This week's Worldbuilding Hangout

This week's worldbuilding hangout will be tomorrow, Wednesday November 9 at 11am PST. We will be talking about Gender in Language. Please come and join us on Google+! Basic prerequisite is a Google+ account, but with no microphone/no camera we can manage workarounds. I hope you will join us.

Magic Systems: a Google+ Worldbuilding Hangout Report

Last week's hangout was a discussion of magic systems. I was joined by Glenda Pfeiffer, Jaleh Dragich, and Harry Markov. Not all the computer cameras were working, but we had a great audio chat.

Since Harry was the one who had initially proposed the topic of Magic Systems, he got us started with the terrific point that the core of any magic system is the source of the magic in question. Knowing where magic comes from is critical to understanding its properties. The most common model is to treat magic like a (somewhat unusual) resource, almost a material in and of itself, that comes in finite quantities and can be manipulated in various ways. If a deity is the source of magic in your world, then the use of magic will very likely be faith-related. If magic use is hereditary, then bloodlines and social structure will very likely be critical to its use.

Harry explained the example of one of his own works, in which blood sorcerers had powers that came from splintered pieces of the soul of a single magical creature who had come to Earth. Which piece you were in possession of (heart, eye, etc.) completely dictated what kinds of magic you were able to work, such as when the person with the eye soul-piece was able to do seeing magic. In his system, objects were able to be affected magically if they had a particular "frequency" of magical vibration.

It's a good idea to avoid all-powerful characters. They may be tempting, but they're far less interesting. Magic use generally has a cost, whether that be in blood, in simple fatigue, in loss of soul or sanity, etc. Readers find it helpful to be able to anticipate what might be possible in the magic system, but if anything is potentially possible, then it's hard to tell why the conflict would even occur without someone waving a hand and ending it all "by magic."

A successful magic system typically has a method of control or limitation. Harry Potter's magic system flirts along the border of being out of control, at least as I see it, because it's hard to anticipate when some new power or potion will come along and completely change what's possible. This has some advantages because few things in the world are totally uniform in their character, and it does keep us on our toes. It's also consistent with the real-world history of magical practice and the various methods that have been used for it. Needless to say, it works.

We talked about various different types of systems that we were familiar with. Jaleh talked about her work, where there is a transformed person and a mage - and how she'd thought about who had what kind of magic and how the two interacted with one another. I mentioned that there are many location-based magic systems that use specific places or lay-lines in order to govern the use of magic. Janice Hardy's The Healing Wars trilogy uses a bit of a different system: tired of seeing magicians always being weakling scholars, Janice came up with a system where enchanters have to work magical metal, and therefore are basically huge intelligent blacksmiths. Parallel to that is the natural genetic ability to heal (and move pain) by touch. Laura Anne Gilman apparently has a system where magic comes from the growing of grapes and the making of wine, where mages grow their own grapes, and drinking different wines will allow you to work different magics. My Varin world is an example of a case where I was so dissatisfied with the uncontrolled qualities of magic that I decided not to make it magic at all - the characters think it's magic because they don't understand it, but actually there are natural (if highly unusual) creatures involved in the phenomena that appear to be magical. Jaleh mentioned a system where magic came from shapes and colors around you in the environment, and each magic user had a specific shape that was their favorite - octagons, for example.

Objects and creatures can be magical, or may not be. Often the magic of objects and creatures is distinct from the magic used by people, and does not operate in the same way.

Harry remarked that magic is a vehicle to propel the story, and should be about more than just battles between wizards. He mentioned telekinesis, which can be used for all kinds of purposes. He also brought up the great point that the presence of magic in a society would have enormous cultural implications.

All the distinctions we recognize between haves and have-nots would exist in a world where magic is used. If magic is a resource, then of course some people will have more of it than others. People often portray magic as an elite power possessed by only a few. Glenda pointed out that there are some authors (like Piers Anthony in the Xanth books) who create a situation where everyone does magic but with varying levels of ability. Most people in such situations will have a tiny bit of power, and a few will have a lot. People entirely without power will be outcasts or seen as strange. Harry compared magic to nuclear power, in that it provides power, has practical applications, but can be highly dangerous and toxic.

The idea of a non-magic-using society where magic exists but is hidden in a secret world, a neighbor-world where magic users only really have dealings with other magic users, is pretty common. We see it in Harry Potter certainly, but in a lot of other contexts as well. That's actually a convenient way to minimize the effect of magic on the larger society.

If you have a society where magic is common, the effects will be much more widespread. Ask yourself what inventions we have that might have been replaced by the use of magic. Any single innovation that did not occur in your world as a result of magic would have large ongoing effects on the development of technology and society as a whole. When I was helping Janice think through some of the effects of the magic system she'd designed, we had to figure out why people wouldn't use normal medicines as an alternative to going to the magical healers - and we realized that people who used herbs and powders etc. would be seen as dangerously unreliable, possibly dirty, and definitely undesirable. On the other hand, these people do exist, and if they didn't, it would really feel like some major world piece was missing.

We talked about a few more models of magic that have been used in different contexts. Blake Charleton's Spellwright uses words in different languages for magical purposes, and confines particular magical effects to the use of any specific language. My own novel, Through This Gate, uses writing as a force of creation and each character's magic is influenced by the cultural imagination of the era from which he/she came (one character teleports like blinking, one like stepping through a curtain, one by appearing in a cloud of smoke, and another like falling through a circus trapdoor and being vaulted up into the new location). Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea books put a lot of significance on the knowledge of true names as a means of working magic. Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson books rely on the magic of the Greek gods and the intervention or non-intervention of the deities themselves (it's interesting to note that the gods have sworn a non-intervention pact; this is a form of magic control and makes the stories much more interesting!). While Percy's powers are heredity-based, some miracle-working can be based on belief (where a crisis of faith can lead to a loss of powers); either way, the identity of the sponsor god or goddess is critical in determining what kind of magic can be accomplished.

Thanks so much to Harry, Glenda, and Jaleh for coming. I had a great time chatting with you. Today's hangout will be discussing Gender in Worldbuilding, so I hope to see you at 11am today!

Manners: a Google+ Worldbuilding Hangout Report

My visitors for this hangout were Kyle Aisteach, Dale Emery, Glenda Pfeiffer, and Harry Markov. It was good to see Dale back after not seeing him for a while! Glenda had a few audio difficulties, so she doesn't appear as often as the others in this report - sorry, Glenda!

We talked about manners. What do you think when you think of manners? I asked. Kyle thought of "A comedy of manners," while Dale thought of choices you make about how to moderate interaction, and Glenda talked about greasing interaction. All of them are correct.

When I start into the topic of manners, which is one of my favorites, one of the big issues I face is that many people think just of fancy manners when you say "manners." Manners is a much bigger deal than that, for two reasons:

1. People don't ever not have manners
2. Manners are managed subconsciously

You might argue that you're very aware of manners and what you should do, and you'd be right. People are very aware of what they should do. Researchers have found that if you ask someone what they say in a particular social situation, people will tell them what they feel they should say, not what they actually say when bugged with a microphone.

Manners in your story are more than just having one prim and proper character.

We then tackled the topic by discussing two aspects of manners language that I had studied:
phatic talk (the talk whose content and meaning has less importance than the social fact that stuff is being said) and Speech Acts, which are contexts where you are "doing" something by saying it (requests, refusals, marrying two people, etc.)

Any time you perform a speech act, you are potentially insulting someone or "threatening their face." Not literally, of course - you're not likely to damage someone's visage with a refusal. However, if you think of "face" in terms of your social image, like "saving face," you'll see what I mean. There are lots of ways that people use to mitigate this possibility. If I add some nice pretty words it will make the threat softer, and protect me from this person who could potentially be very upset.

Kyle told us a very interesting story about how difficult it was for people to get women's accounts of the Titanic disaster, because it was considered rude to ask a lady about anything upsetting that had happened to her in the past. Apparently some people's stories were lost forever because whenever they were asked about it, they would get all affronted!

We asked, "How can you approach somebody? What is appropriate?" Sometimes there is a socially licensed way to approach a person. Sometimes it's easy, as when you are friends. Sometimes you can't approach that person at all, and have to use elaborate work-arounds.

Dale asked me what I meant by "elaborate work-arounds." The most common everyday example I could think of is when a girl who is not a member of a particular social clique likes a boy who is a clique member, and asks an intermediary to approach him - or even asks an intermediary to approach another clique member, who can then approach him on her behalf.

Kyle mentioned that when you see a celebrity out eating dinner, it's inappropriate to interrupt their dinner and ask for an autograph. This leads to people standing by doors, lying in wait outside the bathroom, etc. hoping that the celebrity will stray across their path in one of these socially autograph-licensed areas.

I gave an example from my current novel in progress of a servant who faces social pitfalls when trying to return to his lady the key to her diary, which has been stolen. The servant can't go to the thief and demand the key back because the thief is a more senior servant than he is. In addition, he can't take the key to his lady himself because he'd risk having her think that he had been trespassing into her private thoughts without permission (and he hasn't yet won her trust). In the end he enlists the help of the lady's son, who as a nobleman is of higher rank than the thieving servant, and who as the lady's son is someone she trusts. In the end she and her son both admire him more for his discretion. And that's one of the critical things that manners can do for you.

In this context, Kyle mentioned N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms as a great example of a story that handles subtle and complex social rules. That's one I'm going to have to seek out!

I mentioned the situation in Japan, where it's uncommon for you to meet anyone as a casual street acquaintance, and much more likely for you to be introduced to someone through correct connections. This situation makes a lot of sense if the language requires you to use different manners depending on the person's relative rank to you. How are you going to guess the rank of a person on the street if you haven't been introduced?

Kyle told the story of Saint Bernadette, who was a peasant in France who met the Virgin Mary. Apparently she knew she was in the presence of a deity because Mary addressed her in the formal "vous" form, and nobody in her life had ever addressed her in the formal!

We briefly discussed the idea of formal and informal pronouns (tu and vous in French), which is common to the Romance languages. Formerly, these pronouns used to be used as reflections of power relationships, where vous referred to someone of high rank and tu to someone of lower. However, this usage has changed over time, and now it's much more common for people to say vous for people they don't know, and tu for people they know, turning it from a power measure into a solidarity measure. According to Kyle, this is at least in part deliberate, as an attempt to move away from old definitions of social class.

At that point I had a chance to introduce another really useful academic concept about politeness: the difference between Positive Politeness and Negative Politeness. The adjectives used here are not the most useful in reflecting how this works, but because it can be really helpful in developing social interactions, I'll explain.

Negative Politeness is the one we most often think of. This is the kind of politeness which involves saying fancy things in order to make sure another person knows we didn't intend to step on them in any way. The core idea here is that the person "doing" negative politeness is emphasizing how willing they are to protect the other person's autonomy, and their right to do things unhindered.

Positive Politeness is the opposite in that it involves getting closer to a person, rather than moving farther away. Autonomy is not the idea here; alignment is. This is the kind of politeness which involves approaching someone and saying something to make sure they know we're on their side. The things we say can seem impolite, especially when looked at from the perspective of negative politeness which relies on autonomy.

Different people, and different subcultures use these two different styles. I have friends who expect negative politeness from me, and others who expect positive politeness. I have helped friends through situations where someone tried to use positive politeness with a person who expected negative, and inadvertently offended them by crossing their personal social boundaries.

At this point, Harry joined us, and we engaged in some greetings and other social smoothing!

As we move through our lives, we are constantly called upon to take social stances - to act like we're members of this social group or that, to approach someone in a humble or a friendly or an authoritative way. I find it really interesting how I have to change my voice and my mode of expression when I go from chit-chatting with my kids and their carpool friend in the car to telling them they've crossed the line and they need to settle down or I won't be able to drive!

Manners are everywhere. They're in your stories, too. Just take an example of an interaction from a story that you're writing and take a closer look. Play it out. Look at what is at stake socially.

Dale mentioned a context in which someone in a position of service, i.e. someone who was socially obliged to carry out another person's orders, was asked to "promise" to do something. Promising is a prime example of a speech act, but unexpected in this context because carrying out an order is something that should be so normal it's unnoticeable here. To ask someone who serves you for a promise, you'd need to be asking them for something that is well outside the boundaries of their normal service.

How many stories do you know about oathbreakers?
Harry mentioned the unbreakable oath taken by Snape in the Harry Potter books.

Dale gave a rather fascinating example of manners in a workplace culture, where if someone suggested you take on a job or a function, you were essentially forbidden to refuse. However, you were not necessarily expected to succeed in carrying out the job or function. You were only obliged to take it on.

I mentioned an example that my husband shared with me: if you receive an invitation from the Queen of England, you can't refuse it. If for some reason (illness or disaster) you can't attend the event she has invited you to, you gratefully accept her invitation, and then say, "unfortunately, I won't be able to make it..."

Manners are everywhere. They are in social restrictions on behavior, approaches, and speech. They are in group membership behaviors. They are in ceremonies and rituals. I encourage you to think about all of these things as you write. It's very easy to fall into a kind of theoretical stance when writing, to think about your world from the standpoint of the author and say, "I have these social groups and this gamepiece is blue, this gamepiece is red, this gamepiece is yellow..." Take it further. Look closely at how the different groups are expected to interact, and what manners they need to follow in different situations.

My Varin world has special greetings that people use to express respect for the people who are of higher caste rank, and the group asked me to explain some details of the world. Essentially, each group has a different job function (officers, public/private servants, laborers, knowledge workers, etc) and each group is proud in its identity and the way in which it keeps life in Varin running. "We've got the real power here, no matter what anyone else thinks; Varin wouldn't survive without us" is the general attitude. The greetings thus reflect the perceived core value held by each caste.
To greet a merchant: "May riches spring from your footsteps."
To greet a laborer: "Fearless labor is the foundation of prosperity."
To greet a knowledge worker: "The focused mind is the sustainer of life."
To greet a knowledge worker who graduated from the University: "May you take your place in the Record of Great Masters."
To greet a public servant: "May your honorable service earn its just reward."
To greet a soldier/officer: "The heart that is valiant triumphs over all."
There are no special greetings for the nobility, to whom caste is more or less invisible, or for the undercaste, because nobody is low enough to owe them a polite greeting. I decided on these greetings very early on in my world design, but they made a great basis for later refinement of the intercaste interactions. If you can start your manners on a basic level, you can move on from there and increase subtlety as you go.

Thank you to everyone who came for the discussion. We decided that today's discussion would be about Magic Systems. We'll be meeting at 11am PDT today on Google+, so I hope to see you there!

Worldbuilding Hangout on Google+ Tomorrow

Here's another announcement for tomorrow's worldbuilding hangout on Google+. We're going to meet at 11am PDT to discuss magic systems. All you need to do is go to Google+ and look up my profile (Juliette Wade) and the hangout should come out right at the top. Remember, you don't need to have a working camera or microphone to participate, and you don't need to be exactly on time. We'll fold you in by whatever means, even if it's by IM chat. These discussions are really thought-provoking and inspiring, I find - they're a great opportunity for us to share ideas. I hope to see you there!

Google+ Worldbuilding Hangout Report: Morals & Values

We had a smaller group last week for our discussion of morals and values. I was joined by Jaleh Dragich and Glenda Pfeiffer.

Jaleh started our discussion by mentioning a multiplayer role-playing game featuring a team of people trying to stop an invasion of Earth - and hampered by the fact that all team members didn't share the same sense of morality. She specifically mentioned a Victorian English player who would get caught up over how little clothing her more modern character was wearing ("showing a scandalous amount of leg").

I thought this was a very perceptive place to start, because morals and values stand out most when they are put in a context of contrast - either between different members of a group, or between readers and characters. They are also a huge potential source of conflict (as they are in our real lives). Imagine a story where a priest and a pirate had to work together!

It's easier when working with fantasy or science fiction to set up groups with a huge contrast of moral value systems, but also important to remember that there is no such thing as a mono-culture. Even within groups who ostensibly possess the same morality, not everyone will agree. I thought immediately of sectarian disputes within religions, and all of the wars and terrible acts they have inspired - indeed, these have also inspired world-changing acts like the departure of the pilgrims for the Americas.

The second question we discussed was where morals and values come from. A society can have laws, but those are generally a later development that follows on a preexisting set of societal values and traditions, which may or may not be religious (indeed, it's hard to separate societal values and religious values).

So how do you go about creating morals and values in a world you are designing?

Glenda suggested that we consider that there were often practical purposes at the root of certain behavioral prohibitions (or other guidelines), and that these may fossilize while the world around the people continues to change. So in creating a world it's useful to consider what the initial conditions of environment and food production were, for example. "Be fruitful and multiply" is a pretty good admonition for farmers who need more laborers to help them bring in the harvest, and would probably also work well (but for different reasons) for hunter/gatherers in a position where child mortality might be high. Once we hit the post-industrial age, however, having a lot of children becomes less clearly beneficial and more problematic.

Leaders, and elite groups, can also have a large effect on societal values. Jaleh mentioned the influence of charismatic leaders whose beliefs can influence the larger society. There can also be aspirational values established by small groups, which make other people want to emulate them, but may be impractical for people who are not members of the elite themselves (I think here of certain types of conspicuous consumption in our world). Glenda gave a good example of the value of pale skin, which started out as a sign of wealth when people who had to work spent a lot more time outside - but which, now that industrial laborers work indoors, has changed to valuing tanning as a sign of wealth and leisure.

One question you might want to ask yourself is this: how do you define a good person, a good member of society? That definition will change depending on the social subgroup you ask. Each group will have specific ideas of the way a person "should be" in order to contribute in an ideal way.

Glenda mentioned manners here. The question of manners had already come up in passing once before, but they can be seen as critical indicators of whether one is a "good person." Using the wrong set of manners, and being "rude," can easily turn into a serious moral condemnation. We'll talk more about this in today's discussion (so come and visit!).

Outsiders coming in to join a group can give conflicting signals because they are not accustomed to the behavioral rules of the group. Jaleh noted that manners are a way to demonstrate that you have the proper morals.

In fact, two people can have the same basic moral code but their way of expressing it through behavior may differ significantly. People very often have a relationship with their own morality - they may hold a set of beliefs, and have a way that they know they should behave, but they may or may not be able to achieve this, and this can fundamentally influence their own self-value.

One interesting thing to do in a story is to take two people who ostensibly have the same morality system, and put them in a situation of stress. Chances are not bad that under those conditions the two people will diverge significantly in their decisions and behavior in spite of those basic moral similarities. Glenda mentioned a Regency context in which one person was more interested in preserving form and appearances, while another person was more interested in "doing the right thing" regardless of appearances; this meant they dealt with the poor very differently.

Jaleh told us a really interesting story about two monks who encountered a woman beside a river. Neither one was supposed to "mix" with women, but one of the two monks decided to help the woman by carrying her across the river. He carried her across, set her down, and she went on her way, but once the two monks continued walking, the one who had not touched the woman started criticizing the other for helping her. The first monk then said "I carried her across and set her down. So why are you still carrying her [mentally]?"

Not only was this story a good example of divergent behavior based on the same morals, but it also demonstrated that morals are often passed on through stories. It's definitely worth thinking through what the parables and morality tales of your world are, and what kinds of language are associated with morals and values. Is there such a word as "scandalous" or "indecent"? What other judgments might use special words in your world?

Our last major topic was the question of placing value on objects/substances. This phenomenon ranges from assessing whether an object is generally valuable or not, to imbuing certain objects with spirit or with other sacred value (around which there may be considerable ritual).

I mentioned that in Japan's history there was a period where Portuguese traders brought Christianity to Japan, and gained quite a large number of followers, but when the local Daimyo realized that Christianity was becoming imperialist and wasn't simply going to be an additional religion that people could follow (since Shinto and Buddhism were side by side), they decided to stamp it out. This led to a period of terrible violence against both the Portuguese and the Japanese Christians. The relevance of this to sacred objects is that one of the tests for seeing whether a Japanese person was secretly Christian was forcing them to walk over an image of the Crucifixion. If they didn't see the image as possessing sacred value, the idea was, then they would walk over it no problem. Other images and objects have had sacred value throughout history, like the holy grail, relics of the saints, the Shroud of Turin, temples and statues of all sorts. Some places come to be imbued with similar value because of the depth of their sacred history. Glenda mentioned a rebellion in India where Hindu troops refused to use their guns because they had been told that the black paper around their shells (which had to be torn with the teeth) had pork fat on it.

This kind of thing is so potent and so omnipresent in our society that I urge writers to try to include something like it in their stories. The lack of any such significance (regardless of whether it is religious or based on some other belief system) will likely seem strange. Thus, unless that strangeness is a deliberate choice, it's good to think these things through for your world.

The question of pork fat also brought us to the value of foods. Is there a concept of clean vs. unclean in your society? Where does it lie? Did the fact that one food isn't acceptable to your people arise from some condition in their early history where the food could not be prepared properly/safely? Might it have been based on an injunction against over-fishing? Or based on the seasonal algae bloom?

Often, even when the original purpose of a prohibition or of a moral rule has been lost, the practice that arose from it has come to have inherent social value. In fact, it can serve as a marker of membership in the social group that holds this particular set of morals. We thought of both the Holocaust and the Spanish Inquisition as examples of people outside a religious group using social practices to single people out for persecution.

Would you be willing to break a taboo to save your own life? Would your character?

An example of a very common substance that gets a special value is water. I wrote about this on the blog once before (A different value: water). Is it for drinking? Is it for bathing? Is it, as in the novel Dune, your entire earthly wealth and something to be preserved at all costs (but wasted extravagantly by the people in power)? Is it something that should never be wasted because of frequent droughts? Or something that should be used to purify yourself and the area around your business?

The list of possible things goes on and on. We also mentioned how often people bathe, and whether a person's smell has social value, as in Babylon 5's Mars domes where any kind of strong smell was not approved of.

It was a good discussion, and at the end we decided to move over into the arena of Manners for this week. I hope you will stop by and join us later this morning.

This week's Worldbuilding Hangout

Happy Monday, everyone! This is just to let you know that this week I will be having a worldbuilding hangout on Google+, as usual, at 11am PDT. The topic of discussion will be "Manners." This is one of my favorite topics! So please come and see me. Do also feel welcome to comment with any logistical questions you may have about joining the discussion.

Google+ Worldbuilding Hangout Report: Economics

This is a report of the discussion about worldbuilding and economics held on Wednesday, October 5th on Google+. It was our biggest worldbuilding hangout yet, and we had such a good time that we ran over a few minutes. I was joined by Jaleh Dragich, Barbara Webb, Amy Sundberg, Glenda Pfeiffer, Heidi Vlach, and Kyle Aisteach.

I started off the discussion by asking a question that is often neglected in economic worldbuilding: "Where do the rich people get their money?" If they are nobility, do they own the land? Do they then take a cut of whatever is produced off that land? Of course, there is always the option of taxes, but we got to those later in the discussion

Economics is a battleground - as we see in real life - and as Glenda said "everything is economics." It underlies a lot of the other features of worldbuilding and societies, so watch out for it as you construct your world. Barbara brought up the idea of how economics underlies food. If there's a mismatch between the climate and the food being eaten, such as rich delicacies or jungle fruit being consumed in a desert, then you need to think of another resource that desert offers which the desert people can trade in order to get that lovely food. Jaleh mentioned the Dragon Jousters, how they had supplies in the desert because refugees to that area brought with them herbs and spices that they could then trade. Heidi took us from there onto the idea of trade pathways, and how they bring resources to an area. Economics and trade can be the reason that a particular city exists at all. It happened on the silk road, which as we observed runs through some pretty dangerous and inhospitable territory, but which happened to be the way to trade most effectively through the area. I mentioned also Route 66 and the movie Cars, for the way that cities can spring up when a road leads through them, and die when it doesn't (mind you, I got laughs for this, but it did fit!).

After that we turned to the topic of money. If you're designing a money system for your world, whatever you use as currency has to have some key characteristics: it has to be portable, divisable, and its value must be agreed upon as verifiable by the people engaged in the trade. In a sense it's a glorified form of barter (thanks for mentioning this, Heidi), where everyone has simply agreed to use money as an intermediate item to trade for. The "default 3 coins" may be copper silver and gold because of Dungeons and Dragons, or they may be bronze silver and gold because of the Olympics, but they don't have to be. In our own real world history rice has been used as a currency, as have salt and cowrie shells. When I mentioned the way that Europeans traded beads for land with the American tribes of the northeast, that brought us to the idea of problems with currencies. Those beads were a problem because they were not part of a larger system of trade in which beads would be accepted by other groups. Wouldn't it be interesting, we thought, to have a story involving several different groups with incompatible currency systems? What would happen then? Glenda mentioned the solution some would take, which would be enforcing the system with guns or weaponry. It's not the only option, I'm sure.

I mentioned the island of Dejima, which was off the coast of Nagasaki in Japan and for about 400 years was the only point of legal contact between Japan and the "Western world," mainly in this case the Dutch. Through this tiny conduit, goods were allowed to pass, and the influence of the Dutch can in fact be seen in Nagasaki architecture to this day - fascinating, because of the difference with Tokyo, where all of the Western overlay is more modern.

Glenda brought up a critical question for those working with trade in science fiction contexts - that of the value of a commodity versus the cost of travel. When faster-than-light transportation occurs simply and easily because of quasi-magical things like dilithium crystals or "jump points," we can easily gloss over it, but traveling between the stars could be incredibly expensive, which would mean whatever you found to trade would have to be super special to justify doing it at all. Amy pointed out that if you traveled in generation ships, the trade would all be within the ship, and none of it would be between worlds. Heidi suggested that trade in ideas might be more valuable - which would bring up other questions of the costs of communicating over such large distances.

Economies, and especially complex economies, resist change. Simple trade structures grow other things on top of them until they form an incredibly complex web, and the more integral a particular commodity or other variable is to the whole, the harder it is to change its use. Fuel is a prime example of this. Power and money tend to flow together, and then people add to the natural resistance of the system to change. Glenda mentioned how rare earth metals are very toxic to produce, and she said as a result of this they are only now being produced in China. Monopolies lead to control of price and then to pressure to find alternatives to these commodities.

At this point Kyle joined the discussion we turned toward different assessments of the value of human life. It started out with the question of valuing labor. What value is placed on manual labor? on skilled labor? Is your "value" as a person equal to the amount of labor you can do in your lifetime, or not? I think many people would hesitate to say that monetary value is placed on human life, but in fact it gets done all the time, by different groups in different contexts. Kyle mentioned that there is a monetary value (he wasn't sure of the precise figure, but somewhere around 2.3 million dollars) placed on saving a life in the context of airline travel. If an improvement that will save a single additional human life costs less than that amount, then it is mandatory for it to be implemented across the airline fleet. But what is the value of a human life when you're calculating money going to hurricane shelters, asked Heidi. That number would be different. In the justice system (wrongful death) the number put on a human life is estimated as the amount the person could earn over their lifetime. A similar kind of number is used in the calculation of life insurance.

Does your world have an economic system complex enough to support life or other insurance? Or what about a stock market where people can speculate and buy odd non-corporeal things like "futures"? It doesn't have to, but if it's a nice complex society, you shouldn't rule it out.

At that point the conversation turned to how to put monetary value on artistic activities like writing and crafting, where the product can't be precisely measured in terms of materials cost plus labor in the same way as a less creatively intensive pursuit. It's another case where the surrounding culture ends up placing a value on something which may not be directly related to the work of creation itself. Kyle observed that market research used to be expensive until the internet made it far easier to obtain and entirely changed its value.

I found the idea of value change (in the monetary sense, here) to be very interesting. Stories can be born out of the question of who is hurt when these changes occur, as Amy and I both observed. How do people respond to economic upheaval? What happens when people take power who haven't had this power before?

We also briefly discussed taxes. I mentioned how my idea of taxes first came out of the story of Robin Hood, where the king would send an army through the countryside and shake people down so that he could sit in a room full of gold. However, as Kyle observed, there was a real economic situation behind that story, in which the war debt from the Crusades was set on Prince John's shoulders and he had to collect even though there was nothing visible the money was being spent on. The result of course being a tax revolt. There is a lot behind the whole idea of taxes, but one of the key ideas that should go into worldbuilding a society that pays taxes is what exactly the people expect their leaders to provide for them. There is less likely to be objection to taxation if people can see what the tax is going to. Kyle asked what would happen in a society where you could tax thieves...would that mean thievery was seen as more legal? Jaleh mentioned a situation where anything could be legal with a permit (and you could get a permit for just about anything, including "illegal" behavior). We all felt that this put quite a bit of power in the hands of the person issuing permits...

You can also find conflict between economic micro-cultures and macro-cultures, as when a small organization is financially doing well but the larger culture is in the midst of difficulties. This can lead to the values of frugality bleeding down into the operations of the smaller group even though they are not necessary, or may in fact be harmful to its operation.

The last major concept we talked about was how to take larger economic models that we may have dreamed up for our societies, and translating them onto the small level of day-to-day personal interaction. When we write stories, it's not as though we have the leeway to spend pages and pages talking about how the world's economic system works. We have to exemplify it by showing the viewpoints and situations of people who live within it. It's very valuable to ask questions like, "how do these people actually get paid, and what do they get paid for?" because very often that will translate into very specific patterns of behavior (as I talked about in my Monday post). Jaleh posited a situation, for example, in which seamstresses would have to buy materials themselves but would be paid for their labor by patrons. This might turn out very differently from a situation in which the patron bought the materials as well as paying for the labor. The patron would have different expectations about the disposition of the materials in these cases. Think through if you can how an individual of a particular social class gets money, whether they are able to increase that amount of money through their own efforts or whether it is controlled entirely by someone else. Once they have it, where would they then spend it? How are their basic needs provided for? Are they? Answer these questions by showing small interactions between people.

When you're working with a story, there are two directions from which you can approach the economics questions. One is to design the system from the "top down" with macro-economic trends and then try to find your way down to how those would be enacted day to day. The other is to start with small individual interactions and then extrapolate "bottom up" into larger patterns that might have influence across the society in other ways. If you choose top down, make sure you get all the way to the nitty gritty bottom level. If you choose bottom-up, you probably don't have to go all the way to the macro-level, so long as you show that you have some understanding for the larger implications of the system.

We could have gone on and on, because we didn't even get into questions of how economic issues influence language use, and how to name currencies, etc.

But perhaps we'll be able to talk about those another time.

Next week's hangout will be on Wednesday, October 19th at 11am PDT and we'll be talking about Manners. Should be fun! I hope to see you there.

Worldbuilding Hangout on Google+ Tomorrow

I'll be on Google+ holding a hangout tomorrow at 11am PDT. Our topic will be morals and values, so it's bound to be an exciting discussion. Please come ready to discuss this as regards worldbuilding.

If you're on Google+ and are trying to find the hangout, please go to my profile (Juliette Wade) and that should get you to the part of the stream where the hangout appears. That should allow you to join in... and don't worry if you don't have a video camera or a microphone, because we are very good at watching the chat sidebar!

I hope to see you tomorrow!

Google+ Worldbuilding Hangout Report: Crime and Criminals

Sorry that it's taken me a few days to get this up! However, I've had this idea that it's too much work for me to write a worldbuilding post and hold a worldbuilding hangout on the same day, and then write the report... so in the future I'm going to be issuing the report on the Wednesday following the hangout, so it will be hangout and hangout report day at once.

I will be holding another hangout this coming Wednesday (tomorrow), October 5th, at 11am PDT. The topic this week was decided at the end of the last hangout: Economics! It's a bit of a forbidding topic for some, but we won't be at all forbidding, so do come and discuss.

Last week's hangout was awesome. I had three visitors: Kyle Aisteach, science fiction writer, Leigh Dragoon, writer and illustrator, and David Peterson, creator of the Dothraki language (Game of Thrones). Leigh did not have a working camera or microphone, so we included her by keeping one eye on the side chat bar, and she made some great contributions. David arrived partway through the session, but we really enjoyed having him. I encourage anyone who would like to drop in this week not to worry about whether you have a camera/microphone, or whether you will be interrupting. I'm sure we will find a way to include you!

When we're talking about crime and criminals in worldbuilding, the (perhaps obvious) first question is "What are the types of crime in your world?" Once you get started, though, the effects can be widespread. What defines a crime? Well, generally, crimes are defined by a set of laws. Then of course you end up with institutions whose job it is to deal with crime. There is also the "culture of crime" which can be very different in our world across countries, and so can differ across your world as well.

Kyle mentioned that you can get interesting results if you have a system where there are different laws for different planets. Smugglers and interstellar criminals would then have to deal with sneaking around different legal systems depending on which part of the galaxy they were in. The idea of smugglers made me think of how different the concept of a "smuggler" is in science fiction versus fantasy. Smugglers are much more common in sf in my experience (but perhaps some of my readers know more fantasy smugglers than I do). What are they smuggling? From where to where, and why?

Crime also brings up the question of punishment. What is considered appropriate punishment? What kind of punishment "fits" the crime? This is a question related to authority structure. In societies which mete out extremely draconian punishments, the likelihood is great that crime will be hidden as much as possible. An "underground" becomes quite likely, since criminals (or law-escapers, depending on your point of view) may want to support each other more to avoid the axe.

Kyle brought up, but didn't answer, the question of what crime and punishment would look like in an anarchistic society. It's definitely food for thought - with no government to create institutions of law, who decides what is wrong? Who decides how to punish people? Is it a recipe simply for endless personal vendettas, or something entirely different?

Certainly for any society, the general social contract will have impact on how crime manifests itself and how it will be treated, how it will be punished. Japan is famous for having low crime rates, so that you will never be mugged on the street. But it's not that it has no crime. To put it simplistically, our American society is very individual-focused, and Japan's society is group-focused, so our "specialty" crime is individual crime (muggers etc.) and their "specialty" crime is group crime (the Yakuza). Furthermore, there can be different assumptions across cultures about whether people will lie to authorities or not (here, yes; in Japan, not quite as much). Kyle mentioned how the Sarin gas attacks of 1995 significantly changed Japan's self-image as it related to crime.

This led us immediately into how the attacks of September 11th, 2001 changed our own self-image, and how we lead our lives. We talked about airport security, and how it has made travel much more difficult, and made it the exception for many people rather than the rule. What other effects might law enforcement have on society as a whole due to a single event? Our view of travel may have changed, but this isn't the first time. Kyle noted that in medieval times the probability was quite high that you would meet bandits or highwaymen on the road, and so you would "lock yourself in a chastity belt" and put your money "in a secret compartment" in your carriage. At that time, travel was inherently dangerous. Is that the case in your world, or can people move relatively freely?

The presence of laws in a society can also create crime. I mentioned caste-marking in my Varin society, where everyone is required to mark themselves with their caste identity or be punished. Kyle saw a parallel with the military, where people are required to wear rank insignia. Leigh mentioned the Stars of David that Jews were required to wear in Germany before WWII. These are cases where the presence of the laws can create lawbreakers of people who would not be considered lawbreakers in other contexts.

This led us to the idea of decriminalization. If a law can create a criminal, and cause the entire society to treat that person as different from law-abiding citizens of other stripes, then can the removal of a law remove the criminality of certain elements of the population? We knew of experiments with decriminalization of prostitution and of drugs in northern Europe. I had heard about the change of law in Portugal which made it illegal to sell drugs but not to possess them for use. Apparently this has had some success there.

Kyle mentioned a time when he was on jury duty where he ended up teaming up with a medical doctor who was also being interviewed for inclusion, and giving the lawyers and other prospective jury members a lecture on addiction.

When I heard that I thought, "Jury duty!" I find jury duty to be a fascinating thing - how juries get selected, how they get paid, how people feel most often like this is something to be avoided at all costs. Not every country picks juries the same way. Some countries just pick twelve people randomly and those people are the jury. In American somehow having knowledge of or a stake in a particular societal issue is considered grounds not for debate on the jury but for exclusion from it. Does that make the jury fairer, or less fair? Is it more representative of the society as a whole, or less so? In Japan, the Americans tried to institute the use of juries after the end of WWII but it was a resounding failure because the jury members didn't want to divulge their opinions or argue them - they were simply unfeasible culturally, and finally they went with having a panel of three judges.

David mentioned he had once been on a jury trying someone for "possession of syringes" which he thought was really not something fair to prosecute.

How do we as a society decide what is harmful to us and what is not? What is fair and what is not? Kyle mentioned a line from Camelot where someone complained, "How can I get a fair trial from someone so impartial?" David told us about the Icelandic "Saga of Njal" in which the supreme court of Iceland was established because of a manufactured dispute across the four "corners" of Iceland. Because the issue couldn't be decided fairly in any of the four "corners," a higher body had to be created...and this created a position for a new chief, which conveniently let Njal get his son promoted. Could he have been behind the whole thing? Individuals can certainly have a big influence on justice, depending on the circumstances.

There is a lot more we could have said. We were not able to get into the question of different societal groups and how they can be treated differently by the justice system (that would have been a rich direction to go). I encourage you to consider brainstorming on this topic.

At this point in the meeting we introduced ourselves to each other and ended up talking about highways for a few minutes, such as the way highways in Northern California are called "Highway 5" etc. where in Southern California they are called "The 5" etc. Leigh remarked that nobody ever resurfaces roads inf Fantasy! Kyle told us about Pompeii where carts had worn grooves in the stones of the road, and that actually had influence on how people built their carts. David asked whether that might have inspired rail. Who knows?

This got us onto populations who travel. The Dothraki of Game of Thrones are nomads, but David says, "they wouldn't travel like that." That most nomads actually have hunting grounds or places of rest between which they travel, or they follow the herds. Kyle mentioned forced migration for work in China. Leigh mentioned how Mexican workers come to work in the US during the summer.

David mentioned how in Jamaica, because of the mild climate, people will often build houses very slowly over fifteen years or so, starting with the roof to keep off the rain. Kyle contrasted this with Egypt where many places will have walls but no roof because the government defines a completed structure (for tax purposes!) as one with a roof. So in the end, we circled back around to the idea of laws. Where there are laws, people will be looking for loopholes (tax loopholes in both Egypt and the US!).

It was a great hangout. Thanks again to everyone who came. I hope to see more people this week to talk about Economics as requested by Leigh!

Worldbuilding Hangout on Google+ Tomorrow

This is just to remind you all that tomorrow, September 28th at 11am PDT, I'll be holding a worldbuilding hangout on Google Plus. If you don't have a webcam and/or microphone enabled you can still participate via Chat. We'll be discussing lots of topics, but I'm leaning toward crime and criminals in worldbuilding, a topic suggested by the wonderful Kay Holt (@sandykidd on Twitter). I hope to see you there, literally!

Worldbuilding Hangouts to resume

Now that my kids are back in school, I've decided to do a few more Google+ live video chat worldbuilding "hangouts." Say what you will about Google+, it's the only place I've found that is able to do this in a way that's convenient for me. The next hangout will be next Wednesday, September 28th, at 11am. I've moved the time one hour later to accommodate early risers and my own dance class. Rumor has it that I may have a visit from David Peterson, inventor of Dothraki...

For those of you who may not be aware of my previous two worldbuilding hangouts, I've decided today to reprint the report of my first hangout, just to give you a feel of what it's like (fun!).
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The hangout went very well. My "guests" were Kyle Aisteach, Dale Emery, and Luna Lindsey, all of whom contributed to the discussion. I was interested to see that not everyone had to have the same level of technological access in order to participate - Luna participated in spite of having no working microphone or webcam, by listening to the discussion and then contributing via the typed chat window as she felt appropriate. This worked remarkably well, so if any of you have been reluctant to participate in Google+ hangouts because of technical restrictions, I would encourage you to take the same approach.

The topic we picked was the links between the physical and social aspects of a world. It was clear that all the participants had ideas that these links existed and were ready to cite examples. The environment has resources which get distributed, generally unevenly, creating haves and have-nots. Early on, we talked about Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, in which there are two major physical factors influencing the social: first, the icy climate, and second, the ambigendered physiology of the inhabitants. LeGuin manages of course to create two very distinct societies given these same conditions (Karhide and Orgoreyn), so physical factors can be considered to restrict your social options, but they don't make them ultra-specific. When you're writing, you can often pick a single aspect of the environment as your entry into a sociocultural model. If you take that single aspect and push as far and as deeply as you can with it, you can often create the basis for a really different way of thinking, and find many opportunities for making your world unique.

We also talked about seasons. Japan has four seasons, and they have huge social influence. People begin letters by mentioning the season; poetry always mentions the season, particular words like "moon" or "blossom" or "mist" are evocative of different seasons, etc. The climate of origin of a people can also be carried along in its culture and remain despite drastic changes, as when they play "Walking in a Winter Wonderland" at Christmas in Australia, or as Kyle mentioned, when they talk about the four seasons of the year in Fresno, CA, which he says has "hot season and wet season."

This brought us to the topic of cultural metaphors. For writers, metaphors can be really important as a way of expressing the connection between physical and social. Aspects of environment can be directly linked to social behavior, revealing cultural ways of thinking. Cultural metaphors tend to stick around for hundreds of years, while the original physical activity out of which the metaphor grew may not. This leads to expressions which are opaque to their users, but evocative of the past of the society.

This grew into a discussion of mythos surrounding important individuals, starting first with George Washington and the cherry tree (a story that provides us with quite a number of useful metaphors). Some of these stories about famous people are deliberately created, like those about Washington, while others, like those of Paul Bunyan, grow up naturally.

Dale Emery in his recap of our session mentioned that I'd said, "Humans like to differentiate themselves as much as they like to affiliate themselves." He saw this as an opportunity to create tension in a story, about questions of fitting in and belonging vs. maintaining one's own individuality (and indeed, my most recent story is all about this question, so you hit the nail on the head, Dale!).

Kyle mentioned how in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World the government deliberately implanted attitudes about social structure in its population by physical (chemical) means. Each group believes that it is superior to all the others, thus causing group members to help maintain the group separations. We talked generally about who bears an interest in maintaining restrictive social structures (of which caste systems like that of Brave New World, or my own Varin system, are only a subtype).

We then turned to the question of how to get from the physical to the social. Nature has its requirements, like day length, year length, climate, etc... The social overlies that. It grows out of that, and construes meaning out of it. Kyle mentioned the way that the flooding of the Nile in Egypt provided physical reasons why planting had to happen very quickly at a very particular time of year; the Pharaoh had a vested interest then in making sure this happened, and was able to use this as a justification for the social order he maintained. That social order wasn't necessary given the physical conditions, but it was compatible. The physical could then be used as a justification for maintaining the social order.

Dale asked how one might go about creating social ideas from physical requirements, and the process of thought that went into that, so I described a couple of my own thought processes, most specifically a recent one where I'd been thinking about cheetah aliens - because my daughter has asked me to do cheetah aliens (she loves cheetahs). I mulled it over for quite a long time before I found something that excited me, when I watched a show that informed me that cheetahs have to hurry and eat their kill or lions will push them off it. Dale particularly picked up on the fact that this was a detail that intrigued and inspired me (all very true). It got me asking whether one could translate that kind of relationship into a social one in a more advanced society. What would such a society look like? And how would the two groups perceive each other/talk about each other? It could be a master/slave race relationship, but wouldn't necessarily have to be. It could be executed in a number of different possible ways depending on what kind of human social models one might like to evoke. The language used by the people in the relationship would probably grow out of that (e.g. there would be a term for 'one of those guys who steals your food' etc.)

We talked about the fact that a species can dramatically influence its environment (like our own). Some societies in human cultures have taken an approach of adapting to the environment more, and others have major cultural models/stories which encourage them to change the environment drastically. This tied back to the question of how metaphors and mythos endure even when the environment changes. What would be retained, and what would be overlaid on top of those old things?

Luna asked us a really interesting question about whether a species which was not particularly geared to alter its environment would ever be motivated to achieve travel into space. That turned into our last discussion! Our society tends to see technology as a means to alter the environment, but that wouldn't necessarily be true. A society might develop technologies for other equally compelling reasons, but perhaps not use them for the same things we do. There are a lot of different possible reasons behind the same kind of behavior (creating technology).

At the end of the session I asked the participants to tell me the kind of stories they were working on. This was very interesting - intriguing stuff being worked on all around, and the question of physical and social was relevant to all of it. Dale had a situation where magic was being initially discovered, and was looking for ways to differentiate the social circumstances surrounding this from similar models in Earth history. Kyle was working with a lot of things, but mentioned his stories about terraforming on Venus, which he says are very "man versus nature." Luna said she was working on something which involved (among other things) future archaeology.
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Thanks again to Kyle, Dale, and Luna for visiting with me back in July. I hope to see some of you hang out again, and I hope also to see some new visitors, next week!

Elements of Religion, with cautions, for worldbuilders

Religion is often included in the worlds we build. This is not because everyone wants to bring religious "issues" into the story (although some do), but because religion permeates our own lives in so many different ways that it makes a lot of sense for another world - particularly a world of humans - to include it.

In fact, issues of religion very often touch a chord with readers. I was astonished by reader responses to my very first story, which included religion as a central aspect of the story. For this very reason, including religion in a story comes with inherent risks. One is that you might be construed as trying to influence another person's beliefs. People sometimes do this intentionally (in which case they may be prepared if someone is offended) but it can be more of a shock if they do it accidentally. Another possible risk is that your portrayal of religion - even a religion which on the face of it is clearly unrelated to those of our own world - will be construed as an insult to a real world religion. [I think this one is related to the idea that readers sometimes construe an author's beliefs or psychology from the content of his/her writing, which is problematic in and of itself...but that's an issue for another time.]

One thing I would recommend is that you take some time to consider how religion is included in your world, and why, and how. I have seen stories where all religious people are zealots, and they don't appeal to me, because they don't speak to me as real. Sure there are zealots in the world, but within any belief system, there is a lot of room for variation.

The reason I titled this post "elements" of religion is because I think worldbuilding religions can be approached from a number of different angles. All of these elements are intertwined, but each can vary. As I write this, I am certain that I am not capturing everything here (I'm no scholar of theology), but coming at it from my usual position of trying to help my own portrayal of social phenomena through basic level analysis. (So please forgive any awkwardness as I try to think this through out loud.)

One element of religion I'll call belief. It's a difficult term, because it means different things to different people, but for my purposes here a belief has to do with how we think the universe works. God exists, or gods exist, or no gods exist... God takes the form of fire, or can change forms at will, or flows through everything; or gods live in every object, or exist above us, etc. This part is about what your characters know is true about the spiritual nature of the world. There will certainly be evidence for belief in language and use of metaphor, and in certain aspects of behavior (but not necessarily churchgoing!).

Another element of religion I'll call tenets (with thanks to my friend Josephine!). Tenets are the "shoulds." They're statements about how people should enact their religion. To be a good Christian you should ___/ to be a good Muslim you should ___/ to be a good member of X you should Y. People, even very religious people, don't always follow all the tenets of their own religion. They will interact psychologically with these tenets, and may follow them, but may resist them, etc. Tenets are usually guarded by, and/or disseminated by, an institution or a specific group of people.

Another element I'll call "practices." These are not the things people should do, but the things they actually do. This would include things like going to the temple for New Year's day and lighting a fire there and bringing it home, or putting out a bowl of water somewhere, or lighting a candle on a certain day. I'm separating them out from the "shoulds" because sometimes people do these things without really connecting them (mentally) to why the religion says they should do them... and because sometimes people hold the tenets but don't actually make it all the way to practices (which can cause them guilt).

Another element I'll call "faith." This is the very personal level of religion, where we find the concept of a relationship to the divine. It is the psychological and emotional aspect of religion. It's possible to believe that gods exist without cultivating faith as such; similarly, it is possible to engage in practices without it.

The last element I'm going to mention here is language. Language use reflects all of the above aspects of religion, and it's worth thinking about how people speak when they are members of a particular religion. Which words are taboo? How do we speak about the divine? Must we refrain from speaking about it? What euphemisms do we use? Another thing that is interesting about the language use associated with a particular religion is that it can be learned, and used, without any knowledge of the elements listed above. Thus, even when a religion is essentially non-functional, the people who used to practice it may still speak as though they do. It is possible to imagine a secular society which still refers to aspects of the divine in quite specific ways.

I think as we go about worldbuilding, particularly if religion will play an important role in the story or in the life of a character, it's worth thinking through these different angles of religion and how they interrelate - and also, how they come together in the mind of the character. For some, all of them are so closely intertwined that they can't be extricated. For others, one element or another may be stronger.

I encourage anyone interested in being inspired by aspects of different real world religions to visit the Religion section of The Writer's International Culture Share. It currently includes seven articles - but if you might be interested to share something of your own, please do let me know.

It's something to think about.

Point of view and characterization mean divorcing from yourself

I got over a hump in my story yesterday. There was a piece that wasn't working, because I couldn't figure out what my protagonist Adrian's reaction would be to one of the story events. Whenever this happens, it's a sign that something isn't holding together earlier in the story. I went back over it several times and talked through it with friends, and after quite a long while I realized I had missed a step in Adrian's thought process - the point at which he went from thinking the word "liar" was an insult to realizing that "Liar" was a name for a social group. Because my story's climax depends on Adrian fully understanding who the Liars are and what they do, developing this thought process for him is critical to my success. Furthermore, each change in his understanding has to happen on screen, so that my readers can follow it.

So what does this have to do with divorcing from yourself? Well, the reason why I got lost in the first place was that as the author, I have all the pieces of the puzzle already. I know the answer, and all the levels of it. I had put together all kinds of steps from Adrian encountering the social group of the Liars to him understanding what it was for... I had just omitted the step where he realizes for the first time that it is a social label. It sneaked by me because I was concentrating so hard on all those other steps. In order to get this to work for readers, I have to step outside myself into Adrian's point of view so completely that I can understand what he learns and when he learns it (and how) without being blinded by my own knowledge.

Standing outside yourself is hard, especially when it comes to fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality.

I remember the first novel protagonist I ever attempted. I had a scene where she was walking out of a vehicle into a beautiful field of golden grass at sunset. She was loving how beautiful it was, ignoring all the people around her, feeling the free air, etc. All the things I myself would have done in her situation. The problem was, she wasn't me. She was a character from the undercaste of Varin - someone who lived underground, had never seen the sun or felt air move except when it was moved by a vehicle. Moreover, she was someone constantly at risk of abuse or persecution by people around her. What the heck was she doing ignoring people and walking out full of wonder and joy into a field at sunset? The result was that she didn't feel like she belonged in the world, and she didn't feel like she could be the age she was.

The age question is a subtle point, and something that many people run into. It's one thing to tell readers that your protagonist is a certain age. "She's nineteen," you say (however you choose to fit it in). But having her act like she's nineteen is something else. The way I wrote my protagonist in the field scene might have worked with her age if she'd been an Earthly nineteen-year-old. But given the social situation of Varin, that kind of attitude made my protagonist feel like she was much younger and more naïve. At the time my critique partners told me she didn't seem like she was nineteen, and I couldn't figure out why they hadn't "noticed" when I specified her age. But then one of the more analytical of them told me that someone of her age in Varin would have learned quite a bit more caution, fear, and manners... and that those would be on her mind in this scene in addition to a natural fear of the surface and the outdoors. This kind of questioning of very basic assumptions is one reason why it's taken me so long to make Varin work to my satisfaction - so many of the assumptions are different that I can't be consciously mindful of all of them at once. I have to identify assumptions, change them, get used to them and learn to use them subconsciously...and then identify the next level, and go through the process all over again.

Really I don't think characterization, point of view, and worldbuilding can be separated from one another. They are all deeply inter-related. Your character has to "come across" to readers in a particular way within the context of your world. Yes, you won't be able to avoid certain aspects of the real world coming in, as readers bring a lot of real world assumptions to their reading. But that's just another reason why worldbuilding is so important to your character's success (as a character). As you introduce your character, you also have the opportunity to introduce those aspects of his/her social context that provide background for the interpretation of their character that you want readers to take away with them. And in order to do this, you need to get as far as possible outside yourself, your basic knowledge sets, and even your knowledge of where the story is going.

It's something to think about.

A metaphor is worth 1000 (or at least 10) words...

I don't think a lot of people realize how wonderfully helpful - and powerful - metaphors are. Yes, I'm sure we're all aware that they are artful, but they are more pervasive than we generally imagine, and I find them incredibly useful for two things: conciseness, and worldbuilding.

Conciseness may not be the first thing that leaps to mind when you consider metaphors, but believe me, it works. The example that leaps to mind from my own work comes from "At Cross Purposes." I'd gone to a lot of trouble to design the bridge of my otter-aliens' ship, and I found myself describing the quality of the light, the fact that there was soft music, the room full of fish (snack bar), the pairs of otters moving and jumping, the whirling bits of light, the this, the that... It got longer and longer and I was despairing a little, because the story was already pretty long. Then I walked away from it for a while, and after a few minutes it suddenly hit me that every detail but one fit into a single metaphor:

"It's an otter nightclub!"

Once I put this thought into Lynn's mind, the whole place resolved itself into an image instantaneously. I had to do a lot less describing of pieces, and I could provide just a few details to ground my use of the metaphor, plus add the one detail (the volume of the music) which constituted the exception. I didn't have to use nearly as many words (I think I cut out at least fifty!).

One intriguing side benefit of using a single metaphor, with supporting details, instead of just a lot of piece by piece description, is the way that you can often achieve a huge leap in clarity. The metaphor becomes the unifying element for details that follow, much in the way that a topic sentence provides the thesis for a paragraph (another reason why it's important not just to throw metaphors at a story, but to have the metaphor and its supporting details match one another). With only details you can end up with a sort of intense close-up effect where the reader never gets the sense of seeing the whole object/person/place, but of seeing only the parts and struggling to put them together. In the case of describing characters, this can mean an unfortunate Frankenstinian effect!

The other thing I wanted to mention is the power of metaphors in worldbuilding. I have mentioned this before on the blog, but I was actually able to mention it at WorldCon in a panel about worldbuilding featuring Greg Bear, among others. The panel was discussing how description of the point of view character's sensory perceptions could be an important tool for worldbuilding, and I commented how important I felt judgment was as a worldbuilding tool.

The judgment of a point of view character is actually quite complex. The most basic part of this is his/her sense that something has value or not. But when we judge things, we seldom talk just about whether is something is good or bad. We talk about what it is good for. We compare it to other things in our experience. And we talk about it in terms of familiar imagery.

This is precisely where the worldbuilding comes in. Whenever we talk about what something is good for, we speak of it in terms of the activities it may be useful for - activities which are a part of our daily social lives, and which can differ greatly depending on the society in which they occur. Whenever we compare it to things in our experience, we are also revealing the nature of our past experiences in our physical and social world. And whenever we use familiar imagery, we reveal which images are the most familiar and resonant in our world.

Is my love like a red red rose, as Robert Burns once sang? Well, we can certainly guess that his world had roses in it. Does your character dream of the day when his ship will come in? That'll be a world with oceans and a nautical history. Does he feel that another character will help him land the quarry he's never taken down in a lifetime of hunting alone? Then it's highly likely his species defines itself and its life goals in terms of hunting on land (that was Rulii, so he does).

Notice that in the paragraph above, there are no alien words. Only the word "rose" is specific to a flower species in our own world. Metaphors are an excellent tool for providing worldbuilding that does not depend on the use of alien language - and since alien language is unfamiliar to (and alienates) readers, I tend to rely heavily on this type of metaphor when I'm creating alien worlds that I want readers to feel at home in.

This technique may not be a magic bullet (metaphor!) but it's certainly worth thinking about.

Cultural expectations about food

Food is very cultural. Our overall menu and sense of what is edible have built up over thousands of years, during which we've learned things like, "Gee, tomatoes actually aren't poisonous." A good thing to know. We've had massive changes in world food culture, such as those that came about after trade began between the Americas and the other continents of the world (chocolate!). What we eat and do not eat may seem "natural" but it is mostly the product of learning. It can become very extreme, and it is subject to fads, as are most other aspects of culture.

Here is an example that has been in my face lately with all our travel adventures. When I was little, a children's menu was a relatively new thing. I suppose it was the effect of the social "promotion" of children from people who should not be seen or heard to people who should be included at restaurants (a development I approve of). I remember that the children's menu typically featured smaller portions of adult meals. This was nice for those adults who didn't want to eat as much food (though some restaurants didn't allow adults to order from the children's menu). These days, though, the children's menu doesn't have smaller versions of adult dishes. It has what our culture expects children to enjoy eating. Chicken nuggets. Fries. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Pizza. Macaroni and cheese. Hamburger/cheeseburger. And that's about it. Can you think of anything else you've seen on a kids' menu? Fish and chips I suppose, at a stretch. I've given up looking at the children's menu these days because my children don't really like anything on that list except pizza and burgers, and they can't be eating pizza and burgers every time they go out.

The funny thing is, this kind of expectation is self-enforcing. Parents worry that their kids won't like vegetables and so they act all scared around vegetables and don't feed them to their children. Parents worry that their kids won't like spicy food, so they don't feed it to them - not even in mild doses. Suddenly the routine centers around bland non-vegetable food - so should we be surprised when that's what kids tend to ask for? I'm actually not here to talk about parenting and food, but you can see that this is an important piece of the entire food culture of a society. There is also science and health and how those relate to food choices... it's definitely a complex mix.

If you're creating a society, imagine what its people will eat, as a start. But consider also the food culture of that society. How food is grown, and where, will affect its value and availability. Then there is how important food is as a social activity, and as a ceremonial activity. I mean, how would anyone ever go on a serious date if not for food? Some societies place a special value on regional foods, while others have one big staple that rules the diet surrounded by other smaller ingredients. Some societies have tons of available spices and others do not. Would your people flavor their food predominantly with herbs? Or would they prefer the bland?

There are a thousand questions that can be asked, and if you can spend some time thinking about them, your world will become much more interesting.


P.S. This could easily become an entire dissertation or more, if I started talking about the quantity one is expected to eat, and how, and when, and eating disorders, etc. Suffice it to say that I encourage you to explore food culture to the extent that you can as you are creating your world!

Creating the *Feel* of a World

Let's say you have a really excellent world, and you've figured out a ton of things about it. The next step in story terms is to translate that world into the story and make it come alive. I've talked before about being careful not to info-dump - about managing and dispensing information in various ways (including Hiding Information in Plain Sight). But a lot of what makes a world come alive is not the information you know about it, but the feel of the place.

What creates the feel of a world?

Well, that information you've created will be useful. It's not going to be enough on its own to create a really intense feel. Here are some things that are useful for creating a world feel:

1. Objects that imply activities
I've mentioned this before, but objects can be extremely useful for creating world feel. What you need to look for is an object that is idiosyncratic. It could be an object designed for an activity unique to your world. It may be an object common to our own lives, but should take a form uniquely suited to the world you're creating. Like this Roman "Swiss Army Knife," for example. These objects will imply the activities and social circumstances they are designed to fit into.

2. Symbols that imply attitudes/judgment
Symbols can be found in lots of places. Real world cultures are full of them. In Japan, the moon is associated with autumn, and therefore can symbolize it. Colors can be symbolic, as when we associate blue with boys and pink with girls (don't get me started on that, but it is a symbolic color system). In your world, any of these things can be symbolic, and if they symbolize unexpected things, the feel of your world will be enhanced. Better still if those symbols can mean one thing to one social group, and another to another. In Varin, the nobility see the manservant's tattoo as a symbol of skill and subservience; other servants see it as a sign of elite education, pride and adulthood; and Lowers see it as a sign of danger (as do nobles who might be in danger of encountering their bodyguard skills!).

3. Metaphors that imply value categories
I can't overestimate the importance of metaphors in creating a feel for your world. We don't think consciously about a lot of the metaphors we use, but using them evokes all kinds of imagery that we associate with what is important and basic in our world. "Life is a journey" evokes all kinds of things, including old fairy tales ("off to seek his fortune"), the voyages of early explorers, the frontier, etc. If "life is a game" then you can go into all kinds of games that life might be like - poker will give you one feel, chess another, power and assassination yet another. In fact, I highly encourage you to create games unique to your world circumstances; they can be enormously important in creating feel!

4. Voices that imply, well, everything
Pay attention to your character voices. Because they are constantly present, they do an enormous amount of work in creating the feel of your world. They can help delineate social groups and world categories all over the map, and by casting judgment (as I've mentioned before in Subjective Point of View: expressing judgment with adverbs and verbs), they create an enormous amount of "world feel" while at the same time working for you in the areas of plot and character.

It's something to think about.

Creating a "realistic" costume... and implications for the means to create in your world

The other day I checked out a post by my new friend Anders Hudson, here, where he discusses how to make your own realistic Battlestar Galactica flight suit. In fact, it's a fascinating post. I confess I am not ever going to be interested in making my own Battlestar Galactica flight suit, but it certainly got me thinking!

Here was my thought sequence.

• I got to thinking about the resources available for making costumes, and how the people who work for TV shows access them, and afford them...
• Then I considered how TV watchers with enough time and inspiration might accesss them, and afford them (which is somewhat different from the first group).
• I realized Anders' post really shows that you can do something very convincing, with materials that are pretty widely available, even if they aren't all very easy to work with.
• And you can do this on a budget.
• And this is very, very relevant to questions of worldbuilding.
  

People in your world are going to have belongings - clothes, tools, luxuries, necessities. And they will have to acquire them...and that means either they or someone else will have to make them. So it would be good to ask some or all of the following questions:

1. What is the process of creation like in your world?
2. Are there a lot of raw materials like paper, fabric, foam, or metal, etc. easily available?
3. Where would a character find the materials necessary to create something? At a sewing shop? An industrial shop? A general store? A specialty boutique? At the mine/factory?
   
4. How expensive are these materials, and where do people earn the money to buy them?
5. How much time and training does it take to create the objects that a reader would see on the page? Is this time and training a net financial loss for the creator? Or a means to better his/her financial situation? How much respect does the creator gain by being able to complete all this?
   
6. Of all the steps necessary to make a complex and valuable (useful) object, which are easy and which are hard? Which steps would form bottlenecks or create delays in the process?
7. How easy or difficult would it be for people of different financial means and social status to obtain similar objects? Is there more than one way to acquire the same thing? Are there any legal restrictions on materials or on finished products?
   

Thanks to Anders for the inspiration. I hope you find these questions useful in your worldbuilding process.

You're creating a world. How much language will you teach?

I read a novel once which had been handed to me with the highest recommendation as a book which created a "truly alien world." And guess what? It was really well done, really alien, very deeply thought through.

I had one problem: there wasn't enough language.

Now, I don't mean to say that there was no alien language used. There was. But for example I noticed that there was a lack of biodiversity: extensive areas of the world growing with the same two or three plant species, and we kept seeing the same animal species. The same pattern was found in a few other places, too (like artifacts), where I sensed the available vocabulary was just too small.

Surely we don't want this. On the other hand, we don't want our readers floundering in piles and piles of alien vocabulary that they don't understand - they will stop reading. I've remarked before on this blog that if you want to create a sense of intimacy and internal perspective, you should avoid using alien vocabulary as much as possible, and make sure to back every instance of it up with a lot of contextual support - conversely, if you want a sense of alienness, more alien vocabulary is all right. It still has to be comprehensible.

One way to avoid overwhelming readers is to use a translation approach. Whatever concept it is that you want readers to understand, find a way of rendering it in English. In fact, I use this approach all the time, because I want my readers to feel like they are insiders (insiders=minimize alien vocabulary).

In "At Cross Purposes" (Analog Jan/Feb 2011) I had two alien concepts that I needed readers to understand. The first one was "Purpose." Our English word "purpose" was a subset, or a partial meaning, for what the aliens meant when they used it. Because of this, I could start having them use it in context in a place where the two meanings overlapped, and then slowly have them extend their use of the world with a lot of contextual support. Notice here: I was teaching my readers deliberately. I start readers in a place they can easily grasp, the area where English "purpose" overlaps with Khachee-translated "purpose." Then I make sure to extend that usage so that the reader will question the places where the meanings don't overlap, and start creating a new definition for it. I did the same thing with the word "cold" in "Cold Words" (Analog Oct. 2009). The second concept I needed readers to understand was much harder. I tried and tried to encapsulate it in a single word, but everything I found was either too corny, too awkward-sounding or too context-specific to our world. Only when I'd exhausted all the possibilities for English translation did I decide to use an alien word, "apfaa." That single term was able to cover all the multiple meanings of the social relationship of twinhood in their society - matching, symmetry, mutual social support, but also conflict, criticism and mutually beneficial argument. I had to make sure the aliens had a good reason to consider the concept consciously (they were wondering whether humans had it). Then I gave a basic definition for it: "the duality that holds agreement in one hand and conflict in the other." After that I tried to make sure all of its uses were supported by context suggesting the different ways it might be used.

I guess what I'm saying is that when you have alien language and concepts (whether those are sf "alien" aliens or just fantasy concepts that are unfamiliar), you need to decide how much language teaching you actually want to do. I'm less interested, in my stories, in teaching vocabulary than I am in teaching different ways to think - but I am very interested in teaching that.

The other thing I'm trying to say is that if you have invented a language with lots of words and all those words have history, and connotations, etc. etc. it doesn't mean that any of that information and insight is making it onto the page. If you want to show that words are related to one another, and make it meaningful to readers, you have to put in a lot of contextual support to make sure those implications are clear. If you have a really cool compound word that you love and you want to teach to readers, make sure that it's highly relevant to the events of the story, and put it in in such a way as to maximize easy understanding of it. If it's pivotal to the story's success, you might even want to break it into parts and show the meaning of the parts before you put it together. Just don't assume that because you have the grand language concept that everyone else shares it too. Remember that there is teaching going on, whether you are teaching actual new words, or just concepts and local metaphors.

In fact, there is teaching in all kinds of stories, even ones without aliens. Real world stories with local dialects? Yes, there's teaching. How about real world stories with hugely extended metaphors like "Snow Falling on Cedars," where the author spends lots of time comparing the snow and its effect on the countryside with the mental states of his main character? There's teaching going on there too. Every place you need to teach, you'll be looking for reader engagement to reward the effort of learning. So don't make people work for things that are trivial.

It's something to think about.

TTYU Retro: The Inciting Event and Your World - Revisited

When I was at Westercon over this last weekend I was part of a number of discussions, and one in particular about the importance of details in setting up a story world. This post immediately leapt to mind. It's about integrating character, world, and the beginning of the story in the form of the inciting event.


I've been thinking a bit about inciting events. An inciting event is generally the event that propels you into the main conflict of your story. My friend Janice Hardy mentions it in a great blog post, here (as many of you already know, her blog has tons of great information on the process of writing and on getting published). In her words, "The inciting event is the trigger that sets the rest of the story in motion." She treats it separately from the opening scene, but I'm not sure the two are necessarily separate. When trying to hook your reader, it's good to plunge into the inciting event as early as possible. I've spent a lot of time in my writing career working on the question of where to start my stories, and believe me, it can be tricky - but it's worth thinking seriously about.

Where I want to take this topic in a particularly TalkToYoUniverse direction is by linking the inciting event to the issue of worldbuilding. When you're thinking about how to open your story in a science fiction or fantasy context, you have to take into account both your need to hook the reader, and your need to introduce your world.

We all know the dreaded word, infodumping. We all know we want to avoid it. But how do we go about creating a scene where this information doesn't need to be explained? How do we make it so the information is simply evident in the action?

First, use your POV character. Make sure you know the character's background, culture and motivations to the fullest extent possible, so that you can use the character to help you convey information. This is what I call making your world personal. Think about what your characters care about, and what they don't care about - where they are especially attentive or where they have blind spots and weaknesses. All of these things can become your tools, as you can imbue your narration with a dismissive or contemptuous tone, or a bubbly enthusiasm, or what have you.

Next comes the tougher, more subtle step: working in the things that the character considers normal. Things that are totally normal, entirely obvious to the character, are not things you want him or her to talk about. Talking about obvious things leads to completely cringe-worthy "As you know, Bob" dialog, and we don't want that.

So here's the question: How can we possibly describe the basic parameters of our worlds, when we know that to our character, so much is entirely unremarkable?

The answer is, use conflict and contrast. I have an example of this done simply and elegantly for a real-world scenario, here.

In fact, there's a beautiful convergence here: the inciting event, the trigger for the core conflict of the novel, very often is all about the precise type of conflict that can let you give out world information.

Here's an example from the drafting stage of my story, "Cold Words" (Analog, October 2009). [I read from it at Westercon and it was so much fun!] Consider the list of events below and ask yourself which one is the best to use for an opening scene:

1. A Human ambassador inadvertently insults the Majesty of the Aurrel, placing a spaceport negotiation in danger.
2. The native liaison asks the Humans to send away the failed ambassador and get a new one.
3. The Human ambassador comes to the native liaison to tell him that he's worried about the motives of the replacement ambassador.
4. The native liaison goes to the Majesty to report the impending arrival of the replacement ambassador and try to rescue the spaceport negotiation.

I wouldn't choose 1 or 2. Any event that occurs before a significant lull, like waiting for a replacement ambassador to arrive, is less optimal because it will require a time break and reduce forward momentum. Furthermore, even though the incident of insult is interesting, it would be hard for readers to understand without significant previous context - which, since this is the first scene, they can't possibly have.

When I wrote my first draft, I chose 4. The story is told in the point of view of Rulii, the native liaison, and thus the main motivating force in the story is Rulii's desire to complete the spaceport negotiation successfully (for his own secret reasons). Why not start where you see him pressing his suit with the Majesty, a place where he can show his intense desire for success and share it with the reader?

The answer to that question is this: if he's alone with the Majesty, he's in a completely native context where everything is normal. And that means that every piece of normal world information will be really difficult to put in.

So in the end, I chose 3. There's conflict in that scene, because the human ambassador brings a warning that may put the negotiation at even deeper risk. More importantly for this discussion, though, scene #3 puts our native liaison in direct contact with a human. There's conflict, and there's contrast. There are opportunities for the human ambassador to demonstrate his own cultural biases, and for Rulii to remark on them, thus putting his own world forward for readers to explore. Better yet, the sense of contrast continues forward as he goes to see Majesty, because with the human interaction foremost in his mind, Rulii is more likely to remark on the quirky cultural things inherent in their interaction.

So, when you're looking at your own stories, consider the kinds of conflict or contrast opportunities that appear in the opening scene as you've written it, and then ask yourself how you could tune the circumstances of that scene to make your job easier.

Finally, in the spirit of making a world personal, I'm posting this list of eleven questions [which also appears in the "Know Your Character Inside and Out" post at left]. You've probably seen questions like these before, but worldbuilding questions are often phrased in a very impersonal way, and that's not what I'm trying to do here. All of these questions are deliberately phrased to relate directly to a protagonist's view of the world, and participants in my workshops have found it a helpful exercise to answer them using the voice of their POV characters.

Here are the questions:

1. What is my home like? How do I visualize its boundaries?
2. What weather and physical conditions do I consider normal? What do I fear?
3. What kind of topography did I grow up in, and how did it influence my physical condition and my concepts of comfort?
4. In what kind of place do I feel most at home? What shapes and textures give me comfort, or discomfort?
5. Who is in charge here? Do I respect them, fear them, both?
6. How do I show who I am in the way I dress? What is comfortable? Will I endure discomfort for the sake of looking good or looking powerful?
7. Where do the things I own come from? Do I worry about getting more?
8. What is delicious to me? What do I consider unworthy of consumption?
9. What are my most prized possessions? Do I hoard anything? Do I have so much of anything that I care little if I must give it away?
10. Who do I consider to be unlike me? Are their differences charming or alarming?
11. Am I in control of my own actions and the happenings around me? What or whom do I believe in?

I hope you may find this exercise helpful in your writing process.