions, take your time. I can hardly give any more useful piece of advice than that. Try out a conflict situation where two people are held back by prejudice. On the first go-round you're likely to get ugly insults and serious conflict, and that kind of stuff is useful to know (it's good to know how people feel deep down). However, ugly insults aren't typically pervasive. In situations of oppression or deep inequality, most of what goes on is subtle and unconscius. You're far more likely to encounter avoidance behaviors than interaction and conflict. At first I thought about what people would say to insult my undercaste character - but then I realized that if she's going to be getting into a vehicle for a long trip, people are far more likely to pretend she doesn't exist. They don't want to raise their blood pressure over the fact that she is there, especially since there will be no way of getting rid of her until they reach their destination. If they interact once, they will have acknowledged that she's there. So they don't interact at all. It was only much later, after I had figured this out, that I realized people don't see undercaste members on the densely built main streets of Pelismara because they are expected to use alleyways between the backs of the buildings, specially designed for garbage collection and utility pipes etc. Even later than that, I finally understood how nobles would refer to undercaste when they had to speak of them, in hushed voices, trying to avoid being too indelicate. The cultural knowledge about how undercaste members use back alleyways turned out to be useful to one of my characters in my novel, because it allowed him to recognize an assassin disguised as a member of the undercaste (who couldn't be undercaste because he was walking on the main street!).
At this point I asked Fanny to take a turn telling us about her work-in-progress, because it has a great example of fantastical culture shock in it. She explained that it's a changeling story, involving a human raised in the "shadow realm" while a "hairn" child is being raised on earth. In her story, the hairn child has trouble because her glamour begins to break, and she starts to see her appearance - but because of the cultural environment, her parents think she has serious body image issues and possibly hallucinations, so they get her diagnosed with body dismorphic disorder and she ends up visiting a therapist.
Another interesting cultural issue in Fanny's story is the presence of wraiths, creatures who feed on the energy of dark emotions, and turn off their feelings of empathy when they have them, because they don't value them. She talked about how difficult it was to place herself in a perspective which does not value empathy and compassion.
[At this point we had a brief cat-related digression, which was pretty funny, but did bring up the issue of communication with animals or animal-like creatures whose language we don't understand.]
Fanny then continued by mentioning how there's a big difference between describing beliefs and dramatizing them. Her wraiths do experience feelings of empathy and compassion, but their view is that "you can't let them rule you." Given how we ordinarily talk about not letting fear or hatred rule us, I thought that was a really insightful phrasing. She also said that in the shadow realm, the hairn family cannot understand why their changeling daughter blushes, and she goes to quite a lot of trouble to explain it to them.
One point that becomes clear from this discussion, I believe, is the importance of "show, don't tell" when you are designing a culturally complex situation. As with any kind of information, social information can be conveyed through a number of means (explained by the narrator, explained by a character, or demonstrated through action and dialogue) but you will achieve greater credibility if you can demonstrate rather than explain.
I brought up the question of third culture persons. These are people who experience culture shock in two directions, because they don't properly belong to either group. The children of international marriages can sometimes experience this, as can children of immigrants, who may not be accepted in the country where they were born, yet have no experience of their parents' home country and its culture. There are a lot of complex problems and emotional experiences that can arise from situations of this nature.
Kyle mentioned that he thought that Petunia Dursley, in the Harry Potter books, was in a complex emotional situtaion - taking in a child she can't stand in order to keep him safe. The interactions between muggles and wizards can also be considered cross-cultural interaction (I think in particular of Arthur Weasley's interesting ideas about muggle technology and manners).
Glenda mentioned that there may be complex cultural interactions within one's own home culture, as is the case with clan or age stratifications. She mentioned that in her world, adults are nominally of equal status, but still engage in subtle status competition (put-downs, etc.).
The idea of cultural differences within a single overarching cultural group is an interesting one, and it doesn't just refer to the situation we have in the US where we have waves of immigrants coming in and engaging in cultural - and literal - conflict with those who lived here before. Each individual member of a culture can be considered to have a relationship with his/her own values. I also call this "not running true to type." Too often in fiction we see people justify their behavior by making reference to their cultural group, as in "I'm an elf, so I do this, because all elves do this." Think through how each person understands the cultural values they are expected to hold. Does your character actively cultivate and enact his/her own cultural values? Or does he/she feel discomfort with those values in any way?
When you are creating complex cultural interactions, a character's reactions will not grow directly out of the values of their culture, but from their own personal relationship and struggle with those values. A person who has internalized feelings of inferiority may demonstrate those or fight against them in any given interaction. A person who is deeply concerned with (I believe Kyle proposed this example) a perceived battle between communism and capitalism will tend to overapply that viewpoint to other interactions, even if they are not related. I have a nobleman character named Adon who is generally very compassionate toward members of the servant caste, and even tries to create a third cultural space within which he can fall in love his own personal servant without subjecting either of them to guilt or status pressure. However, when he discovers that (unbeknownst to anyone) his father was a member of the servant caste, instead of embracing a servant identity, he repudiates everything realted to servant and blames his servant-caste heritage for his own weakness in falling for the servant.
At this point we brought the discussion to a close. Thank you to everyone who participated! I always feel at the end of an hour that there is so much more we could talk about, but I really enjoyed speaking with all of you.
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
TTYU Retro: When do we need to know what a character looks like?
I used to think that it was really, really important to know what characters looked like. So important that I wanted to make sure that I described each one as soon as he or she appeared. I would draw pictures of each of my characters so I could understand what I wanted to describe.
Now that I've been writing for a while, I realize the answer to this question is less clear-cut. It has nuances.
Before I hit nuances, though, I will say this: it is not necessary to describe your main character on the first page. Sometimes you can get through an entire short story with only a very minimal sense of what the character looks like. So back away from the mirror scenes, folks, before you make your readers scream, "cliché!"
Right, then. When is it important to know what a character looks like? Here are some factors to consider:
1. In which genre are you writing?
If you are writing romance, the appearance of the main characters particularly is very, very important. Typically, so is the type of clothing they wear. You will also find the trend toward describing clothing and appearance in gothic and steampunk contexts, and sometimes in alternate history. In other genres, whether or not you describe appearance will depend on other factors. Which leads me to...
2. How much of the character's appearance can be supported using existing reader expectations?
If you are writing in mainstream genres or in genres (like historical) that access existing sets of technology, fashion, etc. then you can take advantage of that existing knowledge in your reader and evoke more than you describe. If you are working in science fiction, fantasy or steampunk where the presence of one thing doesn't necessarily imply the presence of another, you may need to put effort into describing more detail in order to defeat incorrect assumptions.
The next set of questions has to do with the nature of the characters in question.
3. Is this an omnisciently observed character, a point of view character or a secondary character?
This is probably the single most important question to answer. If you're using an omniscient narrator, the narrator is the one deciding what visual details of the main character and secondary characters readers need to see. If you're using limited point of view, then what details of secondary characters get described will depend on the mental states, perceptiveness and judgment of the point of view character. And what details of the point of view character get described will depend on how aware that character is of his/her own appearance.
4. If this person is a secondary character, will he/she appear in the story more than once and need to be recognizable?
A character who will need to be recognized later needs to have some characteristic that stands out and is noticed by the point of view character. This feature does not have to be visual, but it often is, and it must be included in the initial description. For example, you might have a character who will be "a guard with a crooked nose" the first time and "the guard with the crooked nose" thereafter.
5. If this person is a point of view character, what aspects of his/her personality lend themselves to a concern with appearance?
The only time you really want a person looking in a mirror is when that person has a habit of looking in mirrors to check his/her appearance. The reasons for checking the appearance will affect how the appearance is described, and they need not occur on the first page where a character appears, but should appear at the point where the concern with appearance is most relevant. A lady might be concerned about whether she looks right for a party and check her makeup in a mirror before walking in, or she might just touch her cheek with one finger unconsciously. I have a character who has to check his appearance constantly so that his boss won't freak out. His self-descriptions are quite detailed but have nothing to do with vanity or the public's opinion.
6. If this person is a point of view character, are there any aspects of his/her appearance which will affect his/her perceptions, judgments, or actions?
When you are using a limited - particularly a deep internal - point of view, and particularly if you're working with a character who doesn't really care about his/her appearance, then this is the question you should be asking. I have a character with very short legs who is taller than the people he's speaking to when he is sitting down, but shorter when he stands up - so I need to be clear about whether he's looking up or down at people at different points. My character Rulii from "Cold Words" is a member of the downy-furred race of the Aurrel, which is enormously important in the story, but not because it's a matter of how he looks. It affects his behavior, his fear of cold, his fear of shame, and his desire for justice (because his race is downtrodden). Those aspects of appearance which affect the way a character perceives things, judges things, or behaves, must be included - but the best way to include them is by demonstrating the effect they have on the character rather than stepping outside the character to observe them.
7. Are there any questions of appearance that readers are likely to get wrong?
This is a funny one. A character in one of my unpublished novels is very pale and has blond hair, but when my writing group first read it, many of them picked him as having dark hair because a) he is a mysterious character and b) I didn't make explicit mention of his hair color early enough. This is one that you might be able to take care of just by including the basics of eye and hair color that Western readers will be looking for, or it may be something that comes up in critique.
Finally, this seems like the perfect place to address Garrett Anderson's recent question:
"What sorts of strategies would you recommend in describing a character to an audience when the adjectives would not exist in your fictitious world? For example, if I have a character whom I want to look Asian, but there is no such place in my fictitious universe, what are some strategies to convey the appearance? Maybe that's not the best example, but basically, if you want a certain look, and you don't want to use real-world references."
I recommend a few steps. First, ask yourself if this particular appearance is absolutely necessary to your portrayal of the character. If it isn't, don't worry about it - just give a few basic characteristics like maybe dark hair and leave the rest up to your reader. If it is, keep reading.
First, create a sense in your mind of what the character looks like physically. Ask yourself what aspects of that appearance would be noticeable to a resident of your world. Those are the ones you will want to include in your description.
Second, and very importantly, think about why it is that residents of your world would notice these physical characteristics of your character. What is it about that person that stands out relative to all the people around? Does he or she resemble a person of a particular nationality local to the world in question? Does the character's appearance give observers a "vibe" like the one that an Asian appearance would give you? Where does that vibe come from? What associations are people going to make with that appearance when they see it? Those associations have to be grounded in the world you have created.
I actually have a character whom I imagine as vaguely Asian-looking. I don't describe him at all until the third page of his opening chapter. You'll notice (and laugh at me no doubt) because this is a mirror moment (not a whole scene, thank goodness). This description comes at the point when he's just finished showering and dressing before a job interview, and gotten into his black silk suit:
"He plucked up his favorite tailed comb and trained his dark hair into its ponytail, which thanks to Kiit's precise trimming, fell just outside his collar. At the mirror he shared with his bunkmate, he painted the small black circle between his eyebrows, cleaned his makeup brush and shut it into the box of implements atop his dresser."
Most of his "vibe" comes from his attitudes and his actions rather than his appearance. If readers don't see him the way I do, that's fine with me.
I hope this helps you all deal with the question of appearances!
Now that I've been writing for a while, I realize the answer to this question is less clear-cut. It has nuances.
Before I hit nuances, though, I will say this: it is not necessary to describe your main character on the first page. Sometimes you can get through an entire short story with only a very minimal sense of what the character looks like. So back away from the mirror scenes, folks, before you make your readers scream, "cliché!"
Right, then. When is it important to know what a character looks like? Here are some factors to consider:
1. In which genre are you writing?
If you are writing romance, the appearance of the main characters particularly is very, very important. Typically, so is the type of clothing they wear. You will also find the trend toward describing clothing and appearance in gothic and steampunk contexts, and sometimes in alternate history. In other genres, whether or not you describe appearance will depend on other factors. Which leads me to...
2. How much of the character's appearance can be supported using existing reader expectations?
If you are writing in mainstream genres or in genres (like historical) that access existing sets of technology, fashion, etc. then you can take advantage of that existing knowledge in your reader and evoke more than you describe. If you are working in science fiction, fantasy or steampunk where the presence of one thing doesn't necessarily imply the presence of another, you may need to put effort into describing more detail in order to defeat incorrect assumptions.
The next set of questions has to do with the nature of the characters in question.
3. Is this an omnisciently observed character, a point of view character or a secondary character?
This is probably the single most important question to answer. If you're using an omniscient narrator, the narrator is the one deciding what visual details of the main character and secondary characters readers need to see. If you're using limited point of view, then what details of secondary characters get described will depend on the mental states, perceptiveness and judgment of the point of view character. And what details of the point of view character get described will depend on how aware that character is of his/her own appearance.
4. If this person is a secondary character, will he/she appear in the story more than once and need to be recognizable?
A character who will need to be recognized later needs to have some characteristic that stands out and is noticed by the point of view character. This feature does not have to be visual, but it often is, and it must be included in the initial description. For example, you might have a character who will be "a guard with a crooked nose" the first time and "the guard with the crooked nose" thereafter.
5. If this person is a point of view character, what aspects of his/her personality lend themselves to a concern with appearance?
The only time you really want a person looking in a mirror is when that person has a habit of looking in mirrors to check his/her appearance. The reasons for checking the appearance will affect how the appearance is described, and they need not occur on the first page where a character appears, but should appear at the point where the concern with appearance is most relevant. A lady might be concerned about whether she looks right for a party and check her makeup in a mirror before walking in, or she might just touch her cheek with one finger unconsciously. I have a character who has to check his appearance constantly so that his boss won't freak out. His self-descriptions are quite detailed but have nothing to do with vanity or the public's opinion.
6. If this person is a point of view character, are there any aspects of his/her appearance which will affect his/her perceptions, judgments, or actions?
When you are using a limited - particularly a deep internal - point of view, and particularly if you're working with a character who doesn't really care about his/her appearance, then this is the question you should be asking. I have a character with very short legs who is taller than the people he's speaking to when he is sitting down, but shorter when he stands up - so I need to be clear about whether he's looking up or down at people at different points. My character Rulii from "Cold Words" is a member of the downy-furred race of the Aurrel, which is enormously important in the story, but not because it's a matter of how he looks. It affects his behavior, his fear of cold, his fear of shame, and his desire for justice (because his race is downtrodden). Those aspects of appearance which affect the way a character perceives things, judges things, or behaves, must be included - but the best way to include them is by demonstrating the effect they have on the character rather than stepping outside the character to observe them.
7. Are there any questions of appearance that readers are likely to get wrong?
This is a funny one. A character in one of my unpublished novels is very pale and has blond hair, but when my writing group first read it, many of them picked him as having dark hair because a) he is a mysterious character and b) I didn't make explicit mention of his hair color early enough. This is one that you might be able to take care of just by including the basics of eye and hair color that Western readers will be looking for, or it may be something that comes up in critique.
Finally, this seems like the perfect place to address Garrett Anderson's recent question:
"What sorts of strategies would you recommend in describing a character to an audience when the adjectives would not exist in your fictitious world? For example, if I have a character whom I want to look Asian, but there is no such place in my fictitious universe, what are some strategies to convey the appearance? Maybe that's not the best example, but basically, if you want a certain look, and you don't want to use real-world references."
I recommend a few steps. First, ask yourself if this particular appearance is absolutely necessary to your portrayal of the character. If it isn't, don't worry about it - just give a few basic characteristics like maybe dark hair and leave the rest up to your reader. If it is, keep reading.
First, create a sense in your mind of what the character looks like physically. Ask yourself what aspects of that appearance would be noticeable to a resident of your world. Those are the ones you will want to include in your description.
Second, and very importantly, think about why it is that residents of your world would notice these physical characteristics of your character. What is it about that person that stands out relative to all the people around? Does he or she resemble a person of a particular nationality local to the world in question? Does the character's appearance give observers a "vibe" like the one that an Asian appearance would give you? Where does that vibe come from? What associations are people going to make with that appearance when they see it? Those associations have to be grounded in the world you have created.
I actually have a character whom I imagine as vaguely Asian-looking. I don't describe him at all until the third page of his opening chapter. You'll notice (and laugh at me no doubt) because this is a mirror moment (not a whole scene, thank goodness). This description comes at the point when he's just finished showering and dressing before a job interview, and gotten into his black silk suit:
"He plucked up his favorite tailed comb and trained his dark hair into its ponytail, which thanks to Kiit's precise trimming, fell just outside his collar. At the mirror he shared with his bunkmate, he painted the small black circle between his eyebrows, cleaned his makeup brush and shut it into the box of implements atop his dresser."
Most of his "vibe" comes from his attitudes and his actions rather than his appearance. If readers don't see him the way I do, that's fine with me.
I hope this helps you all deal with the question of appearances!
Monday, February 11, 2013
Metaphoric Spaces: Magic, Technology and "Big Issues" in Our Stories
We use metaphors all the time. I suspect it's hard to imagine quite how often we use them, since most metaphors don't take the obvious form of, "She is the angel of my heart." (Though of course they can.)
Actually, a lot of the fantastic, active, interesting verbs we're encouraged to use rely on metaphor for their meanings. "He barreled down the hall" uses a metaphor. So does "The cats like to rocket around the house." So does, "The dog shot out of the barn and over the wall."
Then of course there are the larger metaphors. A hilarious example of this is George Carlin's famous routine about the differences between baseball and football. Baseball is a game, and football is a war - at least metaphorically. There can be no better testimony to the power of metaphors to inspire strong feeling than to watch Carlin make faces as he makes the comparison. The way we speak about things influences the way we react to them.
Now, George Carlin is a very funny man, but part of the power of that routine is that metaphors do strongly influence how we think about life. When negotiations are described using war metaphors, the participants are more likely to believe that only one side can win - when in many cases, there is an optimal solution that will help both sides. Politicians choose their words carefully (and even use focus groups!) in order to make use of the feelings that metaphors can inspire in us.
This is one reason why I encourage people who are working with alien or fantasy worlds to think about the metaphors that their characters use to understand their lives. My favorite example (as blog readers will no doubt know) is my character Rulii who thought of life in terms of hunting, and therefore called colleagues "huntmates" and his goals "quarry."
Today I'd like to go one step further in considering metaphor, and look at three places in science fiction and fantasy writing where metaphors can play a critical role.
First is magic. When you're designing a magic system, watch out for the metaphors that crop up. If you're trying to create a highly organized, rule-based system, you'll probably want to identify a single metaphor that can help you to handle your descriptions of magic use. Some books treat magic as if it were water; some treat it like wind. Others treat it like bullets shot out of a wand that stands in for a gun. My own novel, Through This Gate, had ink magic. The choice of this underlying metaphor will give you a sense of how the magic can be controlled and how it behaves; also, how it might be countered or broken. Consistency of metaphor is often crucial. If you've got your magic acting like gravity in one place and like bullets in another, people will notice - and they may object. It can be worth taking a special pass through a manuscript to check the kinds of adjectives and verbs used to describe magic, and making sure that they are all consistent with a single underlying metaphorical concept.
Second is technology. How many of us are actively conscious of our association of technology with "progress"? What if technology were not assigned that metaphorical value, but an entirely different one (like art, perhaps)? I'm sure you are all familiar with the portrayal of virtual space as one "above" reality, or "inside" a computer. This, too, is a metaphorical choice, which puts the virtual space in a position like that of heaven, or in the second case in the position of the inside of a dollhouse or gameboard. I'm sure you can think of other possibilities. The story I'm currently editing, "Mind Locker," uses an entirely different metaphor, one associated with the new concept of augmented reality, where the virtual "overlays" reality, in a sense reversing the idea of a heavenly/platonically ideal space into one that invades the earthly plane.
Last for today is "issues." Whenever you are dealing with important and conflict-filled issues like gender, racial, ethnic, or language identity, pay close attention to the metaphors that you are using. The feelings that they provoke will infuse emotion and judgment into your portrayal of these critical issues, and if you aren't paying attention, you may end up provoking something you hadn't intended. For one thing, you want to make sure that if you're working in a secondary world, the metaphors you associate with personal identity characteristics are appropriate to the world you are working in, and not to ours. Allowing metaphorical associations to creep in from our world can change the feeling of a created world drastically, and can sometimes become confusing. For example, do the people of your world think of race in terms of coloration, or some other criterion? Is the most useful metaphor one of "blood" and the dilution of blood, or something else? Switching to gender now, are females "flowers" in your world? Might men be "cats"? Why? When I was designing my Varin world, I had to be very careful with how I used metaphorical descriptions. Skin color there varies, but is not a critical identity criterion in the way that caste is, because though the initial population had different skin tones, there has been no immigration for a thousand years and interbreeding has been constant. Once you factor in that everyone has lived underground that whole time, you end up with a group that varies between "golden" and "pale," with the exception of the few people who actually do spend time on the surface (and they vary from freckled to brown-skinned). I therefore tried to dissociate the metaphors usually used with skin tone, and reassign them for use with caste identities, so that "blood" refers to the quality of one's caste.
There is so much more I could say here, but I will leave you with this: metaphors are everywhere, and they have powerful links directly into your emotions. It's worth taking the time to analyze them consciously and make sure that, as a writer, you are using them to their full potential.
It's something to think about.
Actually, a lot of the fantastic, active, interesting verbs we're encouraged to use rely on metaphor for their meanings. "He barreled down the hall" uses a metaphor. So does "The cats like to rocket around the house." So does, "The dog shot out of the barn and over the wall."
Then of course there are the larger metaphors. A hilarious example of this is George Carlin's famous routine about the differences between baseball and football. Baseball is a game, and football is a war - at least metaphorically. There can be no better testimony to the power of metaphors to inspire strong feeling than to watch Carlin make faces as he makes the comparison. The way we speak about things influences the way we react to them.
Now, George Carlin is a very funny man, but part of the power of that routine is that metaphors do strongly influence how we think about life. When negotiations are described using war metaphors, the participants are more likely to believe that only one side can win - when in many cases, there is an optimal solution that will help both sides. Politicians choose their words carefully (and even use focus groups!) in order to make use of the feelings that metaphors can inspire in us.
This is one reason why I encourage people who are working with alien or fantasy worlds to think about the metaphors that their characters use to understand their lives. My favorite example (as blog readers will no doubt know) is my character Rulii who thought of life in terms of hunting, and therefore called colleagues "huntmates" and his goals "quarry."
Today I'd like to go one step further in considering metaphor, and look at three places in science fiction and fantasy writing where metaphors can play a critical role.
First is magic. When you're designing a magic system, watch out for the metaphors that crop up. If you're trying to create a highly organized, rule-based system, you'll probably want to identify a single metaphor that can help you to handle your descriptions of magic use. Some books treat magic as if it were water; some treat it like wind. Others treat it like bullets shot out of a wand that stands in for a gun. My own novel, Through This Gate, had ink magic. The choice of this underlying metaphor will give you a sense of how the magic can be controlled and how it behaves; also, how it might be countered or broken. Consistency of metaphor is often crucial. If you've got your magic acting like gravity in one place and like bullets in another, people will notice - and they may object. It can be worth taking a special pass through a manuscript to check the kinds of adjectives and verbs used to describe magic, and making sure that they are all consistent with a single underlying metaphorical concept.
Second is technology. How many of us are actively conscious of our association of technology with "progress"? What if technology were not assigned that metaphorical value, but an entirely different one (like art, perhaps)? I'm sure you are all familiar with the portrayal of virtual space as one "above" reality, or "inside" a computer. This, too, is a metaphorical choice, which puts the virtual space in a position like that of heaven, or in the second case in the position of the inside of a dollhouse or gameboard. I'm sure you can think of other possibilities. The story I'm currently editing, "Mind Locker," uses an entirely different metaphor, one associated with the new concept of augmented reality, where the virtual "overlays" reality, in a sense reversing the idea of a heavenly/platonically ideal space into one that invades the earthly plane.
Last for today is "issues." Whenever you are dealing with important and conflict-filled issues like gender, racial, ethnic, or language identity, pay close attention to the metaphors that you are using. The feelings that they provoke will infuse emotion and judgment into your portrayal of these critical issues, and if you aren't paying attention, you may end up provoking something you hadn't intended. For one thing, you want to make sure that if you're working in a secondary world, the metaphors you associate with personal identity characteristics are appropriate to the world you are working in, and not to ours. Allowing metaphorical associations to creep in from our world can change the feeling of a created world drastically, and can sometimes become confusing. For example, do the people of your world think of race in terms of coloration, or some other criterion? Is the most useful metaphor one of "blood" and the dilution of blood, or something else? Switching to gender now, are females "flowers" in your world? Might men be "cats"? Why? When I was designing my Varin world, I had to be very careful with how I used metaphorical descriptions. Skin color there varies, but is not a critical identity criterion in the way that caste is, because though the initial population had different skin tones, there has been no immigration for a thousand years and interbreeding has been constant. Once you factor in that everyone has lived underground that whole time, you end up with a group that varies between "golden" and "pale," with the exception of the few people who actually do spend time on the surface (and they vary from freckled to brown-skinned). I therefore tried to dissociate the metaphors usually used with skin tone, and reassign them for use with caste identities, so that "blood" refers to the quality of one's caste.
There is so much more I could say here, but I will leave you with this: metaphors are everywhere, and they have powerful links directly into your emotions. It's worth taking the time to analyze them consciously and make sure that, as a writer, you are using them to their full potential.
It's something to think about.
Thursday, February 7, 2013
Worldbuilding Process: A Google+ worldbuilding hangout report
I was joined for this discussion by Dale Emery, Glenda Pfeiffer, and Kyle Aisteach.
For the discussion of worldbuilding process, I wanted to explore how people got started on creating their worlds rather than go through a checklist of areas where worldbuilding information might be found, because not all worlds need to be elaborated in every area, but people come at their worlds from a lot of different angles. To this end, I started by asking about the worlds that my guests had created.
Dale told us that he'd just managed to come up with a backstory for a world he has created, so we explored his process first. He began with a premise: the idea that a man gains the power to compel people to say what they're thinking - or to stop them from saying what they're thinking.
Here is the background that he created.
The people in his world live in an isolated community, isolated because they escaped from religious persecution in a place where their way of life received no respect or privilege, and plenty of abuse.
The community has a legend of its own origins, which goes like this: An unnamed benefactor lent them money to build ships for their escape, on condition that all the people of the community live by their principles for 100 years. In fact, the legend hides the fact that three men stole the money. Dale knows that there is a letter which is supposed to be opened on the 100th anniversary of the community's founding, but Dale doesn't know yet whether it will contain a confession or more lies. Either way, some fundamental lie about the community's identity is about to be revealed.
From a process point of view, Dale explained that he realized that his protagonist's magic was about truth, and that this would create conflicts if people had deep secrets... so therefore he went looking for what kind of deep secrets people might have. He also understood that the stakes would be higher if the secrets threatened the entire community... so he went looking for something that would cut straight to the heart of what the community's founding stood for. These ideas about truth and its value have also given him ideas to think about in developing the protagonist's personality, so that the original premise has expanded to influence both the setting and the characters.
So what we see here is recurring elements - we hesitated to call them "theme" - of honesty, revelation, et. spread across different aspects of the story including plot, conflict, and character. There was also the issue of the use of power to compel or suppress truthfulness, which allowed the story conflict to spread outward into the world.
In a sense, what we come up with here is the idea that when you are worldbuilding, you're really stepping into a vast web of interconnected parts. In fact, if the parts of the world weren't logically interconnected, you'd find your world would have a serious credibility problem. This isn't to say that you can't have diversity in a world - lack of diversity also decreases credibility. But you do have to think through a lot of complex interrelations and interactions, and try to expand elements of meaning as far as you can into the story. The nice thing about a web that is interconnected is that you can find your way in at any point, and because of those interconnections, you will still be able to find your way to the other regions of the web.
Next I talked about my initial development of my Varin world, which has been expanding for going on thirty years (yikes!). That one, too, started with a story premise, but it wasn't that story premise that caused the expansion to occur. Initially the premise was that ancient kings with magical powers got cast down and became the lowest of the low, whereupon one person discovers this hidden truth and gets imprisoned. Kings cast down, though, wasn't what made the world really take off for me - it was instead the idea of a political prisoner, someone who is imprisoned for "knowing too much" (and indeed in my 13 year old draft, that was what was written on his prison door!). At that point my subconscious decided to stick with the concept it found most fascinating, and the idea of being trapped or imprisoned started expanding through the world. I created high-tech underground cities, and I created a very restrictive caste system. The concepts may not seem related at first glance, but both of these have:
1. levels
2. relative comfort on each level
3. no escape
In fact, a lot of factual research also went into my creation of this world, despite the fact that it is not a future Earth or related to Earth in any way. I imagine the process of research looks a bit like one's knowledge of a town with an extensive subway system. The subway system is the interconnected web of the story and its world. Each time your train comes to a halt because you don't know enough, you get out and go up into the real world to learn what you need in order to make things run more smoothly (like checking out the neighborhood of the station). I use a ton of my own knowledge for linguistics and anthropology, but also sociology and psychology, and the history of Japan, etc. etc. I based my caste system on that of Edo era Japan and then modified or refined it based on the characters I had imagined. The characters were also deepened by these caste concepts because I was able to establish the values of each group and have each character relate to them differently. As you worldbuild, you will often discover that characters and world feed into and inform one another.
Dale pointed out that often, the setting becomes so important to a science fiction or fantasy story that it is almost like a character in itself. It's always cool when you can say, "This story couldn't have happened anywhere else." The setting can be used to amplify conflicts and present threats to what characters accomplish. Similarly, you want to have a character who fits into both the world and the conflict, so that the story "could only happen to this person." The conflict is stronger if it feeds directly into the character's problems. Kyle called this, feedback between the setting and the story. He himself has been working on a world that was inspired by a physics paper he read, but hasn't yet landed on the appropriate conflict for it yet.
At this point we talked about story seeds, and anthology themes - essentially, these are when someone hands you a piece of information and says "this must be in your web." I used to find them really tough to deal with, but when I think about it as an element of the web, then I find it helps me a lot.
Recently I was handed the idea of battles in military fantasy and asked what I could do with it. Since battles haven't been my "thing" to this point, I panicked a little, but immediately started thinking about what kind of culturally interesting aspect of battles and fantasy I could find to make this element fit into a workable web. I found my way to the concept of a translator, and from there to the idea of someone caught between the two cultures. That made me think of someone who lives in a place where the land is continually fought over (there are tons of real-world examples including Kashmir, Alsace, and Jerusalem among others). When I started to ask how a single person might influence the clash of armies, that made me think that magic could be useful, which gets in the fantasy element I was looking for.
When you're looking for a type of magic, it can often help to use metaphors as inspiration. I was thinking of the actions of the two armies like waves sweeping over this region of land (albeit slowly) and that made me think the town my protagonist lives in should be called (in translation) Tides of Death. That brought me to moon magic, and suggested that the moon goddess should be the goddess of war. My daughter suggested there should be two moon goddesses, fighting one another and causing the phases of the moon (yes she is very cool). That brought me back to what implications this idea might have for the world, and gave me ideas for battle standards, light vs. dark etc. It's an idea in progress, but since this hangout was about practice, I thought I'd show the connections.
Brian picked up the idea of third culture persons and took it in a different direction, talking about how many stories have featured halfbreeds, or mixed marriages, and issues surrounding them. He mentioned that once an area has been fought over long enough, there is no way to disentangle the ethnicities involved. Yugoslavia, for example, held rifts going back to the 15th century, but the whole area is ethnically a mix.
Kyle mentioned his mother had done some genealogical research and discovered that while she believed she was entirely Irish, she is in fact half English. Her parents were English and Irish, but at that time, if you married an Irish person you became Irish - this belief persisted even in the United States, where they were living, despite the distance from Ireland itself. In early Australia, in the penal colonies, there was a similar perception of the English and Irish as different "races" that must be kept separate.
Dale mentioned that using a checklist of topics can be very useful in worldbuilding process - things like History, Religion, Family, Community, etc. I suggested we talk about it another time, but for my readers, I encourage you to go and look at the list of hangout reports to get some ideas of things to think about. This hangout was primarily about organic process, but analytic process is also very important and the categories must interlock. Often, we can use analytical techniques to inspire and trigger progress in our organic worldbuilding.
Brian brought up the question of the difference between worldbuilding for short stories and worldbuilding for novels. While it is true, as Brian said, that short stories often need less worldbuilding effort, they don't necessarily need as little as you might imagine. I referred my guests to the article I wrote for Janice Hardy's blog some time ago, here, in which I describe the difference between the two lengths as that between looking out the window and walking out the door. In a short story, you will have to be able to provide meaningful glimpses of the world you have created. When we look out a window we see a small but complete enough view that we can extrapolate about what surrounds us. However, unless we walk out the door, as we have room to do with a novel, we can't get into the close details of that view, or know for sure what lies outside the boundaries of the frame.
Dale gave the example of old movies where what we see when looking out of the car windows is obviously fake, and Brian mentioned the movie Airplane where stock footage plays behind the car. He also mentioned that if you don't move your hands on the steering wheel it looks fake, even though when we drive we don't move our hands on the wheel at all. Sometimes we can do the equivalent of borrowing stock footage for our stories by making reference to a technology set or something else (like FTL drive) that people are very familiar with. Essentially, using an element like this is the equivalent of saying to the reader, "It's okay to maintain your usual expectations in this spot."
Our last topic was one about expectations as well - but this time, the expectations that surround us in out own culture. Every work of literature reflects in some manner the social expectations of the era in which it was published, and the works we write are no exception. They reflect our values, often in very subtle ways, and those values are a product of our era and our cultural environment. It's also valuable when writing and worldbuilding to consider the kinds of social debates that are ongoing in society at large. I believe it was Kyle who said that "whatever is currently under discussion must be validated." For example, because gender and racial diversity are major topics, it can feel like a big omission if we don't at least make a nod to those issues in our work ("hang a light on it"). That basically means that these issues don't need to be central to the main conflict or our stories, but if they are not, then it's good to indicate subtly why (or that they are deliberately not included). Kyle suggested that it would be very interesting to contrast the worldbuilding of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings with an eye to examining the influence of the World War II historical context.
Thanks to everyone who attended! It was a great chat. Our discussion today was a lot of fun, and we talked about crafting cultural interactions. That post will be up next week!
For the discussion of worldbuilding process, I wanted to explore how people got started on creating their worlds rather than go through a checklist of areas where worldbuilding information might be found, because not all worlds need to be elaborated in every area, but people come at their worlds from a lot of different angles. To this end, I started by asking about the worlds that my guests had created.
Dale told us that he'd just managed to come up with a backstory for a world he has created, so we explored his process first. He began with a premise: the idea that a man gains the power to compel people to say what they're thinking - or to stop them from saying what they're thinking.
Here is the background that he created.
The people in his world live in an isolated community, isolated because they escaped from religious persecution in a place where their way of life received no respect or privilege, and plenty of abuse.
The community has a legend of its own origins, which goes like this: An unnamed benefactor lent them money to build ships for their escape, on condition that all the people of the community live by their principles for 100 years. In fact, the legend hides the fact that three men stole the money. Dale knows that there is a letter which is supposed to be opened on the 100th anniversary of the community's founding, but Dale doesn't know yet whether it will contain a confession or more lies. Either way, some fundamental lie about the community's identity is about to be revealed.
From a process point of view, Dale explained that he realized that his protagonist's magic was about truth, and that this would create conflicts if people had deep secrets... so therefore he went looking for what kind of deep secrets people might have. He also understood that the stakes would be higher if the secrets threatened the entire community... so he went looking for something that would cut straight to the heart of what the community's founding stood for. These ideas about truth and its value have also given him ideas to think about in developing the protagonist's personality, so that the original premise has expanded to influence both the setting and the characters.
So what we see here is recurring elements - we hesitated to call them "theme" - of honesty, revelation, et. spread across different aspects of the story including plot, conflict, and character. There was also the issue of the use of power to compel or suppress truthfulness, which allowed the story conflict to spread outward into the world.
In a sense, what we come up with here is the idea that when you are worldbuilding, you're really stepping into a vast web of interconnected parts. In fact, if the parts of the world weren't logically interconnected, you'd find your world would have a serious credibility problem. This isn't to say that you can't have diversity in a world - lack of diversity also decreases credibility. But you do have to think through a lot of complex interrelations and interactions, and try to expand elements of meaning as far as you can into the story. The nice thing about a web that is interconnected is that you can find your way in at any point, and because of those interconnections, you will still be able to find your way to the other regions of the web.
Next I talked about my initial development of my Varin world, which has been expanding for going on thirty years (yikes!). That one, too, started with a story premise, but it wasn't that story premise that caused the expansion to occur. Initially the premise was that ancient kings with magical powers got cast down and became the lowest of the low, whereupon one person discovers this hidden truth and gets imprisoned. Kings cast down, though, wasn't what made the world really take off for me - it was instead the idea of a political prisoner, someone who is imprisoned for "knowing too much" (and indeed in my 13 year old draft, that was what was written on his prison door!). At that point my subconscious decided to stick with the concept it found most fascinating, and the idea of being trapped or imprisoned started expanding through the world. I created high-tech underground cities, and I created a very restrictive caste system. The concepts may not seem related at first glance, but both of these have:
1. levels
2. relative comfort on each level
3. no escape
In fact, a lot of factual research also went into my creation of this world, despite the fact that it is not a future Earth or related to Earth in any way. I imagine the process of research looks a bit like one's knowledge of a town with an extensive subway system. The subway system is the interconnected web of the story and its world. Each time your train comes to a halt because you don't know enough, you get out and go up into the real world to learn what you need in order to make things run more smoothly (like checking out the neighborhood of the station). I use a ton of my own knowledge for linguistics and anthropology, but also sociology and psychology, and the history of Japan, etc. etc. I based my caste system on that of Edo era Japan and then modified or refined it based on the characters I had imagined. The characters were also deepened by these caste concepts because I was able to establish the values of each group and have each character relate to them differently. As you worldbuild, you will often discover that characters and world feed into and inform one another.
Dale pointed out that often, the setting becomes so important to a science fiction or fantasy story that it is almost like a character in itself. It's always cool when you can say, "This story couldn't have happened anywhere else." The setting can be used to amplify conflicts and present threats to what characters accomplish. Similarly, you want to have a character who fits into both the world and the conflict, so that the story "could only happen to this person." The conflict is stronger if it feeds directly into the character's problems. Kyle called this, feedback between the setting and the story. He himself has been working on a world that was inspired by a physics paper he read, but hasn't yet landed on the appropriate conflict for it yet.
At this point we talked about story seeds, and anthology themes - essentially, these are when someone hands you a piece of information and says "this must be in your web." I used to find them really tough to deal with, but when I think about it as an element of the web, then I find it helps me a lot.
Recently I was handed the idea of battles in military fantasy and asked what I could do with it. Since battles haven't been my "thing" to this point, I panicked a little, but immediately started thinking about what kind of culturally interesting aspect of battles and fantasy I could find to make this element fit into a workable web. I found my way to the concept of a translator, and from there to the idea of someone caught between the two cultures. That made me think of someone who lives in a place where the land is continually fought over (there are tons of real-world examples including Kashmir, Alsace, and Jerusalem among others). When I started to ask how a single person might influence the clash of armies, that made me think that magic could be useful, which gets in the fantasy element I was looking for.
When you're looking for a type of magic, it can often help to use metaphors as inspiration. I was thinking of the actions of the two armies like waves sweeping over this region of land (albeit slowly) and that made me think the town my protagonist lives in should be called (in translation) Tides of Death. That brought me to moon magic, and suggested that the moon goddess should be the goddess of war. My daughter suggested there should be two moon goddesses, fighting one another and causing the phases of the moon (yes she is very cool). That brought me back to what implications this idea might have for the world, and gave me ideas for battle standards, light vs. dark etc. It's an idea in progress, but since this hangout was about practice, I thought I'd show the connections.
Brian picked up the idea of third culture persons and took it in a different direction, talking about how many stories have featured halfbreeds, or mixed marriages, and issues surrounding them. He mentioned that once an area has been fought over long enough, there is no way to disentangle the ethnicities involved. Yugoslavia, for example, held rifts going back to the 15th century, but the whole area is ethnically a mix.
Kyle mentioned his mother had done some genealogical research and discovered that while she believed she was entirely Irish, she is in fact half English. Her parents were English and Irish, but at that time, if you married an Irish person you became Irish - this belief persisted even in the United States, where they were living, despite the distance from Ireland itself. In early Australia, in the penal colonies, there was a similar perception of the English and Irish as different "races" that must be kept separate.
Dale mentioned that using a checklist of topics can be very useful in worldbuilding process - things like History, Religion, Family, Community, etc. I suggested we talk about it another time, but for my readers, I encourage you to go and look at the list of hangout reports to get some ideas of things to think about. This hangout was primarily about organic process, but analytic process is also very important and the categories must interlock. Often, we can use analytical techniques to inspire and trigger progress in our organic worldbuilding.
Brian brought up the question of the difference between worldbuilding for short stories and worldbuilding for novels. While it is true, as Brian said, that short stories often need less worldbuilding effort, they don't necessarily need as little as you might imagine. I referred my guests to the article I wrote for Janice Hardy's blog some time ago, here, in which I describe the difference between the two lengths as that between looking out the window and walking out the door. In a short story, you will have to be able to provide meaningful glimpses of the world you have created. When we look out a window we see a small but complete enough view that we can extrapolate about what surrounds us. However, unless we walk out the door, as we have room to do with a novel, we can't get into the close details of that view, or know for sure what lies outside the boundaries of the frame.
Dale gave the example of old movies where what we see when looking out of the car windows is obviously fake, and Brian mentioned the movie Airplane where stock footage plays behind the car. He also mentioned that if you don't move your hands on the steering wheel it looks fake, even though when we drive we don't move our hands on the wheel at all. Sometimes we can do the equivalent of borrowing stock footage for our stories by making reference to a technology set or something else (like FTL drive) that people are very familiar with. Essentially, using an element like this is the equivalent of saying to the reader, "It's okay to maintain your usual expectations in this spot."
Our last topic was one about expectations as well - but this time, the expectations that surround us in out own culture. Every work of literature reflects in some manner the social expectations of the era in which it was published, and the works we write are no exception. They reflect our values, often in very subtle ways, and those values are a product of our era and our cultural environment. It's also valuable when writing and worldbuilding to consider the kinds of social debates that are ongoing in society at large. I believe it was Kyle who said that "whatever is currently under discussion must be validated." For example, because gender and racial diversity are major topics, it can feel like a big omission if we don't at least make a nod to those issues in our work ("hang a light on it"). That basically means that these issues don't need to be central to the main conflict or our stories, but if they are not, then it's good to indicate subtly why (or that they are deliberately not included). Kyle suggested that it would be very interesting to contrast the worldbuilding of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings with an eye to examining the influence of the World War II historical context.
Thanks to everyone who attended! It was a great chat. Our discussion today was a lot of fun, and we talked about crafting cultural interactions. That post will be up next week!
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
1000 Posts at TalkToYoUniverse!
This morning, four years and seven months after its inception, TalkToYoUniverse has reached a total of 1000 published posts! I'm amazed to have gotten to this point, and I'm so grateful to all of you who continue to come and read the blog. I've made lots of great friends here, and even met a few as I've traveled to conventions - I hope that continues!
For those of you who are new to the blog, I encourage you to take a look around my archives. The left menu bar suggests some great places to start:
These are transcripts of the live discussions I've had on Google+ with interested folk, and cover a wide range of topics such as the Culture of Oppression, Gender Roles, Illness and Medicine, and Language Design (featuring Game of Thrones' David Peterson and Dr. Lawrence Schoen of the Klingon language institute).
These are articles about areas all over the world, intended to give hard-to-research insights into world regions for people interested in setting stories there, or interested in having inspiration for alien/fantasy worldbuilding. Each article has been written by a person who lived in that location long enough to have a very intensive cultural experience, or by a person native to that area. The collection now has 34 articles from Australia and Brazil through Latvia and the Netherlands, all the way to Wales. It even includes several articles on different states of the USA. Please contact me if you are interested in adding your own location to the collection!
For these posts, I took the first 500 words of a story sent to me by a blog commenter, and went through it word by word for worldbuilding clues, looking at what each choice of word or image implied about the world being created. They're a bit like detective explorations of the stories in question, and they cover a lot of interesting topics like the Narrator as Ambassador, Juxtaposing Normal and Abnormal, Metaphors and Magic, and Managing Information and Surprises.
These posts feature common things that are often taken for granted, and look at how they can be valued differently across cultures or in literature. Some examples are Alcohol, Information, and Water.
These posts were featured on the SFWA website, and explain the different areas of linguistics, and how they can be valuable to writers in their work. They cover things like articulatory phonetics, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.
These posts each take an excerpt from a well-known piece of science fiction or fantasy and analyze word-by-word to see what can be learned about worldbuilding and writing craft. They include authors Kij Johnson, Jacqueline Carey, Ursula K. LeGuin, and others.
You may also be interested in these post topics:
Again, thanks for being a part of TalkToYouniverse over its first thousand posts! I'll be posting another Hangout Report later today (I hope) and will be holding another hangout tomorrow at 11am PST on Google+. We'll be talking about how to build cultural interaction.
For those of you who are new to the blog, I encourage you to take a look around my archives. The left menu bar suggests some great places to start:
These are transcripts of the live discussions I've had on Google+ with interested folk, and cover a wide range of topics such as the Culture of Oppression, Gender Roles, Illness and Medicine, and Language Design (featuring Game of Thrones' David Peterson and Dr. Lawrence Schoen of the Klingon language institute).
These are articles about areas all over the world, intended to give hard-to-research insights into world regions for people interested in setting stories there, or interested in having inspiration for alien/fantasy worldbuilding. Each article has been written by a person who lived in that location long enough to have a very intensive cultural experience, or by a person native to that area. The collection now has 34 articles from Australia and Brazil through Latvia and the Netherlands, all the way to Wales. It even includes several articles on different states of the USA. Please contact me if you are interested in adding your own location to the collection!
For these posts, I took the first 500 words of a story sent to me by a blog commenter, and went through it word by word for worldbuilding clues, looking at what each choice of word or image implied about the world being created. They're a bit like detective explorations of the stories in question, and they cover a lot of interesting topics like the Narrator as Ambassador, Juxtaposing Normal and Abnormal, Metaphors and Magic, and Managing Information and Surprises.
These posts feature common things that are often taken for granted, and look at how they can be valued differently across cultures or in literature. Some examples are Alcohol, Information, and Water.
These posts were featured on the SFWA website, and explain the different areas of linguistics, and how they can be valuable to writers in their work. They cover things like articulatory phonetics, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.
These posts each take an excerpt from a well-known piece of science fiction or fantasy and analyze word-by-word to see what can be learned about worldbuilding and writing craft. They include authors Kij Johnson, Jacqueline Carey, Ursula K. LeGuin, and others.
You may also be interested in these post topics:
Again, thanks for being a part of TalkToYouniverse over its first thousand posts! I'll be posting another Hangout Report later today (I hope) and will be holding another hangout tomorrow at 11am PST on Google+. We'll be talking about how to build cultural interaction.
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
TTYU Retro: A sf/f writer experiments in literary thinking
I never thought of myself as a literary writer. Sure, I've done a bit of reading (ok, quite a bit) of literature that's considered classic, but that was never my thing. I always knew I was a writer of science fiction and fantasy. However, the further I go into this the more I can see value in some of the features of literary writing that I learned about in school (in fact, I learned more in university level discourse analysis than I did in high school English).
My goal has never been to get high-falutin'. I've seen, and laughed at, plenty of those jokes and stories about how the literary reader sees someone next to a blue curtain and draws all kinds of extra conclusions about mood etc. when all the writer meant to do was make the curtain blue. But I'm lucky enough to work with someone who views literary interpretation in quite a new way (new enough that she's doing research on her teaching techniques). And I'm realizing that while we may not intend to give things extra meaning, a lot of times those meanings sneak in anyway.
Let me get specific. I'd been working for years on the idea of aligning metaphors with features of the story. After all, to me a metaphor that doesn't link up with anything else is merely showing that the writer wants to be cool and use a metaphor (which is limited in its usefulness). In my worlds, metaphors have to be consistent with the worldview of a character. The girl who compares fields of grass to bedsheets because she's never seen the former, and seen plenty of the latter. The alien who compares working toward major life goals with chasing down quarry. Our metaphors come out of what is familiar to us, and having a metaphor from our world happen in a world that is unlike our own can be at best slightly clunky, at worst, something that throws a reader out of the story completely.
Then I wrote a story (out on submission now) where a metaphor got a little out of hand - in a cool way. I had a Japanese character who was suffering enormous grief and rage, interacting with a nature spirit who had been recently hit by a bolt of lightning. It seemed natural to set the story during typhoon season. But as I wrote it, the typhoon metaphor grew. There were typhoons happening during the story - a character waiting for rain - a character trying to contain a typhoon inside herself - someone trying to create a raincoat... So, naturally, I went to my literary friend and said, "Yikes, can you look at this?" And she grinned at me as though I'd just discovered something she knew about all along. I suppose you could think about it like a piece of art that has the same color in multiple places across the composition. It's almost like hiding a beautiful pattern in the story for the reader to find if they'd like - not letting it be the whole point, or letting it take away from the main conflict, but picking something that will play into the main conflict and allow the different parts of the story to link together. Even if a reader isn't consciously aware of it, their subconscious probably will be on some level, allowing it to contribute to the "feel" of the story.
In fact, I'd been struggling with a literary-symbol task for a while before the typhoon story started lining up. Why? Well, because in my Varin world, there is an unusual phenomenon that the local people don't really understand, characterized by two things:
1. Small, bead-sized (1/4 in diameter?) will-o'-the-wisp type energy creatures, called wysps, that float around the underground cities and the surface, drifting through walls and generally being a sort of background phenomenon;
2. Incredibly tall "trees" called shinca whose trunks grow up from the rock underneath the city and continue on without branching all the way to the surface, where they branch and grow "fruit." The shinca give off heat and a bright silvery glow. They are also invulnerable, so buildings must be built around them.
Now, there is plenty of room for me in later stories to make the shinca and wysps be a topic of mystery and questioning, and to allow characters to try to figure out their nature. But not in this one, which means that I have to write an entire novel in which both shinca and wysps are simply a part of the background and normal day to day life in Varin. But I knew that if I just left it at that, I'd end up with some people going, "what's the point of having these things?" So I'd been looking around for ways to help them fit in with what's happening in the story in some way. I decided as an experiment to have wysps show up when people were taking risks, and to have shinca appear when people were getting insights.
As plans go, it sounded clunky, but I was game to give it a try, because the last thing I wanted was for people to say "If you take these out, the story won't suffer." I can't take them out. So they can't seem extraneous.
As I've been writing, however, I've sometimes put them in in places where I didn't expect to, and sometimes omitted them in places where they might have appeared. And then yesterday I realized my subconscious had been up to something. I was putting wysps in places where people were taking, not just any sort of risks, but risks related to social boundaries that were associated with highly charged emotional states. At the same time, the shinca were appearing not with all insights, but in scenes where protagonist characters got specific kinds of insights - and appearing to interfere with the antagonist's insights. Something tells me the human brain loves patterns so much it schemes them constantly without conscious help. I can feel a pattern coming together that fits with a lot of the fantastical qualities I had given to shinca and wysps already, and so far it's not feeling clunky. I'm sure that revision will help me make it work more effectively, but I'm excited to realize that not only will I have a good reason to keep shinca in wysps in the current book, but that their thematic meanings will actually be able to carry forward into the later stories where they become more of a central issue.
I'm not sure what kind of suggestions I can make for other people's writing. What I can say is that no metaphor or simile should be considered to stand alone. If you find you're writing a descriptive phrase just because you've always wanted to use that phrase somewhere, make sure to check it - see if it fits into the mentality of this character, into the values of the society and the world. If you're describing a particular phenomenon a great deal, you might want to ask yourself if it has any ulterior significance to the culture, the characters, the story problem, the themes you're trying to evoke.
One more thing. I tend to focus a lot on doors. It's not something I ever consciously planned, but there are lots of occasions when people can go through a door in one way or another, or hang in a door, or not want to stand in the door, etc. Now, believe me when I say that for the most part in my work, a door is a door (aside perhaps from the fact that I've made sure the architecture fits the culture of the groups I'm working with). I'm not planning to drop everything about pushing my story forward and run off to look at every instance of doors in my story. However, in Varin at least, a lot of the story issues have to do with what kinds of behaviors are closed off, what kinds of people are supposed to have barriers between them, etc. - and so maybe a focus on doors makes sense. Maybe if and when I get Varin published, someone will pick up the book and go, "you know, she was up to something with those doors." It's possible I am, without even thinking.
It's something to think about.
My goal has never been to get high-falutin'. I've seen, and laughed at, plenty of those jokes and stories about how the literary reader sees someone next to a blue curtain and draws all kinds of extra conclusions about mood etc. when all the writer meant to do was make the curtain blue. But I'm lucky enough to work with someone who views literary interpretation in quite a new way (new enough that she's doing research on her teaching techniques). And I'm realizing that while we may not intend to give things extra meaning, a lot of times those meanings sneak in anyway.
Let me get specific. I'd been working for years on the idea of aligning metaphors with features of the story. After all, to me a metaphor that doesn't link up with anything else is merely showing that the writer wants to be cool and use a metaphor (which is limited in its usefulness). In my worlds, metaphors have to be consistent with the worldview of a character. The girl who compares fields of grass to bedsheets because she's never seen the former, and seen plenty of the latter. The alien who compares working toward major life goals with chasing down quarry. Our metaphors come out of what is familiar to us, and having a metaphor from our world happen in a world that is unlike our own can be at best slightly clunky, at worst, something that throws a reader out of the story completely.
Then I wrote a story (out on submission now) where a metaphor got a little out of hand - in a cool way. I had a Japanese character who was suffering enormous grief and rage, interacting with a nature spirit who had been recently hit by a bolt of lightning. It seemed natural to set the story during typhoon season. But as I wrote it, the typhoon metaphor grew. There were typhoons happening during the story - a character waiting for rain - a character trying to contain a typhoon inside herself - someone trying to create a raincoat... So, naturally, I went to my literary friend and said, "Yikes, can you look at this?" And she grinned at me as though I'd just discovered something she knew about all along. I suppose you could think about it like a piece of art that has the same color in multiple places across the composition. It's almost like hiding a beautiful pattern in the story for the reader to find if they'd like - not letting it be the whole point, or letting it take away from the main conflict, but picking something that will play into the main conflict and allow the different parts of the story to link together. Even if a reader isn't consciously aware of it, their subconscious probably will be on some level, allowing it to contribute to the "feel" of the story.
In fact, I'd been struggling with a literary-symbol task for a while before the typhoon story started lining up. Why? Well, because in my Varin world, there is an unusual phenomenon that the local people don't really understand, characterized by two things:
1. Small, bead-sized (1/4 in diameter?) will-o'-the-wisp type energy creatures, called wysps, that float around the underground cities and the surface, drifting through walls and generally being a sort of background phenomenon;
2. Incredibly tall "trees" called shinca whose trunks grow up from the rock underneath the city and continue on without branching all the way to the surface, where they branch and grow "fruit." The shinca give off heat and a bright silvery glow. They are also invulnerable, so buildings must be built around them.
Now, there is plenty of room for me in later stories to make the shinca and wysps be a topic of mystery and questioning, and to allow characters to try to figure out their nature. But not in this one, which means that I have to write an entire novel in which both shinca and wysps are simply a part of the background and normal day to day life in Varin. But I knew that if I just left it at that, I'd end up with some people going, "what's the point of having these things?" So I'd been looking around for ways to help them fit in with what's happening in the story in some way. I decided as an experiment to have wysps show up when people were taking risks, and to have shinca appear when people were getting insights.
As plans go, it sounded clunky, but I was game to give it a try, because the last thing I wanted was for people to say "If you take these out, the story won't suffer." I can't take them out. So they can't seem extraneous.
As I've been writing, however, I've sometimes put them in in places where I didn't expect to, and sometimes omitted them in places where they might have appeared. And then yesterday I realized my subconscious had been up to something. I was putting wysps in places where people were taking, not just any sort of risks, but risks related to social boundaries that were associated with highly charged emotional states. At the same time, the shinca were appearing not with all insights, but in scenes where protagonist characters got specific kinds of insights - and appearing to interfere with the antagonist's insights. Something tells me the human brain loves patterns so much it schemes them constantly without conscious help. I can feel a pattern coming together that fits with a lot of the fantastical qualities I had given to shinca and wysps already, and so far it's not feeling clunky. I'm sure that revision will help me make it work more effectively, but I'm excited to realize that not only will I have a good reason to keep shinca in wysps in the current book, but that their thematic meanings will actually be able to carry forward into the later stories where they become more of a central issue.
I'm not sure what kind of suggestions I can make for other people's writing. What I can say is that no metaphor or simile should be considered to stand alone. If you find you're writing a descriptive phrase just because you've always wanted to use that phrase somewhere, make sure to check it - see if it fits into the mentality of this character, into the values of the society and the world. If you're describing a particular phenomenon a great deal, you might want to ask yourself if it has any ulterior significance to the culture, the characters, the story problem, the themes you're trying to evoke.
One more thing. I tend to focus a lot on doors. It's not something I ever consciously planned, but there are lots of occasions when people can go through a door in one way or another, or hang in a door, or not want to stand in the door, etc. Now, believe me when I say that for the most part in my work, a door is a door (aside perhaps from the fact that I've made sure the architecture fits the culture of the groups I'm working with). I'm not planning to drop everything about pushing my story forward and run off to look at every instance of doors in my story. However, in Varin at least, a lot of the story issues have to do with what kinds of behaviors are closed off, what kinds of people are supposed to have barriers between them, etc. - and so maybe a focus on doors makes sense. Maybe if and when I get Varin published, someone will pick up the book and go, "you know, she was up to something with those doors." It's possible I am, without even thinking.
It's something to think about.
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