Babel Clash

Thank you Terry, Celine - and everyone who dropped by. It’s been fun! Drop by my blog “Tropic Temper” some time if you want to know more about what life is like for an Australian writer who lives in Malaysia …and really doesn’t know what she’s doing most the time. All I know is that I have to write, and that will never change. I have stories to tell. Too many of them.

Well, Glenda & Celine, I have thoroughly enjoyed your posts (and your books!), but it’s about time for us to wrap up.  Any last thoughts (or plugs for your respective series) before we hand things over to some alternate historians?

Tomorrow, we’ll be joined by S.M. Stirling and Taylor Anderson.  Welcome,  guys!

I absolutely agree with what Celine has to say about character in her previous post.

As a person who starts the creation process for a book with an idea for a world or some aspect of the magic rather than the protagonists, I suppose there is a danger that the world will dominate the characters. I work hard at making sure that doesn’t happen. The characters and a character-driven plot are what makes most books a great read or otherwise, at least to me.

I always feel disappointed when a book resolves conflict or dilemmas by some kind of deus ex machina – have an earthquake wipe out all the bad guys (or have your hero develop magic so strong, or your hero’s space ship be so advanced, that it amounts to the same thing). That doesn’t mean that the characters can’t be affected by natural disasters; in fact one of my books ended in a tsunami! But what counted was not that it happened, but why it was a disaster for some and not for others – and that was all about character and how they dealt with the events leading up to the tsunami.

I also try not to make my heroes too clever, or too physically strong or too magically talented. With Havenstar, the unstable, constantly changing world immediately suggested a character who would be important: a mapmaker. So Keris Kaylen came into being ― someone who could make the world marginally safer for those who had to cross it, but who would live a life of danger herself. She’s a very ordinary heroine, feisty, but really not terribly special. She doesn’t wave a sword around, or blast people with magic. All she does is make maps. So the way her character evolves answers the question: how does an ordinary person deal with being in an extraordinary situation?

With The Last Stormlord, it was obvious that the most important people in a largely waterless world would be those who could supply water, and that led to the idea of a stormlord, and to the plot – what would happen if the last stormlord was dying and the only replacement you can find is someone hopelessly flawed?

But this sounds like another overdone fantasy trope. I’d rather twist it from the norm ― boy finds power and zaps all the bad guys in a magical climax ― and have the main protagonist flawed to the end. The world depends on him nonetheless, so it is up to him to find another way to solve the problem. Much more interesting that way, just as Celine prefers to use negotiation and diplomacy rather than force for her heroes.

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.

In the post below, Celine was talking about being influenced by her inner world. I’m not sure that I want to go there…!

One of my writer friends once remarked that in my books the main character was usually someone who was an outsider in a foreign setting, trying to belong. He posited that the reason was that I myself had always been the stranger in the foreign place ― the Australian living abroad: in Malaysia, then Austria, then Tunisia.

I’m not sure I want to know how much that influences my writing. As Celine said, let’s not decipher a novel based on the life of the author!

I do know that much of my fantastic world is really not so far different from the fantastic of this world. People say that writers are just good liars who lie for a living. Well, I’ll add to that: we’re thieves. I steal ideas from real life, all the time.

The three Stormlord books are full of the fabulous, yet much of that already exists. Once ― on a very clear day ― I was looking out of the window of a plane traveling at 30,000 feet over Iran. Below I could see the occasional village in what appeared to be an unbearably dry landscape, and radiating out from each village were lines of holes. I spent much of the journey thinking about what they were and decided they had to be accessing some kind of underground tunnel. I was right: two thousand-year-old tunnels still bringing water to living settlements… How cool is that? It’s in The Last Stormlord.

Moving sand dunes that gobble up the land with ferocious appetite and vast salt pans fed by dry washes without a drop of water in sight? I’ve seen them in Australia. Buildings and furniture made of salt? I’ve seen those too. What about painting pictures on the surface of water? Done by an artist in India. Segmented beasts with multiple legs and feelers? Try the rainforest. Sand dunes that sing? I’ve heard recordings…
One day in late December, I visited a town in the Saharan desert in Algeria. And there were date palm plantations and houses built in the dry water courses, houses with strange slits in their garden walls. Why? And what happened to those houses when it rained?
That December day they had their first rain for the year… and I found out. You’ll find that in the book too. Another stolen idea.
Being a thief is fun.

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.

When I was very young, growing up in Australia, I decided there were two things I wanted to do in life: travel and write books. What I didn’t realize until many years later was how much the traveling would impact my writing.

You may ask: “Why? You write fantasy! You make stuff up. You aren’t writing about the places you’ve been.”

That’s true, but to make an imaginary world believable is not as easy as it sounds. I’ve been lucky because I’ve lived for years in many places far from where I was born. In a way, I collected worlds. That dusty Australian farm where I lived till I was eleven, a suburban house in the tropics where I was (and still am) part of an extended Asian Muslim family, a Viennese house on a road where Beethoven once lived, a flat-roofed villa in Tunisia with marble floors often gritty with the dust of the Sahara, a small apartment in Borneo with a view over the South China Sea, monkeys on the balcony and ants living in the walls.

Each time I moved, I had to learn more than just a new spoken language; I had to learn the cultural language. What was polite in one society was rude in another, what made one culture vibrant was denigrated by another. (Do you know how hard it is for an Australian to understand that walking across a lawn in Vienna is an appalling breech of public behavior?) All this is an excellent way to understand how to build the culture of a fantasy world, and then how to slip that culture into the story without the dreaded infodump.

But it’s not just how a culture operates that impacts a story, it’s the more physical aspects of the landscape too. And here I have been lucky as well. I’ve worked extensively in the rainforest on avifaunal conservation projects, and this has given me an understanding of how the natural world fits together. What happens in a neighboring country can affect the birds in your own. A logging operation means more exposed soil upstream. Run-off means the river is brown with mud. How does a riverine kingfisher see the fish it must catch to live? What happens to the birds of the mangroves at the river mouth? What if a hornbill only nests in the tallest of trees - which have been cut? If the hornbill and the kingfisher are missing, what does it mean to the rainforest? Life is all about connections.

World building is like that. You don’t create just a house and a street. You are creating a world, and it is all interconnected. You can’t have your pre-industrial townsfolk eating fresh tuna if your town is miles from the ocean. In a desert, no one burns firewood in their fireplaces, so what will they use to fuel their cooking? How will the people conserve and transport water?

Of course, you don’t put everything you know about your world into your book! But you have to know it and understand how it all fits together. Only if you do, will your reader feel that when s/he has opened the page, s/he has stepped into another real place.

The world of The Last Stormlord is an arid one, where water is everything - currency, status, security. It could even be the world of our future. It may be the story of Shale Flint, a barefoot village boy kidnapped and manipulated for a talent he hardly understands, and of Terelle Grey, a runaway looking for freedom and ending up in an even worse mess – but that story plays out against a backdrop that makes sense culturally and environmentally. It’s a beautiful, brutal land – of many cultures.

Now that I really think about it, most of the fantasy I’ve read recently that was described (by friends, reviewers, etc.) as medieval is actually much closer to renaissance in feel.  I can’t say that I’m very surprised by the confusion, though.  Just thinking about the Renaissance Fairs I’ve been to makes me realize that what we think we know about history isn’t anything close to what really went on. 

This conversation has reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: The Wake.  Gaiman’s extremely long-lived character, Hob Gadling, says of a Renaissance Fair, ”Nobody in England had even heard of the renaissance until it had been over for centuries . . . This has as much to do with the past as I have to do with, I dunno, hedgehogs.”  Makes me chuckle every time I read it.  But then again, it also makes me a bit sad.

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

It looks as if I am the first to the party - I guess because Tuesday starts earlier here; I live in Malaysia. Terry is still in bed in the US and Celine is just getting up in Ireland.

I believe the topic is world-building, which for me is the fun part of writing. Perhaps because it buys into a delusional idea of a writer being god-like? There is something liberating about commencing with a clean sheet of paper and ending up with an entire universe. (“Creation? Sure, I can do that!”) It takes me a bit longer than six days, though, and so far I have drawn the line at going off-world.

In reality, the world-building starts long before I ever put the first word on paper. Just as a story is one little idea at a time, so it is with creating a whole new world. It has to start with an idea that takes me somewhere new, exciting, different. And I build upwards and outwards from that. I spend months thinking about it.

Funnily enough, the concept for the world of my first trilogy was born because I was mad at someone. He made a mocking remark about how he didn’t like fantasy because fantasy novels were all the same – a medieval monarchy or imperial empire surrounded by barbarian wastes; a place where royalty inhabited castles with dungeons, peasants battled wolves and boars in dark forests and heroes went on quests across jagged mountains and hid in caves. And there was no technology beyond a blacksmith’s forge.

Huh, I thought, fuming. I’ll show you! The next book I write won’t have a castle or a mountain or a forest or a cave or a wolf or a king… Dammit, it won’t even have a tree! And it won’t be medieval, either.

And so The Isles of Glory trilogy had as its setting an archipelago about to clash with a developing technology-based culture exploring from a far-off mainland. I envisaged the time period to fall technologically about 200 years ago, let’s say the earth equivalent of British exploration between Captain Cook (1770s), and Darwin aboard The Beagle (1830s). All the ships, and much of the weaponry and other technology falls within this period. The first book, The Aware, took place on a flat sand spit that had no trees, no mineral wealth, no horses or other land animals for transport – and just one ramshackle town.

Which presented its own challenges. How does a writer make a sand spit in the middle of the ocean interesting? Gorthan Spit obviously would have to depend on the sea. Fish and seaweed for food. Shark-skin for leather. Whale bones for all sorts of things. Flotsam and jetsam for building material, naturally cemented sea shells for building blocks, some kind of sea creature for transport…gradually I began to picture that land. I began to smell it, hear the sounds of it. Taste the food. To know the kinds of things people on this sand spit would fear most.

But why would such a society exist in the first place? It sounds a pretty unpleasant island. Smelly with fish, hot with blinding white sands, not enough fresh water for much washing or cleaning, dependent on tides, subject to storms ― definitely not a place for the well-to-do.

Ah, but what if it was a place where other islands, more prosperous, threw their unwanted people ― the criminals, the citizenless, the diseased? Such a place might be attractive to runaways, or to priests coming to succor or convert, to slavers, to bounty hunters looking for the wanted. With that thought, I had my my protagonists: a priest in search of a runaway and a citizenless bounty hunter. And who would have the power on an island like that? Those who could use magic - and those who could see the magic.

And there you have the beginnings of the story.

The way it works for me is that the story and the world evolve together, side by side as the ideas for both emerge, to be taken on board or discarded. And the aim with the world-building is this: it has to feel real ― in spite of its fictional nature. And that means taking care with the details. People aren’t going to be able to eat beef on Gorthan Spit. When you walk the streets of the town, the fish scales are going to scrunch underfoot. The environment is going to impact the inhabitants. If you want a doctor, he’s unlikely to be a good one, not in a place like this. A bounty hunter is going to have to be physically strong and savvy. Scavenging is going to be a way of life.

In the following books, I expanded the world to other islands and other ideas. (A modern equivalent would be the Indonesia, where each island tends to have its own culture and social structure.) In the second book, Gilfeather, I took a look at whether an ecologically sustainable society can really exist, and if it did, wouldn’t it be a very restrictive sort of place to live? In Book 3, The Tainted, it was the idea of a bore tide being used for transport ― sort of the ultimate surfing thrill ― and how would that impact the culture and the hierarchical structure of society.

And the ultimate irony? One of the first reviews of The Aware started with the words: “In this medieval island world, Glenda Larke has…” Sometimes it is hard to shake the perceptions of readers who have preconceived ideas about fantasy novel settings!

I can talk about all this stuff forever, so if you have any questions, ask away, and I’ll do my best to answer.

Glenda