Purposeful Ramblings Through My Mind

My character is going to be fun, and so far she's fun to play. As before, read them in dated order rather than posted order - that is, go back to the first or the fifth depending on whether you read the earlier ones already.

http://velvetpage.dreamwidth.org/

"Worldbuilding" is the act of creating a fantasy world in which to set a work of fiction. Some authors worldbuild for years, to the point where their world is extremely well-developed when they finally start writing the books that are going to be set in it. I believe Robert Jordan is one of these; Tolkien is another decent example.

Most authors, however, don't do that. They do something a lot simpler, but that requires more backstory later on. They choose a framework, usually a pre-existing one - say, generic medieval/renaissance sword-and-sorcery, recognizable in three-quarters of the fantasy fiction on the market - and then they build the individual details onto that framework. Instead of wizards, my world will have mind magic. Instead of the usual constant level of corruption, my world has such-and-such to keep the high-and-mighty honest. My world has dragons. My world has elves, only they're not called elves, they're called this other thing. My world has anthropomorphic characters. And so on, and so forth.

This kind of worldbuilding serves a valuable purpose. If the author is using a semi-generic framework, it means they can evoke that framework for the reader, who gets to use their prior experience with the same framework as a route into understanding the book. The semi-generic framework is triggered by certain details - names of weapons, styles of architecture, names of people or places, or landscape features (try writing a fantasy novel set in the high north without evoking either Vikings or Inuit or Russians! Go ahead, try it!) Sometimes this use of a framework is so deliberately historical that you can learn a lot about the framework being used by reading it (see Guy Gavriel Kay for an example of that.) Other times, the framework is loose at best.

The problem I see with this kind of worldbuilding is twofold. First, if the book/series actually succeeds, it invariably requires a lot of backfilling to make the setting rich enough to support the wealth of sequels that eventually get written. Anne MacCaffery and Mercedes Lackey have both experienced that problem over the course of their careers - the worlds in their later Pern and Valdemar series use the worlds in their first books more as guidelines than as canon. Dedicated fans can easily plague your life out wondering how such-and-such a detail in the first book is consistent with such-and-such a detail eight books later. However, any author who manages to get eight or more books out of one world, and have fans that dedicated, doesn't deserve my sympathy so much as my envy. No, the more common problem is the second: what is a good ratio of generic framework to new material? How much can you draw from history or other fantasy books before your book looks and feels exactly like six dozen others published in the last four decades? How little can you draw from those frameworks before your world becomes impenetrable and dense, too far "out there" for anyone to understand without a complex system of charts and maps that no one wants to keep flipping to while they read?

The goal is to achieve a balance, where your readers will be able to visualize the backdrop and understand the comparisons, but will still find your writing to be fresh and interesting.

Thirty-three thousand words and change, in four weeks! I've never done NaNoWriMo, because November is stupidly busy for me with, like, my job, but by the end of this month I will have written nearly the target amount for NaNoWriMo, while looking after two kids full-time. Furthermore, while it's a draft, it's a good draft. There will be no complete rewrites. There will be touch-ups and additions and scenes that change location in the book, but I've never seen the point of "getting it on paper" only to go back and rewrite three-quarters of it. (Yes, this is a big part of the reason why I've temporarily abandoned the dolphin book. I have no heart for rewrites.)

I'm going to get dressed and take my kids to the mall for a while. Maybe I'll buy myself a non-food-type treat to congratulate myself on "well begun is half done" job.

Lieutenant-Commander Kathleen Bell, acting Chief Medical Officer, FSS Bellerophon, private log.

( Read more... )

Well, it feels like it, sometimes.

More accurately, it's a story from the last halcyon days of high school. In those days, in Ontario, there was a fifth year of high school, designed as a university-prep year. I went to France between grades 12 and 13, so when I got back, I still needed to do that final year but most of my friends had left the school in favour of the local university. Meanwhile, while I was away I developed a long-distance love-by-letter by the name of Piet. By September of that year (1994) we'd been dating for almost two months.

During the spring semester, I took a course called Writer's Craft. It was an OAC (that is, university-prep) writing course, and it was taught by the most eccentric teacher in the school, called Mr. M, or more commonly, the Tyrant. He had a glass of water on his desk all the time, long before bottled water had become fashionable; he dressed in threadbare, button-down, short-sleeve shirts, year round, in his glacial basement classroom; he had his desk on the pedestal at the front of the room and all the student desks arranged in a semi-circle out from it, so students had to crane their necks to see him; and he liked to shout quips at people, following them with a loud guffaw that made him more than one enemy amongst the students.

Every OAC class had a Final Project that was generally spoken of in hushed, despairing tones. All of these were generally due about three weeks before exams, depending on how much of an oral presentation was required for them, and it was not uncommon to see students juggling posters, cue cards, videos, and sometimes guest speakers, for two or more presentations within a day or two of each other. As university prep went, it was quite effective. The final project for Writer's Craft with Mr. M was to choose an author from a long list he had, read and study at least two books by that author, and then write a story in the style of that author. The list included some very well-known people, some who should have been well-known but weren't, and some that didn't deserve much beyond a space on the shelves at the local used bookstore. On that list were Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and about two dozen others. I had no real interest in reading most of them, but I had to choose one.

Having recently gained access to Piet's library, and encouraged by him, I decided to do Raymond Chandler, author of "The Big Sleep." It was a good book. I enjoyed reading it, even while finding the note-taking to be tedious. I was quite diligent at it, though. I read with a pencil in one hand and a notebook on my lap, noting turns of phrase, vocabulary, setting details, plot twists - anything I thought I'd be able to use in my story.

Piet suggested one or two other books for research into Chandler and his writing style. One of them was a collection of essays, some of them autobiographical, by Chandler, which contained one of the more memorable pieces of wisdom I've ever used: he said that all great literature had in it an element of redemption. Ever since, I've tried to make sure all my characters had that, and it has never failed me yet.

The other main piece of non-fiction that I used as a resource was a roleplaying game called Justice Inc.

Many of you are familiar with it. At that time, I hadn't ever played a roleplaying game. I knew about them, mostly from Piet of course. I had long since gotten past my narrow D&D-is-the-devil's-tool outlook shared by so many at my church, and I was willing to be convinced. Piet pointed out that many RPGs (at least, the well-researched ones) contained a surprising amount of real information about the eras in which they were set, and they often differentiated clearly between what they'd found in history books, and what they'd made up. Justice Inc. was a superhero game set in the 1930's. It was an excellent source for setting and slang, and fit perfectly with my subject. I couldn't have gotten away with using it in any class where sources had to be academically credible, but Mr. M was not that kind of teacher. He liked seeing people make use of unusual sources, though he would roast anyone who did it poorly.

My project got an A. Mr. M praised it to the skies. In that class, it was enough to solidify some bad feelings towards me, but those had always been there and it was the last three weeks of high school. It also solidified my relationship with Piet. We had learned that we had similar tastes, and the ability to pick information from unlikely sources.

I was reminded of this today, by Piet's explanations about Dentists and Drugstores in Depression-era pulp fiction. You see, several major plot points in my story happened in a drugstore, including an important anonymous telephone call and a meeting over a couple of sodas, late at night.

In my story, the druggist was one of the main suspects. He wasn't guilty, though. The worst he did was traffic in some morphine.

A little something for the august_writing community, that I thought I'd post here as well.

( Maudlin mommy poetry )