Is it a spaceship or a cloud?

Funny that I'd see this question asked just after I asked it myself in "At Cross Purposes"! Check out the fantastic photo, here.

Backups!

If you're a writer, you need to back up your work. We all know this, but we don't necessarily do it. I did it, but didn't back up at a separate site, thinking that the greatest likelihood was that I'd lose or damage my laptop outside the home. Instead, our home was burgled the night before Thanksgiving, and both computers - along with my backups - stolen.

I'm very fortunate, in fact. I've discussed how important critique is to my writing process, and as a result of that, I have sent relatively recent drafts of all my work to friends, who are now sending them back to me. I've only lost my most recent work, about two and a half chapters.

Needless to say, however, I'll be changing my backup strategy. There are services now which provide off-site storage for files, and even services that provide automatic back-up saves for you. A number of my friends have recommended Mobileme, or the Dropbox service, to me, so I'll be looking into them.

My message for you for today is this: however you do it, do it and don't wait. If you feel cautious about using an outside service, burn yourself a disc today with all your files on it, and then take the time to do your research. Or find a friend with whom you can exchange files regularly so there's always an extra copy out there somewhere.

I'm going off now to work on reconstructing what I've lost. Thank goodness that's as little as it is.

Another Guest Post Today!

Today I'm visiting over at Janice Hardy's The Other Side of the Story, with a post about revisions. This one was a special request from Janice. I'm talking about how to revise a scene without changing anything that happens in it, just by using the internalizations and mental states of your point of view character to change what the scene means.

The post is called Re-envisioning a Scene Without Rewriting it. I hope you find it interesting!

Guest Blog Post today!

Well, we've arrived at the time for another guest blog post! Today you can get an inside view into Khachee, the language of the Cochee-coco aliens in my new story, "At Cross Purposes." Many thanks to Ann Wilkes at Science Fiction and other ODDysseys for inviting me over.

The article is called Peering behind the curtain with Juliette Wade. I hope you enjoy it!

Focus Your Worldbuilding Efforts

You're creating a world. You want to write a story in it, and you want it to feel real. How best do you go about that?

Well, you have to have all the underlying basic principles down. Climate, ecology, economy, etc, etc, etc. It all has to fit together and make sense. But a lot of that stuff isn't precisely relevant to your plot. The temptation might be to explain things - and that leads you into trouble. You want people to believe in you, yes. But don't tell them things and ask them to believe. If you show those things effectively, then they'll believe in spite of themselves.

I'm sure you've all heard this "show don't tell" advice before. I have a whole post on its different meanings, but I'm not trying to access all those meanings today. I just want to say that if you can bring your worldbuilding efforts into sharp focus, you can achieve that "show don't tell" feeling, and a little bit of worldbuilding can go a long way.

A good place to start explaining this is with a short story. Say your story is short, so you don't have room to try to explain the world - and yet, you want to make sure that the world feels large. One really good way of doing this is picking a single object to start with. This object has to be one that has high relevance to the character - but not necessarily to the plot. I recommend everyday objects. Not something like a fork which has become nearly generic, but something that is slightly off what in the real world we would consider normal. Maybe it's a ceremonial object, or an object of significance to the main character. Maybe it's this Roman "Swiss army knife" that Astrid Bear pointed out to me on Facebook this morning (thank you!).

The reason why I enjoyed the Roman knife-tool was that it was so detailed. So much to be learned from its discovery about the habits of the person who carried it. The fork and spoon. The blade. The spike which may have been used to remove the meat from snails. The toothpick; the spatula.

If you can pick one highly relevant, salient object, its nature can imply many things about the world around it. In my story, "Let the Word Take Me," (Analog July/Aug 2008) I gave my alien girl two objects like that - a ceremonial knife, and "sun armor." Here's a quote:

On top [in the artifact case] was a ceremonial knife in a scabbard of intricately worked grazer-leather, with a leaf-shaped blade and a hilt wound with stone beads. Underneath was a mass of white feathers. Lifting the top layer, he found himself unfolding a hooded coat of perforated leather densely clad with yorro plumage. ... David suspected it was an heirloom; the unblemished feathers were layered without gaps, but the leather inside showed that patches had been resewn, and two of the worn tie-thongs had been replaced.

I spent this many words describing the two objects because of what they said about the technology level and culture of the people who had made them. Find the right object, and its significance will radiate outward, accomplishing far more than general descriptions on a larger scale.

The fact of the matter is, while this technique is very convenient in short stories where you have fewer words to work with, it is equally effective for longer works. The objects don't have to be ceremonial or have special importance. They can be small things that the characters consider quite mundane. A lot of large-scale principles become evident in the tiny details of the everyday. Focus your worldbuilding efforts and you can get a lot of power out of a very few words.

It's something to think about.

Point of View changes everything

I love point of view. This is in part why I talked about multiple points of view over at The Sharp Angle last Friday - but you don't need to have multiple points of view. Even one can be fantastic, and for me, the deeper into the point of view you go, the more fun it is. Point of view restricts you, but it lets you do so much.

I want to share with you the following video, "Out of Sight," which I discovered through Facebook this week. It was made by a pair of film students at the National Taiwan University of Arts - and for those who know the name, I see a lot of the influence of Hayao Miyazaki in it. To me, this is a wonderful expression of how the limitations of point of view can make for a truly unique experience. This goes for watchers in the case of this short film, but it also goes for readers in the case of written point of view. The mysteries are deeper, the revelations more dramatic, the emotions more poignant. Karen Anderson also pointed out to me that this is a terrific example of an unreliable narrator. I hope you enjoy the film.

Body Language: eye gaze (in life and animation)

Eyes are important. You remember all those scenes where the bad guy is questioning a child, trying to find people who have hidden, watching the kid's eyes to see if they flicker off in any direction to indicate the location of the hiding place. You probably also remember that the character Violet's first line in The Incredibles is, "He looked at me." In real life, and in the movies, we're constantly watching people's eyes - characters' eyes - to learn things about what they are thinking and feeling.

Just because you're working in words - writing a story rather than a movie - doesn't mean you should ignore the power of eye gaze. It's one of the most important non-verbal cues that we watch for, and if it's missing, readers will sense a huge gap in your story.

Eye gaze is an excellent tool for reinforcing point of view. To me there's a wonderful contrast between talking about the things seen by the POV character - where I explicitly try to avoid saying "I saw" - and giving descriptions of the way that a non-POV character's eyes move. In this context, having your pov character "look" makes it a conscious gesture of the eyes. Here's an impromptu example:

I turned. Josephine was standing in the doorway. (1) When I looked at her (2), she dropped her gaze away (3).

1. POV character's observation, no mention of "seeing"
2. POV character makes a deliberate eye gesture: placing gaze on Josephine.
3. POV character observes movement of Josephine's eyes, which suggests an emotional state.

We are taught throughout life to manage our eye gaze. "Look at me when I'm talking to you!" "How dare you give me that look?" "As you speak, make sure you're looking out across the crowd and making eye contact with individuals." Because of this, we form expectations about what different eye gaze positions and styles mean, and those expectations can help you in your story. Talking about eye movements or what someone is looking at is a great way to externalize one character's assessment of another character. It's also a great way to "show don't tell."

Different cultures place different value on eye gaze. I had a friend once who was having a period of difficulty with job interviews, and someone else suspected that his style of making eye contact might be at fault. In my local culture, students in school are expected to make eye contact with teachers as a way of indicating that they're paying attention. In other cultures (such as Japanese or Native American), making eye contact with a teacher is considered inappropriate and presumptuous, possibly an affront. If you're working with an alien group or an alternate world, keep this in mind, because it can give you lots of opportunities for creating difference and possible misunderstanding.

Because I like this stuff, I've created a special instance of eye gaze that I'd like to share from my own work. The Imbati servant caste of Varin has a special set of "gaze-gesture codes" that manservants use in order to communicate when speaking is not appropriate (for example, when their masters are speaking and they can't interrupt). It's not a language, and not universal to the caste, since it's taught explicitly to the elite manservant group. However, the most basic gaze gestures are known to most Imbati and can be used in place of speech whenever they would like to use them. Some examples are "permission," "apology," "request," etc.

Recently I've noticed a sort of common gaze language - or more accurately, eye language - emerging from the portrayal of eyes in animated films. Both Pixar and Dreamworks make use of what I call the "shrinking eye." When characters are shocked or frightened, their pupils shrink down to tiny dots. When Toothless the dragon is angry and ready to pounce, his pupils are small; when he's friendly, they're large.

In fact, this is contrary to my observations of nature. I used to play a game with my cat Folly. I'd stare her down and try to get her to pounce at me by using nothing more than my eye gaze. I could always tell when she was about to pounce because her pupils would abruptly expand. Expand - they'd get so big I could scarcely see her irises, and a split second later, she'd jump.

I've asked myself why in the world the shrinking eye would be so effective at conveying fear or shock, and I've come to this conclusion: pupil size is only one indicator of shock. The wideness of the eyes is another major indicator - probably even a more obvious one. When an animated character experiences shrinking eye, not only the pupils but the irises get smaller, leading to a significant expansion in the white of the eye. By using the shrinking eye, the animators are able to convey an extreme widening of the eye without having to have the eyes expand and take over the head (as they, and mouths, do quite often in anime-style animation). In the case of Toothless the Dragon, the pupil not only expanded but distorted, becoming less oval and more square. The result was an optical illusion that made his eyes look more round - more cute - without requiring the animators to change the shape of the eye and create a weird distortion effect on the dragon's face.

I wonder if you've noticed this trend in animated movies, as I have... I hope the commonness of these effects doesn't lead to them becoming the accepted method. Too much uniformity detracts from creativity, in my mind.

Anyway, try spending some time concentrating on how people use their eyes. It could give you some ideas for your latest story.