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.
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Link: A great article on culture and worldbuilding from Mike Flynn
Many of you may know Mike Flynn, author of many superb stories in Analog and also of Eifelheim and The January Dancer. He's an expert on culture and worldbuilding, and he shares some great insights in this article:
Random Thoughts on the White Room
Check it out!
Random Thoughts on the White Room
Check it out!
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
How realistic does a created world have to be? A Google+ Hangout Report
This week I was joined by Lesley Smith, Brian Dolton, Glenda Pfeiffer, and Harry Markov.
I started the discussion with the caveat that I have a personal bias against magic. While I love reading stories with magic, when I write them I have a tough time because I find magic "slippery." This is one reason why my Varin world's magic long ago (in writer time) turned from plain old magic to a semi-natural phenomenon. I don't like to be put in the position where I wave my hands and things happen the way I want them to. I want magic to have restrictions - and whatever freedoms it has, they often need to be counterbalanced with more realism in other areas. This topic will come up again later in the report.
We turned at first to Science Fiction, because it often has very stringent requirements of realism, in particular the rules of physics. Brian immediately remarked that much of science fiction doesn't conform to the rules of physics, as for example when people use faster-than-light drive for space ships. However, we did manage to agree that there was a difference between a story that takes something like FTL drive and "sets it aside," i.e. makes it a necessary condition for the story to take place, but doesn't have its scientific details play a critical role in the main conflict. For example, my stories take place on planets that must have been reached by FTL drive but in which no one ever travels that way. Brian has a story, by contrast, in which the nature of the propulsion is what the story is about. When you put the main focus on propulsion, then you at least need to have an internally consistent set of principles for that propulsion.
Brian proposed a fantastic Venn diagram of two overlapping circles, one of which would be Realistic and the other of which would be Believable. When we write, we definitely want to portray things that are believable, but not all of them must be Realistic as such. They say that truth is stranger than fiction, and often things that have really happened are so far out that if you wrote fiction about them, nobody would believe you. For example, I once wrote a story about my sixth grade class, using a few of the first names of people who'd been in it, and a teacher told me the names were unrealistic.
As an author, you are put in the position of establishing a contract of trust with the reader, where they must believe that you are narrating in good faith on some level. Maintaining a degree of realism in the story can help the reader continue to believe in you as you stretch credulity in limited areas.
I tend to think that character psychology and human emotions benefit from being realistic. Mind you, I do a lot with cultural differences and different ways of thinking - but I always come back to a basic rule of sense-making, requiring my characters to possess drives that we might find familiar, and to explain how they make sense of things if their thoughts are vastly different from ours. If a character becomes so alien it "goes off the rails," then the reader is less likely to stick with the story (without other things available to keep him/her reading).
At that point we turned to the question of language. Conlangs, or created languages, have been increasing in popularity lately. [Klingon, Na'vi, Dothraki are standouts] They can often create a sense of realism for an alien group and its culture. Harry argued that this is only the case on film, that using alien language in written narrative reduces his enjoyment of the story. However, creating a language does not mean you have to fill your story with long tracts in that language. My own approach is to create the grammar and culture and manners of a culture but to use only minimal vocabulary, and allow the alien language to influence my use of English. That way people can continue to grasp what is going on (I hope! but this is what critiquers are for) and yet have the feeling that the language exists, and is real, because of the way that it changes the alien's use of English.
Next we turned to the genre of Fantasy, and specifically to the question, "Does it bother you when magic doesn't follow rules?" Brian remarked that many people in the real world believe in magic in one way or another, such as when we knock on wood, and that magic in and of itself wasn't inherently unbelievable. Lesley agreed, mentioning Arthur C. Clarke's principle that any sufficiently advanced technology is seen as magic. By this argument, much of our understanding of our current technology resembles belief in magic, since a great many of us don't understand how it works.
I argued that in the Harry Potter books, magic follows rules the way English follows grammar rules - that it has areas of order, and areas of disorder. Several of us felt that the magical diversity employed by Rowling went too far in places. On the other hand, Harry mentioned a book he'd read where a superhero was super-powerful whenever he needed to be, and sometimes his powers drained him, but at other times they restored him - that sometimes he needed to touch someone to influence them, and sometimes he didn't. This was the kind of lack of realism that everyone in the group was bothered by.
One thing that can help you keep a feeling of consistency in magic is the use of a consistent metaphor for the magic. Is magic like water? Is it more like air? Are spells like inhalations that come into you and then affect the entire area around you? Or are they like projectiles which you can shoot? Sticking with a consistent metaphor for your magic is a lot like sticking with the rules of physics in science fiction.
Finally we touched on the question of cultural realism. Brian proposed another type of Venn diagram, this one showing the two overlapping circles of "What history was like" and "What people think history was like." History is written by the victors, which influences what appears in it. Fiction has also influenced our view of history, as when we draw conclusions about what the Middle Ages were like based on our Fantasy reading. Harry said there is a common illusion that the Dark Ages didn't experience any cultural advances, but that this was largely a product of the fact that we don't have as many records from this period. Brian observed that while the Roman Empire fell, things were still going on and "advancing" in other places.
It's important to avoid falling into the ideological trap where if it didn't happen to our "favorite" civilizations, or our "favorite" members of those civilizations (be they nobles or men, or members of particular races) then it didn't matter. The historical record is not well-integrated across cultural zones, and widely divided into what matters and what doesn't matter. What you end up with, then, are a lot of cultural assumptions about what history holds and therefore what is "real." Recently there was the example of Scott Lynch receiving criticism for his female pirate mother of two being "unrealistic," which he responded to brilliantly (there are some great links about it here). There have also been recent discussions of whether the lack of people of color in the movie Brave was historically accurate (hint: it wasn't, but many people thought it was).
Glenda made the excellent point that every author should ask, "Who is my reader?" Your intended audience can have a big influence on how you would like to portray your world. Writers and readers often have different criteria (writers are typically far more critical!). I mentioned the book Red Moon, Black Mountain by Joy Chant, which featured three children who fell through a magical portal (not unusual) but who were separated in their magical travel and ended up landing in the magical world at different times, so that by the time they reunited, one of them had aged a number of years and the others only a month or two. Was it realistic? I found it believable when I read it, and the group agreed that it was a refreshingly original author choice. I could, however, imagine that some people might be disturbed to find their expectations confounded.
Thanks again to my guests for the excellent discussion! Join us again tomorrow at 11am PST on Google+ when we will be discussing Worldbuilding Process. I hope to see you there!
I started the discussion with the caveat that I have a personal bias against magic. While I love reading stories with magic, when I write them I have a tough time because I find magic "slippery." This is one reason why my Varin world's magic long ago (in writer time) turned from plain old magic to a semi-natural phenomenon. I don't like to be put in the position where I wave my hands and things happen the way I want them to. I want magic to have restrictions - and whatever freedoms it has, they often need to be counterbalanced with more realism in other areas. This topic will come up again later in the report.
We turned at first to Science Fiction, because it often has very stringent requirements of realism, in particular the rules of physics. Brian immediately remarked that much of science fiction doesn't conform to the rules of physics, as for example when people use faster-than-light drive for space ships. However, we did manage to agree that there was a difference between a story that takes something like FTL drive and "sets it aside," i.e. makes it a necessary condition for the story to take place, but doesn't have its scientific details play a critical role in the main conflict. For example, my stories take place on planets that must have been reached by FTL drive but in which no one ever travels that way. Brian has a story, by contrast, in which the nature of the propulsion is what the story is about. When you put the main focus on propulsion, then you at least need to have an internally consistent set of principles for that propulsion.
Brian proposed a fantastic Venn diagram of two overlapping circles, one of which would be Realistic and the other of which would be Believable. When we write, we definitely want to portray things that are believable, but not all of them must be Realistic as such. They say that truth is stranger than fiction, and often things that have really happened are so far out that if you wrote fiction about them, nobody would believe you. For example, I once wrote a story about my sixth grade class, using a few of the first names of people who'd been in it, and a teacher told me the names were unrealistic.
As an author, you are put in the position of establishing a contract of trust with the reader, where they must believe that you are narrating in good faith on some level. Maintaining a degree of realism in the story can help the reader continue to believe in you as you stretch credulity in limited areas.
I tend to think that character psychology and human emotions benefit from being realistic. Mind you, I do a lot with cultural differences and different ways of thinking - but I always come back to a basic rule of sense-making, requiring my characters to possess drives that we might find familiar, and to explain how they make sense of things if their thoughts are vastly different from ours. If a character becomes so alien it "goes off the rails," then the reader is less likely to stick with the story (without other things available to keep him/her reading).
At that point we turned to the question of language. Conlangs, or created languages, have been increasing in popularity lately. [Klingon, Na'vi, Dothraki are standouts] They can often create a sense of realism for an alien group and its culture. Harry argued that this is only the case on film, that using alien language in written narrative reduces his enjoyment of the story. However, creating a language does not mean you have to fill your story with long tracts in that language. My own approach is to create the grammar and culture and manners of a culture but to use only minimal vocabulary, and allow the alien language to influence my use of English. That way people can continue to grasp what is going on (I hope! but this is what critiquers are for) and yet have the feeling that the language exists, and is real, because of the way that it changes the alien's use of English.
Next we turned to the genre of Fantasy, and specifically to the question, "Does it bother you when magic doesn't follow rules?" Brian remarked that many people in the real world believe in magic in one way or another, such as when we knock on wood, and that magic in and of itself wasn't inherently unbelievable. Lesley agreed, mentioning Arthur C. Clarke's principle that any sufficiently advanced technology is seen as magic. By this argument, much of our understanding of our current technology resembles belief in magic, since a great many of us don't understand how it works.
I argued that in the Harry Potter books, magic follows rules the way English follows grammar rules - that it has areas of order, and areas of disorder. Several of us felt that the magical diversity employed by Rowling went too far in places. On the other hand, Harry mentioned a book he'd read where a superhero was super-powerful whenever he needed to be, and sometimes his powers drained him, but at other times they restored him - that sometimes he needed to touch someone to influence them, and sometimes he didn't. This was the kind of lack of realism that everyone in the group was bothered by.
One thing that can help you keep a feeling of consistency in magic is the use of a consistent metaphor for the magic. Is magic like water? Is it more like air? Are spells like inhalations that come into you and then affect the entire area around you? Or are they like projectiles which you can shoot? Sticking with a consistent metaphor for your magic is a lot like sticking with the rules of physics in science fiction.
Finally we touched on the question of cultural realism. Brian proposed another type of Venn diagram, this one showing the two overlapping circles of "What history was like" and "What people think history was like." History is written by the victors, which influences what appears in it. Fiction has also influenced our view of history, as when we draw conclusions about what the Middle Ages were like based on our Fantasy reading. Harry said there is a common illusion that the Dark Ages didn't experience any cultural advances, but that this was largely a product of the fact that we don't have as many records from this period. Brian observed that while the Roman Empire fell, things were still going on and "advancing" in other places.
It's important to avoid falling into the ideological trap where if it didn't happen to our "favorite" civilizations, or our "favorite" members of those civilizations (be they nobles or men, or members of particular races) then it didn't matter. The historical record is not well-integrated across cultural zones, and widely divided into what matters and what doesn't matter. What you end up with, then, are a lot of cultural assumptions about what history holds and therefore what is "real." Recently there was the example of Scott Lynch receiving criticism for his female pirate mother of two being "unrealistic," which he responded to brilliantly (there are some great links about it here). There have also been recent discussions of whether the lack of people of color in the movie Brave was historically accurate (hint: it wasn't, but many people thought it was).
Glenda made the excellent point that every author should ask, "Who is my reader?" Your intended audience can have a big influence on how you would like to portray your world. Writers and readers often have different criteria (writers are typically far more critical!). I mentioned the book Red Moon, Black Mountain by Joy Chant, which featured three children who fell through a magical portal (not unusual) but who were separated in their magical travel and ended up landing in the magical world at different times, so that by the time they reunited, one of them had aged a number of years and the others only a month or two. Was it realistic? I found it believable when I read it, and the group agreed that it was a refreshingly original author choice. I could, however, imagine that some people might be disturbed to find their expectations confounded.
Thanks again to my guests for the excellent discussion! Join us again tomorrow at 11am PST on Google+ when we will be discussing Worldbuilding Process. I hope to see you there!
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
TTYU Retro: Boy meets girl - how?
You know all about "boy meets girl" - it's one of the most common things we see in stories, even ones that don't have romance as their primary reason for being. But if you're working in a world with alternate social rules, one thing you should probably consider is how boys and girls meet each other. After all, if they aren't meeting each other at all, then that makes it hard for them to fall in love. And if they are meeting each other in very restricted circumstances, that may have a deep influence on what the society considers relevant to choosing a match.
Imagine the situation where boys and girls aren't allowed to meet. The sexes are totally separated as much as possible, so love between a potential husband and wife is probably not considered that important. This is the kind of place where you'd expect to see arranged matches based on criteria that can be assessed within the isolated context.
Imagine the situation where boys and girls play together all the time, but boys and girls tend to be separated for things like team activities, and gender roles are seen to be relatively distinct. Relationships form, and some boys understand girls better because they have sisters or cousins who force the gender-divided expectations to be broken down, and vice versa for girls understanding boys. But there are also going to be large groups of boys who haven't had much contact with girls and know their ways mostly by hearsay and culturally based report. This is sort of the situation my children are currently working in.
Every parameter you change is going to have a huge influence on how relationships form.
In this vein, I was thinking about Disney princesses. When we watched Mulan, I remarked to my daughter how this was my favorite of the Disney princess movies, and she said, "but she's not a princess." It was a good observation. Mulan is obviously a member of a noble family, but really, she's not a princess. And I think the reason why I always enjoyed her relationship with the Captain was that in spite of the deception involved in her pretending to be male, she actually got to know him. They went through rough things together. Compare that with the typical love-at-first-sight scenario that we see basically everywhere else in the Disney princess canon.
If you think about it, the idea of love at first sight in itself isn't a horrible thing - instant attractions happen. But when you look structurally at the positions the princesses are put in, they aren't ever in positions where meeting a boy will happen naturally and allow them to get to know each other. Historical princesses had some of this difficulty as well (though I imagine they were more realistic in their personalities), because the ways in which they were allowed to interact with potential matches were very circumscribed. If you're only ever going to be meeting any member of the opposite sex for an hour at a time, on a dance floor, then NOT believing in love at first sight is going to be a problem, because it will simply mean you have to resign yourself to not loving the person you're going to marry. Which of course does happen, but we like to think of these matches in an idealized way (because thinking of them any other way might be depressing! Just witness the Disney princess annotated portrait that has been floating around the internet lately).
Now, an example from my Varin world. The social parameters in Varin are twisted by the fact that the noble caste is in decline and in desperate need of healthy children (which it finds difficult to procure). As a result of this, women in the noble caste (but not the ones below) are very oppressed, and rushed into babymaking as soon as possible (age 17, which in the global scheme of things is not horrible, but still very early from my own point of view). Because their health and safety is considered a priority, the Grobal women are given bodyguard-nurses at birth, and these companions safeguard them until they are grown. This means that it is extremely difficult for boys to interact with girls. Boys are expected to approach the girl's servant before they approach the girl herself, to the extent that they must speak with the servant first until they get permission to speak to the girl. This means that boys without sisters have very little idea how to interact with girls at all. It also means that arranged marriages are the norm. Arranged marriages are also the norm because of the need for alliances between the Great Families, and they are typically arranged by men in power, so you end up with lots of couples where the man is 20 years older than the woman - because the man is powerful enough to make the arrangement successfully, and the woman is being rushed into childbearing. This has consequences all through the society because love is not generally the currency on which these things are based, and because young people are not able to satisfy their sexual appetites without braving bodyguards and serious trouble (which means they look for various other ways to satisfy them that I won't go into here).
What parameters for interaction have you set up in your world? How do boys and girls meet? What are the expectations for love and marriage? How does that change expectations and behavior?
It's something to think about.
Imagine the situation where boys and girls aren't allowed to meet. The sexes are totally separated as much as possible, so love between a potential husband and wife is probably not considered that important. This is the kind of place where you'd expect to see arranged matches based on criteria that can be assessed within the isolated context.
Imagine the situation where boys and girls play together all the time, but boys and girls tend to be separated for things like team activities, and gender roles are seen to be relatively distinct. Relationships form, and some boys understand girls better because they have sisters or cousins who force the gender-divided expectations to be broken down, and vice versa for girls understanding boys. But there are also going to be large groups of boys who haven't had much contact with girls and know their ways mostly by hearsay and culturally based report. This is sort of the situation my children are currently working in.
Every parameter you change is going to have a huge influence on how relationships form.
In this vein, I was thinking about Disney princesses. When we watched Mulan, I remarked to my daughter how this was my favorite of the Disney princess movies, and she said, "but she's not a princess." It was a good observation. Mulan is obviously a member of a noble family, but really, she's not a princess. And I think the reason why I always enjoyed her relationship with the Captain was that in spite of the deception involved in her pretending to be male, she actually got to know him. They went through rough things together. Compare that with the typical love-at-first-sight scenario that we see basically everywhere else in the Disney princess canon.
If you think about it, the idea of love at first sight in itself isn't a horrible thing - instant attractions happen. But when you look structurally at the positions the princesses are put in, they aren't ever in positions where meeting a boy will happen naturally and allow them to get to know each other. Historical princesses had some of this difficulty as well (though I imagine they were more realistic in their personalities), because the ways in which they were allowed to interact with potential matches were very circumscribed. If you're only ever going to be meeting any member of the opposite sex for an hour at a time, on a dance floor, then NOT believing in love at first sight is going to be a problem, because it will simply mean you have to resign yourself to not loving the person you're going to marry. Which of course does happen, but we like to think of these matches in an idealized way (because thinking of them any other way might be depressing! Just witness the Disney princess annotated portrait that has been floating around the internet lately).
Now, an example from my Varin world. The social parameters in Varin are twisted by the fact that the noble caste is in decline and in desperate need of healthy children (which it finds difficult to procure). As a result of this, women in the noble caste (but not the ones below) are very oppressed, and rushed into babymaking as soon as possible (age 17, which in the global scheme of things is not horrible, but still very early from my own point of view). Because their health and safety is considered a priority, the Grobal women are given bodyguard-nurses at birth, and these companions safeguard them until they are grown. This means that it is extremely difficult for boys to interact with girls. Boys are expected to approach the girl's servant before they approach the girl herself, to the extent that they must speak with the servant first until they get permission to speak to the girl. This means that boys without sisters have very little idea how to interact with girls at all. It also means that arranged marriages are the norm. Arranged marriages are also the norm because of the need for alliances between the Great Families, and they are typically arranged by men in power, so you end up with lots of couples where the man is 20 years older than the woman - because the man is powerful enough to make the arrangement successfully, and the woman is being rushed into childbearing. This has consequences all through the society because love is not generally the currency on which these things are based, and because young people are not able to satisfy their sexual appetites without braving bodyguards and serious trouble (which means they look for various other ways to satisfy them that I won't go into here).
What parameters for interaction have you set up in your world? How do boys and girls meet? What are the expectations for love and marriage? How does that change expectations and behavior?
It's something to think about.
Friday, January 25, 2013
Link: 25 more words that don't exist in English!
On the heels of my last "untranslatable" post, here are some more fun words that don't exist in English! I like this post because it has a lot of Japanese. Interestingly, there's only a single word of overlap with the last post on untranslatable words!
25 Handy Words That Simply Don't Exist in English
25 Handy Words That Simply Don't Exist in English
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
How to keep rich worldbuilding from bogging down your story: A Google+ Hangout Report
I was joined for this hangout by Glenda Pfeiffer, Liz Arroyo, Harry Markov, Lesley Smith, and Sid Schneider. It was great to get back to these live discussions, and I hope more people can join us next time! Social highlights were the presence of new visitors Lesley (from the UK) and Sid, and the new video camera which let us see Harry for the first time, all the way from Bulgaria.
The real trick with detailed worldbuilding is that very often it will take huge amounts of time to do the research and build the details of a world, but we have only the time allowed by a single reading person's attention to make it come to life for our story. This can lead to overloading a story with information and explanation, and this was the challenge we were all present to discuss.
I started the discussion with the following idea. Because, as an author, you are trying not to provide more information than a single person (the reader) can understand, one great way to approach the problem is to use a restricted point of view (either 1st person or 3rd person limited), using the character as a filter. What you give the reader to understand will therefore automatically be as much as one single person can think about at any given time, creating a microcosm of the world. Characters are allowed to have areas of uncertainty or ignorance. They are allowed to be culturally myopic, too - without implying that the author hasn't thought the world through sufficiently.
I did give my guests the caveat that I am not an expert on third person omniscient, so I wasn't going to be able to comment much on how to handle exposition in that format.
As an example of a large world focused through a single character, I gave the example of Grobal Tagaret, from my recently completed novel, For Love, For Power. As a nobleman, Tagaret has no concept of what life is like outside his own caste. He has a set of stereotypical views of what people are like (or are supposed to be like) when they come from other castes (servants, artists, merchants, etc.). He also has knowledge of certain individuals whom he knows personally, and while he doesn't treat them according to stereotype, he never really pushes his knowledge of those individuals into the kind of questioning which might lead him to conclude that perhaps members of the castes aren't all alike, or aren't quite what the stereotypes suggest. Then, as he learns more, the reader can also learn.
The idea here is to establish a character with an individual knowledge set, an idiosyncratic set of judgments, and then set up a situation of conflict and interactions that will press his buttons and make him express judgments.
I also talked about the protagonist of my short-story-in-progress, who goes by Hub Girl (an internet handle). She comes from a futuristic earth where people have the internet in their heads and are able to customize their reality by "overlaying" images from the internet on their surroundings. One important element of the worldbuilding is the idea that advertising can be used to cover up undesirable views, and in fact Hub Girl lives in a slum that is covered over by a layer of advertising (which she always sees from the underside). By putting the reader in Hub Girl's head, I can show how she customizes her reality, and how she takes for granted the advertising that covers over her home.
The other thing I recommend for rich yet concise worldbuilding is to choose unusual details. If you've done a lot of independent worldbuilding, you'll end up with far more detail than can actually fit into the story. However, a lot of that detail can be implied by mentioning one item (buildings like cliffs of glass, for example) that suggests others (a cityscape of tall modern-tech buildings). Then you can look for a detail that is both unexpected and relevant to the situation at hand. Including unusual details can win you a lot more trust than you'd expect, because readers are really good at filling in expected details. In Hub Girl's story, I have a moment where she's walking along the sidewalk and noticing everyone's shoes. One of my critique partners commented that she hadn't ever seen a story of near-future where shoes were mentioned, and she liked that I had included the detail. On the other hand, I don't just say, "and by the way, Cityfolk wear these kinds of shoes." Because Hub Girl doesn't have shoes, she feels vulnerable walking along the street where Cityfolk wear shoes that are both fancy and seemingly dangerous to her. It sets the mood, propels the action, and tells you what kind of shoes people are wearing. Here's the quote:
So many fancy shoes: stilettos jabbing, platforms thudding like hammers. If I flinched, they'd notice I got none.
Sometimes you can convey a lot about a world through the simple choice of a word. How would your character conceptualize the events and things and people around him/her? Be careful to choose a word that has judgmental connotations, or extra implications about the culture and the world around. Vagueness is not going to help you here. I was looking for a word to describe a kind of misfortune that might befall one of Hub Girl's friends (having tech stolen out of their heads), and had begun with the word "fluke" to express that it was something that didn't happen all the time. But the word said nothing about what Hub Girl thought had happened, and thus implied nothing about the dangers of the world. I thought about using "mugging" but that was also too vague, because while it expressed the appropriate idea that people would be held up for something of value, it missed the technical aspect, which was critical. "Head-jacking" was closer, since "hijacking" has long since been expanded to include "carjacking" etc., but I was concerned that people might guess it was a software problem like hacking. In the end I settled on "hardware-jacking," to get the greatest specificity about the nature of this misfortune into a single word.
From there we moved into talking about metaphors and similes, which are also great for concise worldbuilding. Any time a character compares one thing to another, you can learn something about what that character is familiar with, and what they perceive to be beautiful, or frightening, etc.
In our world, we very often compare things we see to elements of nature. Perhaps in the world you're working with, people have a similar relationship to nature as we do, but perhaps they do not. Neither Tagaret nor Hub Girl has the same relationship to nature that I do, for very different reasons. Tagaret lives in an underground city where few people have ever experienced wild nature, and most people are afraid of it. Hub Girl lives in a slum beside a big city, and the river that runs through the slum is polluted, so she doesn't get a lot of nature either. This means that neither one is going to compare anything to a growing tree, or to singing birds and babbling brooks. Instead, I have them compare things to what they have experienced in the past, or things that are common to their world. This gives me the opportunity (and can give similar opportunities to you) to reveal things about their past experiences and about what is common in the world. Sometimes you can take a familiar phrase, say, "blind as a bat" and change one element to suggest worldbuilding. What is "blind" in your world? Tagaret might say "blind as a child lost in an adjunct" (adjuncts are the cave systems surrounding the city). A person from Tagaret's world who travels to the surface is actually liable to reverse these comparisons, and compare elements of nature to more familiar things from the city. Hub Girl is urban, so she is far more likely to compare tiny and enormous networks saying that one is a footpath and one a superhighway, rather than saying that one is a spiderweb and one a river system.
At this point, Harry shared an example of this that he had read in Cathrynne Valente's Six Gun Snow White. The story that places Snow White in the wild west, where the name "Snow White" was given to her as an ironic insult because she is of mixed white and American Indian blood. Valente tells the story using a lot of earth, gem, metal, and rough imagery to fit with the wild west setting.
Harry also mentioned that he's working on a story where two ships are in competition to colonize a planet (only one can stay), and where he'll have the people comparing the wild natural state of the planet to the artificiality and sameness of the ships they've been traveling on. This is a similar reversal to the one I use for Tagaret, and for essentially the same reason: familiarity and unfamiliarity, both of which are really important to establish when worldbuilding.
One thing you can do in order to find ideas for expressing world through character is to ask a list of questions about your character and his/her judgments. What scares them, and why? What excites them? What comforts them? What disgusts them, or intrigues them, or confuses them? (We had a lot of great suggestions from our guests in this section, and I'll also point you toward the questions in my post, Designing Character Interviews that Really Matter, because many of these are directly related to worldbuilding).
Remember that people don't talk about things that are completely normal. If they do, that's when you're likely to feel like the information is bogging down the story. People remark on unfamiliarity or contrast, so use new experiences or departures from the norm to help establish what the norm actually is.
You may ask, "How do I go about conveying information to the reader which is not known to the character?" This can be a challenge, but be aware that sometimes people perceive things that they do not really notice, or even if they do notice they may not understand, or be too busy (due to story action) to analyze thoroughly. They may even observe something and actively try not to think about it, as when encountering an activity that is taboo.
For more information on how to include worldbuilding information more smoothly through grammatical means (backgrounding), I'll point you to my article, Hiding Information in Plain Sight.
Thanks to everyone who attended the hangout! Please feel free to add to the comments if you recall things from the hangout that I may have forgotten. Questions are also welcome.
Our next hangout will be tomorrow, Thursday, January 24th at 11am PST. We will be discussing the balance between realism and fantasy in sf/f, or in other words, "How realistic does a created world have to be in order to be plausible?" I hope to see you there!
The real trick with detailed worldbuilding is that very often it will take huge amounts of time to do the research and build the details of a world, but we have only the time allowed by a single reading person's attention to make it come to life for our story. This can lead to overloading a story with information and explanation, and this was the challenge we were all present to discuss.
I started the discussion with the following idea. Because, as an author, you are trying not to provide more information than a single person (the reader) can understand, one great way to approach the problem is to use a restricted point of view (either 1st person or 3rd person limited), using the character as a filter. What you give the reader to understand will therefore automatically be as much as one single person can think about at any given time, creating a microcosm of the world. Characters are allowed to have areas of uncertainty or ignorance. They are allowed to be culturally myopic, too - without implying that the author hasn't thought the world through sufficiently.
I did give my guests the caveat that I am not an expert on third person omniscient, so I wasn't going to be able to comment much on how to handle exposition in that format.
As an example of a large world focused through a single character, I gave the example of Grobal Tagaret, from my recently completed novel, For Love, For Power. As a nobleman, Tagaret has no concept of what life is like outside his own caste. He has a set of stereotypical views of what people are like (or are supposed to be like) when they come from other castes (servants, artists, merchants, etc.). He also has knowledge of certain individuals whom he knows personally, and while he doesn't treat them according to stereotype, he never really pushes his knowledge of those individuals into the kind of questioning which might lead him to conclude that perhaps members of the castes aren't all alike, or aren't quite what the stereotypes suggest. Then, as he learns more, the reader can also learn.
The idea here is to establish a character with an individual knowledge set, an idiosyncratic set of judgments, and then set up a situation of conflict and interactions that will press his buttons and make him express judgments.
I also talked about the protagonist of my short-story-in-progress, who goes by Hub Girl (an internet handle). She comes from a futuristic earth where people have the internet in their heads and are able to customize their reality by "overlaying" images from the internet on their surroundings. One important element of the worldbuilding is the idea that advertising can be used to cover up undesirable views, and in fact Hub Girl lives in a slum that is covered over by a layer of advertising (which she always sees from the underside). By putting the reader in Hub Girl's head, I can show how she customizes her reality, and how she takes for granted the advertising that covers over her home.
The other thing I recommend for rich yet concise worldbuilding is to choose unusual details. If you've done a lot of independent worldbuilding, you'll end up with far more detail than can actually fit into the story. However, a lot of that detail can be implied by mentioning one item (buildings like cliffs of glass, for example) that suggests others (a cityscape of tall modern-tech buildings). Then you can look for a detail that is both unexpected and relevant to the situation at hand. Including unusual details can win you a lot more trust than you'd expect, because readers are really good at filling in expected details. In Hub Girl's story, I have a moment where she's walking along the sidewalk and noticing everyone's shoes. One of my critique partners commented that she hadn't ever seen a story of near-future where shoes were mentioned, and she liked that I had included the detail. On the other hand, I don't just say, "and by the way, Cityfolk wear these kinds of shoes." Because Hub Girl doesn't have shoes, she feels vulnerable walking along the street where Cityfolk wear shoes that are both fancy and seemingly dangerous to her. It sets the mood, propels the action, and tells you what kind of shoes people are wearing. Here's the quote:
So many fancy shoes: stilettos jabbing, platforms thudding like hammers. If I flinched, they'd notice I got none.
Sometimes you can convey a lot about a world through the simple choice of a word. How would your character conceptualize the events and things and people around him/her? Be careful to choose a word that has judgmental connotations, or extra implications about the culture and the world around. Vagueness is not going to help you here. I was looking for a word to describe a kind of misfortune that might befall one of Hub Girl's friends (having tech stolen out of their heads), and had begun with the word "fluke" to express that it was something that didn't happen all the time. But the word said nothing about what Hub Girl thought had happened, and thus implied nothing about the dangers of the world. I thought about using "mugging" but that was also too vague, because while it expressed the appropriate idea that people would be held up for something of value, it missed the technical aspect, which was critical. "Head-jacking" was closer, since "hijacking" has long since been expanded to include "carjacking" etc., but I was concerned that people might guess it was a software problem like hacking. In the end I settled on "hardware-jacking," to get the greatest specificity about the nature of this misfortune into a single word.
From there we moved into talking about metaphors and similes, which are also great for concise worldbuilding. Any time a character compares one thing to another, you can learn something about what that character is familiar with, and what they perceive to be beautiful, or frightening, etc.
In our world, we very often compare things we see to elements of nature. Perhaps in the world you're working with, people have a similar relationship to nature as we do, but perhaps they do not. Neither Tagaret nor Hub Girl has the same relationship to nature that I do, for very different reasons. Tagaret lives in an underground city where few people have ever experienced wild nature, and most people are afraid of it. Hub Girl lives in a slum beside a big city, and the river that runs through the slum is polluted, so she doesn't get a lot of nature either. This means that neither one is going to compare anything to a growing tree, or to singing birds and babbling brooks. Instead, I have them compare things to what they have experienced in the past, or things that are common to their world. This gives me the opportunity (and can give similar opportunities to you) to reveal things about their past experiences and about what is common in the world. Sometimes you can take a familiar phrase, say, "blind as a bat" and change one element to suggest worldbuilding. What is "blind" in your world? Tagaret might say "blind as a child lost in an adjunct" (adjuncts are the cave systems surrounding the city). A person from Tagaret's world who travels to the surface is actually liable to reverse these comparisons, and compare elements of nature to more familiar things from the city. Hub Girl is urban, so she is far more likely to compare tiny and enormous networks saying that one is a footpath and one a superhighway, rather than saying that one is a spiderweb and one a river system.
At this point, Harry shared an example of this that he had read in Cathrynne Valente's Six Gun Snow White. The story that places Snow White in the wild west, where the name "Snow White" was given to her as an ironic insult because she is of mixed white and American Indian blood. Valente tells the story using a lot of earth, gem, metal, and rough imagery to fit with the wild west setting.
Harry also mentioned that he's working on a story where two ships are in competition to colonize a planet (only one can stay), and where he'll have the people comparing the wild natural state of the planet to the artificiality and sameness of the ships they've been traveling on. This is a similar reversal to the one I use for Tagaret, and for essentially the same reason: familiarity and unfamiliarity, both of which are really important to establish when worldbuilding.
One thing you can do in order to find ideas for expressing world through character is to ask a list of questions about your character and his/her judgments. What scares them, and why? What excites them? What comforts them? What disgusts them, or intrigues them, or confuses them? (We had a lot of great suggestions from our guests in this section, and I'll also point you toward the questions in my post, Designing Character Interviews that Really Matter, because many of these are directly related to worldbuilding).
Remember that people don't talk about things that are completely normal. If they do, that's when you're likely to feel like the information is bogging down the story. People remark on unfamiliarity or contrast, so use new experiences or departures from the norm to help establish what the norm actually is.
You may ask, "How do I go about conveying information to the reader which is not known to the character?" This can be a challenge, but be aware that sometimes people perceive things that they do not really notice, or even if they do notice they may not understand, or be too busy (due to story action) to analyze thoroughly. They may even observe something and actively try not to think about it, as when encountering an activity that is taboo.
For more information on how to include worldbuilding information more smoothly through grammatical means (backgrounding), I'll point you to my article, Hiding Information in Plain Sight.
Thanks to everyone who attended the hangout! Please feel free to add to the comments if you recall things from the hangout that I may have forgotten. Questions are also welcome.
Our next hangout will be tomorrow, Thursday, January 24th at 11am PST. We will be discussing the balance between realism and fantasy in sf/f, or in other words, "How realistic does a created world have to be in order to be plausible?" I hope to see you there!
Link: Recordings of Animal Sounds (especially Birds)
Here's a link to the Macaulay Library, which has put together an enormous collection of animal videos and sounds. Their specialty is birds. This is the kind of thing I love to listen to in order to create new ideas for alien languages. I hope you find it inspiring, too.
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