Two writers on worldbuilding, fantasy, and whatever else comes to mind.

Saturday 27 May 2017

No longer so, Orson?

Orson Scott Card, the author of Ender's Game, has a nice series of articles on writing based on correspondence and questions from writing classes he has occasionally taught. The newest is now over ten years old, and the advice on publishing is thus out of date, but any blog-readers who are interested in writing will still find helpful the thoughts of a successful author (and, they say, an even better teacher of writing).

One of his older posts gives me pause, however. In an essay on "rhetoric and style" from 1998, Card attacks the idea, too common (in his judgment, anyway) in creative writing programs, that an author needs to develop a distinctive, individual style. That an author will have his own style is, Card says, an inevitability, but there is no point in belaboring it; rather, the author should seek to tell the story he needs to tell. By focusing on the story itself, not on the language in which it is being told, the author will arrive at real clarity, and good style, too.

Anyone who has read overwrought, self-consciously "literary" writing will know exactly what Card means, and most will probably agree with his judgment (I certainly do). However, I wonder if Card isn't overlooking something, or rather, whether the rise of self-publishing hasn't changed the advice one might want to give.

Friday 26 May 2017

Mahound is in his paradise: religion in fantasy

Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunsets and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees;
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.

--G.K. Chesterton, Lepanto, second stanza

1.

A tourist visits Gondor at the end of the Third Age, on the eve of the War of the Ring. What does he see in its capital? More or less what Pippin does before Sauron's armies cross the Anduin: the black outer wall of the city, the lesser walls of its upper circles, houses and arches of white stone, a tall tower atop the central stone keel of the city, and, around the dead, white tree before it, the soldiers of the Tower Guard in their sable uniforms.

Now, imagine being a tourist in Rome during the reign of Nero. What would you see? Again, buildings of marble, arches, perhaps not soldiers (forbidden, in theory, within the city's sacred boundary). And what else? Statues, aqueducts, columns, and, scattered throughout the city, one other kind of building that Pippin does not: temples. From the grand edifices of the forum to the little shrines on the street-corners, Rome was a city full of gods in "a world full of gods." Minas Tirith is not.

Wednesday 24 May 2017

Adventures in Self-Publishing, Part I

Self-publishing is an easy choice if you tend to enjoy managing lots of fiddly details. That doesn't mean, however, that the process itself is easy. Here's a smattering of things I've had to research or consider so far.

Disclaimer: I am a housewife, not a lawyer, publisher, or other expert. Information in this post comes from my own experience and (possibly flawed) understanding; if you take any action based on it, I am not responsible for the results.

Friday 19 May 2017

Thoughts on Alternate History VI: the limitations of a genre

1.

I've read some pretty good alternate-historical stories, rigorous, "soft," and more or less fantastic. I've often felt discontented with what I read, however, for reasons on which I've not quite been able to put my finger. I suppose I can only say that the fantastic settings and plot-devices reveal two key intellectual limitations of the genre: materialism and chronological snobbery. In what is, for now, the final post on the topic, I'll try to explain what I mean.

Wednesday 17 May 2017

Thoughts on Alternate History V: Bats from Planet X

Unbeknownst to the Puritan pirate captain, the ring of power had fallen into the hands of the warlord of a distant planet whose name is made up entirely of phonemes in shaded areas on the International Phonetic Alphabet chart. The warlord bided his time, gathered his armies. Then one day, a cloud of fire-breathing bats descended from the sky, wreaking havoc and burning all the countryside. The warlord rubbed his hands together—or rather, the ends of his wings—as he looked down and saw the Earth burning like a little firecracker, and he sat back in his throne and laughed and laughed and laughed.

--Ella Hansen, In Enigmate, "False Ending" (revised)

Ahem. I'll let Ella explain where that little gem came from, and why, someday. Let's just say that Young Adult fantasy sometimes gets old, even for the authoress herself. What I mean to draw attention to is the paragraph's protagonist: our trusty alien warlord, whose presence in the story I apparently inspired. "Alien Space Bats" were--so the story goes--invented in a usenet discussion by a contributor who wanted to underscore just how impossible it would have been for Unternehmen Seelöwe ("Operation Sealion"), the planned German invasion of Britain in WW2, to succeed: only the intervention of extraterrestrials could have brought the Germans victory.

Monday 15 May 2017

Thoughts on Alternate History, part IV: Writing "hard" and "soft" alternate history

If the observations I have made in the last two posts are accurate, there is an important practical consequence for the writing of alternate history: every "hard" alternate-historical narrative is in danger of going soft. Once the timeline has diverged sufficiently from the main narrative, only authorial fiat prevents it from diverging further. Once John F. Kennedy has given the order for an all-out response to Soviet aggression off Cuba and Thomas Powers has flattened everything under Moscow's sway with the full might of the Strategic Air Command, there is no telling what the world will look like even five years later, let alone fifty.

Sunday 14 May 2017

Your Loving Aunt

When looking through old files of my writing, I rediscovered this story, first published on a now-defunct collective blog in 2008.  My novels (however the early drafts start) always end up fairly serious; my short stories almost never do.


*****

To Miss Prunella Pig, 234 Penn St.
5 June

My dearest Prunella,

How delighted I am to hear that your new house is completed! You must tell me everything about it. Have you chosen curtains for the parlour yet? There is a lovely print in a shop not far from my house: yellow with small pink roses. It would match your couch perfectly. And of course you mustn’t forget the wallpaper. Perhaps a pale yellow or pink will do best. Oh, my dear, I am so anxious to see it all. I have more things to remind you than I can write.

Saturday 13 May 2017

Thoughts on Alternate History, part III: Chronology and the problem of genre

When does a story set in an imaginary past stop being alternate history? As I noted in part II, alternate history stories, at least those found on the internet, tend to take an explicitly chronological form. Even when they do not, there is an assumption that the plot derives from a particular alteration in the actual events. But what if it doesn't, or if the deviation lies so far in the past that any but the most tenuous sense of irony or comparison with reality is lost? Even chronology, the most rudimentary tool of historical analysis, eventually loses its meaning. Charting one's way through time is rather like charting one's way through space: without fixed points of reference, both the writer and the navigator find themselves directionless.

Wednesday 10 May 2017

Thoughts on Alternate History, part II: "Hard" Alternate History

If alternate history has little to do with the writing of actual history, what makes it work? I've noticed a striking effect when reading alternate history scenarios online. As a rule, posters on the Alternate History Forum prefer timelines of varying elaborateness to traditionally organised novels or novellas. Their stories, except those that fit under the broad category of fantasy alternate history (more on this in another post), are usually organised not around the actions and psychological development of particular characters, but according to a sequential, chronological arrangement of events. Coupled with this structure is a tendency, not universal though sometimes hotly defended by purists, to make the events of the timeline deviate from a single "point of departure" (POD, in the parlance). Alternate history is thus presented, in form, as a fictitious analogue of the straightforwardly "factual" narratives of modernist historiography, albeit without the supporting structure of footnotes and sources.

Tuesday 9 May 2017

When in Doubt, Add Villains

Plots are my weak spot.  Although I have problems developing at least one fairly major character per book, the other characters work out without much effort; the dialogue goes swimmingly; and describing things vividly and efficiently is my favourite part of editing.  But it takes me a long time to find out just where it's all going.

I wish I could report that I've discovered the key to easy plotting.  Alas, I had to get help outlining the novel I'm currently writing -- even though I knew more or less everything that was going to happen!  I have, however, stumbled upon one trick that helps move the story along: add more villains.

Thoughts on Alternate History, part I: introduction

Admiral Kimmel woke in a sweat. As he blinked, the buzz of the propellers of two hundred airplanes faded from his ears. A dream. That's all it had been. A dream. It was Sunday morning, a new day in Honolulu. But still-- "Lieutenant," he called. "Send the order: put the fleet on highest alert. And call General Short. His planes need to be ready for action, at once."  So began the Raid on Pearl Harbor, and the first American naval victory over Japan in the Pacific War of 1941-1944.

For the last several years, I've lurked (and occasionally posted) on the Alternate History Forum, one of the internet's premier sites for discussion of what could have, should have, would have happened, if Husband E. Kimmel really had alerted the Pacific Fleet on the morning of December 7, 1941, if Wellington had died of malaria after the Battle of Assaye, if Mustafa Kemal, the future Atatürk, had been hit by a stray shell at Gallipoli--if, well, you name it, and someone's probably thought of it, at least if it has to do with a famous general or politician dying before his time.

Sunday 7 May 2017

Fantasy Names

Adapted from a blog post published in 2013.

In a constructed world, characters' names should ideally come from the relevant conlangs (constructed languages).  This is especially helpful when there's a large cast of named characters from many different places: if the languages are different enough, the reader can start to feel where a character might come from, going only by his name.  (Compare the names Bilbo, Gimli, Legolas, Théoden, Ar-Pharazôn, Ghân-buri-Ghân:  One isn't going to forget quickly which one is the hobbit and which one is the elf.)

Wednesday 3 May 2017

"Vow" is also Latin: an addendum on register

In a recent re-post from her old blog, Ella gives a quotation from The Silmarillion as an example of grand, yet simple diction. She notes that Tolkien uses only a few Latinate words: "'terrible', 'mountain', 'pursue', 'vengeance', 'possession'". However, there is at least one other: "vow," which is ultimately derived, through medieval French, from the Latin votum (of much the same meaning as the English derivative, though it can also denote the thing for which a vow is offered). The reason, I imagine, why she overlooked the word is that it feels so very Anglo-Saxon: it is short, has a w (not a very Latinate letter), and has been a part of ordinary English diction for a very long time.

The Moral of the Story

In 2012, a thread on the NaNoWriMo Plot Doctoring forum asked, 'What exactly is it that makes a story worth telling in your opinion?'  One commenter of many claimed that 'fiction [doesn't need to] teach you a moral lesson or even have a moral outcome'.  To this, I replied:

When we talk about stories having morals, though, we generally mean one of two things, which in practice often overlap but are probably worth distinguishing:

1. The story shows approval of characters, actions, or situations in accordance with the demands of an ethical system (e.g., the kind people win and the mean people lose; the poor are happy and the rich are sad; the people who care deeply about things are shown favourably and the cynical people are shown unfavourably); or

2. The story illustrates a general truth about the world or human nature (e.g., slow and steady wins the race).

Tuesday 2 May 2017

Register, Part II

Adapted from a post from 2014 on the NaNoWriMo Fantasy forum, in response to a writer who requested tips for 'developing a good fantasy voice' for high fantasy.

A fantasy story of the kind that you describe will have two different categories of voice, the first of which is the speech patterns of the characters.  These should naturally vary, not only from character to character, but also by context.

Register, Part I

First posted in 2013 on the NaNoWriMo Plot Doctoring Forum, in response to a writer who wondered what would happen if he wrote in a 'casual' style except with 'somewhat archaic and uncommon' adverbs, such as 'peradventure', 'hitherto', and 'forasmuch'.

The main problem I foresee is not one of comprehension but one of register. For anyone unfamiliar with register, I will explain, as well as I can:

Register might be described as the level of formality and technicality of a piece of writing. For example, in English, 'The king hired an assassin to kill his rival' is probably medium-register. If he hired a 'hit-man' to 'bump him off', that's fairly low register; if it were the 'head of state' trying to 'eliminate his competitor', that would be slightly higher but more technical-sounding; and so forth. In other words, register is the 'feel' of a passage. It's influenced not only by vocabulary but also by sentence length and structure and word-order.

Welcome!

After months or years of saying I'd like to publish a novel someday, it's time to make it happen.  I've joined forces with another writer in the same position, and we're working towards releasing a book each this year (August or September).

We plan to use this blog for occasional progress updates as well as (hopefully less occasional!) posts on various writing topics.  The title (in case anyone wonders) comes from G. K. Chesterton's poem 'Lepanto', which begins 'White founts falling in the courts of the sun'; no special significance, it just sounded nice.