What is home? What "says home" to you? What does "home" mean?
I came across this link on Twitter, and the moment I started reading it, I knew I'd have to talk about it. Here's a quote from Melissa Crytzer Fry's post:
Home … what defines it? Grandma’s old farmhouse? The whirr of traffic buzzing past the highway in front of your childhood home? Pepsi in a glass bottle from the upright dispenser in Uncle Bob’s auto shop, tugged from its individual, circular cubby behind the swinging glass door? The bleating horns of cabs in front of your urban apartment? The aroma of the Italian bakery on the corner? Family dinners around a bonfire? The dusty smell of soaked creosote bushes after a desert rain?
What I love about this post - and about the comments that follow it - is that it gets people writing down the sensory perceptions that they associate with this highly emotional concept. Because that's what "home" is. It's a fundamental emotional concept that we've learned, and once we've established it, it continues to exist at our core. As Melissa and her commenters remark, sometimes the concept of home can be expanded, or can be associated with more than one location. What she also points out is that it's fundamental to a writer, and can have enormous influence on a writer's stories.
What I'd like to point out is that it's not just fundamental to a writer. It's fundamental to every character in your story. Do you feel different when you're away from home? More scared? More free? Sure - and so will your characters. Furthermore, the stranger your characters are, the more unexpected their concept of home may be. When Bilbo wants to comfort himself, he thinks about teatime at his home in the hobbit-hole. Frodo thinks of the Shire too - and the contrast between their emotional roots and the adventures and terrors they're going through add an amazing amount of dimension to the stories we read. Mind you, if it were me, I'd like to know what Legolas and Gimli think of as home, too... and Gandalf. Why not?
Particularly if you're getting into a character's head, think about "what means home" to this person. Maybe they don't have a home. But if they don't, does that mean that "home" turns into an idea that other people push on them, something that causes them anger? That knowledge is still valuable.
Melissa Crytser Fry mentions that there are writers who write only stories that occur in their own home settings. When we write science fiction and fantasy... um, we're not doing that. But that doesn't mean we can't learn from what those writers accomplish. Take a look at how the commenters in this post speak of their own homes (this ties back to my post Interviewing Characters? Interview Yourself!). Your human characters will likely have a home that they think about in a very similar way, and which they compare to their current experiences. Even your alien or fantasy-race creatures probably have a concept of home. If you can capture it, and capture how your characters think about it, then it will bring depth and realism to even the most far-out speculative fiction.
It's something to think about.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Monday, February 6, 2012
An Exciting Event for Language Designers
The date and time have been confirmed, so I can finally announce this officially:
On Thursday, February 23rd at 5:00pm PST I will be holding a very special Language Design hangout on Google+ with my eminent language-designing friends David Peterson and Lawrence Schoen.
David is the mastermind behind HBO's Dothraki language, while Lawrence is the director of the Klingon Language institute. We will chat, brainstorm and talk shop for an hour. I can only invite two or maybe three people to this hangout. I'm looking (ideally) for people who are working on creating languages and implementing them in a current work of fiction. If you are a conlanger who is interested in applying your conlanging skills to story-writing, this might be a great hangout for you. If you are a writer with a great story that has a language in it that you made up, but that you don't feel is yet linguistically sound, this could be a great hangout for you.
If you would like to attend, please comment below, ideally providing some few basics about what you're working on. I will get in touch with you to learn more about your project and select attendees to invite based on that.
You must be capable of getting onto Google+ in order to attend. However, you need not be a current member of Google+, just willing to sign up for it and try it out before the event so you can attend without glitches. It's okay if you don't have a webcam or a working microphone, though the microphone in particular is a real advantage. If you don't have a microphone, you'll basically be limited to chatting with us by typing - which is workable, but not as easy as just chatting.
I'm really excited to be doing this, and I look forward to hearing about your projects.
On Thursday, February 23rd at 5:00pm PST I will be holding a very special Language Design hangout on Google+ with my eminent language-designing friends David Peterson and Lawrence Schoen.
David is the mastermind behind HBO's Dothraki language, while Lawrence is the director of the Klingon Language institute. We will chat, brainstorm and talk shop for an hour. I can only invite two or maybe three people to this hangout. I'm looking (ideally) for people who are working on creating languages and implementing them in a current work of fiction. If you are a conlanger who is interested in applying your conlanging skills to story-writing, this might be a great hangout for you. If you are a writer with a great story that has a language in it that you made up, but that you don't feel is yet linguistically sound, this could be a great hangout for you.
If you would like to attend, please comment below, ideally providing some few basics about what you're working on. I will get in touch with you to learn more about your project and select attendees to invite based on that.
You must be capable of getting onto Google+ in order to attend. However, you need not be a current member of Google+, just willing to sign up for it and try it out before the event so you can attend without glitches. It's okay if you don't have a webcam or a working microphone, though the microphone in particular is a real advantage. If you don't have a microphone, you'll basically be limited to chatting with us by typing - which is workable, but not as easy as just chatting.
I'm really excited to be doing this, and I look forward to hearing about your projects.
Why (not) tell the story in present tense?
I love narrating a story in present tense. There's something about it that really makes me go "ooh." The other day my awesome-editor-and-writer-friend Dario Ciriello called to say that he was considering taking his WIP and shifting it into the present tense. Out of that conversation came not only a discussion of what makes present tense interesting and challenging, but also an exchange of Facebook that ended with Gardner Dozois warning us that novels written in present tense might put editors off. I myself have heard some people say that they don't like reading stories in present tense.
So what's going on here? Should we write in present tense or not?
As does everything else, it depends on two things: 1. What the choice of present tense narration is doing for your story and 2. How you execute it. I'm going to talk about each of these two things below.
So let's get concrete here. Why would you want to use present tense? I actually fell into using it rather by accident in my story, "Let the Word Take Me."(Click to read it free.) I was writing the human point of view in past tense close third person narration (my standard at the time I started writing it), but when I switched to alien point of view, it just came out in first person present tense:
"I do not understand this prison. I have searched it, tested every surface with fingertip and claw, but learnt nothing. Is it the cell of Duro-mudi? - but no, for there is no barrier of thorns here, no green of leaves, and no flowing water. There is only a soft bed of I-know-not-what; a mirror-basin lying empty and useless while a wall of silver reflects my face; and a chair of knife-metal where my tormentors like to sit."(p.6)
When I think back on what I was trying to achieve, I think it was two things. I wanted my reader to be in my alien Allayo's head, listening to how she thought as she was doing it. And I wanted a sense of disconnection from the narration of the human character, David. What I think I also got was a feeling of being almost in a dream. I was very happy with this effect. But it's one of the effects of present tense that you have to watch out for.
In The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood begins her narration in the present tense. She creates this incredible feeling of dreamy reality with no forward motion - and the present tense contributes to this. There is a point in the story when she abruptly changes to past tense. I admit that, famous as this book is, it totally threw me when I hit that point. On the other hand, I stuck with it and realized that she'd done something very specific: when the book shifts to past tense, the sense of static, dreamy reality ends and the story suddenly has the feeling that it is moving forward. The protagonist is finally caring, and doing something to change her circumstances.
Just in case you think that dreaminess is the only thing you can do with present tense, believe me, it's not. My story "Cold Words" was all in present tense, and to my ear it doesn't sound dreamy at all:
"I scent human outside the door: our linguist, Parker. He never comes to the Ice Home while I attend Cold Council - he must bring important news! I bow to haunches, then excuse myself from Majesty's presence, quickly as I can without inviting snarls from the others. Parker stands waiting, his body showing agitated despite its covering clothes. I've told him many times that decorative cloth is most appropriately displayed on a wall, not dragged through mud and weather - but I won't chide now. I begin to fear for our project." (p.1)
"How" is the big question here. So let's talk just a bit about how to do present tense.
One major thing to watch out for is having your syntax be too uniform. If you're always doing subject-verb sentences people will start feeling like they're getting hit on the head. "I do" "I say" "I walk" etc. But you wouldn't do that in the past tense either, would you? You know already that having the same syntactic structure all the time reduces the sense of flow and makes things clunky. So you can avoid that for present tense just the way you do for past tense.
Another one is dialogue tags. Some readers are majorly bugged by seeing "I say" or "He says/she says" much less "I whisper" or "He shouts." If anything, err on the side of using fewer tags rather than more. On the other hand, don't tie your hands by restricting yourself so severely that you think you can't use them at all. Use them for clarity. And whenever you do that, use them in the present tense.
A third thing to watch for in present tense narration is what I call strict microchronology. This has to do with accepting the idea that you are experiencing the story as it is happening along with the character. If you are going to accept the premise that you are actually in the character's head right now as the story action is happening, you'll want to make sure things happen in the correct order. That is, your character will perceive something, then judge it, then react. Not the other way around. Your character will have no knowledge of the future, so don't reverse them. This might seem easy, but a lot of times we'll end up giving the reaction and then explaining what caused it. The closest you can get is when two things happen at once.
Here's something to keep in mind: present tense narration is not completely uniform. Each instance of the present tense may be a bit different depending on whether you're describing perception, action, or judgment, and upon which form of present tense you use. You can have "The sky is so blue today..." or "The door opens..." You can also have "I walk out the door" which feels very different from "I'm walking along...". Then there's "I have to do something" or "He must mean I should go by myself." Depending on your use of modal verbs, you can change the effect a lot. I think Allayo sounds dreamy because she is mostly observing her environment and musing about what is going on rather than acting. The material from The Handmaid's Tale is similar, because Offred is musing and observing, not acting. Rulii in "Cold Words," on the other hand, never uses the present progressive. Instead of saying "I am running" he will always, always say "I run." Instead of saying "Parker is looking embarrassed" he says "Parker shows embarrassed." You'll notice he does another alien-y thing which is that he uses his verbs differently. However, the entire effect is geared to have him be an entity of action, and to avoid the dreamy potential of present tense. Using "is" (having your character observe states) all the time will also tend to give you a static feeling. So if you don't want a static feeling, focus on modals that express needs (must, have to) rather than those that express states (is).
You can use present tense without having it be clunky. You can use present tense without having it be static. Doing those two things will go a long way toward making present tense work for your readers. I can't speak for the editors, of course. But if you can do this well and to specific effect, you'll be in much better shape with editors than if you don't.
It's something to think about.
So what's going on here? Should we write in present tense or not?
As does everything else, it depends on two things: 1. What the choice of present tense narration is doing for your story and 2. How you execute it. I'm going to talk about each of these two things below.
So let's get concrete here. Why would you want to use present tense? I actually fell into using it rather by accident in my story, "Let the Word Take Me."(Click to read it free.) I was writing the human point of view in past tense close third person narration (my standard at the time I started writing it), but when I switched to alien point of view, it just came out in first person present tense:
"I do not understand this prison. I have searched it, tested every surface with fingertip and claw, but learnt nothing. Is it the cell of Duro-mudi? - but no, for there is no barrier of thorns here, no green of leaves, and no flowing water. There is only a soft bed of I-know-not-what; a mirror-basin lying empty and useless while a wall of silver reflects my face; and a chair of knife-metal where my tormentors like to sit."(p.6)
When I think back on what I was trying to achieve, I think it was two things. I wanted my reader to be in my alien Allayo's head, listening to how she thought as she was doing it. And I wanted a sense of disconnection from the narration of the human character, David. What I think I also got was a feeling of being almost in a dream. I was very happy with this effect. But it's one of the effects of present tense that you have to watch out for.
In The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood begins her narration in the present tense. She creates this incredible feeling of dreamy reality with no forward motion - and the present tense contributes to this. There is a point in the story when she abruptly changes to past tense. I admit that, famous as this book is, it totally threw me when I hit that point. On the other hand, I stuck with it and realized that she'd done something very specific: when the book shifts to past tense, the sense of static, dreamy reality ends and the story suddenly has the feeling that it is moving forward. The protagonist is finally caring, and doing something to change her circumstances.
Just in case you think that dreaminess is the only thing you can do with present tense, believe me, it's not. My story "Cold Words" was all in present tense, and to my ear it doesn't sound dreamy at all:
"I scent human outside the door: our linguist, Parker. He never comes to the Ice Home while I attend Cold Council - he must bring important news! I bow to haunches, then excuse myself from Majesty's presence, quickly as I can without inviting snarls from the others. Parker stands waiting, his body showing agitated despite its covering clothes. I've told him many times that decorative cloth is most appropriately displayed on a wall, not dragged through mud and weather - but I won't chide now. I begin to fear for our project." (p.1)
"How" is the big question here. So let's talk just a bit about how to do present tense.
One major thing to watch out for is having your syntax be too uniform. If you're always doing subject-verb sentences people will start feeling like they're getting hit on the head. "I do" "I say" "I walk" etc. But you wouldn't do that in the past tense either, would you? You know already that having the same syntactic structure all the time reduces the sense of flow and makes things clunky. So you can avoid that for present tense just the way you do for past tense.
Another one is dialogue tags. Some readers are majorly bugged by seeing "I say" or "He says/she says" much less "I whisper" or "He shouts." If anything, err on the side of using fewer tags rather than more. On the other hand, don't tie your hands by restricting yourself so severely that you think you can't use them at all. Use them for clarity. And whenever you do that, use them in the present tense.
A third thing to watch for in present tense narration is what I call strict microchronology. This has to do with accepting the idea that you are experiencing the story as it is happening along with the character. If you are going to accept the premise that you are actually in the character's head right now as the story action is happening, you'll want to make sure things happen in the correct order. That is, your character will perceive something, then judge it, then react. Not the other way around. Your character will have no knowledge of the future, so don't reverse them. This might seem easy, but a lot of times we'll end up giving the reaction and then explaining what caused it. The closest you can get is when two things happen at once.
Here's something to keep in mind: present tense narration is not completely uniform. Each instance of the present tense may be a bit different depending on whether you're describing perception, action, or judgment, and upon which form of present tense you use. You can have "The sky is so blue today..." or "The door opens..." You can also have "I walk out the door" which feels very different from "I'm walking along...". Then there's "I have to do something" or "He must mean I should go by myself." Depending on your use of modal verbs, you can change the effect a lot. I think Allayo sounds dreamy because she is mostly observing her environment and musing about what is going on rather than acting. The material from The Handmaid's Tale is similar, because Offred is musing and observing, not acting. Rulii in "Cold Words," on the other hand, never uses the present progressive. Instead of saying "I am running" he will always, always say "I run." Instead of saying "Parker is looking embarrassed" he says "Parker shows embarrassed." You'll notice he does another alien-y thing which is that he uses his verbs differently. However, the entire effect is geared to have him be an entity of action, and to avoid the dreamy potential of present tense. Using "is" (having your character observe states) all the time will also tend to give you a static feeling. So if you don't want a static feeling, focus on modals that express needs (must, have to) rather than those that express states (is).
You can use present tense without having it be clunky. You can use present tense without having it be static. Doing those two things will go a long way toward making present tense work for your readers. I can't speak for the editors, of course. But if you can do this well and to specific effect, you'll be in much better shape with editors than if you don't.
It's something to think about.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Dealing with chronological breaks in your story
Do time-breaks in your story ever drive you mad?
They do me. My current novel is on a very strict schedule - this event has to happen on one day, then this other event has to happen at a three-day delay, and then the next one at the same three-day interval, etc. etc. I get to a certain point and I realize, "I'm on the wrong day. More time has to pass than this. How can I get more time to pass?"
If I were using a more external narrator, this might be easier. I might just say, "The next day..." or "Three hours later..." and there we go. Well, okay, it wouldn't be that simple. The real problem with chronological breaks is that you have to maintain the story drive in spite of them, which means you have to create a sort of bridging effect across them.
So what kind of continuity links can make this work? There's quite a range. You can make an explicit reference to the amount of time passing, but this works more easily with a distant narrator; with a deep point of view, there would have to be a specific reason why the character was aware that this much time was passing. Besides which, I don't prefer to make direct reference to the amount of time if I can help it. I much prefer to use a topic link, or a psychological link.
A topic link means that you leave a cue in the last piece before your time break that you can then pick up again on the other side. I had a case where I was struggling with a break that looked something like this: Nekantor and Tagret were talking about their plans to contact the Sixth Family, and Nekantor said effectively, "No problem, we'll contact them; it'll be great to do this while father's busy talking to his friend Doret." Whereupon Tagret said, "Why is he talking to Doret?" I tried to move on from there to the meeting with the Sixth Family and it felt really awkward because I was feeling as if I had to show them getting a message off, getting a message back, sleeping on it (ugh!) etc. I thought to myself, "What did I do? Why am I feeling obliged to fill all this space with events?" And then I realized that I hadn't bridged properly. None of the message-sending stuff, or what happens in between, is actually relevant to their goals. It shouldn't be in the story. Where I turned off-course was in having Nekantor specifically refer to what they would do to contact the Sixth Family and when they would do it. That automatically sets up an expectation that we will see it as it happens, find out about Doret, etc. Not even explaining the amount of time passed would feel quite right.
So I went back and cut everything out that I had written, so that I stopped with Nekantor saying, "No problem; we'll contact the Sixth Family." The only expectation I set up there is that their next order of business is contacting the Sixth Family - and that allows me to hop straight across the time gap. I can open the next section with "The Sixth Family took nearly a full day to reply, specifying an evening meeting..." and give Nekantor and Tagret's reactions to their slowness, thus orienting readers to the fact that time has passed and making it personally relevant to the characters and their state of mind. Because of the bridge, it doesn't feel like anything is missing.
The other kind of link that I like to use is a psychological link. Basically this means that instead of focusing on the flow of external events, which might make me feel obligated to include them all, I turn inward to the state of mind that my character is in when the time break is happening. I have a break of several hours that I'm going to be bridging today, between a morning event where Nekantor encounters a setback, and an evening event where he is put under significant pressure. I've already set up that he's got to wait until evening for the event; what I don't want to do is have him wandering around all day doing irrelevant stuff. My focus is therefore on how he feels about the setback he's just been dealt, and what he feels he has to do about it. The presence of the later event means that whatever confusion he's experiencing, he has to get through it before he's "put on trial"; I can therefore focus on him trying to find a way forward mentally, and refer to his various attempts to break his state of mental confusion without having to ground them in actual external time. He'll then make the decision to take action just at the time when the chronological flow of outer events has to resume, which will allow me to move back into the outer events at that point.
I'm sure there are more ways to do this, so feel free to share if you have any special tips. I just thought I'd mention these methods because they are particularly useful when I'm dealing with a time break in deep point of view.
It's something to think about.
They do me. My current novel is on a very strict schedule - this event has to happen on one day, then this other event has to happen at a three-day delay, and then the next one at the same three-day interval, etc. etc. I get to a certain point and I realize, "I'm on the wrong day. More time has to pass than this. How can I get more time to pass?"
If I were using a more external narrator, this might be easier. I might just say, "The next day..." or "Three hours later..." and there we go. Well, okay, it wouldn't be that simple. The real problem with chronological breaks is that you have to maintain the story drive in spite of them, which means you have to create a sort of bridging effect across them.
So what kind of continuity links can make this work? There's quite a range. You can make an explicit reference to the amount of time passing, but this works more easily with a distant narrator; with a deep point of view, there would have to be a specific reason why the character was aware that this much time was passing. Besides which, I don't prefer to make direct reference to the amount of time if I can help it. I much prefer to use a topic link, or a psychological link.
A topic link means that you leave a cue in the last piece before your time break that you can then pick up again on the other side. I had a case where I was struggling with a break that looked something like this: Nekantor and Tagret were talking about their plans to contact the Sixth Family, and Nekantor said effectively, "No problem, we'll contact them; it'll be great to do this while father's busy talking to his friend Doret." Whereupon Tagret said, "Why is he talking to Doret?" I tried to move on from there to the meeting with the Sixth Family and it felt really awkward because I was feeling as if I had to show them getting a message off, getting a message back, sleeping on it (ugh!) etc. I thought to myself, "What did I do? Why am I feeling obliged to fill all this space with events?" And then I realized that I hadn't bridged properly. None of the message-sending stuff, or what happens in between, is actually relevant to their goals. It shouldn't be in the story. Where I turned off-course was in having Nekantor specifically refer to what they would do to contact the Sixth Family and when they would do it. That automatically sets up an expectation that we will see it as it happens, find out about Doret, etc. Not even explaining the amount of time passed would feel quite right.
So I went back and cut everything out that I had written, so that I stopped with Nekantor saying, "No problem; we'll contact the Sixth Family." The only expectation I set up there is that their next order of business is contacting the Sixth Family - and that allows me to hop straight across the time gap. I can open the next section with "The Sixth Family took nearly a full day to reply, specifying an evening meeting..." and give Nekantor and Tagret's reactions to their slowness, thus orienting readers to the fact that time has passed and making it personally relevant to the characters and their state of mind. Because of the bridge, it doesn't feel like anything is missing.
The other kind of link that I like to use is a psychological link. Basically this means that instead of focusing on the flow of external events, which might make me feel obligated to include them all, I turn inward to the state of mind that my character is in when the time break is happening. I have a break of several hours that I'm going to be bridging today, between a morning event where Nekantor encounters a setback, and an evening event where he is put under significant pressure. I've already set up that he's got to wait until evening for the event; what I don't want to do is have him wandering around all day doing irrelevant stuff. My focus is therefore on how he feels about the setback he's just been dealt, and what he feels he has to do about it. The presence of the later event means that whatever confusion he's experiencing, he has to get through it before he's "put on trial"; I can therefore focus on him trying to find a way forward mentally, and refer to his various attempts to break his state of mental confusion without having to ground them in actual external time. He'll then make the decision to take action just at the time when the chronological flow of outer events has to resume, which will allow me to move back into the outer events at that point.
I'm sure there are more ways to do this, so feel free to share if you have any special tips. I just thought I'd mention these methods because they are particularly useful when I'm dealing with a time break in deep point of view.
It's something to think about.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Cities: A Google+ hangout report
Last week we had a great chat about Cities - such a great chat, in fact, that we didn't cover certain aspects of the topic! So if you are interested in talking about the resources that go into supporting a city and how to set those up, come to the hangout today at 11am PST and we'll discuss it!
My fellow discussants last week were Glenda Pfeiffer, Janet Harriet, and Brian Dolton - thanks so much for coming.
Our first topic of discussion was City Planning - i.e. whether the city was a planned city or not. I brought up the distinctions between the city of Kyoto, Japan and the city of Tokyo. Kyoto was planned and designed to be the Imperial city, and was between roughly 700-1000C.E. As a result, it was laid out with roads on a grid system which it retains to this day. The boulevards and parallel streets all run north-south or east-west. Orienting in the city is easy, and you can take an alternate route any time you like so long as you retain your sense of orientation to the compass. Tokyo was not planned in this manner (and has in fact had large parts of it destroyed and rebuilt), so its feel is totally different. There are small areas where streets will run parallel, but this can never be entirely guaranteed. If you turn one street too early you can often get completely lost. Neither of these two cities utilizes a lot of street names; I think probably Kyoto has more of them, but in each place these are only for large notable streets. In Tokyo, houses are numbered based on their position on the outside of a block, rather than on either side of the streeet: the number of a house will bear no relation to the number of the house across from it. This can be very disorienting for Americans!
Population density is also a very important question for cities. I remember hearing as a child how dense the population was in Japanese cities, but I never really understood how this was accomplished (short of literally stacking people on top of one another). Japanese cities will give me a sense of being contracted. The small streets will be one lane wide and totally impractical for any sort of parking, with no sidewalks at all, and the houses are built right up to the road. They have no surrounding gardens; if they have gardens at all, these will be in the back or on the inside. One of the consequences of this is that it's very easy to walk from one place to another. The American wide lanes for cars, sidewalks, big yards, etc. mean that it's impossible to walk out of your neighborhood (especially in apartment neighborhoods) without a significant expenditure of time, and hard to get anywhere useful.
That brought us to the question of transportation. I mentioned that in my underground city of Pelismara (in Varin), the five vertical city levels mean that it's actually pretty easy to get from one place to another on foot. The diameter of the widest level of the city is only five miles; so long as you have good climbing legs, you can get all around it as a pedestrian.
Brian jumped in at this point to mention the old European cities, describing them as "inconvenient for modern life." Old cities, he said, are a mess but enormously fun. This brought to my mind a story I had heard about the rebuilding of London after bombings in World War II, when an attempt was made to impose order by changing the placement of streets, etc. but the local citizens totally ignored it and simply followed the twisted complicated roads they always had - and in the end the original street placements were retained. If any of you have ever navigated Paris or Brussels in a car, you'll have a sense of this (I once spent an hour trying to get out of Brussels!). Brian particularly mentioned Venice, where the canals mean that modes of transport are limited to boat or foot. The placement of the canals means that movers have to carry things through the narrow streets on carts. Rich people with large homes and large things to move in - say, like grand pianos - will need to find places bordering the canals, because otherwise there would be no way to get these large objects through the streets into the house!
The topic of Venice brought me to Janice Hardy's city of Geveg (from The Healing Wars series), which was modeled partly on Venice and partly on Africa (Lake Victoria). She used the canal organization for her worldbuilding, but changed the climate, the flora and the fauna, including providing menial jobs for people pulling water hyacinths out of the canals, which put them in danger of being attacked by crocodiles.
Janet picked up on the idea of a lake city and mentioned a city she had read about which was on pylons in the middle of a lake. Laketown in The Hobbit was like this too, and Brian mentioned that there was an age where laketowns were common, particularly in Russia. Because of the heavy forestation and the effort it would take to clear land for a town, in some locations all the towns were built over the river or in the lakes. Both Glenda and Brian mentioned Tenochtitlan (current Mexico City), the Aztec city which had floating crop platforms in Lake Texcoco. (If you want to explore this environment, I recommend the work of T.L. Morganfield and Aliette de Bodard.)
Brian brought up the recent archaeological finds in South America, which are a rich source for possible alternative modesl for city-building. He mentioned that there had been fishing towns where the only major agriculture was the growing of cotton to make fishing nets. Glenda mentioned that she has a particular interest in the area between Peru and Ecuador. I mentioned the Andes (thanks for the inspiration, Janice!), where it was impractical to use wheels because everything you owned would constantly be running away down an enormous hill (Brian suggested square wheels to deal with this problem). On the other hand, if you had an Andean waterfall and a lake uphill from you, that would be great for creating plumbing systems, or even generating power.
The surrounding geography and climate are really important to the way a city feels. Building materials will be different. The age of buildings will also be different. I mentioned the town of Berk in How to Train Your Dragon, where the town was 700 years old but all the buildings were new, due to the predations of fire-breathing nasties. I think it was Janet (correct me if I'm wrong) who mentioned a real-world example of this in Warsaw, where they have lines on the buildings to indicate how much of the building remained after World War II...but where all the buildings were rebuilt - restored, in fact - based on old photographs of how the city looked before the war. Apparently it gives a very interesting impression of being both classically old and "too new." Tokyo was almost completely rebuilt twice, once after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and once after the bombings of the war, and its architecture, by contrast, is almost entirely concrete jungle.
Kyoto has retained its ancient buildings to a large extent and gives a very mixed visual impression, with lots of really new buildings having old, and sometimes ancient, buildings mixed in among them. Strangely enough, the tenant laws in Japan have contributed to this - it's so difficult to evict a tenant in Japan that buildings tend not to be renovated or rebuilt. Brian said that English high streets are often similarly mixed - that you'll see a building from 1400 beside one from 1600 and then one from 1930 and then one from 1820 all in a row, jammed together. Apparently the tourist cities are the ones that have retained a more unified feel among the homes, where almost all of them have come from a single era (I thought that was pretty interesting... now I need to go find one of those jumbled streets to see what it looks like!).
In worldbuilding, you don't need to have a lot of description to show heterogeneity, just include an example of buildings that don't fit here or there, and show the general overall impression.
Janet talked about the contrast between the East and West coasts of the US. In the West, most of the cities were built after the age of the automobile, and it shows (older cities like San Francisco really stand out). In the East, people think little of putting a junior high school in a building which on the West coast would be considered a historical landmark!
The advent of automobiles brought about huge changes that show in modern cities of the US. In particular we discussed the loss of infrastructure like trolley systems and ferry systems. The San Francisco ferry system was almost completely dismantled when the bridges were built, because people were afraid that no one would use the new bridges; now we've come back around and people wish it were easier to put all that old infrastructure back. I have an example of infrastructure loss in my own city of Pelismara: long ago they had a wired telephone system and moved from it to a wireless system, whereupon the old wires were taken down and recycled (Pelismara has to recycle everything, for a number of reasons). The result of this is that when the wireless system failed and certain pieces of technological advancement were lost, there was nothing to fall back on, and they now have to use human messengers.
This was about the point where I mentioned psychogeography - a super-interesting topic that I ran into when I was at WorldCon in 2011. It has to do with the way the arrangement of space changes the way we think (and I go into some depth if you follow the link above). Something like the arrangement of a home to face inward or outward (i.e. compound with inner garden/courtyard versus home with surrounding gardens) creates an enormous difference in the sense of space and what we consider privacy to be. These days we also have the addition of the electronic/virtual world, which is overlaid on actual reality through the use of maps that point out certain things (but not other things) about our surroundings. Surveillance changes the feeling of spaces, and so does the battle over electronic communication spaces (like governments vs. Twitter users in protest movements, for example).
Some good examples of fictional cities to check out:
Genevieve Williams' futuristic Seattle from her Strange Horizons story, "Kip, Running"
Coruscant (Star Wars)
The Capital of Panem (The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins)
The layered city from Jennifer Pelland's "Brush Strokes"
Jeanne DuPrau's City of Ember, with its finite resource plan
We got to the end and there was still more to say, so we decided to pick up the functioning of cities for this week's hangout (today at 11am PST). Come and join us!
My fellow discussants last week were Glenda Pfeiffer, Janet Harriet, and Brian Dolton - thanks so much for coming.
Our first topic of discussion was City Planning - i.e. whether the city was a planned city or not. I brought up the distinctions between the city of Kyoto, Japan and the city of Tokyo. Kyoto was planned and designed to be the Imperial city, and was between roughly 700-1000C.E. As a result, it was laid out with roads on a grid system which it retains to this day. The boulevards and parallel streets all run north-south or east-west. Orienting in the city is easy, and you can take an alternate route any time you like so long as you retain your sense of orientation to the compass. Tokyo was not planned in this manner (and has in fact had large parts of it destroyed and rebuilt), so its feel is totally different. There are small areas where streets will run parallel, but this can never be entirely guaranteed. If you turn one street too early you can often get completely lost. Neither of these two cities utilizes a lot of street names; I think probably Kyoto has more of them, but in each place these are only for large notable streets. In Tokyo, houses are numbered based on their position on the outside of a block, rather than on either side of the streeet: the number of a house will bear no relation to the number of the house across from it. This can be very disorienting for Americans!
Population density is also a very important question for cities. I remember hearing as a child how dense the population was in Japanese cities, but I never really understood how this was accomplished (short of literally stacking people on top of one another). Japanese cities will give me a sense of being contracted. The small streets will be one lane wide and totally impractical for any sort of parking, with no sidewalks at all, and the houses are built right up to the road. They have no surrounding gardens; if they have gardens at all, these will be in the back or on the inside. One of the consequences of this is that it's very easy to walk from one place to another. The American wide lanes for cars, sidewalks, big yards, etc. mean that it's impossible to walk out of your neighborhood (especially in apartment neighborhoods) without a significant expenditure of time, and hard to get anywhere useful.
That brought us to the question of transportation. I mentioned that in my underground city of Pelismara (in Varin), the five vertical city levels mean that it's actually pretty easy to get from one place to another on foot. The diameter of the widest level of the city is only five miles; so long as you have good climbing legs, you can get all around it as a pedestrian.
Brian jumped in at this point to mention the old European cities, describing them as "inconvenient for modern life." Old cities, he said, are a mess but enormously fun. This brought to my mind a story I had heard about the rebuilding of London after bombings in World War II, when an attempt was made to impose order by changing the placement of streets, etc. but the local citizens totally ignored it and simply followed the twisted complicated roads they always had - and in the end the original street placements were retained. If any of you have ever navigated Paris or Brussels in a car, you'll have a sense of this (I once spent an hour trying to get out of Brussels!). Brian particularly mentioned Venice, where the canals mean that modes of transport are limited to boat or foot. The placement of the canals means that movers have to carry things through the narrow streets on carts. Rich people with large homes and large things to move in - say, like grand pianos - will need to find places bordering the canals, because otherwise there would be no way to get these large objects through the streets into the house!
The topic of Venice brought me to Janice Hardy's city of Geveg (from The Healing Wars series), which was modeled partly on Venice and partly on Africa (Lake Victoria). She used the canal organization for her worldbuilding, but changed the climate, the flora and the fauna, including providing menial jobs for people pulling water hyacinths out of the canals, which put them in danger of being attacked by crocodiles.
Janet picked up on the idea of a lake city and mentioned a city she had read about which was on pylons in the middle of a lake. Laketown in The Hobbit was like this too, and Brian mentioned that there was an age where laketowns were common, particularly in Russia. Because of the heavy forestation and the effort it would take to clear land for a town, in some locations all the towns were built over the river or in the lakes. Both Glenda and Brian mentioned Tenochtitlan (current Mexico City), the Aztec city which had floating crop platforms in Lake Texcoco. (If you want to explore this environment, I recommend the work of T.L. Morganfield and Aliette de Bodard.)
Brian brought up the recent archaeological finds in South America, which are a rich source for possible alternative modesl for city-building. He mentioned that there had been fishing towns where the only major agriculture was the growing of cotton to make fishing nets. Glenda mentioned that she has a particular interest in the area between Peru and Ecuador. I mentioned the Andes (thanks for the inspiration, Janice!), where it was impractical to use wheels because everything you owned would constantly be running away down an enormous hill (Brian suggested square wheels to deal with this problem). On the other hand, if you had an Andean waterfall and a lake uphill from you, that would be great for creating plumbing systems, or even generating power.
The surrounding geography and climate are really important to the way a city feels. Building materials will be different. The age of buildings will also be different. I mentioned the town of Berk in How to Train Your Dragon, where the town was 700 years old but all the buildings were new, due to the predations of fire-breathing nasties. I think it was Janet (correct me if I'm wrong) who mentioned a real-world example of this in Warsaw, where they have lines on the buildings to indicate how much of the building remained after World War II...but where all the buildings were rebuilt - restored, in fact - based on old photographs of how the city looked before the war. Apparently it gives a very interesting impression of being both classically old and "too new." Tokyo was almost completely rebuilt twice, once after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and once after the bombings of the war, and its architecture, by contrast, is almost entirely concrete jungle.
Kyoto has retained its ancient buildings to a large extent and gives a very mixed visual impression, with lots of really new buildings having old, and sometimes ancient, buildings mixed in among them. Strangely enough, the tenant laws in Japan have contributed to this - it's so difficult to evict a tenant in Japan that buildings tend not to be renovated or rebuilt. Brian said that English high streets are often similarly mixed - that you'll see a building from 1400 beside one from 1600 and then one from 1930 and then one from 1820 all in a row, jammed together. Apparently the tourist cities are the ones that have retained a more unified feel among the homes, where almost all of them have come from a single era (I thought that was pretty interesting... now I need to go find one of those jumbled streets to see what it looks like!).
In worldbuilding, you don't need to have a lot of description to show heterogeneity, just include an example of buildings that don't fit here or there, and show the general overall impression.
Janet talked about the contrast between the East and West coasts of the US. In the West, most of the cities were built after the age of the automobile, and it shows (older cities like San Francisco really stand out). In the East, people think little of putting a junior high school in a building which on the West coast would be considered a historical landmark!
The advent of automobiles brought about huge changes that show in modern cities of the US. In particular we discussed the loss of infrastructure like trolley systems and ferry systems. The San Francisco ferry system was almost completely dismantled when the bridges were built, because people were afraid that no one would use the new bridges; now we've come back around and people wish it were easier to put all that old infrastructure back. I have an example of infrastructure loss in my own city of Pelismara: long ago they had a wired telephone system and moved from it to a wireless system, whereupon the old wires were taken down and recycled (Pelismara has to recycle everything, for a number of reasons). The result of this is that when the wireless system failed and certain pieces of technological advancement were lost, there was nothing to fall back on, and they now have to use human messengers.
This was about the point where I mentioned psychogeography - a super-interesting topic that I ran into when I was at WorldCon in 2011. It has to do with the way the arrangement of space changes the way we think (and I go into some depth if you follow the link above). Something like the arrangement of a home to face inward or outward (i.e. compound with inner garden/courtyard versus home with surrounding gardens) creates an enormous difference in the sense of space and what we consider privacy to be. These days we also have the addition of the electronic/virtual world, which is overlaid on actual reality through the use of maps that point out certain things (but not other things) about our surroundings. Surveillance changes the feeling of spaces, and so does the battle over electronic communication spaces (like governments vs. Twitter users in protest movements, for example).
Some good examples of fictional cities to check out:
Genevieve Williams' futuristic Seattle from her Strange Horizons story, "Kip, Running"
Coruscant (Star Wars)
The Capital of Panem (The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins)
The layered city from Jennifer Pelland's "Brush Strokes"
Jeanne DuPrau's City of Ember, with its finite resource plan
We got to the end and there was still more to say, so we decided to pick up the functioning of cities for this week's hangout (today at 11am PST). Come and join us!
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
TTYU Retro: Critique is about the readers
I'm a person who loves critique. Whenever I have a story done (or sometimes even when I don't have it done, as I remarked yesterday) I find a writing friend willing to look at it and send it over for their comments. I have learned so much through critique that I wouldn't do it any other way.
For me, the only bad critique is one that doesn't speak specifically about the text or story elements - one that attacks me personally or one so vague I can't make anything out of it. A critique that criticizes, or even one that makes me think "gee, he didn't get it!" is still valuable.
When somebody doesn't get it, it's important to ask why. That lack of understanding happened because the reader missed the boat somewhere - and that's why I think it's important to go back and take a look, to try to figure out what precisely it was that left them behind. Some missing clue, that if it had been there, would have saved this person from their misconception.
It's really important to remember that when we read, much of what we understand of the text comes from our own minds. Each word activates in our brains the set of meanings that the word has built up for itself over all the instances of its use in our experience. Story elements evoke emotions based on our experience. Every time we read, we bring ourselves to the story.
Obviously, this affects critique. I once had a friend read my beginner novel and tell me he thought I should have matched up the characters differently - X should have hooked up with A, and Y with B, not the other way around. I still don't agree with him! But what I can do is when I go back to get that novel right, I can make sure I put lots of evidence in for why my solution is the better idea.
If you ever find yourself writing off a critique for a reason like, "That person isn't a genre reader," you might want to reconsider. Who do you want to read your work? Is it only for the specialist reader of sf/f, or cosy mystery? Great works will transcend and be readable by a larger audience. In a sense each time you offer your work for critique, you're testing out a potential group of readers. If all your readers fall into the same group, you may not learn as much as if you give the work to different kinds of readers. Literary readers. Romance readers. Science fiction readers. Fantasy readers. Their opinions will give you a glimpse into what others of their tastes might think, and chances are there will be a way for you both to maintain your artistic vision and to make them feel more welcome in your world.
I think that's something worth striving for.
For me, the only bad critique is one that doesn't speak specifically about the text or story elements - one that attacks me personally or one so vague I can't make anything out of it. A critique that criticizes, or even one that makes me think "gee, he didn't get it!" is still valuable.
When somebody doesn't get it, it's important to ask why. That lack of understanding happened because the reader missed the boat somewhere - and that's why I think it's important to go back and take a look, to try to figure out what precisely it was that left them behind. Some missing clue, that if it had been there, would have saved this person from their misconception.
It's really important to remember that when we read, much of what we understand of the text comes from our own minds. Each word activates in our brains the set of meanings that the word has built up for itself over all the instances of its use in our experience. Story elements evoke emotions based on our experience. Every time we read, we bring ourselves to the story.
Obviously, this affects critique. I once had a friend read my beginner novel and tell me he thought I should have matched up the characters differently - X should have hooked up with A, and Y with B, not the other way around. I still don't agree with him! But what I can do is when I go back to get that novel right, I can make sure I put lots of evidence in for why my solution is the better idea.
If you ever find yourself writing off a critique for a reason like, "That person isn't a genre reader," you might want to reconsider. Who do you want to read your work? Is it only for the specialist reader of sf/f, or cosy mystery? Great works will transcend and be readable by a larger audience. In a sense each time you offer your work for critique, you're testing out a potential group of readers. If all your readers fall into the same group, you may not learn as much as if you give the work to different kinds of readers. Literary readers. Romance readers. Science fiction readers. Fantasy readers. Their opinions will give you a glimpse into what others of their tastes might think, and chances are there will be a way for you both to maintain your artistic vision and to make them feel more welcome in your world.
I think that's something worth striving for.
Tomorrow's Hangout: Making your City Work
I hope you will join me on Google Plus tomorrow at 11am PST for a discussion of all the worldbuilding elements that help make a fictional city work. We'll be talking about resources and where they come from, jobs people do in your city, etc. I'm looking forward to it!
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