Mythology in Worldbuilding - a Dive into Worldbuilding Hangout report

Special thanks go out to Glenda Pfeiffer for this one, because she and I had a terrific one-on-one conversation about mythology, which covered some things you might expect and other things you probably didn't!

We started out by defining some of the conditions under which we've seen mythology used in worldbuilding. They looked something like this:

1. Building a 'real' world where an existing world mythology is true. This is the Rick Riordan approach, where you have Greek and Roman or Egyptian gods showing up in New York and other real world places. It also includes things like urban fantasy where our own world coexists with vampires or fairies etc.

2. Building a world internal to a mythological canon in order to extend it. This is what people do when they write "new myths" which fit into a particular paradigm. I think particularly of the way Hayao Miyazaki and Mizuki Shigeru have treated Japanese mythology in their work - and the way people like Howard Pyle and Theodora Goss (and others) write new European-style fairy tales.

3. Building a secondary world with its own mythology/mythologies.

This third one is where we put much of our attention. It's something that has also been done by a lot of authors - though it's worth asking what is the difference between creating a religion for a secondary world, and creating a mythology. In fact, mythology is a word that is often used to describe old religions that are no longer widely held - which means it can be offensive to label something as a mythology that is still an actively practiced religion. Mythologies also often contain accounts that sho the layering of historical belief systems, as in the Greek example where Zeus' many love affairs show the way that the belief in Zeus was able to incorporate local female deities into its stories as the religion moved into those regions (and conquered).

Glenda noted that mythology often contains elements of true history that have devolved into mythology over time - or, one might say, evolved into mythology. Elements of true events remain within a storytelling matrix, an archetypal scenario that departs from a precise historical account. Lost colony stories are examples of these; so are origin stories.

One thing you can do as an author is take inspiration from existing mythologies when designing religion or mythology for a secondary world. My own Varin world uses a religion that is very loosely based on Greek mythology, in that the gods are a family with representation among the heavenly bodies, and each one is the patron of something different. Varin also has a mythology of sorts - but this one is an ideological mythology concerning the origins of their society and the role of their hero, the Great Grobal Fyn, in its founding.

Glenda asked a question that neither of us knew the answer to (and maybe some of my readers do). She wondered whether there was a place for tales of genies within the context of Islam, and whether there is a historical connection of some kind.

Getting back to creating a mythology, the form a mythology takes is going to depend a lot on the setting where it exists. Do your people live near a volcano? A river? On an island in the ocean? Then those elements are doubtless going to appear within the local mythologies and origin stories.

You can also ask, "What is the place of the mythology in this culture?" Is it something quaint or "cool" that people recount stories about, or is it an active teaching tool? Is it a driver of actual behavior, like the stories of golden cities and Amazon women that sent explorers searching into the American continents? Is there a mythology that has grown up around specialized settings like the frontier, or the mountains where hermits and "mountain men" might live? Furthermore, any society can have more than one existing mythology. They can have an ancient mythology, as well as a current ideological mythology (like the Varin example above) and also urban mythology. In fact, I had never thought about what kind of urban mythology might exist in Varin, and after this discussion, I was inspired to give it some thought! I'm sure the undercaste characters who are the focus of my next book will have non-regularized urban myths that they believe in. (Exciting opportunity for me!)

At that point we talked a little about origin stories. Do the people in your world believe that a deity or deities created their world? How, and out of what? Was it a darkness-and-light thing, or is the world a deity in itself (herself)? Was the world made from the dead body of an evil giant? Was it a blanket that was woven by the gods? Were people made out of clay? We can take inspiration here from all kinds of existing world mythologies and religions. Greek, Norse, native American Indian, Semitic, Amazonian... the list is endless. I mentioned my own surprise upon reading an English translation of the Kojiki, which is the native Japanese origin story. In that story, the children of gods become islands, but all sorts of divine bodily fluids and excretions also turn into gods, or islands, or other elements of the world.

Another good question to ask involves the roles of animals in the world, and in its mythology and origins. Are they created alongside humans, or are they participating as deities and creative agents in their own right?

We spoke also about Watership Down by Richard Adams, which is a brilliant book that features the mythology of the rabbits as well as their society. It's a great example to look up for the way it features the natural environment and capabilities of rabbits and turns them into sources for teaching tales.

Glenda said that Feng Shui has taken on its own meaning across contexts. We both thought that directionality was very important in mythologies, including all those with personalities for winds from different directions, and those like the Japanese which included directional taboos (days on which you couldn't travel in a given direction). We wondered what a mythology based on an absolute direction system (rather than a relative directions system like left/right) would look like.

What kind of mythologies would develop in a spacefaring culture? Would there be mythologies of the cosmos?

Needless to say, we could only scratch the surface of this topic in the time we had. I hope we'll have a chance to discuss it again soon.

TTYU Retro: Write from your specialty

Everybody on Earth or in orbit has a unique life experience. No two people are precisely the same. We get told this a lot, but it's a pretty useful thing to consider when you're writing fiction. The things you've experienced, and the topics you've pursued or studied, contribute to a unique persona, and that translates into a unique style of writing. This could, I suppose, be considered an aspect of "write what you know." Or it could simply be a statement that you're going to write what you know whether you intend to or not.

There are a lot of story ideas out there. One might even say there are infinite stories out there. Which ones are yours are going to depend a lot on your specialty. How you execute the classic ones is also going to depend on your specialty.

I came into fiction writing with a specialty in language, linguistics, and culture. Even when I'm not specifically focusing a story on a language or culture-related premise, that's going to show through. I have the knowledge in these areas, so I'm not going to let myself cut corners. I'm not going to do something that's patently ridiculous - and my definition of patently ridiculous is going to be a lot stricter because I've spent a pretty ridiculous amount of time becoming acquainted with these topics!

You might think that the ideas that are "out there" in science fiction and fantasy are finite. I've heard people argue that. The ways of approaching them, however, are not. The reason that people in English classes and writing classes study the historical context of the writing of a piece is that the societal issues of the time are often reflected in the stories being told. Well, so are the life conditions of the author. Your life conditions change those ideas that are "out there." Your special viewpoint makes them your own.

I have a terrific writer friend who has a nontraditional family, and who has a background in theater. That means that she has special expertise in portraying certain types of nontraditional families and the individuals who might be a part of them; it also means she has a great sense of dialogue and movement in her character interactions. Another friend of mine has tons of teen interactions through gaming; that gives her teen characters a lot of realism and intensity. More than one of my friends has experienced intense suffering, and they are able to portray remarkable emotional range in their writing.

I find that people often aren't aware of the ways that their life experiences influence them. They might be very good at something due to personal experience and not even realize it. When I first came into sf/f writing I thought of my studies as a delay in getting to what I really wanted to do; quickly, though, I realized that they were the reason I could do this successfully, and stand out. It's really valuable to consider what might be your specialty. Take a step back from your life experiences and think about the ones that have most profoundly influenced your mindset. Then look at what you've written and see if you can find the footprints of those experiences. If you never have before, consider taking something from that core expertise of yours and putting it at the center of a story. Your specialty will become a solid foundation for whatever you plan to build there.

It's something to think about.

Don't squander your readers!

When I get through with writing a story, my first reaction is to want to show it to people. And since I thrive on critique, I always like to get multiple views on a story, which means showing it to more than one person at a time.

I have to remind myself to have patience.

It's really a better idea not to have everyone read the first draft. In fact, it's better to have only yourself read the first draft (ok, maybe one more person if you're feeling like you can't get distance on it). Have other people read it when you personally can't see a way to improve it.

And even then, have patience.

This may not be as much the case with a short story, but with a novel, at least, there will be many iterations. If it's the novel you're teaching yourself to write with, it will have many, MANY iterations (trust me). That means it needs to be looked at lots of times, to help you move forward. Each person who looks at it will be able to give you unique feedback, and sometimes, the same person will be willing and able to look at the project more than once and help you determine how close you're getting to your vision.

However, there is always value in the opinion of an outside reader - and by that I mean someone who has never seen the story before. Preferably, that person will not even have spoken with you about the story in depth. After all, those agents and editors you'll be sending it to won't have seen it before, or spoken with you about it. And your audience, the readers you're hoping will love your book and buy a million or two copies, they haven't seen it either. Thus, an outside reader can give you an impression that a close friend who has read the story a thousand times cannot.

This is why I recommend not just showing the story to everyone, even if you are super-enthusiastic about it. Outside readers are a precious resource, and you should not squander them.

When my mother was visiting a couple of weeks ago, I asked her to look at my synopsis. Not the whole novel, mind you - just the synopsis. It was a big deal for me, because I'd never asked her to have anything to do with this novel before. I may have mentioned it obliquely, with warnings that it was an adult kind of novel dealing with current social issues. It's hard to ask your mom to look at a book you wrote that has sex in it for some reason - go figure! Anyway, she looked at it, and gave me wonderful feedback. She was able to see where things weren't fitting together, because she didn't have all the extra world knowledge and baggage I had that helped me fit things together in my brain, whether or not they were there on the page. She had a little bit of world knowledge from having read a short story set in the world, but that was it.

It was incredibly refreshing feedback. It was also a really awesome bonding experience!

It really brought home to me - again, and this time literally - the importance of outside readers, even very late in the process of writing. So don't squander your readers, people. Keep a few in reserve at all times, just in case.

They'll be knights in shining armor when you need them.


#SFWApro

Language Barriers - a Worldbuilding Hangout Report

I was joined for this discussion by Lykara Ryder (welcome, Lykara!), Glenda Pfeiffer, Brian Dolton, and Jaleh Dragich.

Language barriers are tricky to portray in written stories. There's a danger of excluding the reader if you use too much of an unfamiliar or created language. A lot of stories in the past have used handwavium to get past the problem of a language barrier - "well, they use telepathy!" "Babelfishes!" etc. I'm not even going to go into the reasons why I think telepathy is problematic, but it's the kind of solution to a language barrier that doesn't hold up well to close scrutiny. On the other hand, it's fully possible to get a reader to accept it if you just put it out there and say "Yeah, so trust me, there's telepathy." Many readers will say "Okay." I will say "Hmm, okay... but couldn't you have done better?" Another way of dealing with an  unfamiliar language is having the point of view character not understand the foreign language either, and show him/her dealing with that lack of comprehension (which lets the reader empathize).

Brian was quick to note that language barriers are a huge real-life problem as well, and played a huge part in early European interactions when they arrived in unfamiliar locations and tried to do reconnaissance. Sometimes it worked (surprisingly) well. Other times not so well, as when the locals brought out an array of barter items and those were interpreted by the Europeans as "gifts." As Brian said, why should they have been surprised when they got attacked for thieves later? He shared a story idea with us, where humans are "shipwrecked" in a location with an intelligent creature that doesn't use auditory language, and thus has no way to communicate with them. What do you do then?

I mentioned one story which stood out to me as having zero linguistic communication between an alien and a human - "Spar" by Kij Johnson (where they were having concourse of an entirely different variety). In my own work I looked at the problem of using a non-auditory channel of communication in "The Liars," where the humans were confused because the Poik were using both auditory and non-auditory channels at the same time, but the humans could only perceive the auditory one.

I'm sure many of you have seen the scenario (and all the discussants had) of two creatures comparing objects and assigning names to them. This is a classic way to approach what I call the "code-breaking" language barrier scenario, where one entity has to learn the other's language. However, Star Trek once showed how the object-comparison scenario has problems with it (remember Troi and the cup of coffee?). Also, there is a fundamental assumption involved that both of the entities involved discern objects in their environment (I'll return to that in a minute). Another common code-breaking scenario is hard-SF-radio-waves-across-the-cosmos, where the main goal is to show the interlocutor that one understands math. It's exciting, but I have a really hard time imagining what next steps might be taken. (I'd love to see a story that takes that question on!)

Language acquisition at the most basic level is all about associating language cues with surrounding context. This makes it very difficult when we do not share context, or share only very basic aspects of context. Given the complexity of social context and the fact that it coexists with circumstantial context, this can be quite challenging.

Different languages tend to categorize things differently, and this is one of the most interesting aspects of bilingualism (to my mind). Sheila Finch had a very interesting way of approaching the language barrier problem in her Xenolinguist stories, because she directly addressed the categorization problem. She gave her xenolinguists drugs to take that were specifically geared to dissociate the mind from its traditional categories. It's an important point, because categories limit us in our thinking. Cultural viewpoints already make huge differences in categories, and species viewpoint could take that even further. What if we were to encounter a species that did not recognize objects as objects, but spoke about the world in terms of the salience of differences in texture? I'm not sure we humans would know what to do - and the old point-and-name technique might lead to unexpected results.

Lykara researches conlangs (constructed languages) and was telling us that she has seen conlangs based on a synaesthetic individual's perception of how words taste. Based on this, she speculates that understanding actual aliens is unlikely. I tend to agree with her, and so does Sheila Finch (as Sheila and I have argued this point before on convention panels).

Jaleh mentioned seeing some interesting Bollywood movies where one character only understood a few words, which led to much misunderstanding and trouble. There's certainly a lot of potential for that with language barriers, which is one reason they make for such good stories!

Another approach that people sometimes take to bridging a language barrier is exposing children to the alien language and taking advantage of their natural language-learning skill. This can work, so long as the language is auditory and perceivable by the children! But it is not without its challenges.

We also spoke about translators. They can make an interaction work, but they can also manipulate it. I talked about a friend of my family's who works as a translator in Japan, and she is appreciated by the governor because she translates his jokes. (Apparently Koko the gorilla also translates jokes...) The point about joke-translation is it relates directly to a politician's purpose in speaking, which is more than just basic message-sending. This relates back to what we spoke about earlier, with social context. A politician has social cues he/she wants to send, and those are culturally based, which means that translating them can be a big challenge. Depending on the amount of cultural information implied by the words being used, a translator may be able to turn a long speech into just a few words... or may have to take a few words and explain them at length in order to make them meaningful. This is related to the question of shared metaphors and shared stories, which always brings me back to the Star Trek: TNG episode "Darmok" and my own story using the same language principle, "Let the Word Take Me." The extreme situation of a people speaking only in literary allusions, i.e. references to a set of shared stories, is only an intensification of what we already do all the time in language. A great many of us love to play that game where we start a movie quote and let someone else finish it. It's hard to say "I'll be back," or "Inconceivable," without evoking an additional layer of emotion - and solidarity on the basis of shared experience. As Lykara mentioned, one can also deliberately misquote for humorous purposes, and subvert the basic context.

The problem of language barriers has been around for a long time. Shakespeare dealt with it in several different ways in Henry V, having the French speakers alternately speak French or English as the surrounding scene required for audience comprehension.

In my story, "Cold Words," I used a minimum of alien language but used the style of my English prose to imply that everyone in the story was actually speaking Aurrel (and readers were simply seeing a translation).

Lykara noted that Jean Auel dealt with language barriers in Earth's Children, often with great humor. Sometimes she had two different language groups use two different English words for the same plant to imply the language difference.

Jaleh mentioned The Blue Sword, in which the reader is asked to identify with the protagonist, who doesn't understand the new language at first. Later, when she understands it, it comes to be rendered in English while other characters comment on their lack of understanding.

I mentioned that I thought there had been a lost opportunity in James Cameron's Avatar, because the design of Na'vi was so brilliant but there were no substantive misunderstandings - i.e. misunderstandings that weren't just quaint and charming, but actually influenced the plot proceedings.

If you are creating languages, it's good to remember that languages are not monoliths. They always have variation and dialect within them - different vocabulary, different sayings, etc. You can also make use of shared cognates between languages that grew out of the same parent language, to ease understanding. Word borrowing can lead to some ease of understanding, but totally unrelated languages (like English and Japanese) are much harder. We are also up against the problem that adult brains will often re-interpret what they hear as being a language sound from their own language, even when it most definitely is not.  Jaleh mentioned that there were five people on Babylon 5 with the name "Zathras" which sounded exactly the same to all the viewers (and English-speaking characters) but were treated as different by the five people in question.

Be aware that using spelling changes to indicate an accent can be problematic, and that changing meter and modes of expression can often be more effective. Putting a glossary in a story definitely changes the reading experience.

This was as much as we were able to cover during this discussion - there is always so much more we could say, and we only tend to realize it right at the end. :) Thank you to everyone who participated.

#SFWApro

Video: Personal Faith in Worldbuilding and Storytelling

I had a great chat today with Glenda Pfeiffer, Deborah J. Ross, and Lillian Csernica. Here's the video for your enjoyment...

Video: Mythology in Worldbuilding

I'm not sure why I forgot to post this one last week! Here is our discussion on Mythology. I really enjoyed it, and I hope you will, too.

Schools and Education: A worldbuilding hangout report

The Schools and Education hangout was just two of us - me, and Erin Peterson - but we had a great time and talked about a lot of fascinating stuff.

Our first concern was to look at some very basic questions surrounding schools and education in a secondary world. For example, is there a school system? What form does it take? Is there more than one type of school for different types of people? Or is there a single schoolhouse for the community? Do people learn mostly by independent study, homeschooling or home tutoring? I mentioned that Thomas Jefferson did a lot of self-teaching through literature - but it's important to note that he was also very wealthy and had access to lots of books.

Erin asked, "What are people trying to learn?" That question is also critical to understanding the kind of schooling that people will require. A large school system often focuses on basics of citizenship; it's paid for communally and mandated for all, because it functions as a source for good citizens of the larger community. There are also religion-based schools, vocation-based schools, work-based schools. In fantasy, you often find apprenticeships, because they are a really effective way for individuals to pass their work onto the next generation without needing generalized formal training. In the US there is a common cultural view that college should be for everyone. Erin argued that high school prepares you for the American Dream, but that college makes that dream easier to achieve.

Education is an accomplishment. How is education valued in the society? Is it revered? Is it considered overly esoteric "ivory tower" stuff? Both? Depending on where you are and the cultural norms surrounding you, finishing high school may be a big deal, or advanced degrees might be a big deal. Erin said her grandmother lived in Hawai'i in the 30's and for her community, High School was a major accomplishment. Depending on the context, just being able to read might be a big deal. On the other hand, what kind of "big deal" it is may also differ. It could be celebrated, admired, resented...even considered holy or arcane.

I have an example of a very complex education system in my Varin world, because each of the seven caste levels approaches educating its people in a different way. The nobles have a very low population, so all of their children go to the same school and there they are groomed for the government and administrative tasks they specialize in. The officer caste has special academies for firefighters, police, and army groups, etc. The servant caste can work in bureaucracy, law, prison administration, or as personal advisors and servants to the nobles. They are therefore thoroughly educated in the topics they choose to specialize in; the special servants for the nobles have their very own Academy that teaches them everything from grace to bodyguarding to medicine and politics. The University, however, belongs to the caste that includes artists, engineers, electricians, writers, and other knowledge workers. The laborers have apprenticeships and certain kinds of centralized Union-based instruction, while the merchants have their own special focus on mathematics. The undercaste has no structured education but receives on-the-job training, while reading is handled as an apprenticeship-based skill. At every level, each group believes that it is superior to the other groups in some way, and there are different criteria they use to judge how successful they are.

Erin mentioned that schools can be used for indoctrination, especially when they serve as gatekeepers for selection of particular people into elite groups. She suggested that there is a stereotypical pattern, which I have also seen before, where upper classes tend to have individual tutoring, middle classes tend to have schools, and lower classes tend not to have any schooling at all. This is not the kind of pattern that can be considered universal. (No cultural patterns are universal!)

Education systems can serve as enforcers of existing cultural biases, even when they are not ideologically committed to those biases. They can be places of active oppression, or just of subtle institutional bias where behaviors are enforced along double standards, and people are quietly treated unequally without notice (as when boys get called on more than girls).

We made a few general social notes: women can oppress other women in these contexts just by force of precedent and habit. It's important to avoid placing modern beliefs in non-modern scenarios (not all downtrodden people will be jealous revolutionaries). Furthermore, if social roles are complementary, people typically won't be keen just to switch roles with their counterparts - women won't want to reject all their traditional roles and become men with their differently restricted roles, for example.

It's quite common for the US/Western view to see schools and education as being secular institutions, but this is not the case everywhere. Religion is often a form of education. Priests are very often scholars, and the church or other religions can be deeply connected with literacy in a community. A small group of people with specialized education can constitute a knowledge elite, depending on whether they freely share their knowledge or whether they carefully guard it. Knowledge of the Bible was restricted for many years to those who spoke Latin - and translating it into English was a huge deal.

In a small community school there may be differential teaching in the same classroom, as when many children of many levels are studying in the one school. The teacher's job is to teach as much as each individual can handle.

School scheduling is another thing that can vary widely. In a community whose seasonal schedule is determined by the needs of the harvest, schooling may also bend to that necessity, depending on how important the presence of each community member is to the success of the endeavor. The schoolteacher may be exempt from participation, or he/she may not. It's possible that the one person who doesn't need to participate in the work can be asked to take on more than one function (as a priest/teacher, for example).

Erin mentioned Kate Elliott's Cold Fire, which explores the impact of social stratification in school with a scenario where girls are taught differently from boys, and rich kids differently from poor kids. Discipline in the school is also applied differently.

We then turned to the question of science fiction where computers are shown functioning as teachers. Both Erin and I had some trouble with this idea, at least in the case where the computer is not a fully functioning artificial intelligence. Teaching is most effective when there is interaction between the learner and teacher. Another question that is often left unexplored (both in medieval fantasy and in far-future science fiction) is the role of parents in schooling. Do parents help with homework (homework itself is not a given!)? Do they scaffold, or demonstrate, how the knowledge is used or how work is to be done? Are they at work all day, or dissociated from the community that holds the knowledge being learned? Are they somehow abusive? Any change of this variety will have an enormous influence on outcomes. In the science fictional computer learning scenario, there is often very little parental presence shown (the schooling scene in DS9 was a real eye-opening first for me!). Any AI functioning in this environment would have to have extensive social and psychological knowledge. Can it figure out what you are talking about if you are making errors? Can it help you understand what kind of questions to ask to improve your knowledge? These are sophisticated things that need to happen for the education to be most successful. Google, for example, can hypothesize what you are about to ask it - but its metrics are based on what it has been asked previously, so it is still ill-equipped to anticipate questions it has never been asked before. Kids are notorious for making errors and asking questions that are unique and unexpected!

We then talked about how classrooms are arranged, and how learning takes place. Do students sit? Do they learn by doing? Are there lectures, hands-on experiments, or getting out in an environment to explore? Does the teacher employ the Socratic method or something like it? Are students asked to derive their knowledge from examples? Are students expected to work in groups, or does the teacher deliberately separate people who like each other, in order to encourage individual learning? The US focus on individual learning can be problematic for some students, as when a second language learner is separated from a friend who has been scaffolding her language and content learning. There is benefit at a certain point, because the student becomes more independent and must fend for herself, but until that point, her progress may be slowed. A similar difficulty arises when we ask whether to separate twins.

At that point we got around to content. Who decides what is important to teach? What is considered vital, and what is restricted? Are subjects integrated with one another, or are they compartmentalized? What is the role of arts? Are they considered integral, or "extra"? Knowledge is web-like and interconnected, and math and art are everywhere, but the US education system has not seemed to recognize this in its traditional curriculum design.

We also have a rigidly defined school year, with semesters, and a fixed curriculum that must be "covered" by a certain time. This means that constant, consistent attendance is a must, and traveling commitments or illness can lead to "missing the boat" and being significantly delayed in that fixed program. A stigma is attached to missing school, or to repeating a grade. However, repeating a grade can be very helpful. Our own experience has been that especially at the earliest level, repeating a year can lead to dramatic improvements in attention, and social success, which can lead to success later as a student progresses in the system.

Individual learning styles vary a lot, and attention to those styles can be very helpful, but isn't necessarily that common. Teacher and parent expectations combine with those styles in interesting ways. Indeed, at the end of this discussion we agreed that there was a lot more we could talk about! (Like why does math have such a reputation for being hard? Or what about people who establish their own schools for specialized skills like kung fu etc.?)

Thanks very much to Erin for coming to chat with me. I'm a little behind (as you  may be able to tell) on my reports, but I hope to catch up this week. This Thursday's discussion (9/19, 11am PDT on Google+) will be about personal faith in worldbuilding and stories. I hope to see you there!

#SFWApro