Building Settings

Some of the most memorable fantasy and science fiction stories in books and movies often seem off-putting at first. They have amazing worlds and characters and let those worlds come to life by not holding the audience’s hand too much.

I bring this up because I’ve been watching Firefly lately. The show offers a very simple introductory explanation that’s part of the start of each episode and then leaves it up to figure out the rest from there. I feel it’s an excellent example of a strange setting done right. At first, the strange mix of almost western-style imagery with space stuff was a bit jarring to me. It’s not what’s normally done, but I understood the basics enough to want to try and understand it. And once they started to expand the setting, it was very easy to get sucked into it and love it.

Firefly also does a great job at establishing the setting through characters’ commentary on how they feel about places rather than using any dry exposition. If they’re going to one of the alliance worlds, then the characters mention what they might like to see or what might be a problem. It gives a good snapshot of the culture, mindset, and interests of the characters while providing the worldbuilding the audience needs to understand what’s going on.

As I’ve read through slush piles, it’s usually easy to see how good an author is at worldbuilding within the first few pages. Novices will usually divide description and character up, or sacrifice one for the other. More intermediate writers will start to get a few things right but usually have the pacing off on how they introduce new elements. Great writers will draw you in with something fascinating by blending both together seamlessly.

You know when you’re reading a great writer by how at home they can make you feel in a strange world, even from the start.

Favorite Characters

I’m still trying to catch up to where I should be on this blog and I’m nearly there. I’ve been staggering new posts so you don’t get more than one in a day, so here’s the post that should have appeared last Friday.

Sometimes there are characters that are more memorable than the stories they were in. Often the stories aren’t bad, but it’s the characters that stand out. Here’s a few of my favorites.

Temeraire the dragon from His Majesty’s Dragon is the main reason I continued reading that series. Most the other characters are quite traditional or frustrating in their own ways, but Temeraire is always inquisitive, forward-thinking, and loveable. He’s smart enough to see beyond traditions and conventions, and it’s often a pity when he can’t convince others to do the same. Still, he has a lot of the traditional dragon quirks, such as loving to gather valuable things. The fun and most the humor of the entire series comes so much from his character.

One of my favorite archetypes for characters is the mentor and mastermind and Ovan from .Hack//Roots definitely fits both. He manages to always have a sense of coolness and mystery. Not only is he a guide and inspiration to the main character, but he’s also a master planner who know far more than he tells anyone, even while he slowly gives them the hints and clues to lead them to what he ultimately wants. It would spoil a lot to reveal what his true plan, intention, and story are, but it’s quite shocking to both the characters in-world and audience watching and leaves you thinking about it for a while. Other notable characters from the .Hack series include Hermit and Haseo, but I don’t want to spend all of this post talking about one series.

Going back to older works, I definitely love Gandalf from Tolkien’s works. He’s another great example of the mentor and planner archetypes. When he needs to be, he’s hands on and in the battle or there to give advice, but he also knows it’s important to let the other characters grow and learn. He’s a very big player in the world of middle earth, but even with all his skill and knowledge, he often has to rely on others that he’s been guiding along.

I can’t think of too many others off the top of my head. Kirito and Asuna from Sword Art Online are both great characters during the parts of the show that have good writing and character development (Season 1 part 1 and Season 2 part 2). It feels like you really get to grow and feel what these two feel during the series, from the intensity and despair of the darker moments and battles to the joy and fun of the simple happy times.

For me, interesting characters leave a feeling or lesson in your mind long after the book or show is over. They feel like teachers and friends that come alive in ways even beyond where the plot or world they’re in leads them. They’re the sort of characters you love to reread for inspiration and quotes long after you’ve finished reading their stories.

Scope In Fiction

I just finished listening to the audiobook of A Game of Thrones and loved it. George R.R. Martin does a great job at making an expansive cast of characters that feel very real, but he does an even better job that feels logistically real at least on the surface. I don’t have the time or knowledge to examine the more in depth logistics of it all, but if you’re going to write a larger story, it’s important to have this level of detail.

I’ve seen the concept discussed several times in various places. I’m not sure if logistical realism is the best name for it. Tolkien described it more as something along the lines of the distant mountains. You need to not only develop the immediate setting, but you need background such as places, lore, or history that are more expansive than the slice of the world your plot and characters lead the readers through.

Essentially, you need your world to feel like a place that functions beyond the immediacy of the plot and characters. A Game of Thrones does a great job at making even minor or one-time characters feel like real people. If they’re poor and ignorant, then they’ll have superstitions or ideas to fit that. If they’re rich and noble, then they’ll be more in line with that. There’s also a lot of actions and events that are mentioned as happening in far off places. It all comes together to make everything feel more real to the reader.

Politics and social aspects of the world also help build up this illusion of reality. If for example, someone does a sudden hostile takeover of another town, then there should be rebellion, guerilla tactics, and more, not just a passive acceptance of the new leader (something I’ve seen done poorly at least once).

When trying to develop an expansive setting, it’s helpful to ask a few basic questions. What do different groups of people believe or feel and why? What are the superstitions, legends, or other lore? Is there a strong belief in them or do people doubt them? What other powers, kingdoms, countries, etc. are near where your plot is taking place and how might they affect it? What events might be taking place elsewhere in the world that could have small or large effects on the plot and setting?

Just remember Tolkien’s principle of the distant mountains. You need to fill up the setting to the horizon, but not beyond that. It’s good to develop your world but bad to spend too long on worldbuilding and not long enough on writing.

As with any writing, it pays off to think beyond the surface level. A shallow story will feel like a bad stage drama that exists only in that moment, while a great story with depth will come alive in many ways beyond the main characters and plots.

Favorite Books

This month I’m talking about my favorites and reason behind why I like them so much. I’m moving up in the editing world and recently became a managing editor at Jolly Fish Press. Now that I’ll be looking for books to acquire, I thought it would be the perfect time to go over some of my favorites by genre.

Fantasy is the genre I read most. It’s hard to pick an overall favorite because so many authors and series all have different aspects that excite and amaze me. Still, I find one book I could reread many times and not get tired of would be The Hobbit. The book manages such a nice blend of character and setting.

It’s easy to feel exactly like Bilbo does when you read about him feeling homesick, scared, or like he’s in way over his head. Instead of having a larger than life protagonist, The Hobbit manages to be so endearing because Bilbo is so ordinary and relatable while he encounters fantastical things on his journey. He’s never expected to be great, but he constantly pushes past his fears and changes slowly from a relaxed hobbit into a seasoned adventurer and wins the admiration of the rest of his party, but at the price of being expected to do some very scary things.

The Hobbit is a fantasy classic and personal favorite because it mixes the fantastical with the mundane so well in both plot and character.

Although I don’t have time to talk much about them, I think my fantasy favorites from last year’s reading would be Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson and the Age of Fire series by E.E. Knight. Way of Kings has such a vivid and unique world while the Age of Fire series gives a refreshing spin to some classic fantasy elements while having dragons as the main characters (always a plus in my opinion). This year I’ve been enjoying A Game of Thrones on audiobook.

My second favorite genre is science fiction. I love exploring how technology and pushing the frontiers of humanity can bring out both the worst and best in people.

In sci-fi it’s not hard to pick a favorite. Asimov’s Foundation series is by far my favorite. It has wondrous technologies, including the predictive sciences central to the book’s plot. It has a small group standing for progress and science while fighting against the uncaring rigidity of the political and bureaucratic systems of a slowly failing empire. Ultimately, it’s about human ingenuity prevailing over ineffective government and social decay.

Most my favorite sci-fi has one of two things, but hopefully both. The first is interesting characters faced with unique issues brought about by the sci-fi setting. The second is exploring the dilemmas and philosophical arguments that come with new technologies and discoveries.

Notable sci-fi that I enjoyed lately would include The Martian by Andy Weir and most the stories by my friend Joe Vasicek.

Well, that’s about all the time I have for long-winded explanations of my favorites. Still, I should feel that my next few genres I find interesting would be self-help, memoirs, and realistic fiction with a side of the magical/supernatural. A few notable books in those that I’ve read recently would be The War of Art and Eleanor.

If you or a friend have a book you’re working on that you would like me to consider, send it to the submissions email at Jolly Fish Press:

Submission Guidelines
submit@jollyfishpress.com

Be sure to address your query letter to me. I’d love to find some new favorites to recommend for publication.

Copyright And Creativity

I just finished reading The Phantom of the Opera recently and it’s been a lot of fun to compare the book to the musical. Both are great and we have both because someone was allowed to make a derivative work from the book. But it’s getting harder and harder to have this sort of cultural exchange as copyrights extend further and further.

Copyrights are there to protect creators and encourage creativity. The original intent was that you could make a reasonable amount of money off something you created for a period of time that seemed reasonable. The terms of copyrights and other details have changed over the years. At first you had to apply for one and then renew it after 14 years for a total of 28 years. Later treaties and conventions made copyright automatic (a good change), but over time, the length of copyright as grown and grown (arguably a bad change), especially as creative works began to come from corporations as much as people.

As it now stands, US copyright protects a work for the life of the author plus 70 years. So if someone has an awesome idea based on the works of today, then they’ll have to pay royalties and work out arrangements with the author or release it posthumously to our great great great grandchildren. But using today is a pretty bad example. I’d go backwards in time but copyright laws changed and that’s why we have things like Wicked based on the Wizard of Oz.

If they had the same laws in place we have now, we’d barely be getting things from Poe, Dickens, Tolstoy, and other late 1800s authors or early 1900s (assuming the usual 100 to 125 year amount the current laws usually extend to).

While it’s great for authors to get paid for the work they did, the current laws heavily favor companies or heirs that continue to hold the rights long after the authors are dead. Because of this, many argue that a shorter copyright term would be better and some argue that it would be better to open everything up (with certain rules) with things like the creative commons license. I’m in general agreement with this sort of thinking.

But the big question still remains. Who should profit from creative work and for how long? I feel that the people and companies who create the things we enjoy need to be encouraged and rewarded for their efforts and successes. By having the right system, we’ll be able to make sure creators enjoy the fruits of their work without stifling the creative dialogue made possible through derivative works.

Let’s look at some of the possibilities. If copyright was extremely short, say between 1 and 5 years, what would it encourage? With such limited time, you’d have to make it big before anyone could get and use your work. That certainly wouldn’t encourage creativity, although it would mean you could quickly see a new thing based on some character, world, or concept you love. There would some very fast-paced cultural dialogue with all the possibilities but the downsides would make new works less common.

If we extend out a bit more to 10 or 20 years, it means a more stable income for creators. You could enjoy sales on popular items for a decade or two and then derivative works would make it popular again for a new generation as your work starts to become free. It’s still not enough time to give a steady income for creators, though, so many of them still might turn their energy elsewhere.

Adding more decades gives the benefit of a stable and reliable income source to the creators but also means there’s less ability to make creative derivative works. I’d say the best area for balance would be either 50 years out or the lifetime of the author. Anything beyond that just seems to be handing out money to greedy companies or heirs. If the author made a popular work and wants to have their descendants or company benefit, then it seems like they could just save and pass on some of the profits they made on the work during their lifetime, rather than having the rights continue to live on through legal successions.

It’s interesting to think about what might be available if this were the case. Works like The Lord of The Rings or the Chroncles of Narnia, for example, would have been available for use years ago. Did leaving the heirs with the rights to these things make for better quality licensed works? What might have been made if anyone was free to try?

It’s always hard to say what might have been done when the laws prevented it from happening. But with our current copyright laws, are we protecting the creators? Or are we letting companies and heirs live off the work of people long dead? If works live on by being enjoyed and shared, then wouldn’t a shorter copyright make it easier for a work to spread to more people that love it? Or does making stuff free faster mean they’ll be considered worthless and forgotten sooner? If you could pick a famous creator alive now and have them do their take on something copyrighted, what would you choose? If we had shorter copyrights, such a combination might be a possibility. But for now, it only happens if the permission is given and royalty rates agreed on.

Why Cursive Is Dying

At work I go through a lot of images of mail and try to figure out where it’s supposed to go. While using my low-level brain functions to do this, I often ponder things like why cursive has been dying out.

Cursive was originally used more often because it made writing a lot of letters easier. I don’t know the percentage, but typing has largely replaced writing things by hand, especially in functions where speed is important.

With its main use replaced by typing, cursive is left only to stand on its other merits. To be honest, basic cursive script, as opposed to more fancy calligraphy, doesn’t have a lot of other merits and a lot more problems. Unless written well and precisely, many of the capitals and many of the lower-case letters all look alike. When written poorly, it just becomes an unreadable loopy mess.

Over the centuries, there have been many different sorts of written handwriting. Some are centuries older than the first fonts and typesets. Sometimes they’d get too messy so a new or reformed version of an old one would then become popular, but I wonder, with things going more digital are we going to lose that? Are we just going to be left with nice digital letters and a handwriting style that mimics that in a rough form? Does how we write change the content, mood, or feel of our writing?

I let you decide, but if you want to learn more on cursive’s interesting history, you can always go read more in wikipedia.

Read the Book

I’ve recently been reading the book of The Phantom of the Opera and it’s been a very interesting experience in the differences between a book and its adaptations to film or stage.

In this book, there’s a very different focus, which makes even things like the characters’ actions take on a very different meaning. Of course, this has the effect of making some character seem better or worse than before. In The Phantom of the Opera, I always enjoyed Raoul as a character but the book shows him more as the spoiled rich young man upset over being scorned by his first love. They do reconcile, as they do in the musical, but just the way he treats her or acts when he doesn’t get his way makes him seem so much more like a spoiled rich kid.

There’s a lot of other book and movies with a very different feel. I’m running out of time today to go in depth, but things like The Hobbit change entirely when they become an epic adventure story instead of a story about a rather ordinary hobbit way in over his head.

In any case, it’s best to read the book. Even in the few cases where the  movie was better than the book (like Stardust), I still enjoyed the book for what it was. So really, just go and read the book!

LTUE 2015

This last weekend I had the chance to attend LTUE for part of a day, but even that short amount of time was enough to get some great inspiration and advice.

The main panels I took notes on were about creativity and productivity –  Breaking Blockages by Sandra Tayler and Blowing Your Writing Goals Out of the Water by Michael D. Young.

Both had great advice. Breaking blockages was about enjoying the writing process, removing sources that drain creativity (or working around them), and refilling your creative well. Life is busy, so our creativity can be used up in daily activities, such as work, family, or other things. If we feel empty when we go to create, then maybe it’s time to rearrange our schedule, set aside a little chunk of the day for creative things before you’re too tired, or get some help from time to time to free up your creative mind.

It’s also important to feed your creative mind. If you only focus on trying to take things our of your soul, you’ll come up empty sooner or later. I’ve often thought the best place to get ideas is to find something wonderful, odd, or mysterious in the world and bring that back to your writing. Find things you love in life and bring those to the page or canvas.

Sandra Tayler said that if there was any advice to take from her panel it was “The art of creation has intrinsic value even if the only person it changes is you.” This is great advice because I feel that whenever I try to focus on making something great, my work always slows down, but when I focus on making something I connect with and enjoy the process, then great work starts to flow faster and faster. I feel this also connected well to the ideas of the second panel.

The writing goals panel was interesting because it focused more on the reasons behind writing than on actual goals. By developing a purpose, you can aim your writing goals towards achieving it. Everyone is going to have a different reason for writing, so the goals that motivate each of us and help us write more are going to be different.

Besides these two great panels, I also spent some time talking to old friends and authors. I got a t-shirt to support the wonderful Leading Edge magazine and picked up the book City of the Saints by D. J. Butler. After his pitch, it would have been impossible to say no to such a quirky steampunk adventure, so I’m looking forward to reading it soon.

Patrons Versus Consumers

Long ago, wealthy people would become patrons of artists and authors they liked. Think back to the Victorian era or slightly afterward. The wealthy class would support artists and authors so they could create their works. In exchange, the artists would make works for their patrons as well as providing something to discuss and show off at social gatherings.

But then came the industrial revolution and it changed the whole dynamic. Artists were hired by companies which then turned their art into a product that would be produced in large quantities and bought by consumers. Their was little direct connection between consumer and artist. Rarely were the names of the artists even mentioned unless you did some research.

But now that the internet is becoming the main method of commerce, the balance is shifting back to the artist/patron model. This is a great thing because it allows each person to decide how they want to interact and support the artists and authors they enjoy. More and more often you can buy art, music, or books in a way where the creator receives a much bigger percent of the pay.

This model gives power to both the creator and patron. Everyone can make what they enjoy and want to make (although catering to what their audience normally enjoys also helps) and then those who enjoy their work can pay them to do more of it. It becomes a very simple incentive system. If you want to see more of a certain type of writing, art, music, movies, or other creative works, simply support the creators by paying them.

In this system, the creators decide how they want to distribute and get paid for their work. There are plenty of sites for ebooks that take some cut of the money in exchange for easy distribution. Artists can offer commissions, prints, art books, or other things for people to buy. Musicians can sell tracks or soundtracks easily through websites designed for them. Recently, other websites like Patreon have experimented with more directly modeling the patron/artist relationship by allowing patrons to pay per month, giving the artist a steady income not from one wealthy patron, but from a crowd of supporters each paying a small part.

If we want to support a diverse and artistic culture, then we have more freedom today than ever in directly supporting artists and creators. Whether you like books, movies, music, art, video games, or whatever other creative product you enjoy, you can simply vote for more of it by paying those who create it.

In our own small ways, we can each change the creative culture through our choices in what media we consume and support. I think it’s great to support the individuals and small studios that aren’t afraid to try their own thing but when the bigger studios and companies work hard to make something amazing, it’s worth supporting that too. Our biggest vote in this system is who we give our money to.

The internet makes it easy to try out and enjoy a lot of content for free. Many artists put out a lot on websites, youtube, blogs, and other places and at most, receive a bit of money through advertising.  For some this is enough to live on and all you have to do is enjoy their work. But for most, they expect people to pay a little back for the content they enjoy. So, don’t be stingy. Be generous to those who create content that enriches your life. Sometimes you can try content or programs out for free but if they feel important to you, don’t be afraid to take the next step and go support the creators.

The internet has the possibility to create a wonderful cultural exchange. Creators have more ways than ever to put their content out there, but this will only work if people support it. Our creative culture will be as vibrant as we are willing to make it.

Poetry

Lately I’ve been wondering a little about why poetry seems so far out of popular culture and discussion. Is it just something we always put off? The closest we get to poetry on a regular basis would be in things like song lyrics. Is it just something we as a culture have put off until we no longer experience it much?

All the best poetry seems best enjoyed in quiet thoughtful moments, so  maybe as a culture we have too few of those. Maybe poetry has isolated itself so much as a means of expression that it can’t spread into new genres. Whatever the problem is, it seems the only place to run into poetry anymore is through very deliberately seeking it, whether it be in poetry specific performances or collections of poems published as books.

Why aren’t the distilled and powerful words of poetry and its imagery not as sticky as silly memes? Does something being powerful and meaningful not necessarily translate into being easily memorable? Still, even in literature, we no longer seem to have the poems and music like we did in things like The Hobbit.

Maybe the problem is that poetry isn’t very accessible. If popular writing is like the pleasant garden paths that are often tread by the people, then poetry is definitely the rocky mountain trails that only a small intrepid crowd dares to venture to.

Personally, I just don’t hear about poetry much and I always seem to put off studying the lauded poets of old. I’d love to read more, especially from personal favorites like Robert Frost. No one seems to talk much about any new or great poems or poets they’ve read, so has poetry gone down some cultural dead end and got stuck? Has poetry become a form of expression that’s grown old?