Now Write!

by Laurie Lamson

  2. What is the source of the magic? Does it come from a theological source (gods or goddesses), or does it come from the ability to exploit the structure or workings of the world? If it comes from a theological source, it has to be, by definition, less powerful than the magic of the deity who grants it and will likely have conditions attached.

  If it comes from the structure of the world, it will be limited and affected by the world itself, but will also theoretically be able to affect the world.

  3. How powerful is the magic, and what limits it? By practical definition, magic has to have limits, because, if there are no limits, it can and will destroy the universe in which you’re writing, besides which, if it’s a part of your universe, the part can’t be greater than the whole.

  4. Who can use magic and why? Generally speaking, magic use can be determined by genetics (inherited ability), disciplined skill honed by knowledge and training, or “grace” (i.e., bestowed by a higher power) . . . or some combination of those conditions.

  In any human society, and probably any society of intelligent beings, any skill of great power or value will be able to be mastered only by a small number of people.

  5. What is required of a magic user? Any use of a high-level skill exacts a toll on the user. That can range from the requirement for long years of training to master the skill, to the need to live apart, or to continually use the skill to maintain that power . . . or to age more quickly . . . but there are costs, and those costs should be consistent for all users. The greater the use of any power the greater the toll on the user, although that toll can be “paid” in many ways.

  6. How is magic used in the society? Human beings are tool users. Most likely any intelligent species is. That means that magic is unlikely to have a significant role in society unless it is predictable, replicable, and cost-effective. How it meets those tests will determine whether the magic user is essentially a poor hedge wizard (the magic being unreliable, but sometimes effective) or a power baron or somewhere in between.

  Useful magic will also most likely have an economic value, depending on what it can accomplish and how many magic users there are with the same skills. In addition, magic will affect the structure of any society because it will create another separation between haves and have-nots.

  7. What is the inter-relation between magic and the technology of the society? Does magic enhance technology, or does technology enhance magic? Are they mutually exclusive? If so, why or under what conditions?

  8. To what degree does the ending or resolution of your story or novel depend on magic?

  A story whose ending is determined entirely by “magic” is likely to be perceived as a deus ex machina ending, while one where magic plays no part risks being considered “mainstream” or “romance”or some other genre with magic just thrown in as window dressing. The best speculative fiction integrates the magic (or technology) with the human elements so that the ending is not possible without both.

  JANICE HARDY

  So, What Do You Know? Deepening Your World Building Through Point of View

  JANICE HARDY always wondered about the darker side of healing. For her Healing Wars fantasy trilogy, she tapped into her own dark side to create a world where healing was dangerous, and those with the best intentions often made the worst choices. Her books include The Shifter, Blue Fire, and Darkfall from Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins.

  I remember the exact moment I finally “got” point of view. I was reading a critique of my very first novel. In one scene, my protagonist was running for her life and mentioned seeing a possible way to escape. The sentence was: “She came around the corner and saw the rowboat tied to a dock piling.”

  The critiquer asked: “Did she know the rowboat was there? Because the implies prior knowledge, and I don’t think she was looking for it or knew it was there before she saw it.”

  Back then I had no clue what she was talking about. Prior knowledge? Huh? She went on to explain that the word the implied that my point of view character knew there was a rowboat there. It wasn’t a rowboat (which implies generality, just something she happened to see) but the rowboat (which implies it’s a known thing to her beforehand).

  Something as simple as the vs. a showed how much my point of view knew about that one silly little rowboat. If she didn’t know it was there, she couldn’t call it the rowboat. She’d have no prior knowledge of it. It would be no different than any other object around. A flat detail with no meaning to character or reader.

  Light bulbs went on.

  What your character knows is a tremendous tool for describing your world and making it feel real to your reader. It can help you decide which details to show and how to incorporate them into your story in a natural way. To put it in writer terms: it can help you show, not tell, and avoid info dumps and backstory.

  What your character knows helps ground the reader to your world and explains all the rules of that world. She can show them what’s normal, how society works, what cultural rules apply, anything you need the reader to know. How she moves through her world is how you’ll describe that world to your reader.

  If you send a five-year-old girl and a forty-year-old ex-Navy SEAL into a room, they’re going to react differently to what they find there. Same as if you sent in a two-hundred-year-old evil wizard and a young idealistic starship captain.

  This is especially important in speculative fiction, because so much of the world is crafted and thus unknown to readers. They can’t rely on what they know to understand the world the story takes place in. They need the characters to show them what’s important and what things mean.

  When you create your worlds and the people in them, remember that the characters who live there take that world for granted and see it as it is, and has always been. What we might consider wrong could be perfectly normal and acceptable for them.

  Even if they’re trying to change the world, chances are they won’t be trying to make it what we think the world should be. They’ll try to change the part that they disagree with based on what they’ve experienced.

  If slavery is acceptable, they won’t think about the poor slaves. One person might treat them like furniture; another may treat them like favored pets and think she’s being kind by doing so. If backstabbing and ruthless business practices are the norm, no one will think twice about betraying a friend. Or if they do, they won’t think of themselves as being bad people, just hate the fact this is what they have to do to get ahead.

  Let your characters see and react to their worlds as someone living in that world would see and react to it. Fill it with lots of small details that show what’s important to them, not just what matters to the setting or plot.

  People see the world as it pertains to them. Take advantage of that, and your story world will be richer.

  EXERCISE

  Ask yourself a few basic questions and think about how your characters would answer them. How do they see the world you’ve created for them?

  1. What is a normal day like for your protagonist? This is a great way to show the everyday elements of your world and how it works. If space travel is common, he might have friends talking about a trip to another planet.

  2. Where does she live? Home environment provides opportunities to show what matters to them and what they care about. Or things they might need to hide. If books are outlawed, a character with a treasured library might go to a lot of trouble to hide it.

  3. Where does he work or go to school? This allows you to show the economic and educational aspects of your world. If your characters are poor and hungry, they might be on the streets or in the bowels of a space station.

  4. Where does she fit on the social and economic ladder? Comparing her to others lets you describe details that are important, but might not be relevant to the point of view character. Plot might dictate readers know who the lord of the castle is and details about him, but if your
protagonist never sees him, it’s hard to get him into the story in a natural way. But if the locals gossip about him, then all those details can be conveyed.

  5. Who are your protagonist’s friends? You can say a lot about a world and the people in it by how your protagonist views her friendships. Do they have common issues? Threats? Ambitions? Friends talk, so world details can be slipped into conversation.

  6. Who are your protagonist’s enemies? (Not just the antagonist, anyone who doesn’t like him or her.)

  7. What social or economic group does he belong to? You can show class distinctions by how your characters view others and why they feel that way.

  8. What are some challenges to living in this world? What makes life harder? Often this will be plot related, which allows you to show the inherent conflicts and lay important groundwork without a lot of exposition and info dumping. What are the things your protagonist tries to avoid on a regular basis? Maybe they’re landscape elements, or weather patterns, or groups of people. It could even be starvation or keeping a secret.

  9. What are some advantages to living in this world? Don’t forget the positive elements.

  10. What’s considered beautiful? What are things to aspire to? What makes life easier? This could be a river that allows your protagonist to get around unseen or a secret ability that lets them accomplish difficult tasks.

  KIJ JOHNSON

  Feel Things Out

  KIJ JOHNSON is the author of three novels and a collection of short stories. She is a three-time winner of the Nebula Award, and a winner of the World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, and Crawford Awards. She teaches a science-fiction novel workshop each summer for the University of Kansas, where she also teaches writing and fantasy as literature.

  Your science fiction or fantasy story takes place somewhere that is by definition not here and now: the future, an alien planet, Oz, the afterlife—or a world a lot like ours except that there are zombies or talking horses. It’s easy to treat these places as a two-dimensional game board you can push your character tokens around on, with just enough depth and complexity to advance the plot, but they’re not. They’re real places, to the characters anyway. There are a million things they can see that you can’t. Their bodies are moving through air (or methane or water) just as ours do.

  To my mind, the trick is to show us the world “immersively”—the things the character notices when she notices and in the way she notices. How does she know who just walked into the room behind her back? By smell? By the sound of walking (or slithering)? Unless her eyes grow on stalks or there’s a mirror, it’s going to be something like that.

  A lot of people will tell you to visualize the scene as it plays out, and I think this is spot-on. For me this involves muttering the dialogue to myself until it sounds right—though since I write in coffee shops, I try to keep it down, not always successfully. I also act out the movements; how can my character carry an unconscious friend through a doorway without bashing his head on the lintel? By ducking, maybe? Do her knees hurt at all from that? Mine would! Might she overbalance? Or maybe she’s in a hurry and she just lets him hit: no time to stop or adjust! Maybe he’s dripping blood now, or maybe the bang wakes him up; either way, what might be a straightforward chase scene develops some unique elements that can make it feel more real.

  But more than that: For me the greatest part of making a scene (and by extension a story) real is not what is seen or said or done; it is what is experienced. Sensation. Our character may be running from aliens or eating a banquet with gods, but whatever else is going on, she is also feeling things, sensing things, experiencing things—and not just in the “engage all five senses in a scene” way.

  EXERCISE

  So, try this. Pick a scene you’re writing, and try to have your character engage with some of the following experiential elements. Maybe she notices one incidentally; maybe one gets in the way of her doing or saying or thinking things; maybe she has an emotional or a physiological response. Maybe her experience of these things reflects a mood you’re trying to convey. Try it with these:

  1. Blood chemistry. Know what a sugar rush feels like? What about a sugar drop? Adrenaline leaves you feeling sick to your stomach. Your character will get depressed once the endorphins wear off; everyone does.

  2. Thirst. Two percent dehydration impairs your ability to think clearly. I didn’t know this, but yeah, it’s true. Let’s not forget that her eyes will get gummy and she won’t be able to stop chewing on her chapped lips, and the skin on her fingers will feel leathery.

  3. A crick in your character’s neck. Anyone who’s ever had chronic pain knows it colors everything. A few years ago my back was bothering me enough that if I had been Frodo, I would have said the heck with it, and let Sauron win.

  4. Ambient temperature. Obviously, being cold makes it harder to thread needles and being hot means you wear less clothes, but what about heat rashes? Winter clothes restrict movement. Your character might have trouble opening her eyes all the way if it’s bitterly cold; she may miss things.

  5. Ambient noise. Close your eyes. Can you hear the 60-hertz buzz of electricity? It’s everywhere and it’s part of your world; you would know if it was missing, even if you couldn’t tell right away what was wrong. What about the air-conditioning clicking on? Your waistband squeaking when you lean forward? Instead of just telling me about noises that move your plot forward—gunfire, screams, ships landing—what about all the background sounds of your character’s life?

  6. Things touching her. Are any parts of you sore right now? Itchy? Ticklish? Are your clothes binding you anywhere: waistbands, bra straps, eyeglasses? Your characters’ do too.

  And so forth. Walk through a day observing things. When you eat, think about the food’s flavor, sure; but also its color and its texture and what the heat or cold feels like on your tongue. When you walk into a new room, think not just about what you see there and who’s waiting but also where the lighting is coming from. Is the air dry? Does it chap your lips? When you lie down to sleep, think about whether you can see through your eyelids or not; how your pillow heats up; whether your sheets are bunching up; how they smell.

  Now extrapolate. There may be no curtains to brush against the pillowcases in your character’s world, but there are other small soft noises that mean comfort. Make one up. You character walks through (or runs through, pursued by bears) her world the same way you and I do: in a cloud of sensory experiences, in a body that feels things large and small. Show me that.

  CHRIS HOWARD

  Building Worlds Without Boring Your Readers or Becoming the Minister for Tourism

  CHRIS HOWARD is the author of several books including Seaborn (Juno Books, 2008). His stories have appeared in Fantasy Magazine, The Harrow, Another Realm, and elsewhere. His short story “Hammers and Snails” was a Robert A. Heinlein Centennial Short Fiction Contest winner. He is illustrating and writing the graphic novel edition of Saltwater Witch.

  If you are writing science fiction, fantasy, horror, tech thrillers, or any kind of story with a speculative layer, you’re probably world building and you have probably run into hazards like the “tour guide” problem, the “talkative professor” problem, or the “erudite writer” problem. I have encountered them all in my own writing. In this exercise I want to work through ways to uncover the beautiful details of your world without boring the reader or setting up barriers in your story.

  I’m going to use new world for any variation or combination of an entirely fictional world (Discworld, Virga, Dune, Middle-earth), or a fictional world that overlays our own, but with some significant differences (the New York of Holly Black’s Valiant, Sookie Stackhouse’s Louisiana, the San Francisco of Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon).

  New worlds, no matter how lovely, dangerous, similar to or different from our own, are still new, and that means it’s going to take some time to get used to them. On the good
side, readers of genre fiction expect a certain level of uncertainty. They also expect the author to come through in the end with most of the answers, and they’re usually willing to wait for them. Readers expect to be taken somewhere they haven’t been before, or to be shown something dramatically different about places they know well. One thing they don’t expect is to have it all dumped on them at once.

  Making them wait is the key.

  In any story with a new world, the writer is going to struggle to hold back the interesting stuff. You want to draw the reader into your world, show it off, and you’ve spent so much creative time and effort on maps, background, and cultural details that they are difficult to pass by without a glance. Why can’t we stop once in a while and take in the scenery, point out the spaceport, or smell those odd-looking flowers?

  You can. It just takes a little patience and some guidelines. There are methods for successfully revealing the workings of your world as well as for letting you know when to cut them from the story.

  Let’s look at some common problems I see in books—my own included.

  The tour guide problem: I know I’m not the only one who would kill to have the Fodor’s or Lonely Planet guide to so many of the worlds in science fiction and fantasy. Chances are a first-time reader doesn’t. That’s usually because they haven’t experienced it yet. They haven’t lived in your world for three or four hundred pages. You know how wonderful your world is—down to the dance steps of the cloud nomads and how Whirligig Alley got its name—and you are dying to tell your readers about it.

  Don’t.

  That’s not a hard and fast don’t, and fortunately writers don’t fall into the tour guide trap. It’s the tour guide problem. Traps have to be disarmed or safely destroyed. Problems are there to be solved, passed to another chapter to deal with, or at least manipulated into something that doesn’t look like a problem anymore. Readers will gladly continue on if your main character—who by chapter four or five has pulled them into the story—finds himself among the cloud nomads and is asked to dance.