World Building 3.0 … for me.

Small reminder up front. My writing columns are about my experiences with the writing process so they offer more depth, but less breadth, than other writing blogs. Simply put, they’re less about generic advice and what did, or didn’t work for someone. YMMV.

So how does word building begin for a story?

With my previous works  I was very much a pants-er, both in my story and my world building. The advantage is that I only create as much of a world as I need for the story.  

But that was sort of a mess for novel one, which is why it’s hidden in trunk. It worked great for my Weird Western, but then again not so much for my proto-Steampunk Celtic/Roman Han mashup (that’s in editing right now).

To sum up, when the conflict* and the world is straightforward, being a pants-er is pretty doable. Add plot twists with evolving world building on the fly as the story develops  and suddenly the story is in at a dead stop as I noodle out the details I need before I continue. Sometimes I realize the detail may never hit the page, but I until I chase that bit down the rabbit hole, I don’t know for sure.

That dead stop, though, drags down a process that’s already slow for a part-time writer. One bit I’ve picked up from writers like Chuck Wendig, Adam-Troy Castro, and Matt Forbeck is that outlines can help -- if you’re not a slave to them. And these guys are like word machines, both quantity and quality.

As I’m getting  ready to do the legwork for my fourth novel. The biggest change to my method is a dedication to Outlining with a capital “O.”

And one way to outline a story is to start with an idea of who your heroes are, what they might need, and then dive into the villain.

No really, the bad guys maybe your most important characters in the story. Without them, there’s no conflict. But straight up baddies are no fun. So giving them motivations adds a little umph.  So it goes something like this.

The hero interferes with the villain's plan by rescuing an innocent. But why did the bad guy need the innocent in the first place? Said innocent has a talent that’s in high demand? That kidnapping still makes him a cardboard villain, though.

But what if this bad guy, say a crime lord, was playing two sides of the fence, as they often do. Sure, he’s making a profit, but that profit helps others or sticks it some assholes. Now the dimmer switch in me brain is starting to turn past the “On” position.

So talented innocent is a sculptor which is great when you need printing plates for counterfeit money to either fund the resistance or destabilize the real bad guys, right?. That’s promising, but why isn’t my hero already working for said resistance. Is she part of the problem? Neutral in said conflict?

I’m not excited by that track, time to spin up the old gray matter again. Maybe it’s a more low-key occupation? Puppet government maybe? I feel like I’m getting warmer.  

Now I’ve noodled out that a background situation that’s simmering, but not ready to boil, has potential. A fantasy Casablanca or Morroco starts percolating.

If there’s more than one occupier, which makes it harder for the resistance to pick effective targets? If you give one a black eye, you’ve only really done the heavy lifting for other jerks and kept their hands clean in the process.

Then history comes to my rescue.

The Ottoman Empire and Poland were both were nations that had Prussia, Austria and Russia screwing with them for centuries. Neither country thought that was a picnic.

So now I have four countries to invent in the short term. Three superpowers and the beleaguered land they all fight over. And their capitals, and probably a lot more stuff I’m not even thinking of right now.

The key, I think will be to touch briefly on these at first. A sentence or paragraph that gets me going, but doesn’t mire me in a history paper for a fictional country.

Even though it’s going to be a fictional world, I now have a LOT of inspiration to draw from. I’m still debating if I should be very happy or very scared.

Whew. I need a break. I’m thinking that taking ten will be good. That’ll give me a chance to flesh out the airship crew.

*My plotting comes from the school of characters in need, and then offer them a conflict that leads them to their need. It’s a little more complicated than that, but it avoids the temptation of creating a plot that may or may not mesh with your characters.

Shannara and Shakespeare

More of this, less of Middle Earth Lite

SG-1 was a show that I never watched until it was repeating on a daily basis with the then Properly-Spelled-SciFi-Channel. If you just double-checked the title of this article, hang with me here. Besides I needed more space before we hit spoiler alert territory.

You’d think this would have been something going a has-been show limping along on its second network (SG-1 started on Showtime.) I was surprised it was still on with a new episode every week..

Eventually the original SG-1 lasted 10 years as a single show, something that even a single Star Trek series pulled off on American TV. And while ST had much better success with its spin-offs, the Stargate franchise still had an astounding run of 15 years. It was based on a one-off movie. How much content could you have? Turns out quite a bit if you’re not shy with your mythology.

In comparison, the source material for Shannara is over 20 novels and counting. 

The first season of wasn’t great TV, a double sin while we are in a golden age of TV and Geekery, but over several episodes it became more watchable. Though it still has a ways to go to put “I don’t think your elf princess is going to want a human’s sloppy seconds,” in the rear view mirror.

But now we have an in-universe reason for why everyone sounds more “modern,” this is our world after some sort of hand wavy genetic apocalypse*. But Manu Bennett, you can still keep up the old Druid-speak in your growly voice. You’ve got that down pat.

And the more TSC embraced its Science Fantasy premise, the more intrigued I became. I haven’t read anything from the series in decades, but I fear that Brooks probably didn’t put that much thought into his mythology beyond using it to prop up his fantasy world. But just in production values alone, it looks like Millar and Gough have fleshed the Science Fantasy mythology more — something that also worked for SG-1 as the years rolled by.

But now we go into spoiler country and why my interest has peaked after the final episode.

Last chance. Spoiler Alert.

More than half of the cast is dead, including the very first main character we met in the pilot. It’s like Shakespearean bloodbath, only with the bad guys doing most of the killing strokes. And it was so total that I wondered if the show was only a miniseries until I saw the “To Be Continued” caption before the End Credits. There was one dude, not the bad guy, who had to be killed twice. That’s taking one for the team.

Every long-standing genre show needs to find a way to evolve and change over time. Some were more subtle about it, like the Doctor Who, X-files and SG-1 as they expanded their mythology while others played the obvious is obvious card like ST’s and Fringe’s regular reboots. (And for anyone keeping up with the Expanse books, you know that’s already in the works for the TV show.)

But with final episode already setting up a villain and clearing the house of all the dead wood (Magic Soul Eating Tree pun intended), it shows a commitment to keeping the show fluid and adaptable over the long haul. Right now, I think the series is on the bubble.

But if it makes to Season 2, it just might be around longer than anyone expects.

*The books go for more of a 1970s hand wavy atomic armageddon.

Lord of Light, the missed opportunity in Gods of Egypt

So evidently some people watch this clip and think that Ra is piloting a space ship. (It might be chairot-ish/boat-ish thing, maybe?)

But for me, it just reinforced what I was thinking already. That all of that money and effort could have given us a Lord of Light movie.

Roger Zelazny’s third book and a Hugo winner, the twisty tale covers the downfall of tyrants who used mind transfer techn and religion to rule a planet. As a bit of trivia, this is the SF book documented in Ben Affleck’s Argo as the book-to-movie project that the CIA used for their cover in the Iranian Hostage Crisis.

Adopting Hinduism for both its use of reincarnation and a caste system, the original colony ship crew judge who is worthy of a better body and who is to be punished by living like a literal animal. Posing as gods, the crew’s definition of karma is a bit more self-serving. The native aliens are called “demons.”

But several lesser “gods,” the colonist own children, have had enough and bring the last rebel back from his prison in the ionosphere . But how does one being, even an immortal one, fight a religion with very real gods.

Ironically, I think the special effects budget might have actually been smaller than GoE. If I remember right, the colony ship in Light landed a long time ago and there’s no need for a space scene.

So as you shake your head of the whitewashing over Gods of Egypt, lift your hand and pull Lord of Light off the shelf and have a good read.

Magic is the tool, not the theme, in Magicians

I’m getting into the Magicians quite a bit, but for while it was hard to pin down why.

First off, maybe I’m reading into it too much, but let’s see. While the literanazies usually comment that much of genre fiction is “adolescent” especially for it's love of the Chosen One trope, the Magicians is more of the collegiate version.

I'll skip over the two obvious spins of that angle, the post-Harry Potter commentary and the addiction allegory, though the undertone I was having trouble articulating about seemed akin to both.

It seemed more like the addition to being a "Chosen One" ... among thousands of other “Chosen Ones” and the sacrifices you make only validate your alleged uniqueness.

Harvard? Yale? Being in the 10% of special people in country? Bah. That pales in comparison to magic school. Suck on that valedictorians!

And yet the show is already hinting that every one of these special snow flakes are all headed towards a crash of realism out in the adult magic world. Just as every wizard graduate from Brakebills will learn that  high scores only puts more expectations to deliver in a world they are outclassed for, so goes it for mundane lawyers, doctors and academia.

You see that some are already finding justifications to avoid dealing with that realization. I.E. at least they are not hedge witches, or worse yet not one of the little people who have no magic. And the hope that if they are willing to keep pushing and sacrificing, they can prove they at least belong if not stand out among peers who are already standing above everyone else. And how those older and more cunning than them are manipulating their insecurity and ambition.

So I knew it's definitely a hubris of some sort,  sometimes, but then some characters use the magic as facade to remake themselves into what they want to be. "I am own greatest creation." Just as others had used magic as something to bury themselves into to hide from their personal pains

Then I realized where I had gone wrong. 

I had assumed the writing room had only picked one theme or one trope. A lot of shows and stories do that. In the past, that was a pretty solid way to go, but I think audiences are more savvy to that now. A show has to keep moving forward now a days.

 Example? Twenty years ago, the old "Hero is stuck in a fake insanity ward" episode would have been in season four of a genre film. 

The Magicians did it as their fourth episode, season one. 

And I think that this show has taken that a step further with magic. Instead of sticking to one metaphor and running it into the ground, on fumes, with a shovel, they've embraced that magic can be many things to many people. It can be a way to power, a place to hide and even a salvation of sorts. 

It could also be a one-way ticket to a personal hell. 

So I tip my hat off to the crew of show. Keep making magic.