Does It Appeal to You?

What's the appeal of world-building?  You want an honest answer?  The cool factor.  If you're experiencing a world and you're like "awesome!" then that world was probably built successfully.  You end up with concepts like balefire and firebending and spice that allows people to fold space and a world where all humans have a sixth sense for magic.

You have Dungeons and Dragons campaigns with whole histories behind them.

Some of my college friends and I spent some time inventing interesting races and detailing their histories with cultural/technological development.  That was really fun, to have a badger-people and bat-people threatening war on a race of ostrich-people because the ostriches had enslaved some badgers and bats.  Then a biology major joined us with octopus-people who communicated primarily by bioluminescence (if I remember correctly).

Epitomy of awesome.

I believe I've mentioned another benefit of world-building.  The kind of story you tell is directly linked to the kind of world you build—as evinced by the importance of diction/word choice to the building of your world.  The sweeping epic that is the Lord of the Rings tells a story of ugly war and the struggles of the small and the simple against the perpetrators of the war.  And if you missed this part, the Hobbits and the Elves and the Dwarves all lose in the end, and Man is the ultimate winner. For now.

The story of the Wheel of Time series is all bound up in the cyclic nature of time in that universe.  Time is a spinning wheel, and people are the threads of the tapestry it weaves.  That's an actual metaphor pulled straight out of the series, and balefire burns people out of existence throughout time.  Then there are Ta'veren, who unconscious weave the lives of those around them to their own purposes.

So you can world-build to explore world-possibilities other than the one we live in (as Wheel of Time does) or you can use it to talk about the world in metaphorical terms (as the Lord of the Rings does, and despite Tolkien's own aspersions toward allegory).  I mention the word "allegory" in that parenthesis, but I'm not saying the Lord of the Rings is actually an allegory.  For one thing, you don't have an allegory unless the author intends it (argue against that all you want, but I believe it to be true) and is skilled enough to accomplish it.  LOTR has allegorical elements, which comes with the trappings of fantasy.  There are metaphorical (or archetypical) parallels to the world we know and live in couched in the adventures of Frodo, Gandalf, and Aragorn.  The reason I am not ashamed to love fantasy is because I believe it allows us to look at parallels to our own lives in a different context and think about them in ways I think are more honest than we otherwise can.

I'm not saying everything in fantasy has to be black and white, good and evil.  Look at the Harry Potter series or at Gollum and you have some good case studies for morally complex storytelling in fantasy.  I'm saying there's more room for stylization, and good stylization can sometimes be more real than reality (Up, Wall-E, Finding Nemo, Toy Story, and Monsters Inc. anyone?).

Do you know how much insane detail goes into the worlds of Pixar movies like Toy Story?  Those movies make you believe, for a time, that toys are alive, and in the process say something important about the value of children (and the value they give to the things they love).  That's what's "literary" about world-building.  When done (and presented) well, it can make a story concept work that would be crippled without it.

So yeah, that's why I like fantasy, guys.  Now go read A Wizard of Earthsea if you haven't already.

Archetypicality

It's hard to blog in the morning when you don't have internet.  I spent most of the morning reconfiguring my family's wireless router so we could get on, then trying to get an old computer to download Guild Wars 2 for this weekend.  It seems that the problem is that it doesn't have enough RAM to download the client, let alone anything else.  Solution?  I guess we're gonna go buy enough RAM to get to 4gb at some point.  Then, maybe, the computer will work out.

I'm a little dazed this week, I guess.  Having a heard time putting it together and getting going.  Maybe I need to set my alarm for earlier.  I dunno.

I've covered the importance of diction, word choice, and characters to writing, and how those apply to building the world your readers will see as they absorb your prose.  In no way have I been exhaustive on those topics.  There's almost always more to say.  But I think I've given you an idea, at least.

One of the things I love about fantasy is the archetypes.  To the other-trained eye they look like clichés:  overused character tropes.  But depending on the kind of fantasy you're telling, the wise and arcane counselor can be quite effective.  It's always best, though, to try for new and interesting combinations—and keep diction and character in mind while you deal with archetypes.

There aren't just archetypical characters, like the Wizard or the Fledgling Hero.  There are archetypical settings, too.  Mordor is an archetypical Wasteland ruined by the villain.  Swords of Power and Words of Power are both also archetypical elements.

So what's the difference between a cliché and an archetype?  Basically, archetypes are old.  Old like the Epic of Gilgamesh old.  Arthurian legend is a good source of archetypical ideas, as are the epics of Homer and the canon of the Greek and Roman pantheons.  The other thing about archetypes is that they are closer to allusions than to clichés, and by using them you are referring to and acknowledging a vast history of stories told.  It's this past-reference that makes archetypes a good thing.

Here's what you have to beware of, though.  It works for alternate histories, and somewhat more casual fantasy, to rely on thinly veiled archetypes.  For example, there are characters with names like Marduk, Vulcan, Tempus, Leviathan, and Tiamat in the world of Hearthstead.  That's because my cousin and I decided that one of the motifs of Hearthstead would be direct allusions to mythological figures and places.  But Hearthstead isn't high fantasy.  Again, that's not a mark against the world.  But it's an identifier.

If you're doing high fantasy, it's expected you're building a huge historied world for your story to take place in, and if that's the case you really don't want a Gandalf stand-in.  Someone very old and very wise?  Okay.  But a wizard with a giant beard who dies and comes back to life is not a good idea.  You should probably also avoid taking names directly from the real world.  No Zeus.  Maybe you can take some names like Zachary, but ehhh maybe not.

This ties in to diction/word choice big time.  It's best to have an idea of what the people of the world call things.  You're probably writing in English, but if it's a fantasy world you most likely don't want to have everyone naming their babies and their places things like Philadelphia or Johnny.  There's also the whole thing of not overdoing x's and y's.

If you're basing a world or a part of the world off of a particular mythology or real-world culture, using naming conventions from those are a good idea.  Norse, for example, or Spanish.  However, if you want mad props for creativity, spending a long time hashing out the nitty gritty details of names, their spellings, and their meanings is probably requisite—as is trying to veil any real-world ties as much as possible.

Even then you'll be using archetypes, for much the same reasons as you're going to have people in your story.  Stories are retold with new (or mixed-up) contexts.  Your job in world-building is to create a place with a set of contexts that's intriguing for the reader.

One story that does this very well is the Avatar series, actually.  Not the movie Avatar with its uninspired story, but Avatar:  The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra.  The former introduced a world where, basically, the whole thing is Asia, and people learn martial arts that allows them to control the elements.  By "the whole thing is Asia" I mean the four main peoples of the Avatar universe are based on real-world Asian peoples.  All the names, cultural motifs, and much of the spiritual/magical element of the show derives from this Asian center-piece.  That's one reason why The Last Airbender movie was completely terrible.  In The Legend of Korra, time has moved forward (pretty rapidly for fantasy) into what seems to be 1920's era city-life, complete with industry, high-inventiveness, and mangled city politics.  The metropolitan lifestyle has affected many of the visual characteristics (such as fashion and ways of moving) but the Asian background is still there and still strong, including the fact that all the names are still created according to very not Anglo-Saxon conventions.  This is a good thing.

So I talked a bit about archetypes and naming things today, and I'm sorry if it was a bit jumbled.  I did say I was scattered.  That's all I really have to say for the day.  See you tomorrow.

Ciao.

Phineas, Ferb, and Avatar

I'm in the same state as yesterday, only with one exam down and more desperate need to finish my manuscript.  You know what's a good show?  Phineas and Ferb.  I mean, its cartoony goodness doesn't hold a candle to Avatar, whether we're talking the Last Airbender or Legend of Korra.  Not if we're talking theatrical releases.  Merf.

Phineas and Ferb is extremely formulaic.  The same basic story is told in every episode.  But that allows them to make a new song or a new twist that makes for great entertainment.  It sort of proves a concept that you don't have to reinvent the wheel to do something good.  I wouldn't call the cartoon art.  But I think the same applies to that, too.

It's not just people who reinvent the English language who do great work in it.

Those are my thoughts for the day.  Yes, it's another one of those days where I don't talk about much.

-shrugs-

Manic Monday Morning

Last day of GW2 beta.  It goes till 3:00 in the morning for me.  MUST PLAY.

MUST WRITE PAPER.

MUST DO ALL THE THINGS.

Church this morning was good.  That was a thing.

Um....?  Finals week starts Wednesday, and I have till then to get it all done.  Life is good.  The Legend of Korra is a good show.  You should definitely be watching it.  But only after you've watched Avatar:  The Last Airbender.  Because that show is pretty much the best thing.  Do those things.  That's my contribution for the night.

I really don't have much else to say.  Sorry to be lame.

-shrug-