Category Archives: setting

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Over the mountain

The thing that draws me to a fantasy or science fiction first is the promise of an interesting world. A place that is vivid, unique and somewhere I can relate to. I read a few science fiction books set in worlds completely unlike our own. In one case it was particularly jarring. I made it through the story, but spent most of the time trying to understand how the characters actually fit into the place. Perhaps the author’s purpose was to describe how bizarre it would be to live in a place like that. If so, he got it, but I also felt like it was at the cost of a compelling story. Now, I get it that this isn’t really the same as writing fantasy, which are typically set in places we might recognize, but it’s a lesson I’m trying to apply.

Where I live, there are places so surreal they seem like you just stepped on to the page of a fantasy. Last year I was hiking with some friends, and thick fog rolled in. With it, came an icy dampness. We came over the top of a hill I’d never gone over before. At the top was a swamp. We might as well have been in the dead marshes (actually I took a picture and told my children this is where we went). When the fog lifted, some lensing trick of the atmosphere made the mountains across the valley behind us seem to tower over us, even though they were still miles away and normally didn’t appear even half that tall. Another place that sticks out in my mind is down at the end of a bay where the land and islands climb out of the water hundreds of feet in sheer grey cliffs, topped with massive spruce trees. Bits of cloud often cling to these cliffs where thousands of birds swirl around squalling.

Sometimes, when I’m driving around I look at the mountains and wonder what’s just over them. Perhaps some place fantastic is out there waiting to be discovered. It seems to me that those worlds, filled with totally routine kinds of things can be almost as fantastic as a fictional place. This is the place that I started, and just added some imaginary stuff with a few odd details, and I like it. There are times when I’m trying to revise where I get drawn into my own story, walking up the road under the rustling canopy of oaks and elms.

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Rewriting the first chapter

Great, now I’ve got to rewrite the first chapter. The driver of the whole story as it’s written so far. Do I just trash the whole thing? Yes, I think I have to, maybe I can keep a little bit.

This is where I was a couple of months ago. It sucked. 15 chapters drafted, and I realized that the first chapter may have launched the action, but didn’t fit with the rest of the story. (At this point a professional writer might say: How is that even possible? – Well it is for me, because I’m not a pro.) That chapter started life as a bit of back-story for a supporting character. The idea was a tragic and secret love-story to explain his motivations. I had a lot of attempts to get my story going and I had characters and a general story arc, just not a good starting point. All I needed was a place I could launch the action that needed to happen. When I made the decision to swap the supporting character for the main character in that first bit of back-story, doors opened. I had motivation for the main character, a way to introduce the antagonist and an excellent introduction to the world.

From that first chapter, the second, third, and fourth chapters came easily. They were horrid the first go around, and I spent a lot of time rewriting them. I like them now, and liked them a couple of months ago. At that point I was ready to share the work, and the immediate feedback was that first chapter was good, but the story of it didn’t really fit with the direction of the rest of the story. In order to make it work, I would either have to expand chapter 1 into at least one more chapter and change significant plans for the main character in the future, or do something different. The conclusion I came to is that I had to scrap that first chapter. Well, that dropped me into a lurch. The action after just didn’t go and those subsequent chapters didn’t make a lot of sense without a launch point significantly similar to the original first chapter.

After throwing a tantrum for a while about having to throw away what had amounted to weeks of writing time – which translates into years for me given all of my other commitments – I spent some thinking about the problem, and managed to find a suitable revision. It was still a complete re-write, but it kept all of the key plot elements necessary to move the action forward. In fact, as far as story structure goes, it’s better. The style of that first chapter is more like the rest now (which was a related problem I’d been struggling with), the introduction of the main character was generally better, and the conflict I was trying to explain seemed to make more sense. The best part of this revision is that it didn’t require huge changes to subsequent chapters. However, there is a major drawback – the first chapter as it is now still needs a lot of revision and polishing. It’s nothing I can’t deal with though.

This experience has taught me an important lesson, one that I should already know: If most of the plot is working, there is no reason you shouldn’t be able to rewrite major portions (all?) of early chapters and still salvage the majority of the writing.

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Made up names

On my first project, not a fantasy, now long dead – and good riddance, I wanted the names of people and places to be foreign. I mean, it’s not necessary for them to be, plenty of fantasies use regular or regular-like English names, and those work just fine. But that’s not how I wanted to approach it, and maybe that’s stupid, but it’s the writer’s prerogative right? So, for that first project I slammed together a bunch of letters and called them names. The result was a bit of text that was unreadable to anybody and had no consistency nor did it make the world feel like the world was full of unique cultures, which is what I wanted. I feel like I’ve read fantasies where the approach was to just put together some random letters until a name was achieved, and in those cases, I wish they’d just used regular English names.

When I started my current project, I still wanted to use names that weren’t like English. So, I started researching, with two goals in mind 1: Develop a language with just enough depth to let me name things. 2: Make sure that language follows conventions easily recognizable and readable to an English speaker. I spent hours, well weeks and weeks really, learning about language. Naturally, I also spent a lot of time studying the famousest of constructed languages, trying to learn what Tolkien did and how. Since I’m not a linguist, I recognize whatever I attempt will still fall rather short of the mark, but it’s a zillion times better than what I had before. Anyhow, in the process I learned a lot and managed to come up with a pair of nearly passable con-langs that gave me enough to name everything on the map and people.

As with anything I work on though, it didn’t stop there. I kept going, building alphabets (check this place out: www.omniglot.com) and complex rules for speaking the language. Between the case endings and made-up words in the second language, there are around 3500 words to pull from. The first of the two languages has considerably fewer words, but provides enough to translate short quotes, which is a fun thing to add into a story. I’m still working on them here and there, mostly when I’m trying to procrastinate. In retrospect, the best thing to have done would have been to learn a second language, and take that experience into the development of a con-lang. You learn loads about ways to deal with conjugation and sentence construction very rapidly. Of course, six or seven years ago when I started this, there wasn’t such a thing as duolingo on your phone, and so it would have been a lot harder than it is now. In the end, the only reason to have these is to rarely interject them into the story, and give some consistency to names, so perhaps it’s all wasted time, but I enjoy it as a creative outlet nonetheless.