Babel Clash

YippeeKiiaaaa M****r F****r.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good Die Hard movie as much as the next person; I love a good western. I like it when a clearly defined good guy beats a clearly defined bad guy over the head with his truncheon and everyone wins in the end. Just don’t expect any of it in my Moorehawke books – ok? Because as much as I like John McClain wisecracking his way through a series of cardboard cut-out black-hats, real life doesn’t work like that, and I was more interested in dealing with the intricacies of real life in Moorehawke than I was in supporting the tried and true ‘cult of the gun’ solution to our problems.

It would have been very easy to have had a ‘big bad’ to whom the reader could point their finger and say, ‘ah yes, that’s who we need to beat’. If we get rid of that person everything will be well.’ But I think it’s far more interesting to put my characters into a swarming pot of grey area and see what they make of the situation (and, conversely, what that situation makes of them)

What might a moral, intelligent person do in a situation where they have complete power, and where violence is not only an accepted way of winning an argument, but also the more respected way? As a ‘good’ person, what are your options when protecting those you love in a world where the toughest guy wins? What about your Kingdom? What if your Kingdom is one of those rare places where people have a true chance at equality, at freedom of choice, at education? How far would you go to protect that?

Some of my characters’ problems would be solved by hanging a bad guy, by shooting a bad guy, or by making the bad guy drive his horse off a cliff. The temptation to wipe one’s enemy from the face of the earth, and the potential to do so, is a constant in these books. But, more often then not, the characters in Moorehawke, are going to find themselves sitting at a negotiation table with the very people they wish they could kill – they’re going to be asked to lay aside the cleaner, quicker and more satisfying option of slitting an enemy’s throat, and pick up the messier, more challenging and often agonising tool of diplomacy. It’s not a tool that many are willing or able to use and those that do are often despised as weak and ineffectual; the results of parlay being far slower and less visible than the results of a gun. ( Can you tell I’m from Ireland?)

It was difficult to write, I must confess, pulling together the many many threads of such a diverse cast of characters with such diverse motivations and histories and focusing them on this one, vital premise, ‘how do we manage to survive this brutal world and make it a better place for longer than just one moment.’ It was complex - three books worth of complex - and far more interesting, to me, than solving the problem with a bullet.

Out of the Mist

Yesterday Glenda wrote a fascinating piece about how her world building is influenced by the many and varied places she has lived, and the differing physical and social landscapes she has found herself adapting to. It got me thinking about how much of our internal landscape we bring to our work. I know that universities discourage ‘biographical’ reviews of literature (where you try and decipher a novel based on the life of the author) and I think this is good because we can never truly know a person via their biographers – certainly we can never know them any deeper then the surface events of their lives or the colouring that their biographers may bring to those events. But I think it is reasonable to assume that all writers bring a piece of themselves to the novels they leave behind.

Some elements of my world building are deliberately chosen from life. My settings for example, are chosen because they are places which have resonated with me in the past. The Moorehawke Trilogy is deliberately set in the South of France. In my graphic novel, the detrimental properties of Hull’s atmosphere are based on the bad effect the air in Pheonix had on my health and that of many of my colleagues when we worked there (the Irish are very prone to respiratory problems and the air there is unnaturally laden with pollen and dust). My current novel is partially set in the old theatres and run down Georgian buildings of Dublin where I used to study ballet in my youth. But these are just trappings – they mean nothing if the world I have built around them doesn’t breath, and if the characters I have placed into them don’t vibrate with life. That’s where the writer’s interior landscape comes into it, I think.

As writers we sit for months at a time dragging words and sentences from the chaos of our brains and forcing them into order on a page. By doing this we hope to make others believe in the existence of a place which has never exist. When they read our words, hopefully they will see and feel and hear a world where shadows have never moved across the grass, where the rain has never fallen, where birds have never opened their throats and sung. More than that, we hope to make others fall in love or hate with characters who have never lived; who have never spoken a word in anger or love, never smiled frowned or shed a tear of pain. All this from the turbulent and insubstantial fog of our own thoughts, feelings and memories. When you think about it, it can’t actually be possible to do so without strip mining our own interior world and reproducing it in some form or another on the page.

That’s not to say we vomit wholesale our lives and experiences onto the page – that’s not writing a story, that’s keeping a diary. But I suspect there’s more than a grain of the writer in each of our characters, there’s more than a splinter of biography in our stories. I can’t see how it’s possible for there not to be.

*photograph reproduce with permission. copyright Grace Kiernan.

Hi Glenda, *waves* Hi babel-clashers.

World building, huh? I guess I‘m very different to Glenda in this approach – world building is something I admire in other writers, but not something upon which I primarily base a story.

Me, I love politics, characters and plot. All my stories start with those three things and grow from there. My approach to writing is to basically know my plot inside out ( it’s usually something quite high concept, like: Career soldiers on five year diplomatic posting to foreign planet become entangled in intergalactic drug war involving the only cross-species narcotic.)

Once I have my plot fixed, the world builds itself around it. For example, what kind of personal differences would you face if going to live on a habitable but foreign planet – would they have chairs, for example? (not in my world, no) Would you be able to wear deodorant? (not in my world you wouldn’t – it would kill the local populous) How would an inter-species narcotic work? What dangers/benefits would it present to the different species? How would differing intergalactic governments and law enforcement agencies react to it? From this foundation, social structures, political alliances and ecosystems grow. But the driving force of my stories is always ‘what way does this impact on the characters?’

Even Aliens need to Frown

And I know those characters like the back of my hand. I’m not fond of lone wolves. My abiding love for team stories, means that I tend to explore the complexities and grey areas of friendship/family ties under pressure. But I hate soaps and melodrama, so the pressures and complexities are less ‘Why doesn’t s/he love me?’ and more ‘how do we get her/him off this planet before the atmosphere eats their respiratory system?’ Again, the world building comes into the way relationships are structured. Would the military structure of an alien race be based on family groups for example? Modern Earth armies generally feel that family ties within a unit weaken battle resolve, would some alien militaries feel it strengthens it? And what would that kind of a structure do to the families involved and to the general midset of the military itself.

This is how I approach my sci-fi writing ( which is generally geared towards graphic novel work) But my fantasy work is very similar, only upside down :0D In my sci-fi I take the mundane ( friendship, legality, medical concerns) and place them in a fantastical setting. In my fantasy work I take the preternatural (visitations, werewolves, prophecy etc) and place them into mundane or historically based settings in order to create the sort of skewed reality I can play with.

It’s all good and it’s all fun, but I think it’s solid too because I do nothing for effect. Doing things for effect only is what I call ‘MTV’ thinking. You know what I mean? Like those cool music videos that are nothing but a series of awesome visuals but mean nothing and resonate no deeper than that? I try never to do that. Every fantastical element I introduce to my work has a solid foundation in the world it’s based in, and has been introduced either for symbolic reasons ( the ghosts and cats and Wolves in Moorehawke for example) or because it makes sense within the plot and the historical/technological/environmental settings of the story ( the Bloody Machine)

that’s it I think - the thought processes behind my approach to world building :0D