Some (More) Thoughts on Worldbuilding

Hello, dear readers!

I'm back from my trip to the Great Upstate, where much planning of weddings was done and I even managed to read most of a book. Hazah! Now it's back to work, and I feel quite refreshed.

I gave up on the idea that I was going to an authorial wunderkind years ago and resigned myself to what I think of as the Rod Smith approach (Denver Broncos fans will probably know what I mean here, but the tldr is that he thought of himself as much less talented than the other top guys people in his field, so he made sure to work twice as hard). Part of that, for me, is a constant drive to improve various aspects of my writing from book to book. I have a long list of things I want to get better at, and one of them is worldbuilding.

So I'm taking a class from Scott Lynch of Gentleman Bastards fame, and I'm learning more about worldbuilding and spending a lot of time thinking about it. Fairly early on, it became apparent to me that I build my best worlds in a way that's often been described to me as "lesser." To wit: my best worlds seem to be the ones I build as I go. When I build a world and then try to set a story in it, the story, and by extension the world it's set in, usually feels a little flat. I really have to struggle to get all the elements to line up. On the other hand, when I start with a story and then build a world around it, everything seems to fit together much more tightly and harmonize much better.

With the help of my classmates, I've come to call the second way "discovery-style" worldbuilding, because you discover things about the world as you write.

I was working on an exercise for the class last night, one for which I'd been tasked to write a short bit of description to accomplish some worldbuilding goals. I wrote it. It read like crap. Absolute crap. I even cheated by setting it in the Soulwoven world and choosing an interesting scene from the backstory to write (for the curious, it's the moment when Eshan and Crixine leave Duenel).

As I was describing a river in the distance (again, for the curious, the Soulth'nth---the one the characters travel up to reach the mountains in the end of the first book), I realized why.

When I do "discovery-style" worldbuilding, I get to create the setting to match the theme. A river only exists in a discovery-style narrative (that I write, anyway) because it serves a thematic purpose; it's a metaphor for a journey, or a point that must be crossed and can never be uncrossed (like the Rubicon, the Lethe, etc.), or one of any other number of things. When I set a story in a world that already exists, the river is there, and I must describe it if the characters are looking at it. That's very limiting to me as a storyteller.

I'm glad that I spent months building the Soulwoven world, writing history and language and geography and myth. Doing that taught me a lot about how to build worlds, and I have a better sense now of what I need to discover when I'm writing them discovery-style (though I'm still learning and probably always will be). Plus, that was how Tolkien built his world, and given how much the traditions I work in derive from his work, it felt good to follow in his footsteps for a while.

But I don't know that I'll build any big worlds like that again; they just don't quite fit my style.

Stephen Deas on Dragons

You may have realized by this point that I spend a lot of time crawling over Fantasy Faction these days. It's a good website, if you're into fantasy.

And today I want to bring you, care of Fantasy Faction, some thoughts about dragons from Stephen Deas, who apparently has been sipping from my cup of tea despite the thousands of miles that separate us geographically.

In his article, Stephen takes the time to break down a few definitions of dragons and ends up with the following:

dragon, n, Something very formidable or dangerous.

That sounds about right to me. He goes on to explain how when fantasists go too far in explaining where their dragons come from, when they humanize them too much, they take the power away from them. I couldn't agree more. Don't get me wrong, I loved How to Train Your Dragon, and I cut my teeth on the shapeshifting, human-loving dragons of Dragonlance, but to me a dragon...a real dragon, one worthy of the word, is one so alien and terrifying that it cannot be understood. The primary purpose of the dragon myth is to put a face on the horrible unknown. And the further your dragons stray from that, the more watered-down they become.

If you've read Soulwoven, you know that's the direction I took with the dragon in the book. But there are people out there who do this even better than I do. One of the authors I edit, John Tristan, has a book coming out that has the most primal, awful (in every sense of that word), alien dragons I've ever seen. If you can imagine what it might be like for a preindustrial civilization to encounter a star destroyer from Star Wars---well, that's more or less what I envisioned when I read his dragons. I'll follow up on this post once we've got a shareable release date on that book, but if you love dragons of the Old Testament sort, keep an eye out for it.

Lucy Hounsom on the Importance of Fantasy

Another post today coming from Fantasy Faction, where Lucy Hounsom penned an excellent article about what makes fantasy important. Most salient quote to me:

The camaraderie we feel with well-crafted characters – of shared trials while questing – is one of the reasons I started reading fantasy. I was an unsociable, diffident teenager and a bit of a loner frightened to make friends. The physical and psychological transition from childhood to adulthood is the hardest we face as individuals, and many of us find ourselves reaching out to others in the same situation. I found myself reaching out to characters that lived in entirely different worlds. That was part of their gift. Unable then to adjust to an adult world full of novelties, I felt that I could only grow with – and learn from – those who fought their battles and faced their demons in the realm of myth.

This is one of the reasons I write (and read, and edit) fantasy as well, and it's the reason I decided at a very young age to dedicate a life in which I believed I could've done just about anything to telling stories. I was not an unsociable and diffident teenager, but I still found the transition from childhood to adulthood incredibly difficult. I still needed stories. I too found what I was after in fantasy, and I have always wanted to give something back---or pay something forward, put more accurately---to it.

And I will be looking forward anxiously to Lucy's first book in 2015, since it seems we're cut very much from the same kind of cloth.

Some Thoughts on Gardening

Yesterday, Stephen Deas posted a thought-provoking article over on Fantasy-Faction (where I've been writing reviews of indie books this year) about one of George R. R. Martin's quotes on writing and the idea of authors as gardeners and architects.

One of his points, about the move toward multi-point-of-view narratives in fantasy in recent years, struck a chord with me.

As an aside, here’s a thought: is ensemble fantasy with no clear central character a relatively new thing (although Lord of the Rings arguably splits the lead between Frodo and Aragorn)? Does the rise of this type of story owe anything to table-top roleplaying games, the goal of most of which is to tell a story using an ensemble cast of roughly equal status? Has Dungeons and Dragons trained a good swathe of modern fantasy authors towards a certain kind of storytelling?

It was an interesting idea, but one I didn't quite buy. The roots of fantasy run deep, deep, deep, into the realms of mythology and religion. So I commented.

I do think that wandering stories with no one main character are as old as stories themselves though. It’s been a while since I read the Iliad, but my recollection of it is that it wandered all over the place and let many characters share the spotlight. It is, after all, the Iliad. It’s about Troy, not about Achilles or Agamemnon or Paris or Hector or Helen alone. Shakespeare (not a novelist, but what fantasy writer isn’t familiar with Midsummer Night’s Dream?) certainly didn’t confine his plots to one main character. And while Dickens (not a fantasist, but for my money as much a contributor to steampunk as Jules Verne) did at some times, at others he wrote pretty broadly. I’d have a tough time saying that Tale of Two Cities was about one character over the others.

That's all, really, except that it's now occurred to me that maybe Dickens was something of a fantasist. He wrote A Christmas Carol, after all. But it's an interesting topic, and I wanted to point you the gentle blog reader toward it. Hope it gives you something to wrap your heads around. I'm sure there must be examples of pre-D&D fantasy that don't center on one main character, and it's interesting to me that I didn't come up with anything off the top of my head, and neither did anyone in the comments.

Unexpected Influences

I'm presently about halfway through doing the hand-annotated copies for early Soulwoven backers. Doing them has forced me to look at the book in a different way than I have before. Among other things, it's meant scanning for influences and spotting broad trends, because I jump around from page to page and sort of skim, which isn't a normal part of my writing or revising process.

One of the trends I've spotted is an unexpected influence.

I've never been a huge consumer of stories in the horror genre. When I was a kid, they terrified me. Like, seeing movie trailers for scary movies would give me nightmares, never mind the movies themselves.

And yet horror has its fingerprints all over key moments in Soulwoven.

It starts with the descriptions. When things get dark, really dark, the characters begin to see the world in the way that characters in horror stories do, where everything is out to get them. And their descriptions reflect that fact. There's a character with sharpened, yellowed teeth. There are undead crawling out of the ground and terrorizing people. And there's the dragon itself, floating in their minds and taunting, taunting, taunting them.

Soulwoven is a fantasy novel. There's no doubt in my mind about that. But if you wanted to, you could plot it against the structure of a horror novel and find a surprisingly high correlation. There's one (short) chapter, in particular, that's more ghost story than anything else in terms of structure.

So apparently, even though I didn't enjoy horror stories much growing up, and I still don't read a ton of them, they left a strong imprint on me. Maybe it's because they resonated so strongly with me that I didn't enjoy them. Or maybe it's because they terrorized me so much that their elements burned themselves so deeply into my brain. I can't really be sure.

But they're there nonetheless, and I don't think they're going anywhere. I suspect all writers have these sneaky little influences. There are things we're aware of that shape us (for me, Tolkien, Martin, Kay, Gaiman, Mieville, Hickman and Weis, the teams who wrote the Final Fantasy games, and much more), and there are influences we're not aware of until after the fact. With all the hours I've spent staring at and analyzing and fine-tuning this book, it's amazing to me that I continue to find things inside it I didn't know were there.

Incidentally, I think "What Lies in Darkness," the horror novellette I wrote for All Hallow's Write last year, is one of the best pieces of short fiction I've ever put together. It's up for free here on the blog as well as on Wattpad, and if you've got the stomach for horror, you might want to check it out.

The Banner Saga

Easing my way back into this blogging thing after a two-month hiatus during which crazy worktimes were had, and I want to start by highlighting an amazing review over at Fantasy-Faction (where, spoiler, I'm reviewing indie fantasy books this year).

It's not even for a book. It's for a video game, one I've been hearing lots about and have been on the fence about buying. In addition to being a great read in and of itself (tough to do in a review), this one has put me over the fence on getting it. Now it's on my Big Fun Stuff To-Do List, right after reading Old Man's War and Lies of Locke Lamora. Oh, and finishing Mass Effect.

But these things will happen, trust me.

Review here.

Also, Soulwoven comes out Friday. Da-yamn. You guys should all pick up copies. Print books will be available on Amazon, e-books on Amazon, BN.com, and Kobo.

I'll link, naturally, once there are links to be had. ;-)