Entering a World

Recently I was part of a forum discussion called "The Hardest Part," where writers were talking about which aspects of story writing they found most difficult.  "Middles," some said.  "Endings," said others.  I had to come down on the side of "beginnings."  I think I've rewritten the beginnings of stories - and that includes short stories and novels - more than anything else.

Beginnings are hard for me because I'm hopelessly in love with worlds.

Which is not a bad thing.

World design is a thorough and gradual process, as I discussed a couple of days ago.  I pointed out then that one of my writer friends was still helping me adjust the language I used to describe my world - after I've been working with it for ten years or more!  Usually what I'll do is work out basic parameters first.  That means cosmology and geography basics, physiology and species model (if it's an alien species), and basic societal structure.  Basic societal structure includes the basic labels for social groups, such as "undercaste" or "nobility" or "oppressed race" and the names I've designed for them.  

Once those things are laid out, I'll start writing, but as I write, I'll keep discovering things.  At the beginning, the labels will be flat, like paper nametags, but the further I go the more I'll start to understand what those labels mean for how people behave, what they value, and how they judge what they see.  Only when I get to the end will I have a full sense of how the different social groups see one another, how they interact, and everything else that makes their behavior feel real and three-dimensional.

BTW, I would love to talk about developing the behavior of societal groups if anyone has a group they're working on that they'd like to tell me about!

So the feel of my world will be as follows after draft one:

--  --  --  --  --

     --  

          --

                --

                     --

Shallow at the start, and deep at the end, which means I have to go back and rewrite from the beginning, with two goals.

1.   to have the world feel "complete" from the very beginning

2.  to have the world be "accessible" from the very beginning.

Usually, goal number one takes a whole rewrite - and goal number two takes another whole rewrite.  Why? Because a world in its full complexity is awfully hard to grasp on minimum evidence, so if I write from the beginning as though I know all the world's secrets (because I do), then people who don't know all the secrets along with me can easily get lost.  This is one reason why I always find it valuable to have critique readers who have never encountered a particular world before:  I can get great advice from those who know it thoroughly, but those people aren't able to speak to the problem of entering the world, because they know too much. (Makes me sound like an evil dictator, mwahahaha)

This problem of entry is at the top of my mind right now because I'm currently working on a complex world piece.  And while as a reader I love to get thrown into the deep end with a complex world and figure stuff out, as a writer I feel like I lose valuable readers if I do it too much.  

So this is where I go back to my discourse analytical tools.  On the one hand, I try to track what each sentence contributes to the world view, and how much it requires the reader to construct.  On the other hand, I try to make sure that the story is so compelling that a reader can't help but go along with me.  

My friend Janice, whom I've mentioned before, wrote an opening scene for her novel The Pain Merchants that was just so awesome you couldn't help but keep reading, because you were laughing and curious at the same time.  I won't give too many spoilers, but I will say that this scene involved a chicken - and ever since then, I've thought about "finding my chicken scene" when I open a story.  

So what is a chicken scene?

I don't know that I can describe it with full accuracy, but I'll do my best.  It's a scene that plunges the reader straight into conflict, but which also instantly illuminates the point-of-view character, the world he or she lives in, and the central conflict of the story to follow.  

That sounds hard, and I guess it is in some respects.  But if you think about the character you've created, and the conflict he or she is about to experience, very often you can pick an aspect of that conflict that stumbles right into your character's main weaknesses, or strengths, or both at the same time.  And if the world you've created is more than just a backdrop, but contains social detail that informs the identity of your character, then your character's reactions to and judgments of other people in the first scene, and of the situation he or she has gotten himself into, and (don't forget this one) of him or herself in reacting to that situation - everything that character does will help to create the world all around.

Now I'll have to run off and find some good examples you all might be familiar with... 

Stories are important!

Today is my birthday, and this afternoon we went to an amazing puppet performance at Millenium Park in Chicago called "A Rabbit's Tale."   Culturally it was an eclectic fusion:  Punch and Judy style hand puppets, gigantic person-inside figures that might have come from Carnaval in Trinidad and Tobago, and smaller puppets operated by puppeteers in black in the style of Japanese Bunraku theater.  The story was sweet and poignant, and it also featured a story-within-a-story, in fact a "puppet show within a puppet show." And it worked.

Seeing all these different puppet cultures come together made me think about how important stories are to people.  We tell stories about what happens to us, and use them to make sense of our experiences.  Or we write stories about people and the things that happen to them.  And we write stories inside of stories.

That little play within a play this afternoon took me by surprise, but when you really think about it, stories inside of stories happen all the time.  Shakespeare's Hamlet has its play-within-a-play.  Anne McCaffrey has an entire tradition of Harper songs written into her Pern books.  Frank Herbert wrote historical accounts into the Dune story.  The list goes on and on.

Of course, I mustn't forget my own planet Garini and the gecko people who believe stories are sacred - or the novel I'm writing now, which is essentially a story about a book (though of course it's much more than that)!

I'm not saying that every story world needs to have its own version of puppet shows, or theater.  But you can learn a lot about a people by hearing their stories, even if those people exist only within a story you wrote. 

Good night, and have fun writing your stories...

 

Writing your language down

Bill Moonroe over at the Analog forum asked me to talk about writing systems, so I thought I'd do a bit of that tonight, starting with the linguistic characteristics of writing systems, moving through a few real world examples I'm familiar with, and finally taking a look at fitting writing systems to a created language and writing technologies.  It's quite a list, so here goes.

Some peoples don't write their language down at all.  Those who do tend to use one (or more!)  of the following three strategies.

1.  An alphabet.  The symbols of an alphabetic writing system are intended to depict the sounds of a language.  Alphabets generally start out as systems with roughly one-to-one correspondence between sounds (phonemes) and symbols - but anyone who has struggled with English spelling knows that this correspondence isn't always clean.  This is due primarily to two factors:  first, the fact that language sounds change more quickly than written spellings, and second, the fact that languages borrow words from other languages that may not be easily rendered in the alphabet (but must be rendered somehow!).

2.  A syllabary.  The symbols of a syllabic writing system are intended to depict chunks of sounds, usually the syllables of a language (though in the case of Japanese, the unit of sound that corresponds to a character can actually be less than one syllable).  What I said about language change applies here too, but at least in the case of Japanese, there has been official reform of the syllabary to try to bring "spelling" more into line with sound.

3. A set of pictographs or ideographs.  The symbols of an ideographic writing system are intended to depict units of meaning rather than units of sound.  Chinese is the classic world-language example of such a system, where there is a character for "I" and another for "you," etc.  Complex concepts can be depicted in such a system by putting two characters together, such as "electricity" and "talk" for "telephone."  And in this case, since no correspondence between sound and meaning is expected, changes in sound and changes in the character system occur independently.

On to examples.  Alphabets that I know about include the Roman alphabet used in different permutations for English, French, Indonesian, Dutch, and many others; also the Greek alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet, the Hebrew alphabet, etc.  Feel free to comment listing any others you know about, and if anyone has further questions about alphabets do let me know.  But for now I'll assume this is a type of writing system anyone reading my blog has to be pretty familiar with.   

The syllabaries I know best are those of Korean (Hangul) and Japanese (Hiragana and Katakana).  Hangul is actually more properly representative of syllables than either of the kana systems.  Interestingly, each character is made up of subparts that represent sounds - but they're arranged as parts of a single more complex character.  Korean symbols can show either open syllables like "a" and "ka," or closed syllables like "kan", just by including one, two, or three sound parts in a single character.  The Japanese kana symbols represent only open syllables like "a" or "ka" and have two separate symbols that are used for closing syllables (one doubles the following consonant, and the other is roughly "N").  The reason there are two types of kana has nothing to do with sound, and everything to do with function; hiragana is used for core Japanese vocabulary, and katakana for foreign-derived words.

In the realm of ideographs I'll look at the Chinese symbols, because they are used by the Chinese, the Koreans, and the Japanese.  Many of these symbols began as pictographs, or picture-symbols of recognizable objects, and then became abstracted and complicated over time.  In much the same way as Hangul, they have recognizable subparts that can be recombined - but all these subparts are meaning-based, and none sound-based.  In a language with the non-conjugating structure of Chinese, such a system can be used alone.  But in Korean and Japanese, both of which have conjugations and small function words, they can be extremely inconvenient.This is where the "one or more systems" part comes in.  Korean uses both Hangul and Chinese characters, while Japanese uses both kana systems and Chinese characters - all mixed together by function.  

Okay, now for created languages.  Most created languages I have seen use alphabets, but if you're going to put your language in written form, I'd encourage you to think through three things.  

1.  While you're free to pick any type of system you want, it's helpful to consider language structure, as I mentioned for Chinese above, in choosing which system to use (unless you want to design more than one!).

2.  If you're going for an alphabet, you'll get a much more alien or world-local feel if you work directly with the sound system of your language, assigning symbols directly to sounds rather than using a code that corresponds roughly to the Roman alphabet.

3.  Consider writing technologies when you design your symbols.  Also known as, not everybody uses pencils!  Cuneiform was written with a reed on clay; runes were scratched on stone and wood; Chinese and Japanese began with brushes of bamboo and horsehair.  People will first begin to write with the materials available to them, on the materials available to them, and this will have an enormous influence on the appearance of the symbols.  I challenge anyone with a bioluminescent species to think about how that species would first begin to make recordings of its language (Wow, that's tough - and cool!).  Real world writing systems generally need to be written relatively quickly, the symbols should have systematic design and parts, and they should be easily differentiated from one another.

That's it for now!  I'll try to come back to worldbuilding tomorrow.

Worldbuilding is more than just World

Worldbuilding is an enormous topic.  As huge as the world, really - and tonight I'm picking a place to start, a little like the way writers pick an entry point into the worlds they create.  But since a lot of you out there have done quite a bit of worldbuilding already, and certainly all of you have experienced worlds created by other people,  I'll skip the nuts and bolts part and begin with a language-and-culture observation:

People are inextricable from their worlds.

Yes (no big surprise), characters in stories behave as if they are from the places that they're from.  And when we hear or read them, we can tell.  Automatically, subconsciously, the little hints add up.

So what does this mean?

It means a lot of things.  One, which links back to my entry about point of view earlier, is that a writer should be careful to consider the observer's background experience in the world whenever writing descriptions.  For me personally, this is the primary reason why I try to avoid third person omniscient point of view; I find it hard to decide whose point of view to use for the narration.  Should I hop from head to head, like Frank Herbert did in Dune, or Mary Doria Russell did in The Sparrow?  Should I try to imagine an independent storyteller telling the story, like C.S. Lewis did in the Narnia books?  Should I stay mostly in one head but bring in regular glimpses of alternate points of view, like J.K. Rowling did in the Harry Potter series?  Just thinking about that stuff makes me crazy!  So my usual solution is to try to keep the narrative point of view as close to the character's point of view as possible, even when I'm using third person.  The last thing I want is for my readers to be able to tell that part of the description was written from my own, the author's, point of view.  

For me, close point of view is a fantastic way to keep a really gigantic and detailed world under control, because the limits on one person's perception and experience give you a great way to limit the kinds of information you're trying to dispense to the reader.  It cuts down on the infodumping, big time.  There are always things that characters don't understand about their own worlds - and that's okay.  As long as your character knows what's going on, and lets people know when they're confused, that helps the reader figure things out.

Let me get down to some concrete details.  My Varin world consists of eight cities, all of them built underground.  They have good quality lighting to distinguish day and night, but it is provided by high-tech lamps all over the ceiling.  So they don't talk about dawn, dusk, or twilight.  They have dayrise and nightfall, and they have daylights instead of daylight.  If somebody brings up a topic unexpectedly, they say that it "came out of the dark" instead of "came out of the blue."  So vocabulary surrounding unique aspects of the setting should reflect that setting, as should expressions people use in conversation.  So far so good.

The other thing I like to do with Varin is play with the fact that people who grow up in the Eight Cities aren't afraid of or bothered by being underground.  It's totally normal to them - so of course when they go up to the surface, that's when things get weird.  And by the way, they don't generally say "up to" the surface, but "up the surface" and "out the surface" - a dialect-like alteration to reflect their sense of place.  I'm sure none of you are surprised that the idea that Varin citizens would find the lack of a roof scary, or outside daylight very bright. But as I've spent time developing my world and the characters in it, I've tried to push it further than that.  When we describe things, we often say what they're like, and we generally compare them to things we know.  So I'll have a character compare a waving field of grass to billowing bedsheets, or a rock face gleaming with sunshine to a clean plate.  A sort of reversal, where daylight could be "as bright as fire" but not vice-versa.

The huge temptation for me, and I'm sure for many others who really love the worlds they've created, is to try to give too much, or to fall into infodumping.  This to me means taking attention away from the story - the central drive of the narrative - and putting it instead into lots of explanatory details that are intended to flesh out how the world works.  The single principle I've found most helpful for controlling my tendency to go crazy infodumping is that of relevance to point of view.   

People do not talk or think about things that they don't notice, things that aren't important to them, or things that are so normal that they don't stand out.  

Take for example an alien.  That alien thinks that everything about his world is totally normal, and so he will generally not explain it.  He has no reason to!  But change the context - put that alien in a conversation with a human being - and suddenly everything changes.  The presence of contrast will cause the alien to notice things about his own world, people, language etc. - but still, those things he notices will depend on surrounding circumstances.  The alien's state of mind (calm and reflective?  anxious and aggressive?  in a state of shock?) will affect the kinds of things that he notices.

And don't forget to ask yourself:  would this alien really refer to his people as "the Gegogians"?  Or would they be "my people"?  Under what circumstances?

I'd like to add one final note on using invented words for elements of a world.  Invented words are wonderful fun, and they demonstrate the language of a region.  Wonderful.  They also make for a sense of alienness, of not being in the world we're used to.  But to be used most effectively, they need to have a lot of supportive surrounding context.  I don't remember who it was that said "if your world has rabbits, then call them rabbits," but they had a really good point.  When too many things have foreign names, the reader can be distracted, and start to dissociate from the setting instead of staying absorbed in it.  In Varin stories, a sense of familiarity is more important to me than a sense of alienness, so I tend to use names like "kelo mushroom" or "river lettuce," or even just "apples."  In my linguistics universe I want to go a bit more alien, so I'll talk about "white-spotted gharralli furs," (who knows how big a gharralli is?) or "grazers" (it might eat like a cow, but I'm betting it doesn't look like one!).

I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of this topic, so I'd really love to have some questions or comments, so I can return to it in the coming days.

A final thanks goes out to my awesome friend Janice Hardy, who put me onto the word "daylights" just a few weeks ago (after I've been working with Varin for more than ten years!).  I'll shout out for her a little, too - she's got a great fantasy novel she just sold, called The Pain Merchants, and yes, it is as amazing as it sounds.  Watch for it!