“Ideas are cheap.” I heard this once from a panel of successful authors at a seminar, and I thought to myself – ‘No, that can’t be right. If I have a genius idea, it’s priceless.’ Right? Wrong.

Then said panel proved it. Take any idea and give it to someone and their spin on it will be completely different than the next person’s and the next’s. So, any idea has an unlimited number of incarnations. Cheap. All our experiences create our perspective and that all plays a role in how we would tackle a topic. Cool. Cheap.

Whenever me and my CP are talking about something that happened to me, or I did, or I lived in the past, she says, ‘that’d make a great story.’ And, I think, DUH, why didn’t I think of that. Everywhere.

Really absorb these concepts, fellow Fictorians – anything, everything is an idea for a story and no two people will tell that story the same. Cheap and Everywhere.

How many of us have watched the TV show, Angel? Me? I own it, love it, discuss it… you get the idea. Yet I never had this moment of brilliance. What if you took the characters of Angel and Wesley and made them gay lovers with a BDSM slant to their relationship? No one have that idea? Wrong. At least one person did. When I found out the book I was reading was inspired by that very idea – I thought that’s freakin’ genius. The names are different and there’s a lot changed… because it’s through this author’s filter. But, knowing the characters that were the source inspiration, there were moments reading the book where I could picture them. I recognized some character traits. The author had an idea and explored it.

The point is that ideas are everywhere if you ‘get it.’ Tap into your inspiration and run with it. Ideas are cheap… and everywhere.

I challenge you – use the following idea, process it through the filter of your experiences, and where do you take that story? Share if you want.

IDEA: You just had several huge flower boxes built in your yard, and they’re big enough to hold a body or two…

To World-Build, or Not To World-Build

June 3, 2011

David Carrico

Picking up the discussion where I left off before my musing interlude post, I’d like to talk about world-building. The fact that this is a subject that occurred to me may give you a hint that I write fantasy and science fiction. ‘Tis true, I admit. And the label world-building may seem to imply those genres; in fact, when most of us think of “world-building”, I dare say we think of it almost exclusively in terms of F&SF. When we attempt to create a background for a story, we are creating a world for our readers to experience. That’s pretty self-evident if our story is going to be laid on/in Venus, Barsoom, Oz, a dwarf planet circling the star Fomalhaut at a distance of 8.3 AU, Lilliput, or the Hierarchate of High Phalangistan.

Lately, however, I’ve come to the conclusion that, while it is perhaps not so self-evident, all writers practice world-building whenever we commit fiction. Period. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. World-building is not exclusively an exercise for the F&SF writers; instead, it should be the equivalent of the mason’s trowel in our tool-kits.

This is true even if a story is laid in a setting as modern as 2011 New York City. A writer might live in the setting of her story. She might know the setting backwards and forwards, have the most intimate details so ingrained in her memory that she is the consummate authority on that locale. But . . . (you knew there was a ‘but’ coming, didn’t you?) . . . the vast majority of the readers of that story will not have that knowledge. They’ve never been to New York City, and all they know is what they’ve seen in the media; or if they have visited, chances were it was a number of years ago. Either way, their superficial knowledge is hopelessly restricted and obsolete in relation to the author’s up-to-the-minute story requirements. In this situation, readers probably have no hope of understanding many/most of the foundational elements of the story. Unless . . . (surely you saw the ‘unless’ coming) . . . unless the writer builds the scene for them, giving them enough information and description and detail that they can place the characters and events of the story in their proper framework and context.

So we all, we writers, practice world-building when we commit fiction. It is impossible to write good fiction if we don’t. And we need to do it well, for two reasons: first, to play fair with the readers, who are totally dependent on our skills as world-builders to bring that setting alive for them; and second, because even though the vast majority of our readers may not have the knowledge or experience to question what we write, there are always a few out there who will know as much (if not more) than we do, and will happily inform us of our mistakes. Count on it.

Lovely case in point: L. Sprague de Camp wrote one of the earliest and finest alternate history novels ever written, entitled Lest Darkness Fall. It’s an absolute classic, even now, 60 + years after it was first published in book form. (What? You haven’t read it? Tsk. Go read it. Now. I’ll wait.)

Anyway, the story is laid in 6th century Italy, and Sprague researched it to a fair-thee-well. In a bit of biography (that I can’t provide a cite to because my library is packed away for a move) he told the story on himself that, proud of his research, he wrote a bit of dialog in one scene in 6th century Gothic. After the book was published, Sprague received a letter from a professor complimenting him on his use of Gothic, but informing him that he used the wrong grammatical case for that bit of dialog.

There’s always someone out there who knows more about something than you do. Always.

Actually, in the scale of difficulty of world-building, we writers of F&SF may have the easiest time of it, overall, because we can invent our story universe out of whole cloth, if we so desire. (Okay, maybe not all the time, but still . . .)

Writers of historical fiction (including alternate history) probably have the next easiest time of it, because once they do the research to get the big stuff right, most of the details can be invented as part of the story process, and the proportion of experts in the reading public who can catch errors at that level of detail is normally pretty small.

The writers of contemporary fiction may face the biggest challenge today, especially when they’re setting a story in a place they’ve personally never been, because there are potentially hundreds or thousands (if not millions) of readers who can catch them in errors and happily splash it across the internet. To do it right, they often have to do mind-numbing amounts of research to provide the foundations for a story, the results of which will mostly never appear at all.

Well, I’m ready to dive into details of world-building, but it seems I’ve about run out of space today. So, set a place-holder and we’ll resume from here next post.

Four Elements, Part 2. . . .yeah

June 1, 2011

David Carrico

Craft & Skills Setting and Milieu The Writing Process 5 Comments

But first, a bit of musing by way of interlude….

I’m a reader. I read like most people watch TV. I’ve been that way for years-most of my life, actually. I can remember in junior high reading 28 young adult novels a week during the summer between school semesters. (The library only let me have 4 per day. I’d check out 4 about 1 pm, read three before bedtime, read the fourth the next morning, and repeat after lunch.) I once tried to estimate how many fiction books I’ve read in the last forty-mumble years, and quit trying after I arrived at a number even I didn’t want to believe. One of my major complaints about actually succeeding at writing is that it cuts waaaaaay into my reading time.

I discovered science fiction in sixth grade, by way of Andre Norton’s novel Catseye. (It gladdens me to see Ms. Norton receiving from many of the current generation of great writers the recognition she is due. It saddens me that she didn’t receive it during most of her life.) From there the jump to Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, etc., was a short one.

I think what caught me up in SF was what the old-timers used to call the “sense of wonder”. But in my case, it wasn’t from the idea of space flight or zoomy technology that grabbed me. No, I was hooked on the worlds. Even at ages 10-12, I began to see beyond the limits of the page and wanted to go to those places.

And then I arrived at eighth grade. Age 13, bright, introverted, lazy, and defensive. (“You really read that science fiction stuff?”) And then I discovered Tolkien.

This was 1964-5, right before the first paperback editions came out. In fact, I first read The Hobbit in paperback, but I read The Lord of the Rings in the hardback edition from the library. And of course, I had no idea what a trilogy was-who did, back then-so I read them out of order. (Did the same thing with Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, too. I told you, I was 13.) And boy, did I get confused, not least by the fact that the two main villains were named almost identically. (Sauron/Saruman-c’mon now, hand up those who didn’t stumble over that the first time through.) (That’s what I thought.)

But what caught me up in a hold that still exists to this day; what caused me to read the entire trilogy 12 times in eight years and re-read my favorite excerpts many times over since then, was the world. Say what you will about the stories-and I know that Tolkien is not everyone’s cup of tea-(Philistines)-the creation of Middle Earth is unequaled in the field of literature with a small ‘L’. The height and depth and breadth of Tolkien’s conception and realization is unparalleled, to my way of thinking. Of course the fact that he spent 20-30 years building it might have something to do with that. (Sometimes we feel like if we spend 2-3 months building our story universes, we’ve wasted time.)

The appendices at the end of The Return of the King quickly became some of my favorite reading. That’s where Tolkien gave me glimpses of everything that was lurking behind the scenes and under the surface. And I wanted that. Oh, how I wanted that. I copied out the tables of the runes from the appendices, and used them to translate the bands of runes on the title pages. (You do know that those aren’t just decorative, right?) I would pore over the genealogies, looking for correlations to the trilogy narrative. I would even lie awake at night and try to figure out what would go in the blank spots where he didn’t say anything…to no avail, of course.

And gradually, the desire began to grow in me to write. But I didn’t want to write to make a buck, or to impress people, or to feed my ego, or even to scratch an unscratchable itch. No, what caused me to set pen to paper (literally) in 1977 was a deep-seated desire to craft something that people would be drawn into the way I was drawn into Middle-Earth.

Oh, I know I’ll probably never attain that. The circumstances behind Tolkien’s craftwork are unique, and will probably never be duplicated. And even if it could, I don’t have 20 years to spend in doing it. But the fact that a goal may not be attained does not mean that it should not be striven for.

To this day, the works that are most likely to be retained in my library for frequent re-reading are works whose worlds are masterpieces of the world-building craft.

So that’s why I’m taking time to share thoughts and discussion about world-building.

Okay, end of musing interlude. On to discussion about world-building…next post. Promise.