Building the Stage: Nuravol and Soravol

All right, we've got Vilhelm the Nuravol, Olwen the Vesna, and Nathanael the Soravol. We know that the Nuravol and the Soravol are rival tribes with ancient history in common, and we know that each has a "mirror" tribe on a higher plane -- the Hild and the Vesna. We also know that Nathanael was raised as a Nuravol, and that he is gone. Vilhelm and Olwen are looking for him.

There needs to be more. Well, okay, some people might think this is enough to start, and that's fine. But I live for this stuff, so I want to write some ancient history for these people.

Since this writing exercise is being contained on this blog, I'm going to keep things small and manageable, with room for expansion if I ever decide to develop things further. History begins shortly after the world is utterly devastated. A few groups of people survived, but they wound up isolated. The people in this story all live in the middle of a ring of mountains. Anyone who climbs the mountains and looks outward will see nothing but devastation, so there is no reason to try exploring. Enough time has passed that no one remembers that life used to exist in the outside world.

Inside this ring of mountains is a forest and a lake. A river runs into and out of the lake, from the northern mountains to the southern ones. For the first several generations after the crisis, the people who lived in this area were able to live peacefully. They cleared out some of the trees for farmland, built homes, and looked to the future. Eventually, economic classes developed -- people with money on the top, people with skills on the bottom. While it wasn't ideal, most people accepted it as life.

Then there was a long drought. The river grew weak and the lake level dropped. The rich hoarded water, even hiring guards to patrol the river and prevent others from drinking. Everyone else suffered. Before long, there was an uprising, and after a bloody conflict, everyone had water again. Things were relatively stable until the drought ended, when the unifying desire for free water became irrelevant and different people had different ideas of how to run things. Thus the Nuravol and the Soravol are born.

Not bad so far. The next question, of course, is where the Vesna and the Hild came from. I'll save that for another time.

Random Name #3

For the record, I decided a few things about this character in advance of picking a name:

• This character has some connection to Vilhelm. I'm leaning toward "last surviving family," but I'm open to other possibilities.
  
• This character disappeared from Vilhelm's life, and he is searching for this person.
• For Vilhelm, locating this character means accepting guidance from Olwen.
• Olwen has a vested interest in the two characters reunion. I don't feel like figuring that out at the moment, though.
• This character will be a sharp contrast to Vilhelm -- where he is strong, this person is frail; Vilhelm prefers to fight evil, this person prefers to nurture good; and so on. Seriously, it would be so boring if they were both Lawful Good!

I'm going to run the random generator at BehindtheName for both a male name and a female name, and... well, basically just pick the cooler sounding one.

Hmm.... we have VENUS and ŚWIĘTOPEŁK (Polish form of SVYATOPOLK). Not entirely digging the results... The female name gives me the first woman James Bond sleeps with, who probably gets killed 30 minutes in (it also gets that Bananarama song stuck in my head...er, what?!). The male name is cool but a tad unwieldy, but I really like the meaning -- "bright folk."

That led to me cheating and getting sidetracked. I thought "bright folk" would be great for another race, so I started looking for names that had "bright" in their meaning. Long story short, I took "Nuray" and "Sorin" and came up with the Nuravol and Soravol -- two tribes or factions that split from a single group long ago. Perhaps in a different story...

Now it's several days after my initial search, and I still don't have my third character. My wife has given me permission to look for a new name, so here goes...

Name: Nathanael
Meaning: "God has given" (Hebrew)

The website mentions a guy named Nathanael in the Bible. I looked him up and discovered "in [him] there was nothing false." Awesome. We have an honest and upstanding guy to work with. That makes sense, being that I just now decided he is best friends with Vilhelm (I think their names are too different linguistically to make sense as brothers).

How did they meet? Suppose Vilhelm is a Soravol and Nathanael is a Nuravol. Nathanael was transplanted as a child (perhaps even an infant), either because his parents were killed and he was taken, or he was abandoned in an area where the Soravol might find him. In either case, he was raised as a Soraval, but was frequently mistreated because (obviously) he looked like a Nuravol. We already established that Vilhelm has a tendency toward protecting the weak, so it was only a matter of time before he witnessed several people beating on Nathanael and came to his aid. Blah blah blah they became friends and then one day Nathanael was gone.

Olwen wants them reunited because she wants to guide them both to the higher plane and grant them supernatural abilities. The Vesna have their own tribe, and she believes that a Soravol and Nuravol working together would be able to turn that battle in the Vesna's favor.

By the way, the female name that popped up when I got Nathanael was "Hildegard," so...

Race: The Hild
Meaning: Battle

For now, anyway. The Hild exist parallel to the Soravol, while the Vesna exist parallel to the Nuravol. I'm not sure if I'd say they are allied, or just that their existences seem to line up nicely in a mystical sort of way, but that's not important now because I'm building a foundation.

The Hild are warriors. I don't mean to imply that they are "the bad guys" or anything like that, just that they take pride in physical strength. Their magic is meant to weaken their opponents or strengthen themselves. If the Soravol have a connection to the Hild, then Vilhelm is a model Soravol.

In contrast, the Vesna are less interested in combat. Their magic will be more geared toward avoiding conflict -- they would rather sneak around, making themselves invisible or confusing their enemies' senses. Nathanael isn't exactly the penultimate Nuravol, on account of being raised among Soravol, but his peaceful nature is definitely a Nuravol trait.

I think that's enough for now... I'm starting to get really pumped about where this could go.

Random Name #2: Vesna

Ok, I've started some extra-curricular projects that are going to be eating up all of my free time. What that means for this blog is a whole bunch of silly updates involving random names from BehindtheName (which I still highly recommend).

So what's with the V theme? That's twice in a row I get a name that starts with the same letter. Oh well.

Name: Vesna
Meaning: "messenger" in Slavic. Name of the goddess of spring.

Hold the phone! A long time ago, I wanted a name for a race of immortals, but couldn't dig up anything satisfactory. Perhaps I'll use Vesna (or a modified form of it) to refer to them. That makes for a really boring blog, though... but I don't want to get attached to a character if I want the name to be associated with a concept. Hmm...

Name: Olwen

Meaning: "white footprint" (Welsh)

This name also comes with attached mythology. Sweet! Here we go:

Name: Olwen the Vesna; Olwen of the Vesna; the Vesna, Olwen

So we've identified a race of beings, and named one of those beings. Great! We don't actually know anything yet.

Let's start with the Vesna. We have "messenger", "goddess", and "spring" to start with. My mind always runs to "angel" from "messenger," so we'll say that Vesna are capable of interacting with two different planes of existence. Does that sound cool? I think it does. How about "spring"? That's the time of year that stuff comes to life, so perhaps their presence brings life and/or healing. Maybe grass or flowers grow where they walk. Whatever. I'll leave that as a placeholder for now and come back to it later. I will say that I don't want it to be something they control, just something that naturally occurs in their presence.

How about Olwen? "White footprint." Great! It sounds like it goes with the healing thing. What else is significant in this? White footprints would be pretty conspicuous, almost like they were leading somewhere. That means she could be a guide of some sort, or maybe a teacher (to go along with the "messenger" concept). Footprint implies that she is always walking, so she has no home.

Wanderer, healer, guide, messenger... people may follow her for a time, but her name is singular, so she is generally alone. She is always searching for someone to deliver a message or to take them somewhere. My mind keeps going to an "angel of death" kind of place with this, but I'm not entirely sure of that. Perhaps she can guide mortals into the supernatural realm. That will require further development of the duality of the universe, but I don't think that's such a horrible place to start. The next question would be how to take that idea and make it fresh. Perhaps next time...

Throwaway Drafts

I don't want to use numbers for fear that they'll increase the pressure, but I will say that I've hit my goals recently and I've been pounding away at my story this week. I'm about to wrap up the first arc of the story, and I'm really excited about it.

This whole "starting from scratch" experience has taught me something that I think is valuable: the throwaway draft (should I capitalize? The Throwaway Draft?). This sort of thing gets covered in writing classes and books (in "Bird by Bird," a book I don't recommend, Ann Lamott has an entire chapter dedicated to "Shitty First Drafts"), but the idea is always "Don't worry about if it is good! Just write and fix it later!" With my next longer writing project, I'm going to approach it a bit differently -- deliberately write something with the intention of throwing it away. Maybe this won't apply to other types of writing, but for fantasy, it has been amazing. I fumbled through my first version of this story with too much of my focus on the "cool stuff" -- magic powers, non-standard environment, epic conflict -- and wound up with a lot of junk. I didn't pay enough attention to my characters, so everything that sounded cool in my head wound up being lame on the page. Nobody cares if a bunch of really boring people have cool powers and are trying to kill each other under two moons.

When I read over the story, a few months after finishing it, I hated it. I needed to get to know my characters better, so I spent some time revising them, giving them more interesting histories and real pain in their pasts that would drive them to make stupid decisions periodically. I axed some characters, brought in some new ones. Then I sat down to rewrite, and things were much better.

I have some ideas for being for deliberate about this in the future. I have no idea if they will be effective, but hey, it's worth a shot.

Babysitting
Pick a couple of characters and write a few pages of what would happen if they had to watch someone's kid(s) for an evening. This kind of exercise would separate the characters from the environment, which I think would help immensely in a fantasy story, since the environment can often be a distraction. Even though the situation would be weird, it seems like a great way to find a character's voice.

Grocery Shopping
This is similar to the first one, only I would take one character and have him or her try to pick out stuff to make for dinner. This would provide an opportunity to focus entirely on what goes on in the character's head -- how he reacts to food he hates, how he thinks about other shoppers, etc.

High School
Dear heavens I hated high school -- would my characters hate it? Would the villain shake down the hero for lunch money? Would the hero pine over Suzie in chem despite the fact that she's totally out of his league? This type of arrangement could provide benefits from the first two examples.

Visitors to the New World
Put "normal" people into your fantasy world. No, don't make them "aware" (as in, "Wow! We're in a strange land!") -- just don't make them any different than someone from the real world. This will help you get a grip on the implications of whatever fantastic element you've added to your environment to make it special, and will help you understand how your characters might need to be different to fit in properly (an exaggerated example of what I mean would be putting an oxygen-breathing human in a world that is entirely aquatic).

Obviously, revision will always be necessary, and I don't mean to imply that I'm trying to eliminate that step from the writing process. The point here is to help figure out your characters before you have to start dealing with how the events of the story change them. Notice I said "help" -- almost every time I write a new scene, I learn something about one of my characters, so I don't want to give anyone the impression that a few prewriting exercises are going to solve all of your story's problems. They won't. They're meant to provide a few more tools at the front end that will breathe life into your characters.

The Mini-Recorder, aka Pure Gold

It takes an hour to get to work in the morning, and an extra fifteen minutes or so to get home in the afternoon. That ends up being a lot of time alone with my thoughts, which often turn to my writing and what I want to accomplish in it. Now, some days I would be lucky, and I'd be near my destination when ideas struck, but more often than not I would develop something, growing more and more excited, only to forget it by the time I had access to paper or a computer.

Eventually I grew frustrated enough that I started looking up mini-recorders online. Microcassette recorders are really cheap these days, so I started looking to see what kind of digital technology would be in my budget. There is some pretty sweet stuff out there for people with tons of money to blow, and once I was done pawing at the screen I decided on a forty dollar one at Best Buy. It's digital and can allegedly store way more audio than I need, but it doesn't have USB connectivity. I did crave the USB, but I think I might be better off for not having it.

I keep this bad boy in the car, and if an idea strikes, I hit the record button and mumble awkwardly into it. By the end of the week, I've usually got around ten sound bytes. Since the thing doesn't have USB connectivity, I can't just drag them onto my computer -- I'm forced to listen to them and type them up, which gets my brain working on the ideas again, so I end up with even more material than I would if I sat down and tried to remember everything.

Obviously this sort of thing isn't for everyone, but I highly recommend it to any writer who spends a lot of time in the car.

Constructing a World, part one

Today I'm going to talk about a specific act of writing, rather than a general concept. As you may have guessed from the title, it's going to be about building a world for your characters to inhabit. While this may sound like something that only applies to sci-fi and fantasy, it comes in handy for realistic settings as well, because you really end up doing the same thing, just on a smaller scale.

I'm currently in the process of building a world, so all of this is in the first half of "trial and error." That means I reserve the right to contradict myself in a few months.

Every work of fiction takes place somewhere. I can hear people objecting, saying, "I wrote something that takes place in a guy's mind!", but I would just say that for our purposes, "world" simply refers to the setting of the story (where and when the story takes place) and the foundation upon which that setting is built (which may or may not involve itself in the story). Basically, "a guy's mind" would be considered a part or the whole of the world in that particular story.

While the setting involves a time period, location, objects in the environment - things that directly affect the character - the world exists beyond the scope of the story and its qualities shape the story and its characters. One of the first things to get a grasp of is the world's immediate history. Figure out what the top headlines would be -- was someone robbed or murdered? If so, how close were they to the characters involved in the story? These are the kinds of things that will weigh on people's minds for a time and potentially affect the way they see and interact with the world. Also know about smaller things, like if a new subdivision recently replaced one of your characters' childhood hangouts. These  are important details to know because they provide a context for your characters to meet and interact in. It's the difference between having an actual set and having cardboard cutouts behind the actors in a movie -- the cutouts might get the job done, but it's a whole lot easier to believe in the set.

Once the immediate history is settled, take your characters for a test drive. Get started on your story and ask yourself, "Do I know enough about the past for this story to work?" If the answer is yes, then great! It means you're that much closer to the final product. If no, that means it's time to go back even further.

If you need ancient history, your best bet is to start reading. Learn about real-world history, even if you're planning on creating an entirely fictional world. It also helps to look into the various mythologies that have existed at different periods in time (I recommend pantheon.org) to help shape the beliefs of your characters. Draw on these things as you create your own universe, as it really helps make your characters more complex.

Challenge: Write about an event that took place a thousand years before the story you are working on. Re-write that event as you think it would be known to the characters of your story. Keep in mind the tendency of time to distort the truth, particularly if good records are not kept.

Mining For Ideas

Every now and again a good idea strikes with such force that the writer feels as though they are channeling the idea from some mysterious cosmic fiction-fountain. The rest of the time, however, coming up with a good idea is a pain in the ass and can be quite discouraging. This week, I'd like to talk about the brainstorming process and how to take seemingly "stupid" ideas and turn them into interesting stories.

I've found that the best place for me to start is with a "what if..." question. This can range from something as mundane as "What if I switched laundry detergents for a month?" to something as far-fetched as "What if an extra-terrestrial being is monitoring my use of plastic knives in conjunction with buttering my toast?"

Now, it's very easy to dismiss these questions with a chuckle. After all, laundry detergent is hardly significant in the grand scheme of things, right? Right... unless you make it otherwise. Think about it: What are the differences between two laundry detergents? The biggies are color and scent, but the amount that is used could vary as could the thickness. But again, who really cares? Perhaps your clothes do.

Okay, so this is still sounding ridiculous. "Why the hell would clothes care about what detergent is used on them?" This is where things can start to become interesting. Why would they care? That is the central question, and it is the path to your story.

(In case you are wondering, there are many reasons why an assortment of shirts and pants would care about laundry detergents. Perhaps they are living entities, and some members have specific allergies, and the detergent aggrivates them. Or maybe the clothing exists in the future or in an alternate universe, and is outfitted with several nanomachines that are responsible for regulating body temperature and maintaining camoflage. The wrong detergent could cause something to glitch out, resulting in any number of strange situations.)

The main thing to keep in mind during this process is that any idea, no matter how stupid it seems, can be fashioned into something relatively interesting. It just takes some work.

Challenge: Take your dumbest idea and think of what implications it might have in the real world, then write that down.

Developing Personality

A character's personality is something that develops over the course of the writing process. It's a lot like getting to know another person - it's impossible to know a whole lot about them before you've seen them in a variety of situations. In the prewriting stage, don't worry about brainstorming a full-fledged character; just stick with the basics we discussed two weeks ago - the immediate backstory and the important details of the characters' relationships with each other. Your chief concern is getting the story finished, even if it sucks.

Because it will suck, and it will most likely be due to your characters. That's where revision comes in. Your second and third drafts (and beyond) are where you start fixing things, including the focus of this week's talk: personality.

Do you have your character sketches handy? Get those out. If you had any ideas during the writing, add those if you haven't already. You should have a rough idea of what the character is like - adjectives like "angry" or "melancholy" should give you a basic filter through which all other details should pass. The next step is to take the information in your character sketch and ask, "How does this interact with the character's personality?"

Let's take a look. Suppose your character sheet tells you that your main character is bald. If he is fundamentally insecure, then he'll probably wear a hat and become defensive if attention is drawn to his head. If he's more secure, he may think he looks like a badass and try to act tough. Of course, it could be an interesting twist for a guy who is insecure about something else to think his baldness makes him look scary, so don't rule anything out without giving it real consideration.

Another thing to keep in mind are your character's hobbies, as they can be quite revealing. Think about the differences between things like collecting stamps and fixing old cars. What is it about your character that makes one hobby preferable to another? Does he have exceptional patience? Is he organized or disorganized? Is he creative or destructive? Try and imagine your character involved in different activities and see how it unfolds.

Finally, think about personality quirks - little things that bring a character to life. These can be anything from fear of clowns to obsession with the freshness of fruit. Work these idiosyncrasies into the story; the characters will be far more interesting with them than without them.

Challenge: Take a character you are working on and put them in a variety of challening situations (traffic jam, power outage, in line behind a screaming kid at the grocery store, for example) to see how he or she will react.

What Good is Prewriting?

Last week's discussion of character touched on something that I think I should deal with more fully before I move on. Developing a character's backstory is just one aspect of prewriting, which is essentially "what you do before you write the story."

Before this goes too far, I want to be clear that it is perfectly legitimate to begin work on the story before stepping back and engaging in what we call "prewriting." When an idea strikes, it may do so with action or dialogue, and there is no reason to forego getting that down simply because it would be "out of order."

The main idea of prewriting is getting the rough idea out of your head and into a notebook or text file. This frees up your mind to develop the idea further since you no longer have to worry about keeping everything in your memory. And that's really the point of prewriting, to get major aspects of your story worked out at the beginning so there is less to worry about in revision.

Obviously character is one of those major aspects that needs to be addressed - personalities, backstory, physical appearance, and relationships are all things that need to be considered ahead of time to make the story believable. But character isn't the only thing that needs to be considered.

It is important for the writer to be aware of the story's setting - the locations the characters inhabit and the props they interact with. The setting has tremendous potential for symbolism, but in the prewriting phase the writer only needs a general idea of the way things are set up. For example, if the story involves three characters on a road trip, the size of the car is more important to consider in the prewriting phase than the vehicle's color or the scenery. Three people driving across the country in a Volkswagen Golf are going to behave much differently than three people in a conversion van because of space difference, but are not likely to be affected by whether the exterior paint is blue or black.

The writer also needs to have a loose handle on where the story is going. This is an area that I strongly recommend against spending a lot of time on in the prewriting phase because it is likely to undergo the most drastic changes throughout the writing process. Still, it helps to have an idea about the situations that the characters may face in the story, even if those situations ultimately become irrelevant because of choices the characters make.

Basically the point of all of this is to establish a framework to build the rest of the story around. It will make it easier to maintain consistency within the work if the world and the characters are laid out for easy reference. Ultimately, this will reduce the stress that comes with revision because there will be fewer mistakes to correct.

Challenge: Create an environment. Then create two or three characters. Write a rough outline of what will happen if those characters are dropped into that environment.

Getting Started With Character

Character is a tricky element to work with in a piece of fiction, but it's the most important. The success of a story hinges upon the believability of its characters. The question, then, is "How do you write a believable character?" The answer involves a number of things, too many for one entry, so we'll just start at the beginning.

Most story ideas allow for a wide range of character types. The first step in creating your characters is to narrow your selection. Suppose you want to write about college life. That is a subject that could involve people of all ages and from any background. Get a little more specific. We'll talk about plot and setting in detail in the future, but consider those things. Who would be present and participating? If your idea involves an introductory Algebra class, you're looking at one teacher and twenty to thirty students. Let's say our idea involves four people meeting for lunch - two students, one professor, and one graduate.

Now stop for a minute. I mean it, this is important. You need to ask yourself why they are having lunch together. Your answer isn't going to be "because they are hungry," or "because they haven't seen each other in a while." Those might be the characters' reasons, and they are plenty sufficient for the reader, but as the writer you need to know much more than that. These four people need to have a reason to get together, otherwise their interaction won't be believable.

Start with the students. Make one male and one female, just for kicks. How do they know each other? One option is that they are dating. Another is that they have a class together. Maybe they are siblings who are following in a parent's footsteps. What are they majoring in? What do they want to be? Do they know yet? These are all things that will affect the way they act together and around others.

Moving along, what about the professor? Let's have a female professor. How old is she? What is she teaching? Is it what she wants to do, or did she get her Ph.D. at a time when her field was full? Have the students taken her class, or does she know them some other way (friend of family, distant relative, etc)? Know these things - again, they will affect her relationships with other characters.

Finally, the alumnus. Why is he in town? Maybe he lives there, or maybe his out-of-state company transferred him there. Or maybe he's just passing through for the holidays. How does he know he professor? Was he one of her students at one point? Maybe they are related - he could be her son, her brother or her father. Maybe they're married or divorced.

What's important in all of this is the common ground that these characters are meeting on. Obviously the college is a part of that, but it isn't enough. A writer needs to know the specific reason that the characters are being brought together. "Random chance" isn't good enough for the writer - each character has his or her own reasons for being where they are at the time the story takes place. Those reasons need to be known to the writer, even if the reader is never aware of them, because they are what make the character's presence in the story realistic.

Remember, this is their story as much as it is yours, so make sure you know who they are.

Challange: Take one or more characters from something you are working on and write a page about what they were up to ten years ago.