It is, I suppose, fair to ask why a New Yorker like me feels so connected to the city of Boston.  Part of the answer lies in my youth, in the fact that all of my (much older) siblings attended college in the Boston area, so that visits to the city became a recurring part of my childhood.  Part of it may lie in the fact that I went to college in Providence, and spent a good deal of my early adulthood in Boston.  Part of it may even lie in the fact that as a Yankee fan, a Knicks fan, a Rangers fan, a Giants fan, I have gained a healthy respect for our New England rivals and their fans.

More than that, though, my love of Boston grows out of my study of U.S. history.  During the years immediately before the American Revolutionary War, Boston was the epicenter of the Colonial rebellion.  This was true not merely because people like Samuel Adams and James Otis, Paul Revere and Joseph Warren were willing to agitate for separation from the Crown and Parliament, although they were.  It was true because so many of the intellectuals who began to conceive of a new form of government lived in the city.  Yes, there were leaders elsewhere — Dickinson and Franklin in Pennsylvania, Madison, Jefferson, and Henry in Virginia — but the concentration of political action and thought in Boston at the time was stunning.

This is one of the reasons why I set my Thieftaker series (written as D.B. Jackson) in Boston in the 1760s.  I wanted an urban setting in Colonial America.  I wanted a city with a seedy side, a dark side.  Boston had those things.  But it also had a richness of history that I could not find anywhere else.  And so, for me the question “Why Boston?” comes down to this. Boston has become, for me, a creative home, a place where my love of history and passion for writing fantasy have intersected, taking my career in a new and exciting direction.  I love the city, and I feel that I owe it something in return for all that it has given me.

But of course, the question “Why Boston?” has a more troubling side.  The same traditions and historical significance that drew me to the city for my Thieftaker books, made Boston a target.  When terrorists attacked New York and Washington, they struck at the seats of our economic and political power.  When they attacked Boston, they struck at our heritage.  And that’s also why we need to stand up and help those most affected by the bombing.  Because Boston belongs to all of us, just as our nation’s history belongs to all of us.

So, I hope you’ll give to the One Fund through my Fundraiser/Giveaway.  And I hope you’ll be one of the lucky recipients of the items I’m giving away.  Thanks.

I have a secret to share.

When it comes to this subject, I don’t think we — writers as a group — have any idea what we’re talking about.

Okay, maybe that’s an unfair way to put it. More accurate to say, I don’t think we have any agreement as to what we’re talking about. I have seen writing advice that says style can’t be taught, but voice can. I have seen writing advice that says voice can’t be taught, but style can. About the only thing the advice has in common from book to book is that sooner or later, that vaporous declaration will show up. Style, or voice — whatever term the author has decided to use — is innate. No teacher can show you the way. The style that can be described is not the true style. This journey, you must make alone.

It’s impossible to pin down the truth of that statement because we can’t even agree on what it is we’re discussing. Is style/voice/whatever (henceforth to be known as SVW) a matter of word choice? Sentence structure? Imagery? Motifs the author returns to again and again? Every last one of those things can be described and taught. Apparently statistical analysis of a writer’s work will show that they have a characteristic vocabulary. Okay, fine: so give me a list of Jane Austen’s characteristic vocabulary, I’ll sit down and diagram a thousand of her sentences, and when that’s done I’ll produce prose more or less indistinguishable from hers. Will I enjoy doing it? No, probably not, because it would be a mechanical exercise rather than my own preference. But I can learn those aspects of SVW — just as technical writers learn a job-specific SVW, and scientists learn one, and legal writers learn one, and so on. Likewise, I could sit down and study what kinds of conflicts Austen presents, and how she handles them, and I could slavishly imitate her. If that’s what we mean by SVW, I can learn that, too.

So maybe what we mean by SVW is just “personality.” I’d go batty forcing myself to write exactly like Jane Austen, because she and I are very different women. But then arguing for how you need to “develop your voice” (by some mysterious, vaporous process) doesn’t really get us anywhere, does it? Such advice is like a less-useful version of the kind of self-help book that purports to teach you “how to be interesting.” I mean, at least those books counsel you to learn a repertoire of half a dozen jokes you can trot out at cocktail parties, or whatever. Writing books just wave their hands in the air. It’s the last refuge of the Romantic ideal of creative genius, perhaps. We’ve accepted that there’s a craft to writing, and much of that craft can be anatomized to one degree or another (though internalizing its processes is easier said than done), but this final thing is a spiritual enigma. Wooooo! <waves hands in the air>

I’m going to be teaching a three-week writing course this summer, and you know what doesn’t have a place on my syllabus? SVW. Because I think my students will gain more from me avoiding vapor. We’ll play around with word choice and sentence structure and imagery and motifs, and I’ll encourage them to write silly things and serious things and horrific things and things that make them go “wow.” They’ll learn how to approach different kinds of story, and acquire skills that can be applied in different ways. Somewhere in there, they’ll figure out what makes their brains light up. And some aspect of that, perhaps, another writer would identify as “style.” Another would call it “voice.” For my own part, I don’t much care.

Opening Exposition

Exposition means conveying background information so that the reader can understand the story. A famous (and blatant) example of exposition is the Star Wars crawl at the start of the first Star Wars movie: “It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire…”

This directly tells us some of the movie’s backstory. For example, we’re told that the Empire is evil. We would have known that soon enough anyway, when Darth Vader shows up and callously kills one of his own men. However, there are many aspects of the war that would be hard to convey through action alone. How long has it been going on? What are the relative strengths of each side? The crawl answers such questions. Perhaps more importantly, the crawl establishes that this is a civil war: Vader and company aren’t an invading army, they’re the reigning dictatorship. The movie is going to be about rebels fighting back.

These points could all be established through dialogue: “How is the war going?” “The rebels have just managed their first victory.” But that’s clunky and time-consuming. The crawl is simpler and faster. (It also makes the movie look like an old science fiction serial, thereby setting the tone…but we’ll talk about “tone” in some future posting.)

SF novels and stories often have passages that are as direct as the Star Wars crawl. We’ve all read books where Page 1 is an italicized prologue that provides details about the world. This approach isn’t used as much today as it once was—there’s been a backlash against prologues, probably because they were used too much in mediocre fiction. I’ve also heard people say that expository prologues are lazy: isn’t it more sophisticated to deliver background information within the flow of the story, rather than addressing the reader directly? That’s a fair point, but I don’t like hard and fast rules. Sometimes a brief direct prologue is the most effective way to get the job done; it can save a lot of dancing around later on.

Interior Exposition

If you only needed to do exposition at the start of a book, writers wouldn’t agonize so much about how to do exposition well. However, exposition is usually needed all through a story, especially in science fiction and fantasy. SF worlds are often quite different from our “real” world, and understanding those differences is crucial for understanding what’s going on. SF also tends to draw on areas of knowledge that readers may not be familiar with: specific facts of science, history, geography, etc. You may have to explain these facts to people who don’t already know them.

How much do you have to explain? That’s a judgment call based on your view of your audience. If I’m writing for Canadian-only readers, I don’t have to explain who John A. Macdonald and Louis Riel were. If my writing will be read by non-Canadians, I have to give background details (unless I’m on the web, in which case I can just put in links to Wikipedia).

It’s impossible to spell out everything that a reader may not know; inevitably, you have to say things like, “I’m going to assume that readers know what the Crusades were. Anyone who doesn’t know the basics just isn’t in the audience for this story.” Even so, you can’t assume that readers will know about, say, a particular battle during the Crusades. If the details are important, you’ll have to provide them.

Let’s also agree it can be effective to leave some things unexplained—The Lord of the Rings worked perfectly well even if you didn’t know any of the background information that appeared in the appendices and the Silmarillion. However, if a reader can’t understand your story unless he or she knows a particular fact, you have to explain that fact.

This happens over and over again in the course of a novel. Since I’ve mentioned The Lord of the Rings, think of how much back-history had to be explained in the trilogy: recent events like Bilbo’s acquisition of the ring, and ancient events like Sauron losing it. Readers also need to understand the social structures (or lack thereof) in various parts of Middle Earth, the nature of magic in that particular world, and all kinds of smaller specifics (such as Gandalf’s friendship with eagles).

Significant characters almost always have details in their backgrounds that the reader must grasp in order to appreciate the characters. The majority of these details can be introduced through the character’s speech and actions. For example, you don’t have to say, “Christine is a brilliant scientist.” You can just have people call her “Professor” and show her running an experiment in a big physics lab…

…but that right there is exposition. As soon as someone calls Christine “Professor”, you’re giving the reader a vital clue about the character’s background; and if you show Professor Christine doing physics rather than chemistry or biology, you’re giving additional information for understanding the character and the story.

The vast majority of background details can (and should) be delivered so naturally that even the writer doesn’t see them as exposition. Let’s go back to the start of Star Wars, and the scene where Darth Vader chokes the underling. Did the writers think of this scene as exposition? More likely, they saw it as a dramatic introduction to Vader: he’s bad and he’s powerful.

But importantly, the scene illustrates what the Force can do. Vader doesn’t shoot the man or strangle him with bare hands; Vader chokes him with the Force. That dramatic demonstration shows the audience what the Force can do. It’s a memorable moment, but it’s also a great example of exposition—from this point on, viewers understand that the Force is a powerful quasi-magical ability that can defeat mere military strength. Until you understand that, you can’t appreciate the rest of the movie.

Explaining Myself Away

I’ve spent this entire post talking about the nature of exposition, but I haven’t addressed the skills involved in doing exposition. How do you provide the reader with necessary facts while avoiding clunky horrors like the famous, “As you know, Bob…” We’ll begin on that next month.

The Thieftaker books are a bit of a departure for me (hence the pseudonym for the series).  They are urban historical fantasy, set in Colonial Boston, built around a series of stand alone mysteries.  They’re really nothing like the work I had done previously, which was high fantasy:  alternate worlds, castle intrigue, lots of magic and wars and stuff.  That was what I cut my teeth on as a fantasy reader many, many years ago, and that was what I wrote for the first dozen plus years of my career.  I have to admit that I miss that stuff, and I’m thinking that my next book (before I go back to write the fourth Thieftaker novel) will be another high fantasy.

As I consider this, I have been thinking back on the books that first set me on this career path, and that first convinced me that I wanted to steep myself in this genre. And I have been thinking about three authors in particular.

1. J.R.R. Tolkien.  Yeah, I know — no big surprise here.  I first encountered Tolkien when I was eleven and at sleepaway camp.  The theater counselor was putting on a production of The Hobbit, and he cast me as Bilbo Baggins.  I had no idea what the play was about, but I instantly fell in love with the story and the characters.  I went home and read the book; loved that, too.  A few years later, I read Lord of the Rings, and I realized that I wanted to read nothing but fantasy for the rest of my life.  Now, fortunately, I didn’t limit myself to fantasy for long, but I remained an avid reader in the genre.  Fantasy novels were not my only reading choices, but they were almost always the books I reached for first.

2. Stephen R. Donaldson.  I read the first Thomas Covenant trilogy in my late teens, and the second a short while later.  I read them through, and then read them a second time, soaking them up like a sponge. Let me say here that I know many people don’t like the Covenant books, and I understand why.  Covenant himself was in many ways a despicable character, and [Spoiler Alert] the rape he commits early in the first book of the first trilogy was/is incredibly disturbing for me to read, then as a nineteen year-old kid, and now as a middle-aged father of daughters.  That said, though, the Covenant books had an enormous influence on me.  Essentially, they made me want to write.  Covenant was such a challenging hero — he was unlike any character I had ever read.  And Donaldson’s world was both wondrous and weird — again, I’d never encountered anything quite like it.  The novelty of the books opened my eyes to the infinite possibilities of writing in our genre.  If Donaldson could do that, then I could do anything!  Without those books, I might not be a writer.

3. Guy Gavriel Kay.  The first books I read by Kay were the three volumes of the Fionavar Tapestry — The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire, and The Darkest Road.  As it happens, I am just now rereading the trilogy — I’m nearly a third of the way through the final book.  The trilogy, which was the first thing Kay published on his own after writing The Silmarillion with Christopher Tolkien, holds up quite well nearly thirty years after its initial publication.  Yes, the books are flawed in some ways, but the series is brilliant nevertheless. The worldbuilding is rich and textured, the characters are drawn with exquisite care, the prose is lyrical and elegant — readers of Kay’s subsequent work will recognize these qualities as the hallmarks of all that he writes.  And that is the point.  Donaldson made me want to write; Kay showed me how I should write.  He was the writer whose work I tried to emulate with my earliest efforts.  I didn’t come close, of course.  But I learned craft in part by reading his work, and eventually I found a style of my own.

So, those are the three authors who most influenced my career, who helped me get to where I am today.  This is not to say that other authors, haven’t influenced my work and my career.  So many have — I haven’t room to mention them all by name here.  But these were the three who got me started.  And I am forever in their debt.

Who are your greatest influences?  Who got you reading speculative fiction?  Who made you want to write?

Or a visual artist — they can get away with it, too. “Third Trumpet Concerto in E-flat Minor.” “Untitled #16.” “Sonata in D.” “Red Four.” Don’t have an actual title? Doesn’t matter! Just call it what it is!

Authors aren’t allowed to get away with that. As I remarked on LiveJournal recently, I cannot in fact call my next book “Victoriain’t Fantasy Number Two in West African Major.” It needs a name, a real one, something that describes what it is without, y’know, describing what it is.

Do you people have any idea how hard those are to come up with?

If you’ve had to title enough things, you’re probably saying “yes, yes I do.” Because there are so many constraints a title has to fit into — especially if it’s a novel title. (Short stories can get away with being called “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual” or “Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics as Employed Against Lycanthropes.” The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making notwithstanding, publishers will usually give you the stink-eye and then douse you in the tears of your cover designer until you change it.) Novels, man — their titles have to be short, but also informative. They need to be evocative, without being full of those words that usually get called “evocative” and at this point are just boring. If it’s a series, you want the titles to look like they go together, but generally you want to avoid the approach Mercedes Lackey is known for, which is the plug-’n-play title set: Magic’s Pawn, Magic’s Promise, Magic’s Price. Winds of Fate, Winds of Change, Winds of Fury. The Black Gryphon, The White Gryphon, The Silver Gryphon. (Though sometimes, man, I think she’s smarter than all the rest of us, and I should just imitate her.)

The worst one, for me, was With Fate Conspire. Oh god, the knots I tied myself into with that one. It was the fourth book in the series, so at that point I had a whole set of requirements its title had to fulfill: it had to be a quote from a piece of period literature. (In this case, Victorians.) It had to be short — no more than three or four words. (Victorians are not quotable at any length shorter than a paragraph.) The quotation had to work as an epigraph to the final section of the book. (Which meant it had to speak to a limited set of themes.) Oh, and it had to end in a verb.

If I continue the series someday, I am going to use the division between Fate and whatever follows to break my titling pattern. Pinky-swear. Because I already spent a year speed-reading Victorian literature in search of a title, any title, please won’t somebody take pity on me and give me a title, and in the end I only found it by accident. Thank god for Tim Powers, whose novel Declare quotes a different edition of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam than the one I had already read. With Him Conspire did not work as a title. With Fate Conspire did.

It doesn’t help that I’m ambitious with my titles. Have you ever noticed how many fantasy novels are some variant on Noun of Nouns? A Game of Thrones. A Crown of Swords. The Sword of Shannara. Pawn of Prophecy. I have a personal aversion to the word “of” in any title of mine . . . unless I can come up with interesting enough words to put around it. And by “interesting,” I don’t mean those half-dozen words that show up over and over and overandoverandover again in fantasy titles. Sword, Shadow, Fate, King/Queen/Prince/Princess, Song, Dragon. Those words are supposed to be “evocative,” but at this point all the actual flavor has been squished out of them. Despite my desperate state when titling With Fate Conspire, I actually questioned whether I wanted to use that phrase, because “fate” is just so overused. I decided the context was different enough to be worth it, though — which is also why I kept A Natural History of Dragons. Sure, “dragon” is overused, but “natural history” isn’t, and besides, it’s a classic case of “does what it says on the tin.” There is no better way to advertise what that book is about. But if I have to have an “of” in the title, I’d rather it be something like The Vengeance of Trees (an unpublished book I may revise someday). Sure, it’s Noun of Nouns — but “vengeance” and “tree” are not normally words that go together. Hopefully that makes it interesting.

Avoiding “of” is hard. It’s one of the easiest ways to string multiple words together in a title; verbs and other prepositions demand a more specific relationship, and frequently also take up more room, both typographically and mentally. “Of” is invisible, in a way that “within” isn’t. Sometimes you can cheat and swap things around to have an apostrophe-s instead: David Eddings called the third book of the Belgariad Magician’s Gambit rather than Gambit of the Magician. Technically it’s still Noun of Noun, but it doesn’t look that way. But not everything works in that construction; if the object of the preposition is descriptive rather than possessive, you can’t flip it around. Swords’ Sea does not mean the same thing as Sea of Swords. Conversely, some things are better flipped: Wise Man’s Fear would be confusing if it were Fear of the Wise Man. Is it his fear, or is somebody afraid of him?

Mind you, just because you avoid “of” doesn’t mean your title is automatically distinctive. YA is glutted right now with one-word titles, which are great when there’s a few of them and blur together when there’s a thousand. (If you’ve only got one word to work with, it has to be evocative. Pretty soon you’ve got random nouns and adjectives being flung at you without any context, just because they sounded cool.) So you’re back to the basic problem: describe your book, in a fashion which is both informative and distinctive, using only one to five words. Go!

Small wonder so many of us fall back on Noun of Nouns. The sequel to A Natural History of Dragons will be called The Tropic of Serpents (subtitled, as was the first one, A Memoir by Lady Trent). I wanted something with a different structure, but in the end, this one won out, because it does what it says on the tin: Victoriain’t Fantasy Number Two in West African Major.

Chicken, Egg, or Chickegg

Which comes first: the story or the world? This varies from story to story. All stories start from a seed—some notion that sparks our interest—and sometimes the seed is an idea for a world. We might, for example, come up with an interesting magic system, an alien race, or a social structure. We might want to write about the aftermath of some history-changing event or the birth of something new in the human condition. Such ideas dictate some aspect of the world that we’re going to write about; they don’t tell us everything, but they give us a start.

On the other hand, many story-seeds don’t come with worlds attached. We may have some vision of a character, or a relationship between characters; we may want to address some theme like “greed is self-defeating” or “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”; we may just say, “Wouldn’t it be a blast if everyone suddenly got superpowers?” Such seeds don’t immediately imply much about the story’s world. In that case, you have to build a world where the seed can grow in appealing ways.

Either way, a seed is only a starting point. You have to develop your world from its first small inklings into something that can actually support a story.

A Matter of Scale

Worlds operate at multiple scales. There’s the high-level stuff—special characteristics like the presence of magic or FTL, and any other headline attributes that distinguish your world from the here-and-now. Then there’s the low-level stuff: what you might see when you walk into a room. Between these two extremes is a spectrum of scales, some of which may be relevant to your story and others not.

The different scales are interconnected, but there’s room for huge variations. After all, the rules of physics are the same all over Earth, but vast differences exist between cultures and individuals. Your high-level concepts can result in many different lower-level manifestations. Even if you choose to work on a small canvas (e.g. setting your entire novel in a single village or spaceship), your patch of the world will still have a range of possible ways it can look and feel.

You don’t have to think of all the possibilities right away—not when you’re in the planning stage. But you have to start playing with your options. In particular, you have to dig deep into the consequences of any differences between your world and the real one: how they affect people, their societies, the environment, and so on. Most important, you have to look at how these consequences will affect the nature of your story.

Let’s look at developing an example. I’m doing this impromptu, just to show how I’d approach it; this is only to illustrate the interplay between world and story ideas, how I’d kick things around if I actually intended to write something. So suppose aliens land on Earth tomorrow, and suppose they have very good teleportation technology: they can instantly beam anyone or anything anywhere within a range of 100,000 miles. What kind of a world results?

My first question is why the aliens came. If they’ve come for conquest, there’s no question they’ll win. They can sit in high orbit and destroy or steal any object they want. They can teleport the hearts out of people’s bodies until the survivors surrender. Frankly, this scenario doesn’t interest me; alien conquest has been done to death and I wouldn’t want to write such a story unless I came up with a really interesting new wrinkle.

So let’s rule out conquest. I’m also going to rule out other aggressive motives (e.g. the aliens want to dine on human flesh, or to convert humans to their religion). Boring! Let’s say the aliens have come to study Homo sapiens response to novel stimuli. They’re going to do this by giving us their teleport technology, posting full details on a public web site. (Either the aliens get their kicks from giving dangerous tech to “primitive” cultures, or they have some ulterior motive I can figure out later.) To make things interesting, let’s say that teleport devices can be made from easy-to-obtain parts, and can be assembled by anyone with modest technical know-how.

Suddenly, many people have access to unlimited teleportation. Undoubtedly, some folks will start hopping into bank vaults and filling their pockets. A few others will start killing—if you can teleport a victim’s heart out of his or her body, what’s to stop you? Expect the deaths of most politicians and many other people in the public eye. Expect bloody reprisals. Expect chaos. I’m not saying that most people would immediately resort to murder, but some certainly would, and how can they be stopped?

Would that be an interesting story to write? Maybe for some writers, but not for me. So I’ll have to modify my original premise. There have to be limits on the teleportation process: enough to avoid total chaos. What would those limits look like…

You get the idea. I invented a high-level concept. I played with it to the point where I could extrapolate consequences, but I didn’t like the results. Therefore I decided to go back and make changes: an iterative process of trial and error until I reach a set-up that appeals to me.

Notice that this “world” is actually our own, except for the addition of the new technology and the presence of aliens. I followed up on those additions to see what their effects would be. I’d do the same if I were inventing a whole new world…except that the process would be more complicated, because there’d be many more differences from modern-day Earth.

Also notice that I’ve only been talking about high-level differences. What would the low-level differences be? Well, rooms would no longer need doors. In fact, there might be a surge of people building hidden rooms, on the theory that thieves can’t steal your stuff if they don’t know where it is or even that it’s there.

There’d also be lots of armed guards hired by VIPs: if kidnappers can enter any room, the only way to protect yourself is to have bodyguards who’ll neutralize intruders as soon as they appear. Wealthy and important people will never be able to be alone for fear of kidnappers and killers. How will that affect society? Politics? Personal sanity? What’s the psychological fallout of never being alone? And what’s the social fallout of being led by people in that position? Hmm…

Do I Want to Say More?

I’ve barely touched the surface of world-building, but I’m loath to go deeper. There are so many ins and outs that a few short blog posts can’t possibly do the subject justice. As I said in last month’s entry, it’s better for you to learn as much as possible about how the real world works, and to read a lot of SF to see how what other writers have done.

So instead of continuing with world-building, what shall I look at next? How about the skills associated with telling the reader about your world: i.e., exposition. (Oh noes, the E word!) In the meantime, I hope that all you commenters will share your own views on what is and isn’t useful when it comes to world-building.

Right now, I’m in the closing stages of writing a book — the third installment in the Thieftaker chronicles, which I write as D.B. Jackson.  I’m at about 85,000 words, on my way to 100k or so, and I’m having trouble focusing on anything else.  I’m writing this book quickly — at a swifter pace than I have any other book I’ve written (except for the Robin Hood novelization, which had a ridiculous turn around, and which I wrote from a script).  I wrote half the book — 50,000 words plus — in February, and I expect to finish the first draft sometime in the first week of April.  The book is due May 1, and I started it later than I should have — hence my accelerated pace.

I normally write pretty quickly, but I also usually do a good deal of polishing as I write.  In the interests of getting the draft done, I’m doing less polishing this time around, which means that my revision process is going to be more important than ever.

Ideally, I like to leave a manuscript for a few weeks before I go back to revise it.  I can’t do that this time.  Everything is compressed, and I really don’t know what that will mean for the finished project.  On the one hand, a hurried manuscript is not necessarily a good one.  On the other hand, there are times when I over-polish as I write, and my initial drafts wind up being too studied, not spontaneous enough.  That will not be a problem this time around.  I’m not sure I’ve ever been less certain of what I will find in a manuscript when I go back to read it through for the first time.  It should be interesting.

Part of what makes the revision process work for me is creating as much distance as possible between the writing experience and my reading of the draft. Distance from the creative process, distance from the emotions and ambitions I entertained while writing it, distance from the characters who were speaking to me while I wrote.  Why is distance so crucial?  Because I don’t want to read this book as the guy who wrote it.  I want to get as close as possible to the reading experience of those who will be judging its quality and commercial viability.  They don’t know what I intended to do with the book; they don’t know the backgrounds of my various characters.  They only know what the book tells them.  And so I want to read the book with their experience in mind.  Of course, I then want to turn around and fix the problems I find in a way that feeds into my creative experience, that reinforces all the stuff I’ve been trying to do as writer-guy.  There is a balancing act here, and it’s not always easy to carry off.

As I said, in the past I have used time as a key tool in creating distance between writing and revising.  If I can put a draft away for five or six weeks, then I actually don’t remember as clearly what I was thinking when I composed the draft in the first place.  I find that enormously helpful.

This time around I won’t have that distance in terms of time, and so I have to create it in different ways.  First, since I wrote the draft on the screen, I will read it through on paper.  That probably sounds silly, like something that couldn’t possibly make much of a difference.  But for me it does.  Seeing the words on paper, rather than on the screen, is a fundamentally different experience that often allows me to notice problems I might otherwise miss.

I will also read as much of the book as possible aloud.  This can be exhausting, so I don’t always get through a whole book this way.  But “hearing” the book, even if in my own voice, is another way of experiencing the writing in a new way, and once again it exposes problems I might otherwise fail to notice.

And finally, I will try to put myself into the mindset of a reader rather than the writer.  And in order to do this, I will try to read as a specific reader: my editor, my agent, my wife; someone who I know, whose comments I can anticipate.  This is basically role-playing and it’s a skill I’ve developed over time, one that really does help.  There are times when I will read a passage and know right off that, say, my agent would have questions about it.  Seeing the issue through her eyes — or through the eyes of another reader — allows me once more to remove myself from the writing process and experience the book as if for the first time.

All of these things help me separate my internal editor from my internal writer, so that I can be as dispassionate as possible in my reading of my own work.  This allows me to be ruthless with cuts when I need to be, and also to recognize what works, not just in the moment when I wrote it, but also for my readers.

That, at least, is the plan.  We’ll see if it works with this newest book.

What tricks, if any, do you use to make yourself a more effective editor of your own work?

I’m talking about the books where the heroes are just barely a lighter shade of grey than the villains, where death comes for everyone without warning, where people get hurt and don’t recover, and betrayal is the order of the day. George R. R. Martin is, if anything, the lighter end of this trend, with people like Joe Abercrombie being further down the path. We’ve coined a number of adjectives to describe the kind of story they’re writing, like “grimdark” or (if you’re feeling much less charitable) “crapsack,” on account of how the world it takes place in comes across as wall-to-wall misery and filth.

Or — and here we get to my argument — “realistic.”

I don’t have a problem with stories where everything is grim and dark and horrible. I may not want to read them, but I’m not going to run around saying they shouldn’t exist in the first place. What I do have a problem with is the imputation of moral virtue to those stories: the idea that they are inherently better than the “escapist” tales in which the characters don’t all behave like assholes to one another, and that people who like Abercrombie’s novels (or whoever; I’m not here to pick on him specifically) are superior to readers who don’t want their faces rubbed in the gutter. After all, the readers of grit are able to look unflinchingly into the ugly face of reality! The rest of us are hiding.

Foz Meadows points out the next problem in the chain, which is the way the claim of “realism” enshrines certain issues as the natural order of things, which we should not expect to be any other way. If “female characters being raped” = “realistic,” then it follows that “female characters not being raped” = “unrealistic.” Sucks to be us, ladies! Ditto racism, homophobia, and a host of other unpleasantnesses many people are working to change right now. That’s the way the world was Back Then, the defenders of grimdark say, and they’re just being honest about it.

(Strange how narrow a view of Back Then those defenders usually have. I want to see them applaud a grimdark fantasy in which the manly tradition of warriors includes institutionalized age-structured homosexuality, with the older members buggering the trainees. Oh, sorry, did I get realism in their “realism”? My bad.)

This trend came up at Fourth Street Fantasy last year, and I found myself vehemently rejecting the notion that only the ugly parts of the world are real. Men’s respect for women is just as true and meaningful as their disrespect. If the unbreakable trust of an ally is not inevitable, neither is betrayal; the world is made out of both. There really are people of breathtaking virtue and decency, as well as complete scum. You can focus on the latter if you want to, but don’t tell me it’s better — morally or factually — than focusing on the former.

How did we arrive at this state, where we valorize that kind of borderline nihilism? The answer to that is complicated and would take a twenty-seven mile detour through recent global history, but my epiphany at Fourth Street was to blame Thomas Bowdler — or rather, the trend to which he gave his name. He edited Shakespeare to remove passages considered unsuitable for women and children, which is just one facet of a larger movement that separated out childhood as a time of innocence, untouched by violence or sexuality or any hint of moral greyness. And, well, if stuff without those things is For Children, then stuff with them is For Adults (or even, as with Bowdler, just For Men), which by the transitive property of storytelling means that if you’re writing for adults/adult men, you ought to put in violence and sex and moral greyness. Pretty soon those things become intellectually superior, because whatever adult men are reading is of course the most important thing out there, and then it’s even more superior to write stuff that’s all about those things. To do otherwise is childish.

I repeat: there’s nothing wrong with writing about violence (even bloody, horrific violence), sex (even nonconsensual sex, which is to say rape), or moral greyness. All of those things are real. But they are not the whole picture. Reality is not a desert in which we stagger from one tiny oasis to the next, barely sucking down enough muddy, stagnant water to stay alive. If you’re writing about the desert, ask yourself why, and where you’re going in it, and whether you’re following that path because it will take you somewhere useful, or just because everyone else has gone that way. Don’t have a female character get raped just because rape is what happens to women. Don’t exclude people of color from meaningful roles in your story just because that’s what you’re accustomed to seeing. Read some actual history and get a sense of how it worked, rather than basing your assumptions on the last ten fantasy novels you read.

That is the way to be honest, mature — and realistic.

This past Friday, Greg posted the following on the Between Books website:

Obligatory Preliminaries

World-building means imagining a world that’s different from our own. Your world may have much in common with the real one—many SF stories are set in the present-day or very near future, where almost everything looks the same as the world we know. But something must be different or else the story isn’t SF…and world-building requires you to show readers what the difference is and then to explore the consequences.

This is a huge topic to deal with, and I can barely scratch the surface in a blog post or two…but let me start with a number of things that must be said.

1. In order to build a fictional world, you have to know a lot about the real one. This means becoming familiar with real-life science, history, economics, the arts, different cultures, different landscapes, different ways of making a living, different methods of survival, different folklores, and on and on and on. At some point, you may have to do in-depth research on specific subjects, but before you can even get to that point, you need a wide breadth of general knowledge. It is painfully obvious when a writer doesn’t know enough about the world. Don’t be that person.
2. You also need to have read a ton of science fiction and/or fantasy. By seeing how other people have built cool worlds, you can develop a feel for the possibilities. Consciously study how other writers have succeeded; when you read a book with a memorable world, examine what the writer did. Make a list of details that made the world come alive, or scenes that presented the world in vivid ways.
   
   Take the time. Write things down. If you were training for some other (non-writing) profession, you’d read textbooks and make notes. If you’re training to be a writer, stories and novels are your textbooks, and you have to read them analytically. (Notice, however, that I’ve put familiarity with SF after familiarity with the world. It’s painfully obvious writers know nothing except what they’ve picked up from Heinlein or Tolkien.)
3. Absorb what other writers say about world-building. Pick some writers you like and follow their blogs or Twitter feeds. Go to SF conventions and listen to what writers say on panels. Read how-to books and essays (but not too many—it’s easy for would-be writers to get lost down the rabbit-hole of preparing to write, without ever actually putting words on paper).

All these things have to be said before I can give my own take on world-building…and I’m tempted just to leave the topic there. Anything I say in the rest of this post won’t help you as much as the three points above. But I suppose there are a few other things I ought to say on this subject.

Useful, Convincing, Interesting

At the beginning of this post, I asked, “How do you create a useful, convincing, interesting world in which a science fiction or fantasy story can take place?” Those three adjectives are all crucial to world-building. Let’s look at each in turn.

Useful: Never forget this point: you’re writing a story, not an atlas. If the story doesn’t work, your world doesn’t matter. Your world has to serve the story, not the other way around.

Of course, when you’re first developing the story, there’s often a give-and-take. You have some ideas for a possible story; you have some ideas for a possible world; you toss them together and see where they lead. During the development process, the world may even come first: you have a mental image of how a world might be, and you come up with a story that arises from that image.

But however the process starts, it has to end with producing a story. In case of an irreconcilable conflict, the world is expendable; the story isn’t. You may have to change any or all details of your world if they stand in the way of getting your story to work. Your world has to be useful to the story.

Convincing: The world has to be “believable”. Many times during this series of postings, I’ve stressed that believability is a fluid concept which depends on the nature of your story. Readers will allow more slack to comedies, exuberant space operas, pulp adventures, etc., and of course, all fantasy, in some sense, defies “reality”. Even so, your world has to hang together—you can’t afford to have readers calling bullshit on you.

Think things through. Avoid inconsistencies. Foresee the side-effects of things like magic or new technology. Not only will these principles keep you out of trouble, your stories will be richer if you delve deeply into the background and consequences of your world’s uniqueness.

To pick a simple example: on your world, what do people eat? How do they obtain that food? Whose responsibility is it? What is the place of food suppliers in the social structure? What happens to the garbage? And the sewage?

In some worlds, these questions are trivial to answer: if, for example, you’re writing about the near future of our own world, you might decide that things are basically the same as today. But if you’re writing about the pre-industrial past or an alien planet, the answers to such questions may affect everything you write. For example, how many desert worlds have we seen where there are lots of inhabitants but no way to grow crops? How does that work? Good SF writers find ways to solve that problem; bad ones may not even realize the problem exists.

Interesting: “Useful” and “convincing” are essential; “interesting” may not be so important, but it’s still a big plus. If you’re going to invent a new world, what’s the point of letting it be boring? Give the reader some eye-candy (or ear-candy, or brain-candy). Show us something we haven’t seen a thousand times before.

There’s a danger in trying too hard—new writers sometimes go overboard with weirdness for the sake of weirdness. But there’s even more danger in not trying at all—giving us lifeless imitations of other writers’ worlds. A writer should bring something fresh to the table: some non-formulaic addition to the SF conversation. Only a few writers have the gift for truly original world-building ideas, but every writer can develop the skill to build worlds that aren’t the same-old same-old.

On That Note…

On that note, I’ll draw this post to a close, but it looks as if I’ll have to say more on this subject—specifically, how do you go about building SF worlds? I’ll try to float some answers next month…but in the meantime, I hope that other skilled writers will make my life easy by filling up the comments with their own insightful tips. Please?