World Building

OK, so I really suck at world building. For any who aren't aware, world building is what they call the process of developing the setting for a novel. If your novel is set in modern day Chicago, your world building is pretty easy to do. If you aren't familiar with Chicago, you might have some research to do, but then I would wonder why you chose to use that as your setting.

But, if you, like I do, choose to set your novels in some sort of fantastical place, you will need to take some time to determine what that place is like. I have read lots of great fantasy and sci-fi novels where the authors were amazing at world building. They create a deep and intricate, while still internally consistent, history and culture for their world.

In the process of world building you'll need to answer lots of questions ranging from the big picture: what is the climate like? what is the class structure like? what is the politics/ruling structure like? what are the rules of physics that must be obeyed? all the way down to minute, persnickety details like: what is the form of currency called? what naming convention is used for towns, streets, countries?  

As you may have guessed from my use of the word 'persnickety' I find answering these types of questions kind of boring. I'm more of a leap into the writing process and then find out what is important type. But, if you're going to write a fantasy-type novel (and by that I mean pretty much anything that isn't set in a purely realistic setting), you need to at least do some thinking. And the big reason for this is that phrase I used before...no not persnickety, 'internally consistent'. 

For a world to be believable, it must be internally consistent. I think this applies to any type of world building, whether you're writing a novel, working on a role-playing campaign, or just day dreaming. In any type of fantasy world there have to be rules and these rules have to be consistent. If superman is weakened by kryptonite, he has to always be weakened by kryptonite. And, if there is going to be a situation where he is going to have to be around kryptonite, but he can't be weakened, you need to come up with an...say it with me now...internally consistent reason why not.  Maybe he's shielded by lead? Or, maybe it's underwater? Or, maybe he just doesn't look at it and thus discovers that it is the sight of kryptonite and not its presence that bothers him? Whatever you decide, will work as long as it's consistent from one end of the story to the other. He had to have specifically looked at the kryptonite every other time, or you're going to lose your readers in an instant. I know, because I've been that reader many times.

But, beyond just not wanting to sit down and answer all of these questions at once, I also had difficulties with conveying the information that I did have in my story.  That sounds complicated, so I'll give an example. How often do you sit around your house, or in the middle of some exciting adventure, and think, "I live in the  United States of America, which is an electoral democracy. The President of the United States is the main guy in charge, but his power is limited by two other branches of government. This type of governmental control was put into place by the founders of this country because..."? No, really, how often does anyone think like that? Like never, that's how often.  So why would my characters?

So, now that I have spent the time deciding that my world is a temperate world, with a medieval type caste system, ruled by a feudal structure led by a king, the currency is gold, silver, and copper pieces, and the towns are named similar to Anglo Saxon styles, how do I get my character to convey that information to the reader?

I like to write very much from a characters perspective, so I don't do much from the perspective of the author/narrator, but maybe I'm going to have to. That would allow the readers to know this information, but I'm worried that it would be too dry. So, I guess I'll just have to experiment and see what works.

I'm thinking that I'll start editing Demon Knight next week, so my next post may be the first chapter of the second draft. Hopefully I'll have more luck editing it this time than I did before.  In the meantime, Beyzl is going to sit for a bit. I think taking some time to work on another project while that just stews and simmers for a little bit will be good for it, because the flavors always get better if you let them sit and blend together for a bit.

Characters

I have a friend who is reading Demon Knight and providing me feedback as he goes. He is the first person to provide feedback on any of my writing, really since college. So, it is kind of interesting. The things he is pointing out are things that I already knew were issues, generally, but I think it will be helpful to have someone else tell me what they saw that needs to be changed.

One of the biggest pieces of feedback that he has given (and admittedly he is only about a third of the way through the book so far) is that my secondary characters are interesting and vivid, but that my main characters seem more boring. Unlike some of the other feedback that he had to give (none of which was particularly harsh or at all undeserved) this wasn't at all hard for me to hear. My reaction was pretty much, "Yep."

I've noticed this phenomenon in my role playing as well. A character that only has to fill one particular niche can have all sorts of quirks and foibles. And let's face it, its the foibles that make a character lovable. One time I had an NPC that I created who was a dwarf, but the dwarves were at war, so all of their powerful magic users were out at the front lines, so I decided this would be the loser dwarf who was really only getting through magic school because he didn't have any competition, and he didn't really have any teachers to fail him anyway. He turned out to be a great character.

My players actually liked him so much that one of them decided to use him as a PC for his next character. What I thought was strange, though, was that this NPC had only been made to fill a very small part of their campaign. In fact, in all honesty, I think I spent less than 5 minutes coming up with the entire character, including the back story and quite a bit of hemming and hawing about his name. It ended up being Heinrich.

On the other hand, though, when a character has to have three fully fleshed dimensions, when it has to be able to fit into any situation that I want to throw at it, I find that those edges get worn off. That they become more...bland, I guess is a good word. They go closer to the middle.

So, how does one have a main character, who has to be able to be sympathetic for the reader and has to be well rounded so that they can deal with any situation, while still having them be memorable and have quirks? I don't really know for sure, but I think I achieved something like this with Jasin, one of my characters from Beyzl.

He is technically probably the 'hero' to Beyzl's heroine, but since it isn't really that kind of story, I think of him as more of a slightly less prominent main character. He is dark and brooding, one of his quirks, but he is also emotional and passionate. I think the trick is to determine what those quirks are going to be from the beginning and stick with them. Honestly, that's probably what works for the side characters, too. It's just that with them, I generally start with the quirk (You know what would be funny? A dwarf mage who's really crappy at magic!), while with the main characters I generally start with the more heroic parts of their personality (So, for this story I need a powerful sorceress who falls in love with a dragon.).

So, going forward, I guess what I need to do is have as part of my story prep, before I even get started, one or two personality traits that make that character distinctive. And, wouldn't it be great if those traits went completely against the conflict that they are going to have to resolve!?!  (I need a personality trait for the warrior who is going to take down the entire undead army...how about making him a pacifist!)

Theme

I finished Beyzl during NaNoWriMo! I actually finished a few days early and have been taking some time off to relax since then. Since I am most productive on the weekends, I had three 3,000+ word days over Thanksgiving weekend and knocked out the rest. The total story ended up at just over 50,000 words, but I think there is some filling out that I need to go back and do at the beginning. At least, I can remember having the thought that I need to go back and add stuff. But, I didn't take notes, so I hope I remember what I was thinking about.

What I wanted to talk about today is Theme. Writing the end of Beyzl brought up some interesting things about the theme I had in mind. For anyone that doesn't know, theme is basically the general point of a story, the 'moral', if you will. I'll take an example from a well known story. The novel "Watership Down" is told from the perspective of a group of rabbits whose home is destroyed. So, they travel and face many hardships in order to find a new safe home. But, once they get there, they realize that almost all of the rabbits are male, so they make forays out to find some female rabbits to join them so they can have a long lasting, safe home. In the end, this is an allegorical tale about the importance of home and safety. That would be the Theme of this story.

As you can probably see, theme is often a little bit of a fuzzy concept. I might interpret a story's theme a little different than someone else, and it generally isn't 'hit you over the head' obvious. Unlike in an Aesop's fable where it's written out at the end.

In fact, from what I've gathered, most writers don't write with a theme in mind. They come up with a plot or character first, and then write the story and see what theme emerges. I generally don't work that way. For me, the theme is kind of the point of writing. I don't always start with the theme, but figuring it out and exploring it during my outlining is an integral part of my process. And, it helps me to know what it is during my writing, because if I get lost or don't know what to do next, the theme can be like a signpost telling me which direction I should head.

When I first came up with the concept for Beyzl, I didn't have a theme in mind. I just had a story that I wanted to tell and a character that I wanted to get to know.  So, I spent some time thinking about what it would be. I finally latched onto the idea that it would be about a girl realizing that she was strong enough to depend on herself. But, when I worked on the outline I found that I had lots of scenes about my characters betraying each other, not trusting each other, or having to trust each other despite the earlier betrayal. So, I thought that maybe the theme would be more around trust and how it can be fragile and hard to develop, but is absolutely necessary to get through some things.

I decided to run with that and got almost all of the way through my rough draft, getting to the climactic scenes, before I ran into real issues with it. Well, that's not exactly true. I had difficulty writing Beyzl as not being trusting. In my mind, she's just an open kind of person, but I tried to lay the betrayal on hard so that she would have a reason to not want to trust. But, in those climactic scenes, I ran across a couple of other possible themes that I think might be a better fit. The first is the idea that a single insignificant person can make a big difference in a big system. And, the second is the importance of 'home' to someone who's never had one.

The first one I think will play a bigger role in the sequel, so I don't think I'm going to focus on it too much, but I would like to leave the seeds of it in there. But, I really like the second one. It feels like something I can sink my teeth into. So, what does that mean? That means that when I start doing my revisions, I'll need to work that into my story from the beginning, rather than just having it show up in the last few pages. But, I think that will tie it together much better than the idea of trust did.