Sometimes it just doesn't come together. And that's okay.
I'm in a strange position, writing-wise. Three novels are out there, shopping at various publishing houses. Any or all could hit tomorrow, or in a month or six months or never.* If and when that happens, I need to be ready to shift focus to the Needs of Publication-- including and not limited to starting the Book II of whatever series hits.
But until that happens, it behooves me to continue to produce more first-of-a-series novels, which is where Way of the Shield comes in. It ties to the other three novels, in that they are all set in the same city at around the same time**, but it is not necessary to the other novels (as they aren't necessary to each other). While it would be ideal for me to have Way of the Shield done, and get a deal in which all four books are published in rapid succession, that's not necessary either.***
This is all a rather long-winded way of me saying that no one, with the possible exception of my agent, is really asking for Way of the Shield to be written right now. And I'd be willing to bet if I sent him something else, say something space-opera, my agent wouldn't complain.
Which is good, because The Muse, as it were, has been muttering Space Opera and aliens and interstellar politics and how Lt. Samantha Kengle of the Terran Stellar Fleet wants people to know that the hairless monkeys from Sol III are not to be trifled with.****
And that's what you have to do sometimes: listen to the Muse, and figure out where it's taking you. Ignoring it, frankly, just makes everything work slower. And that doesn't mean one project is dead because focus is shifted onto another. Quite the opposite. It's getting a chance to breathe.
---
*- Personally, I'm hoping more in the tomorrow-to-a-month range, myself.
**- Strictly speaking, Way of the Shield takes place about a week after the end of Holver Alley Crew, which itself starts about a week after Maradaine Constabulary, which starts three days after the events of Thorn of Dentonhill. Yes, I have a whole calendar. Yes, I am that obsessively detail oriented about these things.
***- In fact, that's pretty damn pie-in-the-sky.
****- Her language is a bit coarser on the subject. Sailor's mouth on that one.
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Monday, November 12, 2012
Perils of the Writer: False Starts
It hits like lightning across the forebrain. The Brilliant Idea that will be the Next New Book. And every thought is consumed with the "Oh, wow!"ness of this new idea. It's fresh and exciting, especially if it hits in the hard-middle-slog of a novel. Then, it inhabits your brain like new lover, with promises of how everything is going to be easy and light and problem free and THIS is the project you should be working on.
And the initial worldbuilding snaps together, characters are as clear as day. You open up a document and just start writing, because isn't that's how it's supposed to be? Isn't that how real writers write, right? They just pound it out and go where the story takes them and they do it brilliantly on their first draft and that's what you're going to do this time because it's brilliant and you're brilliant and this is the best novel ever written by anyone ever and--
CRASH
Somewhere between five and fifteen thousand words, the fiery passion part is burnt out, and then you're poking at those dying embers and realizing, "I don't actually have a plot here, do I?"
So you put it do the side, mourning its failure for a bit. Get back to work on the things that need work, where the work is paying off, slowly and surely.
But, of course, the siren call is there, summoning you back with the promise that this time it's going to work. This time it's going to be brilliant.
I've gone through this particular cycle with USS Banshee several times now. I do have a good sense what "went wrong" on my first few attempts: namely, that lack of plot. But with later ones, it was almost as if I didn't want to actually get to the plot. Put simply, I kept wanting to just write a "hang out" book. I was having fun with the various sets of characters in different sections of the ship, just playing with the personalities, showing off shiny toys, that I could never manage to get to the point where they went anywhere for something to actually happen. One failed draft reached 40,000 words of NOTHING.
That's the most prominent false-start in my stable. I keep coming up with new takes on it, one of which I'm currently quite excited about. Still hashing it out, but I think this one might work. But I've thought that before. Not to mention, there's all the "terminal cases" I have in my writing folders. But USS Banshee is, frankly, the one I can never give up on.
And the initial worldbuilding snaps together, characters are as clear as day. You open up a document and just start writing, because isn't that's how it's supposed to be? Isn't that how real writers write, right? They just pound it out and go where the story takes them and they do it brilliantly on their first draft and that's what you're going to do this time because it's brilliant and you're brilliant and this is the best novel ever written by anyone ever and--
CRASH
Somewhere between five and fifteen thousand words, the fiery passion part is burnt out, and then you're poking at those dying embers and realizing, "I don't actually have a plot here, do I?"
So you put it do the side, mourning its failure for a bit. Get back to work on the things that need work, where the work is paying off, slowly and surely.
But, of course, the siren call is there, summoning you back with the promise that this time it's going to work. This time it's going to be brilliant.
I've gone through this particular cycle with USS Banshee several times now. I do have a good sense what "went wrong" on my first few attempts: namely, that lack of plot. But with later ones, it was almost as if I didn't want to actually get to the plot. Put simply, I kept wanting to just write a "hang out" book. I was having fun with the various sets of characters in different sections of the ship, just playing with the personalities, showing off shiny toys, that I could never manage to get to the point where they went anywhere for something to actually happen. One failed draft reached 40,000 words of NOTHING.
That's the most prominent false-start in my stable. I keep coming up with new takes on it, one of which I'm currently quite excited about. Still hashing it out, but I think this one might work. But I've thought that before. Not to mention, there's all the "terminal cases" I have in my writing folders. But USS Banshee is, frankly, the one I can never give up on.
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Worldbuilding, Psychohistory, and the Power of Numbers
So, now our election is over, and if one thing can be declared an uncontested winner, it's Math. Despite having his vocal detractors, Nate Silver's meticulous statistical analysis of polls produced an electoral college map that was spot on. You might not like what his results were, but you can't argue with their accuracy.
Any old-school Asimov fan could have told you that. While I doubt any of us would argue that Hari Seldon's level of psychohistorical projection is probably impossible, there is a simple truth that pure math has no bias.
Now, applying this to worldbuilding. I will fully admit that I'm more of a numbers geek than your average writer, so I will do things that would probably make most people weep at the prospect of it.
Take, for example, my latest bit of Build Process, incorporating a dimension of time into my already-complex 150-ly radius Space Opera Setting. I looked at my several hundred intelligent species*, and even knowing their technology level, I asked myself, "Yes, but who got their first? How did they expand?"
So, I start with some assumptions, some of which probably have underlying errors, but work in terms of large-scale worldbuilding as a whole. It also works in terms of applying the Guns, Germs and Steel ideas on an interstellar scale.
Assumption #1: That all intelligent species in question, in this patch of interstellar neighborhood, were all at an equivalent state of Intelligent, Pre-Civilized Hunter/Gatherer at the same time. This is a HUGE presumption, especially in terms of evolution and cosmic time. It more or less requires some form of direct Precursor Intervention, which I've included in the model. The point is, the bell is rung at 11,000 BC, and at that point, every species starts the race.
Assumption #2: All species hit certain Technology Level Benchmarks, and the time ratio for those benchmarks is consistent. These benchmarks are broad brushstrokes, and don't represent the details of how a culture gets from A to B to C, or exactly what that Tech Level might mean at any given point. But it takes into account that the journey from Pre-Civilization to Early Metalworking is a much longer one than from Late Industrial to Technological.
Now, with those two assumptions, I add in two Randomizing factors to tweak those ratios for each Alien Civilization. One broadly represents Ingenuity-- how quickly a species as a whole comes up with and enacts new ideas-- and the other represents Resources-- having the natural means on hand that enable enacting new ideas. As per the underlying thesis of the Guns, Germs & Steel Model, Resources is the bigger determining factor.
For example, for the sake of the model, I assign Humans an Ingenuity Factor and Resource factor of 1. With the Ingenuity, the range of variance is pretty minute: with one exception (a species I wanted to beat everyone else to space by a wide margin), the range of Ingenuity is between .95 and 1.05. No species is really significantly smarter than anyone else.**
Resource Factor had a much bigger range, and small changes in the range could generate much larger effects. The range was, for the most part, between 0 and 2, but for species that I wanted still in a Hunter/Gatherer phase, the RF might be well into the negatives.***
And then I generate an equation that plugs the IF and RF into the Advancement Ratio I've already created, and: Bam. I now know to the year when every alien culture breaks the FTL barrier, and where every culture is, broadly speaking, in any given year.
Now, whether or not this is really useful information for a writer to know, that's debatable. It certainly falls under the Iceberg Principle of worldbuilding: stuff the reader will never see above the surface.
---
*- Yes, I am a loon. We've established this.
**- Not to mention, the "Ingenuity" factor really represents several different factors that don't necessarily tie into "Intelligence", such as broad social factors that could enhance or hamper scientific advancement. But I'm not a sociologist, and the math here was complicated enough. A single number that represents all those things broadly was sufficient.
***- Which could represent a lot of things: a complete lack of domesticatible animals or crops, or a sparsity of easy-to-work metals like copper or tin, for example.
Any old-school Asimov fan could have told you that. While I doubt any of us would argue that Hari Seldon's level of psychohistorical projection is probably impossible, there is a simple truth that pure math has no bias.
Now, applying this to worldbuilding. I will fully admit that I'm more of a numbers geek than your average writer, so I will do things that would probably make most people weep at the prospect of it.
Take, for example, my latest bit of Build Process, incorporating a dimension of time into my already-complex 150-ly radius Space Opera Setting. I looked at my several hundred intelligent species*, and even knowing their technology level, I asked myself, "Yes, but who got their first? How did they expand?"
So, I start with some assumptions, some of which probably have underlying errors, but work in terms of large-scale worldbuilding as a whole. It also works in terms of applying the Guns, Germs and Steel ideas on an interstellar scale.
Assumption #1: That all intelligent species in question, in this patch of interstellar neighborhood, were all at an equivalent state of Intelligent, Pre-Civilized Hunter/Gatherer at the same time. This is a HUGE presumption, especially in terms of evolution and cosmic time. It more or less requires some form of direct Precursor Intervention, which I've included in the model. The point is, the bell is rung at 11,000 BC, and at that point, every species starts the race.
Assumption #2: All species hit certain Technology Level Benchmarks, and the time ratio for those benchmarks is consistent. These benchmarks are broad brushstrokes, and don't represent the details of how a culture gets from A to B to C, or exactly what that Tech Level might mean at any given point. But it takes into account that the journey from Pre-Civilization to Early Metalworking is a much longer one than from Late Industrial to Technological.
Now, with those two assumptions, I add in two Randomizing factors to tweak those ratios for each Alien Civilization. One broadly represents Ingenuity-- how quickly a species as a whole comes up with and enacts new ideas-- and the other represents Resources-- having the natural means on hand that enable enacting new ideas. As per the underlying thesis of the Guns, Germs & Steel Model, Resources is the bigger determining factor.
For example, for the sake of the model, I assign Humans an Ingenuity Factor and Resource factor of 1. With the Ingenuity, the range of variance is pretty minute: with one exception (a species I wanted to beat everyone else to space by a wide margin), the range of Ingenuity is between .95 and 1.05. No species is really significantly smarter than anyone else.**
Resource Factor had a much bigger range, and small changes in the range could generate much larger effects. The range was, for the most part, between 0 and 2, but for species that I wanted still in a Hunter/Gatherer phase, the RF might be well into the negatives.***
And then I generate an equation that plugs the IF and RF into the Advancement Ratio I've already created, and: Bam. I now know to the year when every alien culture breaks the FTL barrier, and where every culture is, broadly speaking, in any given year.
Now, whether or not this is really useful information for a writer to know, that's debatable. It certainly falls under the Iceberg Principle of worldbuilding: stuff the reader will never see above the surface.
---
*- Yes, I am a loon. We've established this.
**- Not to mention, the "Ingenuity" factor really represents several different factors that don't necessarily tie into "Intelligence", such as broad social factors that could enhance or hamper scientific advancement. But I'm not a sociologist, and the math here was complicated enough. A single number that represents all those things broadly was sufficient.
***- Which could represent a lot of things: a complete lack of domesticatible animals or crops, or a sparsity of easy-to-work metals like copper or tin, for example.
Monday, November 5, 2012
Fantasy Fiction and Democracy
Let's face it: democracy is not a key factor in most fantasy fiction. It is a genre that has its foundations built on a primarily European-based aristocracy/nobility model. One of the tired tropes of the genre is the idea of rule-through-birthright: the king of Return of the King is the great-to-the-infinite-power grandson of a long-gone king, and the rulers of Gondor are "stewards" who have essentially been waiting for an heir of Isildur to bother to show up and claim his throne. Same thing in The Belgariad: Garion is the heir of the secretly-preserved line of Riva, and the empty throne has waited for the Rivan King to show up for 800 years.
Seriously, these are some patient people, since they go centuries working on the premise of, essentially, a temporary regency waiting for the "proper" ruler to show up, even though the ancestor who last occupied the throne is long out of living memory.* Why do they put up with this? Because, apparently, in this type of fantasy, birthright never fades. Nobility is important.
I'm not entirely immune to this: Druthal has a king (Maradaine XVIII) whose line comes from the first king of Druthal (Maradaine I), and that line being on the throne was not continuous. There are some key differences, though: The line broke in the first place because the son of Maradaine I was something of a dullard, so other various lords quietly shuffled him to the side while someone else claimed the throne. Second, the line was restored to the throne nine centuries later not out of prophecy or divine providence, but because a small group of conspirators discovered that a minor noble they liked was a direct descendant of that dullard son, but more importantly because the current king was a complete and total loon and they were desperate to get rid of him. So the line claim was really only about giving their revolution a bit of extra legitimacy. It didn't launch a golden age where everything in Druthal was now wonderful since the Rightful Line was Restored.**
But, while I have those European nobility influences-- Druthal has a king, not to mention archdukes, dukes, earls and barons-- it also has a Parliament. An elected Parliament, where the real legislative power lies. Democracy is a crucial element of how Druthal works. The people's voice is important, even if it gets corrupted and twisted and bought out from time to time.
I am having fun with that in Way of the Shield, where the partisan make-up of the Parliament, how various aspects of the press interpret what the Parliament does, how people feel about the Parliament (ESPECIALLY Dangerous Fringe Elements) all come into play. It's messy, because democracy is messy, which is how I like it.
I won't get too political here, but the thing I love about democracy is the element of dissent and disagreement. I love that I can have an enormous, pitched argument with someone on the polar opposite side of an issue, and the end of the day, we'll both think the other guy is just plain wrong, but neither of us is going to get taken in by the police in the middle of the night for what we said. And in a little bit, we're going to have an election, and shortly afterwards a little more than half of us will be pleased, and a little less than half will be pissed. But that little-less-than-half will dust themselves off and gear up for the next fight. And that's awesome. That's what it's about.
And, hopefully, I can work a bit of that into by fantasy writing, and get some good drama out of it.
---
*- Essentially, even though both LOTR and Belgariad have functionally-immortal characters. Strictly speaking, there is living memory of Isildur and Riva, but it's not amongst the common people living day-to-day under the regency rule.
**- Also note, this is just an incident in the extensive history my insane-worldbuilder brain has created. It's three centuries before the stories I'm telling.
Seriously, these are some patient people, since they go centuries working on the premise of, essentially, a temporary regency waiting for the "proper" ruler to show up, even though the ancestor who last occupied the throne is long out of living memory.* Why do they put up with this? Because, apparently, in this type of fantasy, birthright never fades. Nobility is important.
I'm not entirely immune to this: Druthal has a king (Maradaine XVIII) whose line comes from the first king of Druthal (Maradaine I), and that line being on the throne was not continuous. There are some key differences, though: The line broke in the first place because the son of Maradaine I was something of a dullard, so other various lords quietly shuffled him to the side while someone else claimed the throne. Second, the line was restored to the throne nine centuries later not out of prophecy or divine providence, but because a small group of conspirators discovered that a minor noble they liked was a direct descendant of that dullard son, but more importantly because the current king was a complete and total loon and they were desperate to get rid of him. So the line claim was really only about giving their revolution a bit of extra legitimacy. It didn't launch a golden age where everything in Druthal was now wonderful since the Rightful Line was Restored.**
But, while I have those European nobility influences-- Druthal has a king, not to mention archdukes, dukes, earls and barons-- it also has a Parliament. An elected Parliament, where the real legislative power lies. Democracy is a crucial element of how Druthal works. The people's voice is important, even if it gets corrupted and twisted and bought out from time to time.
I am having fun with that in Way of the Shield, where the partisan make-up of the Parliament, how various aspects of the press interpret what the Parliament does, how people feel about the Parliament (ESPECIALLY Dangerous Fringe Elements) all come into play. It's messy, because democracy is messy, which is how I like it.
I won't get too political here, but the thing I love about democracy is the element of dissent and disagreement. I love that I can have an enormous, pitched argument with someone on the polar opposite side of an issue, and the end of the day, we'll both think the other guy is just plain wrong, but neither of us is going to get taken in by the police in the middle of the night for what we said. And in a little bit, we're going to have an election, and shortly afterwards a little more than half of us will be pleased, and a little less than half will be pissed. But that little-less-than-half will dust themselves off and gear up for the next fight. And that's awesome. That's what it's about.
And, hopefully, I can work a bit of that into by fantasy writing, and get some good drama out of it.
---
*- Essentially, even though both LOTR and Belgariad have functionally-immortal characters. Strictly speaking, there is living memory of Isildur and Riva, but it's not amongst the common people living day-to-day under the regency rule.
**- Also note, this is just an incident in the extensive history my insane-worldbuilder brain has created. It's three centuries before the stories I'm telling.
Thursday, November 1, 2012
Perils of the Writer: The Slow Process of Getting the Ball Rolling
¡Feliz día de los muertos! We're now in November, which for some writerly types, means NaNoWriMo, aka Nation Novel Writing Month. If you aren't in the know, participants pledge to write a 50,000 word novel over the course of November. This translates to writing approximately 16,666 words a day. Back in the early days of writing, I participated, but I don't anymore, since every month is Novel Writing Month, and at this point in my life, a pace of 50K a month for 12 months is not something I could ever hope to maintain. Writing at my own pace is just fine by me.
In my opinion, NaNoWriMo is an excellent exercise in terms of process, in learning how to write a novel... but not one in terms of results. The novel you write in one month won't be a particularly useful one, not without significant editing. Briefly: I think it's a wonderful way to crank out a trunk novel. One of my trunk novels was, in fact, a NaNoWriMo.*
But exercise and process are important, especially when it comes to getting started. Getting a novel started is, for me, a very slow and deliberate process, in that the path from conception to writing actual text can take quite some time. I sometimes make the metaphor of my writing brain being like a kitchen, with various projects on front and back burners. But then there is other stuff in crockpots on back counters, slowly stewing away for years until they are really ready to work.
Phase One: Conception.
This is, more or less, the Big Idea phase of things, where the thunderstrike of a Shiny New Story smashes across your brainpan. It's usually the broadest of brushstrokes: Steampunk Airship Flying Through Alternate Universe Texas! Secret Telepath War In Manhattan! Abducted Human Wakes from Hibernation Sleep on a Dying Ship Full of other Abducted Aliens! Cold hard truth: 75-90% of projects never get out of this phase. It's always a bit fun and exciting, but it's also easy to mistake that Fun and Exciting for "And now I will write the book". That never works, at least for me. Though I suspect that many people-- at least non-writers-- believe that this phase is all you need to write the book.**
Phase Two: Setting.
Once I have an idea, I need to build the place where it unfolds. I'm a worldbuilder, it's what I do. For me, this phase is all too crucial: it's about placing the gears that will power the engine behind the story. This phase can often be the longest, because it is filled with working and reworking things out. If it doesn't work, if it doesn't make sense to me, then the center doesn't hold. Case in point: when I initially conceived my Space Opera Setting, back in 2002, I created some initial star maps with colonies and alien homeworlds and such and so forth. But as I first tried to write, this signal of WRONG WRONG WRONG across my brain was jamming things up. Why? It took a while to realize, but I finally hit upon it: the stars of these colonies and alien worlds, while being in close proximity to Earth, had nothing to do with actual stars close to Earth. Back to the drawing board.
Phase Three-A: Characters.
Phase Three-B: Circumstances.
I put these two together like this because they tend to go hand in hand, but I can't honestly say which one goes first. Both things are crucial to figuring out what the actual story is: what's happening, and who it's happening to. It's a strange, intertwined process that, frankly, I haven't quite mastered. Trying to craft circumstances without knowing character at the center can yield something soulless and mechanical. But crafting characters without really knowing the story can make an unholy mess, where you end up with numerous people standing around with very little to do. The best solution I've found is to, at this phase, focus on just the core characters and the ripe circumstances that initiates things, and let it flow from there.
Phase Four: Outline
Now that I've worked out the key elements, who, what, where, when and (to a degree) why, it's a time for a big helping of how. Of course, I use my Twelve-Part Structure as a base, writing out about a paragraph for each part. With that finally in hand, THEN I can start Actually Writing.
___
*- I gave it significant editing afterwards. It's still a trunk novel, and that's what it deserves, frankly.
**- This is where those, "I've got a great idea for a book, so you write it and we'll split the profits!" pitches come from.
In my opinion, NaNoWriMo is an excellent exercise in terms of process, in learning how to write a novel... but not one in terms of results. The novel you write in one month won't be a particularly useful one, not without significant editing. Briefly: I think it's a wonderful way to crank out a trunk novel. One of my trunk novels was, in fact, a NaNoWriMo.*
But exercise and process are important, especially when it comes to getting started. Getting a novel started is, for me, a very slow and deliberate process, in that the path from conception to writing actual text can take quite some time. I sometimes make the metaphor of my writing brain being like a kitchen, with various projects on front and back burners. But then there is other stuff in crockpots on back counters, slowly stewing away for years until they are really ready to work.
Phase One: Conception.
This is, more or less, the Big Idea phase of things, where the thunderstrike of a Shiny New Story smashes across your brainpan. It's usually the broadest of brushstrokes: Steampunk Airship Flying Through Alternate Universe Texas! Secret Telepath War In Manhattan! Abducted Human Wakes from Hibernation Sleep on a Dying Ship Full of other Abducted Aliens! Cold hard truth: 75-90% of projects never get out of this phase. It's always a bit fun and exciting, but it's also easy to mistake that Fun and Exciting for "And now I will write the book". That never works, at least for me. Though I suspect that many people-- at least non-writers-- believe that this phase is all you need to write the book.**
Phase Two: Setting.
Once I have an idea, I need to build the place where it unfolds. I'm a worldbuilder, it's what I do. For me, this phase is all too crucial: it's about placing the gears that will power the engine behind the story. This phase can often be the longest, because it is filled with working and reworking things out. If it doesn't work, if it doesn't make sense to me, then the center doesn't hold. Case in point: when I initially conceived my Space Opera Setting, back in 2002, I created some initial star maps with colonies and alien homeworlds and such and so forth. But as I first tried to write, this signal of WRONG WRONG WRONG across my brain was jamming things up. Why? It took a while to realize, but I finally hit upon it: the stars of these colonies and alien worlds, while being in close proximity to Earth, had nothing to do with actual stars close to Earth. Back to the drawing board.
Phase Three-A: Characters.
Phase Three-B: Circumstances.
I put these two together like this because they tend to go hand in hand, but I can't honestly say which one goes first. Both things are crucial to figuring out what the actual story is: what's happening, and who it's happening to. It's a strange, intertwined process that, frankly, I haven't quite mastered. Trying to craft circumstances without knowing character at the center can yield something soulless and mechanical. But crafting characters without really knowing the story can make an unholy mess, where you end up with numerous people standing around with very little to do. The best solution I've found is to, at this phase, focus on just the core characters and the ripe circumstances that initiates things, and let it flow from there.
Phase Four: Outline
Now that I've worked out the key elements, who, what, where, when and (to a degree) why, it's a time for a big helping of how. Of course, I use my Twelve-Part Structure as a base, writing out about a paragraph for each part. With that finally in hand, THEN I can start Actually Writing.
___
*- I gave it significant editing afterwards. It's still a trunk novel, and that's what it deserves, frankly.
**- This is where those, "I've got a great idea for a book, so you write it and we'll split the profits!" pitches come from.
Monday, October 29, 2012
Worldbuilding: Mapping in 4-D
There's a neat little video out there that shows the various political shifts in Europe over the course of a thousand years. It's the sort of thing you have to be something of a map/geography/history dork to really get into, but, hey, here I am:
Now, this highlights a startlingly obvious points: the politics of a map change over time. A LOT. The question is: does your worldbuilding reflect this?
There is a bad tendency, especially in fantasy, to have the map of the world essentially be: this is how it is, and that's how it's been. Empires stand for 10,000 years, locked in stasis. Any changes over the course of history are singular and tied to key events. No tweaks, no shifts, no growth.
Of course, I understand this. Doing a full world map (or, even crazier, a full sci-fi map of however many stars to however many light-years) is a lot of work. To then document even FURTHER the shifts over the course of time is a daunting task, and one you have to be somewhat obsessive to do.
Which means I try to do it.
On the Druthal maps, it's a matter of broad brushstrokes and a few generalizations. For example, far east of Druthal is a nation called Lyrana. Over the course of history, that land has also been part of the Tyzanian Empire, and the Pagari Nations. Now, "Pagari Nations" is collective term for a number of city-states in that area. There were something on the order of fifty different Pagari Nations, but I don't really need to know the details of which were which or what exactly went on between them. A notation of the area as "Pagari Nations" and that they were fifty-some odd city states at a bronzeworking level of technology that had ever-shifting alliances, wars and trade is all I really need to know.*
Sci-fi mapping is a bit more interesting, because you have two big factors to work in: which planets have intelligent life, and when those civilizations achieve FTL flight. It's all well and good to note that, distance-wise, two different species might claim a certain planet as a colony. But if you add in one species has a hundred year headstart on colonizing... then "might" goes out the window. Am I crazy enough to create a spreadsheet crossing each intelligent species to various technological milestones in order to chart exactly when each one achieves interstellar flight, and then calculate the spread based on that?
What do you think?
---
*- One could argue that, given as of now all my stories take place in Maradaine, and modern Lyrana barely has an impact on it, let alone it's deep history, that I don't even need to know that much. But I like to. It's how I am.
Now, this highlights a startlingly obvious points: the politics of a map change over time. A LOT. The question is: does your worldbuilding reflect this?
There is a bad tendency, especially in fantasy, to have the map of the world essentially be: this is how it is, and that's how it's been. Empires stand for 10,000 years, locked in stasis. Any changes over the course of history are singular and tied to key events. No tweaks, no shifts, no growth.
Of course, I understand this. Doing a full world map (or, even crazier, a full sci-fi map of however many stars to however many light-years) is a lot of work. To then document even FURTHER the shifts over the course of time is a daunting task, and one you have to be somewhat obsessive to do.
Which means I try to do it.
On the Druthal maps, it's a matter of broad brushstrokes and a few generalizations. For example, far east of Druthal is a nation called Lyrana. Over the course of history, that land has also been part of the Tyzanian Empire, and the Pagari Nations. Now, "Pagari Nations" is collective term for a number of city-states in that area. There were something on the order of fifty different Pagari Nations, but I don't really need to know the details of which were which or what exactly went on between them. A notation of the area as "Pagari Nations" and that they were fifty-some odd city states at a bronzeworking level of technology that had ever-shifting alliances, wars and trade is all I really need to know.*
Sci-fi mapping is a bit more interesting, because you have two big factors to work in: which planets have intelligent life, and when those civilizations achieve FTL flight. It's all well and good to note that, distance-wise, two different species might claim a certain planet as a colony. But if you add in one species has a hundred year headstart on colonizing... then "might" goes out the window. Am I crazy enough to create a spreadsheet crossing each intelligent species to various technological milestones in order to chart exactly when each one achieves interstellar flight, and then calculate the spread based on that?
What do you think?
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*- One could argue that, given as of now all my stories take place in Maradaine, and modern Lyrana barely has an impact on it, let alone it's deep history, that I don't even need to know that much. But I like to. It's how I am.
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Perils of the Writer: The Uphill Slog
Earlier this week, John Scalzi wrote about finishing his latest project, The Human Division. The part that interested me the most in this post was this bit on the process of writing it:
Part of it is the fact that it took him ten months to write it. It makes me feel like my timetables aren't so terrible. But the more comforting aspect is how back-end heavy the writing is, because I've found my experience is the same way.
OK, for the way I write, a typical Novel Rough Draft clocks in around 80,000 words*, and that takes about eight-to-ten months to write. I would like it to go faster, but, you know, LIFE.
But this is how it goes:
First 10,000 words (or so): Sprint of awesome excitement. Cranks out like gangbusters. Yeah, I totally can DO THIS. Writing sessions of 1000-1500 words.
10,000-20,000: Whoa. OK. This is actually a bit of work now. Losing that pace. Need to figure out some stuff that I thought was perfectly clear. Writing sessions of 500-1000 words.
20,000-50,000: The Long Uphill Marathon of Pure Pain. Nothing is working. I can't do this. WHY DID I THINK THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA? My outline for this part is woefully inadequate. I HAVE NO CLUE HOW TO GET FROM POINTS A TO B TO C HERE. I'm a moron. I hate this book and my characters are stupid. A 500-word writing session would be a PARTY. This part takes MONTHS to get through.
50,000-60,000: The uphill evens out. Pieces click together. The path is becoming clear. 500-1000 word writing sessions.
60,000-end: Downhill sprint. The end is in sight, it's just a matter of getting it all out through my fingers. 2,000-3,000 word sessions.
Right now, Way of the Shield? Still in the uphill. I'm getting through it by reminding myself that when I was writing Thorn, Holver Alley and Maradaine Constabulary it went exactly the same way.
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*- For me, the Rough Draft tends to be underwritten, and the final draft comes in somewhere between 90-100K. I find it suits me better to step back and figure out what needs more depth, rather than overwrite and figure out what fat needs to be cut.
For process fans, the first words of The Human Division (which eventually found themselves incorporated into Episode Three) were written on January 11, 2012, at 2:37pm. The final words were written on October 23, 2012, at 12:02am. Most of the words were written in September and October; there were a fair number of words written before then but a lot of that got chucked.This makes me feel better, personally.
Part of it is the fact that it took him ten months to write it. It makes me feel like my timetables aren't so terrible. But the more comforting aspect is how back-end heavy the writing is, because I've found my experience is the same way.
OK, for the way I write, a typical Novel Rough Draft clocks in around 80,000 words*, and that takes about eight-to-ten months to write. I would like it to go faster, but, you know, LIFE.
But this is how it goes:
First 10,000 words (or so): Sprint of awesome excitement. Cranks out like gangbusters. Yeah, I totally can DO THIS. Writing sessions of 1000-1500 words.
10,000-20,000: Whoa. OK. This is actually a bit of work now. Losing that pace. Need to figure out some stuff that I thought was perfectly clear. Writing sessions of 500-1000 words.
20,000-50,000: The Long Uphill Marathon of Pure Pain. Nothing is working. I can't do this. WHY DID I THINK THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA? My outline for this part is woefully inadequate. I HAVE NO CLUE HOW TO GET FROM POINTS A TO B TO C HERE. I'm a moron. I hate this book and my characters are stupid. A 500-word writing session would be a PARTY. This part takes MONTHS to get through.
50,000-60,000: The uphill evens out. Pieces click together. The path is becoming clear. 500-1000 word writing sessions.
60,000-end: Downhill sprint. The end is in sight, it's just a matter of getting it all out through my fingers. 2,000-3,000 word sessions.
Right now, Way of the Shield? Still in the uphill. I'm getting through it by reminding myself that when I was writing Thorn, Holver Alley and Maradaine Constabulary it went exactly the same way.
----
*- For me, the Rough Draft tends to be underwritten, and the final draft comes in somewhere between 90-100K. I find it suits me better to step back and figure out what needs more depth, rather than overwrite and figure out what fat needs to be cut.
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