Concept and Application

I applied to work at Meijer today.  The same one Rachael worked at last year when we were scrambling together money to get married.  Now we'd like to scramble together some money to not end up broke.  Because being broke isn't fun, guys.

You can't exactly be successful at writing and be broke.

Hey, that right there?  That was untrue.  Plenty of people do it.  They're called starving artists, and they're all over the place because our culture has created people who don't want to settle for doing something meaningless with their lives.  They would prefer to suffer in order to do something meaningful.  And for most people the most meaningful thing in the world is art.

But I wasn't planning on talking about art.  I was planning to talk about money.  And how it fits into the world of your story.

In Talas Ke, I took money out of the equation.  Kind of.  I decided it was a barter society with no concept of currency, because I believed (and still kinda do believe) that such a society is better off than one with the hulking abstracted behemoth we call "money."

Maybe I'll outline the way money got to where it is today.

You see, somewhere close to the origin of written language, people decided to start quantifying value.  It likely started with bushels of grain or something similar.  One bushel of grain had a certain amount of value, and people tended to agree on what that value was.  They would trade the bushel for something (or a couple somethings) else of roughly equivalent value to the bushel.  Then, we had the bright idea to start using more portable symbols of that value, worth the standard value of the bushel.  This tended to be easy to move into, because of precious metals and their great worth in societies just developing technology that benefited from such material.

At some point banks came into the equation, and at some point banks started to do two different things:  they would lend out your money (for which, ideally, they would pay you) and they would allow you to carry a waiver that told another bank you were in good standing and could withdraw money from that other bank even though it wasn't physically your money.

And money continued to abstract until the point where today it's more a digital numeral than a physical thing you can grasp in your hands.

So what will you do with that in your story?  Is your world one where the people have begun to abstract the value of an object and give it a number?  Or is a simpler one?  How simple?  Think about it, and if you're creating a world based on development past the one ours has, think about how money might change from where it is now.

Honestly, I can't imagine the behemoth will survive much longer.  That's why I don't think about it too much.  But it's a good thing to consider when you're world-building.

So there.  There's more significance to this blog post.

-shrugs-

Fantasy and the Weird

You know, for a shy person who doesn't like to step on toes, it's really hard to just be like, "Hey, I'm gonna go disappear and do productive things for a while.  Don't bug me."  Especially in a house that doesn't really have a separate place for me to work.

I need to not complain.  Don't complain.  So I'm just observing.  And trying to think of a way to do what I need to do.

Homestuck continues to be a thing.  A crazy thing.  It and Adventure Time are my cartoony indulgences.  Legend of Korra is not an indulgence.  It is a necessity.

I think one of the coolest ideas for creating a world is to play with video game motifs.  It's something that Homestuck does, and most video games (obviously).  There are quite a few other stories that I can't think of at the moment, and plenty of webcomics that don't have an overarching  plot, all of which mess around with video game (and other pop culture) motifs in building the world of their story.  Scott Pilgrim is another good example of this.

Themed worlds are definitely easier to create than wholly new ones.  And "wholly new ones" are probably impossible.  But what I mean is it's easier to say, "This story is set in the Prohibition Era U.S." and present a world that a lot of people will recognize.  It's not as easy to develop the epic sweeps of the history of Arda.  Honestly, one of the most interesting aspects of the Inheritance Cycle was Paolini's experiment in world-building.  He used a lot of the trappings of stereotypical fantasy (men, elves, dwarves, and dragons) but he worked hard to make it his own.

Honestly, and it's taken me a while to realize this about myself, I prefer my worlds a little weirder.  Doctor Who's version of reality is very engaging partly because it doesn't take itself seriously.  Worlds you can laugh in make the moments of sorrow that much more poignant.  Which reminds me of Up.  Goodness, that movie is brilliant.  I won't even get started on that, though.  The Avatar world (again, the Asian-themed cartoon world and not the giant-blue-tentacle-people world) has hilarious things like platypus-bears and the recurring tragedy of a man and his cabbages, but their existence only heightens the feeling when we learn about an important piece of Iroh's past, or see a pair of brothers doomed by the upbringing their father gave them.

And Homestuck is definitely weird.  It's like Hussie dropped in the Weird-brew teabag and just left it there in the piping water until the ratio of Weird to water made the tea into a non-Newtonian fluid.  Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey Weird tea.  That's what Homestuck is.

And that's why I love it.

Now, some people can't take that seriously.  The irony of that statement is fully intentional, yes.  What I mean is that some people lose all their disbelief suspension and miss out on the ride because it's just too weird.  But I was never nearly normal enough to get along with people who like their world always straight vanilla.  Sometimes you just need to have some bacon ice-cream and get over it.

There's a smaller version of a dragonfly, and some wise guy/gal named it the damselfly.  That's an official thing.  That's the kind of world we live in.  We name bugs after medieval mythology.

There's a beetle out there somewhere that, as far as I know, can haul around a banana that's way bigger than it is.  Ants can lift things 100 times their weight.  If fleas were human-sized, they could jump football fields.  In the depths of our ocean, the wildlife glows, and the invertebrates down there are more mind-blowing to watch than a model of a four-dimensional object.

Our world flipped the lid off the can of weird before we came up with the semantic concept that weird corresponds too.  Also, we're capable of exploring semantic concepts that could never occur, and live in those mental spaces fairly comfortably without going entirely insane.  Most of the time.  There was never a Zeus, God of the Sky, man, but we sure as heck know about the stuff he did.

I guess what this Weird tangent was about is that we all need to settle down and non sequitur all over everything once in a while.  It's more honest.

Also, people like me need to drag our heads down out of the clouds every so often and do some manual labor so we can know this world we're living in isn't just made out of semantic space just because that's how we can (kind of) comprehend it.  There's stuff to it.  And it happens.  It keeps hapening.  You gotta eat something that's alive (or once was) in order to live.  Dog my cats, but that kinda sucks, doesn't it?  All it takes is a gulp of something suitably not air to cut off our respiration, and we go out like a light.

 I'm gonna stop there before I get too morbid.  I guess that's the kind of stuff I think about, and I bring it all back to stories because I'm wired that way.  This was all another defense of fantasy as a storytelling medium, I guess.  Or something.  I don't even know.

I'm still thinking about that deep sea jellyfish.

Religion and World-building

When you're creating characters of a different religious philosophy than your own, my best advice is to avoid stereotypes like the Contagion.  And yes, you'll have to read Ashes of Silver to understand that reference.

Here are some examples to illustrate what I'm talking about.  The Believer Who Never Asks Questions.  The "Believer" Who Grasps for Power.  The Ultra-skeptical Non-believer.  The Non-believer Hero Because Heroes Aren't Stupid Enough to Believe.

You may notice that there are people in this life who absolutely fit into the schema presented by those stereotypes.  I don't care.  Reality holds more straw men than fiction is permitted.  I'm also not saying that you can't have a believer with a strong faith or a non-believer who feels strongly about his unbelief.  It's just that you need to be very careful when deciding what a character believes or you can end up with a flat, uninteresting character really fast.

Here's something I've observed.  You can call Boopy Shenanigans if you want, but here it is:  readers get bored really fast with characters who one-note on the opposite line of what they believe.  For atheists/agnostics, that means characters who grapple with real faith issues can get dull because they perceive these struggles as a meaningless facade, and vice versa for people who are (relatively) sure of what they believe.  It's even possible for people in the middle (not willing to discount the supernatural, but not willing to jump off the fence) to lose interest in anything not thoroughly steeped in gray.

Like I said, I could be wrong about this observation.  It also makes writing really difficult, because I would like for my audience to be a bit more general than "Christians interested in reading Christian fantasy fiction."  Because that means the only people who read my books will be the ones who specifically go looking for them, because the books sure as Tartarus won't be found in a secular book store like Barnes and Noble.  At least not in the same section as all the other fantasy.

Another reason I don't want to go down that road is because not everything I write is going to have overtly Christian subject matter.  For example, Ashes of Silver's universe doesn't necessarily have a God (at least not one that the people of Hearthstead are aware of) so the subject of service to Him is kind of a non-issue.  That could be an issue if I let it be, but the world of Hearthstead wasn't exactly set up to tackle those sorts of questions.  My cousin and I have always been a little too light-hearted about Hearthstead to delve into a theological mire in a world created originally as a stick-figure comic.

I want as many people as possible to read my work.  Honestly, the money that would come from that is secondary or tertiary for me.  What I want is the discussions.  The "that was awesome!" and "this made me sad."  I want to see people invested in the stories I tell.  So that may be why I hesitate to launch into heavily theological themes in my writing.  I want to be able to handle it in a way that keeps even staunch atheists invested in the story.

You may have noticed by now that I want to be able to have my cake and eat it too, then maybe have some pie afterwards.  I certainly don't make things easy on myself.

So you can ignore my advice about the religiosity of your characters if you want.  I think I originally intended it for a different purpose.  Namely, that if you are an atheist you shouldn't make believer-characters in such a way as to make them easy targets for an agenda, and the same goes for believers and characters who don't believe the same.  In my own writing life that means I tend to leave atheist characters less explored than I might, because I want to avoid characterizing them in a way that's inaccurate and two-dimensional.

When you're creating a world, it's also important to keep matters of theology in mind, even if that's to explicitly exclude an all-powerful deity from having created the universe.  It's fiction, and you can do that.  Especially if it's fantasy, because then you can explore what a world would really be like without God or followers of Him.  You can also leave the question as open-ended as it is in reality, with great debates going about it.  You can skip out on the wars.  That would be nice, but unlikely if your people are anything remotely like humans.  Then there will be war, whether it's over God or cheese.  Sorry, but that's the cold hard truth.

The more time you invest into the metaphysical makeup of your fictional world, the better-sorted those issues are likely to be.  That's a prediction, not a fact, by the way.  But it stands to reason that since preparation rules in the rest of world-building, it should here too.

Well, that's all I've got this morning.  I've been typing without contacts in long enough, and there's only so much of that to be stomached before I start punching faces that aren't my own.

Ciao.

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.

Is This Even Really a Webcomic?

Can't talk. Too busy reading(?) Homestuck. It's fantastic. Only downsides are the occasional vulgarity and foul language. Short of that, it's just sheer excellence. I've been quietly nerding out over it all day.

It's both the way the world builds slowly in intensity and the way the author plays around with the narrative that hook me. I can't really explain it now that I'm smack dab in the middle. Well actually, I think I can explain it in two words:

Liminal fantasy. You see, liminal fantasy is when there is the realm of the fantastic and the realm of the mundane, and these two realms bleed into each other throughout the story. Like all good fantasies, Homestuck isn't really hard and fast on the liminal line. There's the fact that it's cartoony to begin with, then there's the whole super complex thing with captchaloguing (I don't think I spelled that right) that's there from before things start getting intrusion-of-the-fantastic all up in there. But I think it's really well done for a comic(?) hosted on a site called MSpaintadventures.

So yeah, that's enough talking about it, now it's time to get back to reading.