Character Personalities as Story Forces

I had this story draft, and it was missing something. (If you have written for any length of time, this may sound like a familiar scenario.)

I figured it out eventually: it was being too well-behaved. Following to the outline, characters doing what they were supposed to do - for perfectly good reasons, mind you, but they were awfully obedient. Too obedient.

They needed personality.

Of course, this will surprise no one. Certainly characters need personality! But what I needed from my characters - what was missing - was not so much backstory and general motives but a sense of each one as a force in the story.

This is what I mean. A character who is a force in the story will be a force for good, or evil, or for chaos, or a force for goofiness, or something like that. When that character walks into a room, you immediately say, "Okay, now things are going to get _____" (Fill in the blank with good, evil, chaotic, goofy.)

I picked the following quote up from Jamie Todd Rubin's website where he recently reviewed a book by George R. R. Martin:

"Another remarkable aspect of A Clash of Kings–for me at least–is that the characters are by now so well developed that as a reader, I felt like I knew them and could guess their reactions to various events."

This is something like what I mean. Because you know what kind of person they are, and what they'll do in a certain situation, they have more dimension. This can be big stuff, like mental illness (for my character Nekantor who is a force for order, and not in a good way) or heavy backstory. It can also be little stuff, like some detail of their self-image that affects their interactions.

I'll give you the example of the characters I've been working with: Adrian Preston and his wife, Qing Preston. Both are linguists. Both are accustomed to working with aliens and taking them seriously. So far so good. But they weren't different enough, and they weren't forces. So I decided to go further with Qing's Chinese background and give her a Chinese nickname for her husband. I looked around on the internet and came up with Big Bear (this is of course the translation). Then I suddenly realized that Adrian should be a genuinely big guy - and self-conscious about it. But then I decided he couldn't be so self-conscious that he was timid. More playful. And from there I got to the fact that each one of them loves being a linguist, but for different reasons. For him, language and culture are all fun, never work, and he just can't get enough. For her, language and culture are such serious business that she devotes herself entirely. Suddenly I saw both how they would be able to work toward the same goal and how they would encounter conflict along the way. They would be able to do what I needed, but they would have personality, and each one would have a different form of influence on the story.

All of a sudden I really want to go write this thing.

It's something to think about if you ever feel your characters aren't quite coming to life.

Should I write to a market?

If you spend a lot of time visiting writers' forums, you may encounter differences of opinion on whether to "write to a market." For those who may not know, writing to a market essentially means letting the market you wish to sell to dictate how the story you write will work. This can happen either before or after you have actually drafted the story: some writers will read quite a bit of material from a particular market to get a sense of what those editors might like, and then attempt to craft a story that fits those parameters; others will have an idea, sketch it out, then pick a target market and (again on the basis of reading what has sold to that market) tune the story to fit. The fit can be stylistic, content-based, or even one of length.

The argument for writing to a market goes something like this: "Of course you should be aware of what a particular editor likes before you send something to him or her. If you don't keep those editorial tastes in mind as you write, your chances of a rejection will go way up."

The argument against writing to a market goes something like this: "Of course you should be aware of what a particular editor likes before you send something to him or her. But chances are you'll be less true to your story, or lose touch with your Muse, if you try to cater to editorial tastes too directly. Your chances of a rejection will go way up."

Both of these agree on two points: 1. It's good to be aware of what an editor likes, and 2. Your chances of a rejection are quite high.

I confess I have difficulty writing to any particular market. When a story idea jumps into my head, I have to write it the way I have to write it. Some story ideas demand a higher word count for me, and others a lower. Some story ideas call for more description, and some for less. Some call for lush voices, and some for spare ones.

You could say that I write to a market now, because I do design stories specifically for Analog magazine. On the other hand, the fact that I wrote a story that Analog wanted to buy was pure coincidence. It was a story that asked to be told, and I had a great tip from Sheila Finch on where to send it. It was only after that that I decided I should deliberately look around for stories to tell about language and culture for the purposes of sending them to Analog. Fortunately for me, I find that alien design, and language and culture stories are incredibly inspiring. The fit is natural.

If you are not going to plan to write to a market, then finding a place to get your story sold will be a little like the process of finding an advisor for a Ph.D. At that point in your studies it's no longer a question of whether you're a good enough student (feel free to substitute "writer"), it's a question of whether there's someone out there who wants to work with you. It is a question of fit between what you can do and what the writer or editor wants.

I can't say I don't envy those around me who talk about writing to specific markets, particularly when they appear to be able to do it successfully. I suppose one could look at submission guidelines for clues, or read a lot of material from the magazine, or find editor interviews online. After that, though, a lot of guessing is involved until you actually manage to make a sale.

Be careful that you don't lose your convictions in your efforts to do what an editor appears to want. Many editors have idiosyncratic, eclectic tastes - you never know what may appeal to them. It could be that if your story resembles some they've seen before, that they'll love it - or it could be that it will strike them as derivative.

I believe that there is wiggle room. If you have a great story with a dynamite core conflict, and you manage to keep its drive going all the way through, then you can play around with thematic and textural elements to give it a somewhat different flavor.

I have a friend, though, who told me something quite fascinating about a discussion he took part in about international science fiction. Several of the people involved came to the conclusion that international sf was often more exciting precisely because people weren't writing to a market, and thus were pushing their ideas further than they might otherwise.

I encourage people to look for highly original ideas, no matter how they execute them. Originality can be tricky, but one thing I've found useful is looking around in my personal experience for story ideas rather than looking for them in stories I've read. Of course, taking traditional story tropes and turning them on their heads is another favorite hobby of mine.

In the end, I think it's important to write what inspires and excites you. Because if you can't get excited about a story, it's hard to imagine how anyone else will. Yes, I do rather believe in the Muse, though I think she's less intractable and more cooperative than many others do.

I wish all of you the best in selling your work, wherever it happens to land. Because I love reading good stories.

Folklore, Parable and Metaphor

I'd like to thank Hayley Lavik for suggesting the topic of folklore and its resonance within culture. She said:

I don't have anything too specific in mind, but I really love delving into cultural folklore (such as England's black dog myth, which became incorporated right into the identity of the town of Bungay, Suffolk) and how it resonates, becomes an influence on a culture as a whole (working into customs, rituals, etc), and the like. I'm hoping to work in more informed folklore research on my blog in the coming year, and I would love to hear your take on it from an anthropological standpoint (or heck, if you have any suggestions for good reading).

I've tried a couple of avenues of research, but I think the best approach here is to point you at the resources I considered, since they contain way too much information for me to share in this post. If you're interested in specific folk tales and their significance over time, you should check out the "Folkways" series published in Realms of Fantasy magazine. Each of these articles picks a different classic story and looks at its roots, its international history, its local significance at different points in history, its literary influence, and other such things. A lot of these would be available in back copies of RoF (of which I have a few, but not that many).

I remember going to Chicago a few years ago when there was a exhibition on at the Field museum about Mythical Creatures. This was a great exhibition, because it talked a lot about both localized and internationally known mythical creatures - and when they were internationally known, it spoke about how the stories had traveled. I wrote a post about the exhibition not long after I visited; it's here.

Also, for those of you who may be interested in the history and folklore behind Japanese mythical creatures, I highly recommend the Obakemono Project, a constantly developing website that has illustrations of creatures and citations from stories in which they've appeared, tells you which regions of Japan they're from, etc. As time goes by, people have also been adding to the website illustrations from classic texts of the ghost tales.

Now, a few thoughts, inspired by my own experience and by a discussion I had with a friend recently. This friend of mine is working on a really wonderful academic project, trying to understand how people interpret literature and why, and how it is that this process has become so difficult to teach to those who need to learn it. Her topic turns out to be relevant here in an interesting way.

We were talking about metaphors, and what they do. Generally speaking, a metaphor is a comparison of sorts: it draws two things into a relationship that weren't in that relationship before. I'll include similes here, because I'm not interested in the technical distinction of "this is that" versus "this is like that." A metaphor has two parts. Those parts play different roles. If we say "I could get lost in the midnight of her hair," we're relating hair, and midnight. One of these is concrete, an object in the story we know basic parameters of but are looking to learn the quality of. The other is more abstract - midnight has lots of qualities. But when the two are in relation, we search for ways that they might be the same. For that phrase, I get that her hair is black (no question), but the addition of "lost" particularly brings in some more connotations of midnight - a sense of space that makes me think she has lots of hair, but also hints something to me about the relation between people.

A metaphor makes new meaning. It puts two things in juxtaposition and challenges us to create a meaningful relation between them. It can act like a bridge for us to understand more about something familiar than we did before, or to reach for new meanings that we haven't yet seen.

A parable, then, is a metaphor on a larger scale. It creates relations between people and challenges us to see the relation between it and our own lives. This is where the folklore angle comes in for me, because folklore to me is a fundamental activity of creating meaning.

The activities we engage in when we understand metaphor and parables are very basic to human minds and to how we understand the world. They aren't flowery extras that you learn in English class. They are forces of meaning much greater than that, which have existed throughout human history and even earlier - imagine how flat and dimensionless life would be without them! And imagine also how difficult it would be to reach for significance amidst unfamiliar things and experiences, without the tools of understanding that metaphor and parable provide. Metaphor is one of the driving engines behind proverbs, for example - and proverbs are I think intended to influence behavior. Janice Hardy uses them wonderfully in her book "The Shifter."

Before I go, I need to talk about the role of metaphor and parable in fantasy and science fiction writing. I read an interesting article here about moss trolls - it talks about the problem that arises when you are letting people in a fantasy environment use metaphors willy-nilly and then have to make up all kinds of world details to back it up.

Metaphors are your friends, but not just in the way you think (I'll let this extend to parable, but I don't use parable as much as metaphor). People use metaphors on all kinds of levels, not just to describe objects or places but also to describe life situations and to understand interactions, etc. So by all means, let your characters in your fantasy or science fiction scenario do this as well. Watch out for moss trolls - make sure that the metaphors you use aren't cosmetic, but are really integrated into your world. And that means you can't assume your characters are going to use the same metaphors that you do. They'll use the ones that make sense to them. How do they conceptualize life and struggle? They'll put it into a metaphor that is grounded in their world.

Rulii in my story "Cold Words" understood his whole life and goals in terms of hunting. Where do their stories come from? Nya in The Shifter has a background of proverbs and stories about the Saints that she draws on constantly. I have a character who lives in an underground city and has never gone to the surface of her planet. So when I send her up there for the first time, I have her describe what she sees in terms of what she knows. Human beings on Earth have a tendency to describe mundane things and compare them to objects in nature. She doesn't know nature, so I turn the metaphors backwards. A field of grass billows like bedsheets. A lake gleams like a clean plate. It feels totally different from the metaphors we'd use because it's been turned around.

A great example of folklore/parable being used to this effect comes from Ursula K. LeGuin's classic novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. She interweaves stories of the local people into her main narrative, to marvelous effect. The stories she relates give dimension to these people, helping to establish the subtleties of their morality and the grounding of their behavior in a way that simple description never could - and since this aspect of the people is central to the main conflict, the stories contribute beautifully to her purpose.

Metaphor and parable are integral to all stories, on more than one level - indeed, the stories we write are in one sense parables themselves. It's cool if you can look at your story in that light, and see the kinds of layered meanings you're creating. I hope that in some small way, this post helps you to do that.


Hayley, thanks again for suggesting this topic, and I'm sorry you had to wait so long for me to get to it. Josephine, thank you for all the illuminating discussions of your work.

Defining Words

I read an interesting article this week - I think it came from the Chicago Tribune originally. The article was called "Redefining Definition," and it was about the future of dictionaries in the age of the internet.

Do you remember your vocabulary lists from high school (or earlier)? Take a word, look it up in the dictionary, and use it in a sentence? How often did you find that the definition didn't really tell you what you needed to know to create your sentence right?

I consider myself pretty good with words. Better now, of course, but I was always decent with them, and I still had trouble with this. I remember using "aggravate" in the sense of, "My brother really aggravates me sometimes," and getting dinged for it. But the fact was, I couldn't grasp "aggravate" based on the dictionary definition alone.

Writing definitions is apparently quite an art form. The writers collect as many examples as they can of the word being used in context, and then based on this try to come up with something succinct that captures the word's meaning. It's amazing that they can do it, and the reason they have to is that paper dictionaries are limited in their length.

As this article mentioned, the internet changes the game by removing the need for succinctness. In fact, it suggests that an internet resource would allow people to behave in the same way as the definition-writers: to see a list of examples of the word so they could formulate a definition - or at least, have a better understanding of the definition as it has been phrased.

I generally agree with this, though some might argue that kids will scavenge the examples for their own assignments. This is, after all, the way we form the meanings of words in our own minds - by concatenating the contexts in which we've seen them.

I actually attempt to pull this trick sometimes in stories, and you might too. Have you ever created a word to represent a complex concept, not really defined it explicitly but let people watch it play out to figure out what it means? That's what I'm talking about. I'm also talking about getting readers to re-interpret words that they already know. If you've ever used an alternate point of view, alien or antagonist, to interpret things that should be normal as strange and vice versa, you may be doing it there, too.

It's something to think about.

Does your story carry a message?

Does your story have a message? You know, a meaning hidden inside it, something to say about life, the universe and everything?

Hey, I'm not telling you it needs one. There's something really annoying about a preachy story, isn't there? The funny thing is, though, your story may have a message even if you don't intend it to. Message is one of those things that sneaks in sometimes, hidden in the parallels between the plot for the humans and the plot for the aliens, or in small mentions here and there throughout the story.

Really it's a sort of "show-versus-tell" issue. Don't stick your message in my face, but if you can weave it in, I might appreciate it...

In any case, message is a good thing to watch out for, because patterns often form in a story when the author isn't really thinking about them consciously. If you can keep an eye out for them, though, you can very likely make them stronger and more effective, or adjust them to keep them from getting too preachy, etc. Here are some things which may contribute to a message (in rough order from most to least preachy):

1. The narrator delivering the message directly. (This is "moral of the story" type stuff).
2. A character delivering the message to another character.
3. A character coming to a conclusion based on a sequence of events which relates to the main conflict and its resolution.
4. A character coming to a conclusion based on a sequence of events which is peripheral to the main conflict.
5. A character behaving in a principled way throughout the story (not necessarily related to the main conflict).
6. Evidence for a message appearing in concentrated form in descriptions of scene or setting.
7. Evidence for a message appearing in dilute form (here and there) in the narrative.

As far as 6 and 7 go, "evidence" can be as little as a word here, a word there - an association between an emotional state and a location, etc. What makes it a pattern is that it recurs. I like to use a version of the "rule of three" to help me decide whether I'm creating a pattern. If a word or phrase or association occurs once, it will become part of the subconscious background as people continue reading forward. If it occurs twice, they will typically notice that it is there. If it occurs three times, it means something. If you think about it mathematically, this is how we used to plot lines. Find one point on the line. Okay, now plot another point on the line. Great - it looks like a line, but let's just check to make sure that our conclusion is correct by plotting one last point on the line. Three points and we're sure.

Once you have your eye out for this, you can start to use it. The rule of three for humor basically says that two points set up an expectation, and the third is your punch line where you break the expectation or twist it in a funny way. You can decide whether you want it to mean something that the boy sits and thinks in his father's chair. If you don't want the pattern, you can break it before you get to three. If you see something twice and you want readers to be able to carry some kind of evidence forward, then you can do it one more time.

People look for meaning subconsciously. It's just something that human beings do. Use this to your advantage if you can.

At this point I'd like to turn the topic in a slightly different, but related, direction. Have you ever asked yourself whether every scene in a story has to mean something?

I was talking with my son about this yesterday, because he was playing a video game, walked into a "room" and then left it without looking for anything. I said to him, "Niall, don't you think that room was there for a reason? Why did you walk out of it without looking for some way that it might challenge or help you?"

The way I think about stories, I feel that every scene has to be "doing" something. This is particularly true for short stories, where you have very few words to carry your plot and character arcs, message, etc. In fact, I prefer it if every single sentence is "doing" something!

I often notice in a quest story if an event seems not to be doing anything for the characters or their story - it makes me impatient. I'll also notice if a similar scene happens twice over in a story. If you're setting up a pattern, like a pattern of three tests the hero/heroine has to pass, that's fine. But if I feel déjà vu, and there isn't a pattern, I start to wonder what the point is.

I have a friend who tells me that life isn't patterned, and that lots of stuff happens that doesn't mean anything. It's true - the events in our life don't come to us in a pattern. However, when we relate them, we turn them into patterns, and stories. We look for evidence in the chaos to tell us that we're learning or progressing in some way. There is even a form of therapy that centers around creating narratives to get control over traumatic experiences. So in a way, if you're using your scenes deliberately to defeat the idea of pattern, that's a different kind of message - a deliberate meaning about chaos and the unpredictability of life.

It doesn't necessarily matter what the meaning or the message is. It may be buried deep. But if you can keep your eye out for it, you can make it work for you, and not the other way around.

It's something to think about.

Characters and Direction

The responses to my last post really got me thinking about characters and their relation to a story.

Characters have always felt very real to me, as though they were my friends and not simply the creations of my imagination. I often discover that characters I designed as mere walk-ons will end up taking on greater importance as a story progresses. And I do feel that they have wills of their own, because when I submerge myself in them, I feel their voices and their desires more strongly than I do my authorial planning.

Often when I'm having trouble getting through a scene, I discover that what is missing is a deep sense of what one of the characters needs. Sometimes that missing point is a sense of the judgment of the point of view character, and other times it's the motivation of the other person in the conversation (as happened recently with the romantic lead in my novel).

I originally started writing short stories as a way to get to know characters who couldn't be point of view characters in the novels I was writing, but whom I wanted to know better. This means that when I first wrote short stories, they felt like vignette snippets from a larger piece of work, and I needed to do a lot of work to grasp the structure of a stand-alone short story. But I did find that going to the trouble of creating a voice for a character helped me to understand them better for the purposes of both the short story and the novel. My main bad guy from the Varin world, the Eminence Nekantor, became a completely different character when I got close enough to figure out precisely how he thinks. Now I find that I love a really challenging character voice - like the mentally ill Nekantor or the alien Rulii - even when it can take me an hour to get into the proper head space to write the voice fluently.

It can sometimes be difficult to know which character to use for the primary backbone of a story. Janice Hardy was the one who really drove the critical criterion home to me: it's a question of stakes. The primary point of view must belong to the person who has the most to gain or lose in the course of the story. So while dallying in other viewpoints can be instructive and help you to flesh out a story, it's not necessarily what will get the story written. To extend the backbone metaphor, if you don't have your backbone in the right place, it's hard to know where to hang the flesh so the body will actually work properly. I wrote about half of a novel believing that my backbone character was one person, and then found it petering out. Only some time later did I realize that I'd picked the wrong person. Now that I have the focus placed correctly, the outline of the story is clear to me from beginning to end, and I can't wait to write it.

Janice and I got talking after my last post about the question of letting a character take charge of the story's direction. She pointed out to me that what I had described as letting the story follow the character was somewhat misleading, because it could have been construed as meaning that the story had no direction and rambled on wherever the character wanted to go. Of course, I thought, that wasn't what I meant. Janice has a way of knowing precisely what the stakes of a story are, how to escalate them dramatically, and where and how she wants to bring the story to an end - but she's amazingly flexible about the details of how she gets there, and that's where she listens to where her characters want to go.

There are a lot of story markets out there that talk about how they look for "character driven" stories. This is opposed to "plot driven" stories. I find that if I don't care about a character, I don't care about the story. This is something different from disliking a character. I can hate them, as long as I care about what happens and whether they get what they want or not. The decisions the character makes, and the actions the character takes, must critically affect what happens in the story, particularly the final outcome. Yes, there's room for external influences - attacks, or natural disasters, or simple bad luck - but these have to be present in conjunction with the character's goals and drives, or the story will just feel like a lot of meaningless stuff happening.

The idea of goals and stakes for a character is independent of the choice of first or third person point of view, or degree of narrative distance. A story usually has a character trying to achieve something, or trying to make some kind of decision. The character is our guide to how to feel and understand the world in which he or she moves.

Love them or hate them, we need to care about our characters.

Animal Metaphors

I'm always amazed how important animals are to us. From Aesop's fables, to gods in the form of cats or snakes, to Brer Rabbit tales - the list goes on and on.

One of the first things children learn is how to make the onomatopoetic sounds that animals make. They learn to sing Old MacDonald and list out animals on the farm. They learn about lions and tigers and bears and elephants. Children in Japan do this also, as do children in France - and I'm sure in many other places also.

As an adult when I was learning foreign languages, I often wondered why it was so terribly important to learn the names of animals. After all, when you're an adult, and you're not likely to meet a lion in the street, why do you need to know what it's called or what sound it makes?

But animals are the basis of metaphors in every language I know.

We know not only what a snake is, and the names of different types of snakes, but also what kind of behavior is associated with snakes and their ilk. We toss off comparisons of people to animals - pigs, dogs, birds, etc. - constantly. Animals also are associated with emotional states like fear, or with personality attributes like slyness.

This is a resource that is often underused in science fiction and fantasy worlds. I have a hard time imagining a population that did not take inspiration in its animals, simply because those animals are resources, by virtue of their interconnectedness in the food chain of any land. I can think of two ways to approach this (off the top of my head).

One, create an animal that is specially relevant to your population for some reason, give it a name, and then start exploring how it could be used expressively in the people's language. In my forthcoming story Cold Words (Analog), for example, the protagonist Rulii compares a human's eyes to those of "the cornered gharralli."

Two, take an existing animal that you are using in your fantasy or science fictional setting, and look for a new twist on its significance. In my Varin world, cats are symbols of selfishness, and I've also designed a species of dog called the tunnel-hound, which is associated with dirtiness.

Take an opportunity to look around for places you can make these connections, and it will help your world take on new dimension.

Getting story ideas

It seems every time I turn around I'm seeing discussions of the question, "Where do you get your ideas?"

Just the other day after my post on hidden stories everywhere, my friend Eric Del Carlo had an excellent thought on the subject, which was basically, "everywhere - just pay attention." This is certainly true of his work; he gets ideas from all over and turns them into cool stories.

But everyone pays attention in different ways. The things that stand out to one person may not stand out to another; the ideas that might come together to layer into a story for one might leave another totally cold.

I got an idea this morning while I was walking my son to school and heard a family speaking Chinese to one another as they got out of the car. When I heard them, I was immediately reminded of the most useful thing I know how to say in Chinese, namely "I don't speak Chinese." It then occurred to me that the phrase I've learned is in Mandarin, but that this family might be speaking another dialect - if I were to say it to them, they'd probably understand, but it wouldn't be what they consider their family's language. And then a connection was made, for no reason I can really explain. I thought of how I'd just recently blogged about the idea of a lingua franca - thinking at the time that I should look for a story to place in such an environment - and began to wonder what it would be like if that language really wasn't the native/comfort language of any of its speakers.

At that moment, I imagined a character. A person who has learned the lingua franca in order to move into a community, and then discovers when he/she gets there that it isn't the "real" language of anyone he/she meets.

It's not a story. Not yet. But it's an appropriate language concept for a story in my Allied Systems universe, so now I'm going to be looking around after this for other ideas to attach to it. Ideas that might tell me who precisely this character is, and what he/she wants, but can't get, because of this language issue. Defining the stakes is critical to having a story to tell, rather than just a situation to describe.

Once I have a sense of stakes I can elaborate more and begin playing with details of alien physiology, environment, langauge and culture. Basically, the million more layers this will need before I can start writing. And I'm pretty sure that once I'm finished, not only will it be a story, but that it will be entirely my own story.

Originality of ideas is always a tough question. Some say there are only ten story ideas in the world (or so). As I read, and watch movies, and go through life, I encounter lots of story ideas that because of the fact that I'm experiencing them, have obviously been done before. I feel lucky to have my bizarre and esoteric (I say this fondly) academic background, because it helps me to have a new perspective on whatever ideas I encounter. Some ideas are clichéd, and hard to revive. But you can't necessarily predict when something familiar will feel old, or when it will feel classic, and a lot of that is in the execution.

Think about what your experience gives you that no one else has - the insights, the perspective, the attitude, whatever it might be - and try to bring that to bear on your search for ideas. An idea someone else thinks is novel may not catch fire for you simply because it doesn't mesh well with the unique heart of your creativity. Or on the other hand an idea that is often considered a bit passé might wake something in you that sends you to your desk to write fiendishly, because it opens up that opportunity for you to show the world what you have that no one else does.

Through it all, keep your senses open, and ideas will come to you.

Hidden Stories Everywhere

I'm back from Yosemite! And I learned some really cool things while I was there. We went on a great tour one day and I learned some of the stories behind the native American names of places in the valley. I love this kind of stuff - in part because I love stories, and in part because I think any place with a long history will have hidden stories in it.

Hidden story #1: Yosemite
It turns out that Yosemite is not the name of the tribe that lived in the Yosemite area; it was the name of the chief's family. And it means "grizzly bear fighter." The tribal group that lived there was the Ahwahneechee, which means "gaping mouth people." The Ahwahnee hotel is named after this group.

Hidden story #2: Tule takanula = El Capitan
El Capitan, as some of you may already know, is the biggest single granite rock face in the world. Its name means "little inchworm." A little counterintuitive, I know, but it comes from a great story. The story is that two baby black bears sat down on a granite rock to have a nap, and while they were asleep it grew and grew into this gigantic rock face - trapping them at the top. The mother bear tried to climb it in order to rescue them, and left the tracks of her claws on the face, but was unable to get them down. The deer and many other animals tried, but all of them failed until - you guessed it - the inchworm gave it a shot. He climbed up the face inch by inch, and took down the baby bears one at a time. A science fiction writer might be concerned with how the inchworm was able to handle carrying a baby bear, but fortunately we're working with folklore here! Thus, the name of this giant face is that of a tiny inchworm.


Hidden story #3: Pohono Falls = Bridal Veil Falls
Bridal Veil falls is very lovely, and I have heard that when the wind blows right in certain seasons, it can blow the entire waterfall up into spray like raising a veil. Its native American name is much more sinister: it means "evil spirit wind." The story behind it is that once long ago a woman of the Ahwahnee was standing up at the top of the falls when a gust of wind rose up from the lake above and pushed her over the edge. Ever after that, it was believed that an evil spirit resided in that lake, and that it would send out winds to push the unwary over the edge. Maybe the white settlers thought that was a bit too macabre when they renamed it - but I thought it was cool.

Finding stories like this always inspires me. As you work with a fantasy or science fictional world, think about its history. Names for places can come from the people who settled a place, or they might come from stories associated with that place. People have stories about the places where they live - even the newest. I'm guessing that the people who built a space station might give an interesting name to a place on the station where a terrible accident occurred, for example. At the very least, thinking about a place's history and trying to reflect that history in names will give a sense of depth to the world. And you may even feel inspired to give additional significance to the history of a place so that it affects the course of the story you are writing. All worlds are built in layers of individual experience over time; it's worth taking the time to explore the possibilities in your own writing.

Story Structure

Whenever I take one of my "ridiculously close looks," I dig into the word-by-word construction of sentences, because reader sensations like point of view and mood are built up in the reader's mind from the tiniest little pieces. This is something I studied before I started writing seriously, so I had it as a kind of resource, but it took me a while to figure out how to use it for my own purposes.

In fact, it was the larger-scale structure of stories that was more difficult to grasp. I think this is probably because of how hard it is to back off of words and sentences and grasp their larger-scale function. Backing off and editing larger structure can be painful, too, because it can mean that sentences we love are completely eliminated.

I had a small epiphany the other day, after teaching my third grade writing workshop. I had written out a series of "story parts," essentially, functions for sentences in a story, and I was trying to have the kids see what part each of their sentences played in the story.

The stories looked something like this (I made this one up myself):

Ouch!
I got hurt one day. I was eight years old. It all started when I was riding my bike in the street in front of my house. I didn't see a big rock and I ran over it. I crashed on the ground. I hurt my knee and cried. My brother called my mom and she gave me a band aid. Then I felt all better. I was glad they were there to help me.

The list of functions (with the sentences from my story in brackets) looked something like this:

Title: the name of the story
[Ouch!]

Opening (Topic Sentence): tells what your story will be about
[I got hurt one day.]

Setting: talks about the time and place of the story and creates a picture for people to see
[I was eight years old. It all started when I was riding my bike in the street in front of my house.]

Lead-in to the main event: sets up the causes of the main event [I didn't see a big rock and I ran over it.]

Main event: what the story is all about (connects to topic sentence)
[I crashed on the ground.]

Consequences of the main event: what happened after or because of the main event
[I hurt my knee and cried. My brother called my mom and she gave me a band aid.]

How you felt about the main event: your feelings about the event.
[Then I felt all better. I was glad they were there to help me.]

The epiphany I came to was this: on some level, this is still what story structure is like. I've explained to these kids that it doesn't really matter how many sentences they give to each function so long as all are present and feel balanced - and in fact, it doesn't matter how the functions are executed either. Maybe your opening is actually one topic sentence - or maybe it's a whole scene, executed in the height of the show-don't-tell style. But it still has to tell the reader what the coming story will be about.

The variability of the model is actually quite high, allowing for great differences in execution. And in some sense I think the model may be almost fractal for longer works, with small sequences of the same kinds of functions within each larger piece. But when you're writing and editing a story, it's still a good idea to ask yourself: what function does this piece play within the context of the larger story? What other pieces of the story have similar function, and should these occur together? Is the amount of material given to each function well-balanced?

Outlining is one technique that gets close to these functional questions, because it forces me to take the long view on a story and look at how it plays out overall. But on its own, outlining doesn't address the function questions, and I find it tends to guide me more to consider the chronology of the plot (of course, this is not a bad thing to consider!). Maybe the next time I outline a story I should make parenthetical notes to myself about what each piece is doing for the story, rather than just what happens in it.

Hm, I think I will.

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...