2. Are there flowers in this world? What do they look like, and most importantly how do they get pollinated? Consider the drive behind every living thing . . . reproduction! Birds do it, bees do it, flowers and trees do it . . . and they do it in millions of weird and wonderful ways. It doesn’t matter if you are not writing about sex. Creation is not just about passing on one’s genes. It encompasses the transmission of ideas and visions, a piece of art, attempting to control the world. Same drive, different outcome.
3. We see only a small percent of color and a fraction of smells and sounds. What do other animals see, hear, and smell? Do a little research and the world will supply ideas.
DAVID ANTHONY DURHAM
Think Historical
DAVID ANTHONY DURHAM is the author of six award-winning works of historical fiction and fantasy. The first of his Acacia epic fantasy series was a Prix Imaginales finalist and won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer of science fiction. His novels have twice been New York Times Notable Books, won two awards from the American Library Association, and been translated into eight languages.
Before embarking on an epic fantasy series (the Acacia Trilogy), I wrote three historical novels. A lot of folks asked, “Why the dramatic change?” Wasn’t writing fantasy totally different than dealing with historical material? I didn’t think so then, and I still don’t.
As a writer of historical fiction, you’re bringing to life a world that no longer exists anywhere but in your imagination. It may seem foreign to readers, with different cultural norms, technological levels, spiritual beliefs, and knowledge of science. The exact same things can be said about speculative settings.
Often, the same issues that trip up historical writers can prove troublesome for science fiction and fantasy writers. In historical fiction, we struggle with how to world build, what details to convey, how to avoid anachronisms, and how to chronicle the events that have shaped the time we’re writing about. Again, all the same things are true of science fiction and fantasy. As a speculative writer, you may be making facts up instead of researching them, but you still need to find the best ways to convey the details of your world to readers.
Also, world building in historical fiction isn’t just about reciting historical facts, names, places, makes, and models. Those may be the things of history books, but fictions set in history have to breathe life into them. Settings need to feel grounded, lived-in, real. They need to be filled with details that are the small stuff of life. With that in mind, I offer the following exercise.
I suggest approaching this as a series of four timed-writing exercises. You can come back and revise later. For the first attempt, I want you to set a timer for three minutes (for each part), turn it on, and start writing. Don’t stop until the timer goes off. Keep your pen moving the whole time. If you have to write nonsense, do it. But keep refocusing on the topic even as you let the first things that come to your mind pour straight out of your pen.
Let’s give it a try. This exercise is one I first developed for writing historical fiction. For our purposes, I’ve recast it for the speculative genres.
EXERCISE
1. Take three minutes and describe the interior of a building, a room from some specific time or place. It could be recognizably Earth, a variation on Earth, another planet, or a fantasy world. Don’t tell us the location overtly. Instead, just describe visually the things that appear in your mind, large details and small. Try to just let pour the things you imagine you would see and feel and smell in your room—wherever in the universe it is.
2. Take three minutes and write a description of a character who’s in the room you’ve just described. Make him or her someone you’re interested in, someone with traits of the specific setting but also with things that are unique to her or him.
3. Let’s hear your character talk. Have him or her begin with some small talk, speaking to someone else he or she knows, and going wherever it goes thereafter.
4. Now get to the meat of the conversation. Introduce the problem that’s been behind your character’s small talk, something that has been influenced by the setting, something you’ve never faced in your twenty first-century life, but which will hit the reader in the gut in some way. What is the troubling situation that’s about to spark where this story goes?
MARK SEBANC
In Xanadu . . . Grounding the Fantastic
MARK SEBANC is the co-author of the Legacy of the Stone Harp fantasy series with James G. Anderson. The first two novels in the sequence are The Stoneholding and Darkling Fields of Arvon. Both are published by Baen Books. Sebanc has also worked as an editor and translator.
In the realm of folklore, a special, oftentimes sinister, significance is attributed to the in-between places, the earthen boundary between forest and ploughland, for example, or the in-between times like dawn and twilight, which mark the slow-stepping progressions of day and night towards one another.
At the same time, these places and times of shape-shifting uncertainty are suggestive of mystery and hopeful possibility. In many ways such boundaries stand as a metaphor for the dangers and ambiguities that mark the frontiers of human experience in all its enigmatic fragility, things like birth and death, sickness and health, loss and gain, wayfaring and homecoming, and so on.
Similarly, in an uncanny echo of this vital aspect of our humanness, fantasy as a literary genre occupies the uncertain, frontier area between what’s “true to life” and soaring flights of the imagination that beckon the reader toward the unfamiliar and the strange. For those of us who practice the craft of words, fantasy can pose some serious artistic challenges, precisely because it occupies such perilously unsure ground.
Writing speculative fiction can be a tough row to hoe, one that requires the exercise of high standards of good judgment, as we try to negotiate our way through the pitfalls and dangers of the ground that lies between a sturdy realism and the figments conjured by our imagination. Like all writers from time immemorial, what we’re aiming to induce in the reader is a willing suspension of disbelief, a term coined by the nineteenth-century English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
According to one school of thought, writers should write about what they know, i.e. their own life experiences. When it comes to the genre of fantasy, this rule of thumb clearly needs to be revisited and qualified. To give a notable example, Elves and Orcs did not stem from Tolkien’s practical knowledge of the world. This is because Tolkien wrote quite properly about not only what he knew, but what he was able to envision by way of his fertile imagination. In so doing, he attracted vast legions of readers. But it wasn’t all about his imagination. In the end, it was about balance. Tolkien succeeded in spectacular fashion because he portrayed perfectly the homey, reassuring realities of everyday life, while setting them in a compelling imaginary world quite out of the ordinary. The key thing about Tolkien’s imagination is that it is not arbitrary, nor is it a faculty untethered from reality.
As fantastic and extraordinary as the outpourings of his imagination are, they are marked by an overarching coherence and grounded-ness. They resonate with the reader because they exhibit a two-fold strength. On the one hand, they are placed in a matrix of ordinary life, many of whose aspects we recognize as normal and human. In this respect, Tolkien wrote about what he knew and experienced. On the other hand, his creative approach is steeped in his vast scholarly knowledge of old England and the medieval world of northern Europe, which he embroiders with his own flights of genius and inventiveness. In this respect, Tolkien’s imaginary creations illustrate the proverbial wisdom inherent in the statement that truth is stranger than fiction.
Of all genres, fantasy most requires the touchstone of truth as an aid to the reader in the suspension of disbelief. Just as electrical devices need to be grounded, so too does speculative fiction. Otherwise, it risks becoming literally incredible, a phantasmagoria of the bizarre. In our Legacy of the Stone Harp
series, my co-author Jim Anderson and I have made it a key principle that our invented world of Ahn Norvys should in vital ways mirror the laws and constraints of the real world. Of course, the actual nature and extent of this grounding in the real varies from work to work and is in the end a matter of artistic judgment and preference. Jim and I are convinced, however, that by pursuing a fairly rigorous exclusion of plot devices that depend on the miraculous, we have added plausibility to our portrayal of Ahn Norvys. This is not to say that we do not have thematic elements that are arrestingly strange, evocatively suggestive of the miraculous.
The theme of songlines that we use in our series is a good example. It’s an idea that was sparked when I read travel writer Bruce Chatwin’s book on the importance of this concept for Australian aborigines. The concept of ley lines is also very similar to that of songlines, suggesting fresh, new, even haunting, ways of regarding the world around us.
For me, travel writing and historical nonfiction have always played an important role as stimulants of my imagination. I’m thinking here in particular of the thought-provoking theories of alternative archaeology proposed by a writer like Graham Hancock, or the fascinating accounts of ancient Mongol and Chinese civilization tendered by John Man, for example. It’s all wonderful grist for the mill and serves to keep our work within the limits of credibility.
In “Kubla Khan,” one of the most famous poems of the Romantic period, Coleridge provides another excellent illustration of what I mean here. An important commentator on the role of the imagination in literature, Coleridge begins with a lavishly fanciful, indeed fantastic, description of Xanadu, the summer palace of the Mongol emperor from whom the poem takes its name. While in the poem Xanadu is actually much more reminiscent of Coleridge’s native Somerset than it is of northern China, we learn that he drew his inspiration for the poem from a passage in the writings of Samuel Purchas, an Elizabethan geographer.
EXERCISE
Consider an area of the world that you’re interested in or some place by which you feel intrigued. Then go on a search engine like Google for twenty or thirty minutes, looking for historical information or travel blogs on the subject. Keep your eyes open for any tidbit that might serve as an example of truth being stranger than fiction, and that might be used as the keynote of an alternative world.
The Web being such a vast and wonderful place, odds are you’ll find more than enough material that strikes your fancy. After that, spend fifteen to twenty minutes framing out a one- or two-paragraph outline that could be used as the basis for a novel.
MELISSA SCOTT
Humming the Sets: World Building That Supports the Story
MELISSA SCOTT is the author of more than twenty science fiction and fantasy novels, and has won Lambda Literary Awards, Spectrum Awards, and the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. Her recent novels, written with Jo Graham, are Lost Things and the sequel Steel Blues (Crossroad Press).
There’s an old joke about musical theater that seems perennially relevant to discussions of world building in science fiction and fantasy (SFF): no matter how good a designer you are, no one leaves the show humming the sets. While this isn’t entirely true in SFF—there are books that are loved as much for their worlds as for their characters—the fact remains that, in most cases, the worlds you spend months creating remain sets, settings in which the characters and the story are lovingly displayed. Even novels that are noted for their elaborately worked-out worlds—The Lord of the Rings, for example—wouldn’t have attracted so many passionate readers if it weren’t for the characters and their story.
Of course, the details of your world are vitally important because of the basic nature of SFF. Most work in the genre is written as though it is in fact a realistic novel, using all the conventions of realistic fiction; however, the world described is entirely imaginary, and often impossible. The reason behind this is to give readers a way into a vast array of wildly differing fictional worlds: No matter how peculiar the world, how far-fetched the science, you’re using a frame that readers understand. They know how to interpret the forms; you’re just filling them with unfamiliar information.
This is part of persuading readers to suspend their disbelief: the buildup of solid, consistent details that seem to follow logically from the choices you’ve made; and to make it work, you have to know your imaginary world inside and out. The weirder your central premise, the more solid your supporting details have to be. Even if the point of the story is the discovery of something new, or the exploration of a strange place, so that the characters (and thus the readers) are learning about the world as they explore it, you as a writer need to know more than they do, so that you can select the perfect detail that directs (or misdirects) the reader’s attention.
The other reason for knowing your world in detail is that it helps you learn about your characters. The world shapes your characters; it sets limits on what they can do for a living, on how they live, on what they can imagine, even on their physical bodies. The more you know about the world, the more fine detail you can add to your picture, the better you understand how to shape your characters’ lives and choices.
For example, in writing Dreamships, I knew that the population of Persephone, where the novel is set, was split between Freyan “coolies” who had been brought in to work the lower-level jobs, and corporate employees from the Urban Worlds, who control most of the managerial functions. There would be a distinct linguistic split between the groups, and the coolies—a relatively small and impoverished population even on their original home world—had a large deaf population for whom sign language is their primary medium of communication. The novel’s main character, Reverdy Jian, straddles both worlds: she works in the industrial upperworld, and is fluent in sign, but she was born to the midworld and educated there. She doesn’t really fit anywhere in Persephone’s stratified society. As I worked out more details, I realized that silence was almost always a sign of lower status, of social weakness. And that meant that Reverdy, who would not concede she was anything but a person of status, would never not say what was on her mind. That realization shaped every bit of dialogue in the novel.
A word of warning: You won’t, and probably shouldn’t, use everything you discover, or at least you won’t put them into the story directly. However, you will know what the world looks like outside the focus of the story, what lies around the corners and in the un-entered rooms; you’ll have a much better idea of who your characters are and why they make their choices. The implicit knowledge, and the consistency it creates, will make for a better story.
EXERCISE
This is an exercise that I come back to repeatedly, because it lets me work on world and character at the same time, each reinforcing the other.
1. The Ordinary Day: What do your characters do on a normal day? What do they do for a living, and how does that shape their daily rhythm? What is their ordinary, mindless routine? What are the things that they do and see and hear that they never really notice? (This is particularly useful to fill out the background of characters who are breaking out of their usual lives to get involved in the events of a novel.)
2. Take the Day Off: If, just for once, your characters have no outside obligations, what do they do with their holiday? What do they do for fun and relaxation? What do they do when they’re not on duty, when no one’s counting on them? What’s the fanciest evening’s entertainment your characters could imagine, and what could they actually afford? What would they dare to do? (This is especially good for characters whose jobs are at the focus of the story.)
L. E. MODESITT, JR.
System Rules
L. E. MODESITT, JR., has written more than sixty published novels and numerous short stories as well as technical publications in the environmental and economic fields. Although he is possibly best known for his Saga of Recluce fantasy series, with over two million books in print, and the more recent Imager Portfolio series (both T
or Fantasy), he continues to write science fiction as well.
If you’re going to write speculative fiction, that generally means that you’re going to write about worlds where there is either a different level of technology or where magic exists—if not both. One of the problems that all too many beginning writers have in dealing with magic or technology is that they don’t understand how a failure to structure the use and costs of either technology or magic can undermine an entire book.
I actually wrote my very first fantasy, The Magic of Recluce, because I was tired of fantasy novels with flawed or patently unworkable magic systems, many of which weren’t well thought out, or were lifted whole from either traditional folklore or gaming systems, and clearly didn’t exactly apply to what the author had in mind. When I began, I faced the very real problem of creating a magic system that was logical, rational, and workable, within a practical economic, political, and technological structure that was neither particularly exotic nor borrowed lock, stock, and barrel from western European history.
While writers today generally do a better job of creating magic systems, all too often they don’t think out all the implications of the magic they invent. The following questions are designed to address those implications. Although it is structured in dealing with “magic,” many of the questions also apply to advanced technology.
EXERCISE
EIGHT QUESTIONS FOR A MAGIC SYSTEM
Use these to examine how your magic system works:
1. Is the magic system logical and practical, or illogical, or arbitrary? This may seem like an obvious question, and it is, but the implications of the choice are not. Almost invariably, a logical and practical magic system offers the characters hope and the chance that, at the very least, they can come to terms with the world. A magical system that is arbitrary and does not follow the rules can leave characters at the whim or mercy of a capricious world. This is not necessarily bad, but it does lead to a different type of story.
Now Write! Page 14
