Author Archives: fictorians

A guest post by Stone Sanchez.

In my journey to be a writer, Anime has had one of the biggest effects on me. From the wayward storytelling of FLCL, to the completely epic outpouring that was Cowboy Bebop, the influence and inspiration it’s served for me has been phenomenal. In my last post, I covered how I was introduced to anime though PokÃ©mon, and a lot of the different types of anime that exist. I’m not making a joke when I say that I’ve sampled and watched, in depth, almost every single type of anime that exists. Its presence has had a massive influence over my writing, how I perceive story, and the way my characters are presented.

When I started off watching anime, I was around six or seven years old. In those early developmental years, my common brand of story became a foreign form of storytelling. Goku (Dragon Ball Z), Heero Yuy (Gundam Wing), and Kenshin Himura (Rurouni Kenshin) were names that were just as big as Superman, Wolverine, and Batman. As I grew older, I delved more into this obsession that was slowly taking America by storm, and became one of those kids who flocked to the internet in search of anime. The why of it has to come into play at some point or another, and for me it was the storytelling. (Not so much in Dragon Ball Z, I have to be honest. Watching two guys beat one another senseless was all the story telling I needed in that one.)

In Gundam Wing, I discovered a sense of idealism that’s managed to still have an effect on me today.

“History is much like an endless waltz.
The three beats of war, peace,
and revolution continue on forever.”
-Mariemaia Khushrenada

Although I cite the quote above coming from the character who said it, the writers of Gundam Wing are the ones who put that view of the world in there. The idea of total pacifism, and the idealism behind giving your life for what you honestly believed in-no matter how old or young, really hit me. In the show, the characters portrayed were all teenagers, but they were fighting ardently for what they believed in. Honestly, my heroes were those five Gundam pilots.

Throughout anime I found characters like those young boys, like Kenshin. Hitokiri Batosai, The Manslayer. A wandering vagabond of a swordsman who, in his journey of repentance for the blood he’d spilt during the Meiji Revolution of Japan, took an oath never to kill again. In his story, this man was known as “The Strongest of the Imperialist” and had such a reputation that, if those who were hunting for him ever discovered where he was, they would take any opportunity they could to kill him. However, after he disappeared from the bloodbath that was the end of the Meiji Revolution, his past came back to haunt him. The current life he’s attempted to make for himself is invaded and he finds himself having to hold off the inner demon that exists inside him, while also defending those he’s come to love as his family; all of this with a reverse blade sword-a sword that is a symbol of his vow never to take another human life again.

In my own writing, characters like these have had a massive impact. Sure, Superman was always overly impressive, but there was a brand of awesome that came with characters that weren’t complete boy scouts. These characters knew the weight that came with having to kill, and often dealt with it in very unique ways-since there were times when killing their enemy was the only true path.

There were a couple of times where I’ve used the word “beautiful” to describe anime. The storytelling in it has left me speechless more than once, and in the case of Clannad, I was in tears. If anyone reading this has never watched a show called Code Geass all the way through, I suggest you do it as soon as possible. The idea of “destroying the world to remake the world” never meant as much as it did until I saw that show. The distorted perceptions of justice, peace, and the idea of flawed pacifism were burned into my mind by anime. I guess you could say that it introduced me to the idea of gray. Things weren’t always so black and white for the protagonist in anime, and sometimes those protagonist weren’t even heroes.

The main influence anime has had on me is that it changed my perception on how I viewed life in general. It sounds funny, but it’s true. I learned more than just story formats. In the same way that an author’s prose affected the way I write, anime’s storylines and passions had a heavy influence on me. Which is probably why some of the first stories I ever wrote was fan fiction of my favorite anime.

So, the Anime Effect has been that it was the format that made me love story enough to want to write stories. It made me want to be creative, and it led me down the path that would eventually have me writing stories of my own. In my own novels and stories, I can see hints of the heroes I had growing up, and traces of the scenes that I watched implanting themselves in my writing. Sure, it wasn’t the only thing that inspired me, but I have to admit it probably played one of the pivotal rolls. It got me writing.

Thanks, anime.

* * *

Stone Sanchez is an aspiring professional author who has been active in the writing community for the past two years. Currently Stone is associated with the Superstars Writing Seminars, where he records and manages the production of the seminars. He’s also worked with David Farland by recording his workshops, and is currently the Director of Media Relations for JordanCon, the official Wheel of Time fan convention. Often referred to as the “kid” in a lot of circles, Stone is immensely happy that he can no longer be denied access places due to not being old enough.

Of Stick Figures and Spiral Notebooks

May 5, 2013

fictorians

A guest post by Greg Little.

When I sat down recently and started thinking about which science fiction and fantasy inspired me to seriously pursue a career in writing genre fiction, I thought the answer was a simple one. But as I actually began putting it down on paper, “the tale grew in the telling” as they say. Nuances I’d nearly forgotten woke as I fired up their neurons. So forgive me in advance if this turns into a bit of a ramble.

Like many if not most of us, I read a lot of fantasy and science fiction as a kid. My mom read Lord of the Rings to me after I’d watched the wonderful Rankin-Bass adaptation of The Hobbit and asked about that last line: “Then you’ll see that the story of the ring is not over, but is only beginning.” (Thanks, Mom!) This was followed by The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander, most (but admittedly not all) of The Chronicles of Narnia, and others.

We flash forward many years to winter break of my first year of college, the moment where I finally caved and jumped on The Wheel of Time bandwagon at the behest of two friends. After devouring everything up through The Path of Daggers (the last book that was out at the time), I switched gears and began with A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin (Game of Thrones to you HBO neophytes). More recently the fantasy uber-series I’ve found most challenging has been The Second Apocalypse, by R. Scott Bakker. Those three series’ collective use of intricate worldbuilding, foreshadowing, dark themes, and multiple viewpoints certainly influenced my writing style.

But the thing that actually got me started writing in the first place took place in between childhood and college. On the verge of entering my teen years, I began reading the Star Wars “expanded universe” novels. I eventually went on to read a great many of those (stopping only when I realized they were never going to end), but the ones that had the most impact were the Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn and the Jedi Academy Trilogy by Kevin J. Anderson.

At that time, my mom had probably noted that for several years I’d eased off reading in favor of video games (video games being a particular weakness and a habit I haven’t managed to kick even today) and so knowing I was a huge Star Wars fan she shrewdly picked me up the first of Zahn’s trilogy. Well, technically she picked up the third book at first, but we quickly sorted it out after a bit of confusion.

I was blown away and instantly hooked (thanks again, Mom!), quickly devouring both trilogies and looking for more. Not only did it get me back into heavy reading, but I quickly realized that I liked the best of the novels even better than I liked the movies, because the books delved so much deeper into story and characterization. My friends and I quickly began incorporating details from the expanded universe into a Star Wars role-playing game of our own design. We took turns as dungeon master, and that was where I got my first taste of how much fun it was to create narrative mysteries for other players to try and solve.

Shortly into high school, my friend Bryan and I began taking turns drawing crude stick figure comics. Each of us came up with one “character” and the comics basically involved increasingly outlandish ways for the characters to kill each other, our own personal Itchy and Scratchy from The Simpsons. But eventually we grew bored with the pen-and-paper carnage, so our characters teamed up and began having narrative adventures (always wielding lightsabers, of course). Then in our sophomore year of high school, we started passing a three-subject spiral notebook around between classes, trying our hand at our own fiction, which quickly morphed into Star Wars fan fiction (set a thousand years in the future from the original trilogy, natch).

It was… not great fiction. Now liberated from the limitations of our crude stick-figure art, the one-upsmanship that had permeated our comics ran rampant. Mostly we would use our turn to either invent a mystery to confuse the other author (perhaps not the best collaborative technique) or each try to paint the other into a narrative corner from which escape would be impossible (an even worse collaborative technique). It marked the beginning of writing purely for my own enjoyment.

We never did finish that first story. Bryan moved away halfway through high school and we saw each other infrequently after that. I toyed around with finishing it anyway (and two others, because all books simply belonged in trilogy form to my inexperienced eyes) but eventually just dropped it. But I still have both that notebook and the comics. In fact, writing this piece spurred me to pull them out of storage and look them over. The prose is even worse than I remember, but I’m trying to take that as a sign of how far I’ve come since then. And as bad as it is, it still puts a smile on my face. I feel like that’s the most you can ask for from your writing.

Why I Write

May 4, 2013

fictorians

Guest Posts The Writing Life 1 Comment

A guest post by Sam Knight.

My grandfather and my mother are avid readers, so I came by that honestly. Writing, however, is a different story.

I have a tendency to get sick. I mean really sick. If everyone else in the house has a sniffle, I have a cold. If they have colds, I have the flu. If everyone has the flu, I’m at the doctor’s. The problem with getting that sick, that often, is you get bored really stinking fast.

Being a child in the 70s, I didn’t have video games until Pong came out, and I could play that for only so long. Television was only worth watching for about two hours a day, and then only on some days (except Saturday morning cartoons!). Books, though… they worked 24/7.

One particular illness sticks out in my memory. I was in fifth grade and down sick with what I was told was the “Russian Flu.” I was miserable sick-except when I was reading. When I was reading, I was in another world. I could literally forget about my own problems! I would be so engrossed, the rest of the world ceased to exist. That was a godsend.

That was also my first real introduction to the idea of a series, where the story continued on into the next book. The world didn’t come to an end when I closed the book, there was another one waiting!

I read Patricia A. McKillip’s Riddle Master Trilogy, Piers Anthony’s Xanth Trilogy (back when there were only three), a trilogy collection of Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter books, and three or four of Alan Dean Foster’s Pip and Flinx series. When I ran out of new books, I re-read The Hobbit.

It was quite an eclectic mix, and I read them all in a little over a week. And then I went looking for more. Everything I could get my hands on. Up until that time, I had been a “reader.” I had read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in fourth grade. But now, after doing so much reading, so intensively, I had become addicted. I had become a biblioholic. I had to have more!

I raided my mother’s bookshelves and then headed for my grandfather’s. I came away with armloads of Andre Norton, Robert Heinlein, Kenneth Robeson, Frank Herbert, and more.

Some sucked me in, others not so much. I was searching for authors with a specific talent-the ability to make me forget I was reading a book. I was actually trying to recreate what I had experienced while I was ill.

Yeah, I read the things the other kids were reading. The Mouse and the Motorcycle, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and the like. They were good, but… they didn’t transport me into another world the way I wanted.

I wasn’t in the game to read about little problems with kid brothers, or mysteries about missing toys. I wanted the Hero’s Journey. I wanted books that let me see Star Wars in my head. (We couldn’t just buy it and watch it anytime we wanted back then. Not to mention that, if I remember right, Star Wars was around $100 when it came out on VHS five or six years after theatrical release, and a brand new book was only $3.50.) I wanted books that let me live a different life.

And I found them. I found a lot of them. I started with authors I already knew could make a movie behind my eyes, and I got everything I could by them. I read Piers Anthony’s older sci-fi stories, and then I followed all of his new series as they came out. I followed Alan Dean Foster’s Pip and Flinx adventures all the way until 2009 when he finally wrapped it up. I’m still waiting for David Gerrold to finish The War Against the Chtorr series. (I’m not holding my breath, though…) Along the way, I found Robert Asprin’s Myth series, Lawrence Watt-Evan’s Ethshar books, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, among others.

I worked sixty hours a week while attending college full-time, and I still made time to read. I would exchange books with co-workers. I gave away my copy of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy just to convince someone to read it, and then I went and bought myself another. I did that three times.

After I graduated, I carried my book du jour to work with me and read it during my lunch hour. At first my new co-workers laughed at me, but by the time I left there were close to a dozen people doing the same thing.

Why? Because books are magic. A well-crafted book made by a talented author will cast a spell over a reader and transport them to a new place, a different time, another life.

That’s what I was looking for when I was sick. A different life. And those wonderful authors gave it to me, even if it was just for stolen moments at a time. They gave it to me. And as I lay in that bed so many years ago, a thought drifted through my mind, a thought that stayed with me the rest of my life: I wanted to return the favor. I wanted to write something that could bring as much joy to those authors as they were giving me.

Ideas began bouncing around in my head after that. When I worked physical labor, I would entertain myself by thinking up stories. When I drove long distance, I would stay awake by imagining new places, new worlds, and new people. Eventually, I found that nearly anything would give me a story idea.

And soon, very soon, I will finally move beyond my apprenticeship and craft a story that repays my heroes. I will inspire the next generation, and honor the previous. I will write because I read, and it was wonderful.

* * *

Sam Knight refuses to be pinned down into a genre. If the idea grabs him, he writes it. Once upon a time, he was known to quote books the way some people quote movies, but now he claims having a family has made him forgetful, as a survival adaptation. He can be found at www.samknight.com and contacted at sam@samknight.com.

Here There Be Dragons: Maps in Fiction

April 29, 2013

fictorians

Craft & Skills Guest Posts Publishing The Writing Life World-building Writing Tools 4 Comments

Jon Roberts_portrait — Artist, Jonathan Roberts

Guest Post by Jonathan Roberts

Let’s get one thing out of the way right now.

A map shouldn’t be pretty.

I know what you’re thinking – those posters of Middle Earth are gorgeous. Of course a map should be beautiful! But for worldbuilding purposes a pretty map is a Very Bad Thing. Beautiful things are precious, and we tend to want to leave precious things pristine and untouched. When we’re building worlds we need to break things, and often. So, out with any thoughts that we’re making a pretty map. We’ll be making a functional map. In fact we’ll be making many maps, one after the other. In exactly the same way that your notes are not the final manuscript, a map isn’t the final world. It’s a visual notepad, and you should be crossing things out, erasing sections and rebuilding from scratch as you go along.

So we won’t be needing photoshop today, we need a pad of scratch paper and a pencil. Ready? Right, let’s build a world.

First of all, think about the world you need to build. In many cases this is a defined area that’s much smaller than the planet you’re on. Very few stories truly span a globe, so let’s begin by cutting down to the area that the story explores. This keeps the work focused on a reasonable area, and means there will always be distant and mysterious lands to explore down the line.

In your tale there will be nations, city states or power centers of some form. Start by making a note of their relationships to one another. Are they at war? Are they aloof? Do they feud over resources or are they closely allied? Think over the things that make them stand out. Are they famous for their expansive grain fields? Their iron? Their navy? I’m sure you can see the theme here. Nations are defined by the geography they inhabit as much as we define the geography by the nation. A nation with a large navy needs sea access, but it should also have natural defenses like a mountain range that allows the nation to neglect other military forces in favor of its navy. Two countries at war need to be close, and need to have a means of attacking one another.

Focus on major terrain at this point–how much coastline and mountain range. Make notes about other terrain that comes to mind–the tulip fields of Alak’tor, the salt mines of Keshel. Those will come in useful later.

It’s now time to start our map. Grab a pencil and faintly draw in circles where your nations are. Nations that are allies or at war should be close. Those that rarely interact should be farther away, or have an insurmountable natural barrier between them. Drawing circles on a map may sound easy, but this stage can take a few tries to get the relationships right.

Jon Roberts_1BasicLayout — Stage 1: Circles. Yes, these are 6 interconnected nations!

But circles aren’t really a map. Let’s draw some coastlines. Think about which of your nations need large coastlines and which should be landlocked. Then let your pen wander. Really – avoid straight lines. Coastlines are jagged and broken things. If your line doesn’t look like it was plotted by a drunken ant, you’re doing it wrong.

Step 2: The coastlines. Keep them broken and randomized.

Now let’s lay in some mountains. Mountains tend to form ridges. Avoid the temptation to fill in whole blocks of land with mountains. Instead, lay them out in wavy lines. They often follow the edge of a coastline (think the Andes). From a story point of view, they form obstacles for your heroes and they create natural boundaries between nations, or between nations and the great unknown. Mountains also create boundaries between climates. So if you need a desert in one area and a jungle in the other, you’d better place a mountain range between them to stop the rain from the jungle getting to the desert.

Step 3: Mountains - they shouldn't be pretty, inverted triangles do the job just fine. — Step 3: Mountains – they shouldn’t be pretty, inverted triangles do the job just fine.

Next up, we have rivers. Rain falls on mountains and runs downhill to the sea. It always flows to the lowest point – and there’s always one lowest point. This means that rivers don’t branch as they flow to the sea, they only join. So – no rivers going from coast to coast. At some point that requires water to flow uphill. No lakes that have two separate rivers leading to the sea – remember, only one lowest point leading out. Think of a river like a tree. There’s one trunk where it enters the sea, but a panoply of branches reaching towards the mountains.

Rivers are also strategically important. There’s hardly a river mouth in the world without a town on it and most great cities lie on a river. If you know where your cities are going to be, make sure there’s a decent sized river flowing through them. Equally, rivers make great defenses. It’s hard to build a wall all the way along your nation’s border, but it’s almost as hard to get an army over a well-defended river as it is to have them scale a wall.

Step 4: As rivers run to the coast they only join, they never branch.

Add some hills to the edge of your mountain ranges. Lay in some forest and see how it looks. Remember, don’t be precious. If you don’t like it, start on a new sheet of paper. Sketch another coastline. Turn it upside down.

When you’re happy with the terrain, go over the pencil lines with pen, and erase the pencil–including your nation boundaries. Scan and photocopy the map. Go away and have some food.

When you come back, try the following experiment. Ignore your previous nations. Look at the virgin world with a new eye. If you were founding a country in the world, where would you start? What would be the key strategic choke points? Look at the world as if you were playing Civ. Where are the resources you need to defend, what lands would you try to annex? Use some colored pencils to sketch in different nations and boundaries. Edit the rivers if you need to, move things around. You’ve got lots of copies of the map–experiment.

Once you have a layout you like, we’ll add cities.

Step 5: Hills and Forests, add them wherever you see fit. These are easily moved.

Cities are where they are for a reason. They don’t just appear up in the middle of nowhere. Population centers need food, water, trade and security. Rivers can provide all of these, which is why towns and cities tend to spring up at river mouths. Locate your capitals in places that are easily defended and that have good transport connections to the rest of the nation. Place smaller cities in key locations, whether that’s in the heart of a mining community on the edge of a mountain range, at a key strategic river crossing, or a market town in the middle of leagues of prime cattle-ranching land. At this point, also mark in major fortifications.

Step 6: Place cities, towns and fortifications.

With these indicated it’s a simple matter to place the roads. These will connect the major cities, the main food producing regions, and any other major trade routes.

You now have a perfectly functional map! But remember, nothing is set in stone. Each time you run through this process your map will be better. Each time you sketch the map you’ll have new ideas. As you continue to write about your world you’ll come up with new thoughts on what terrain you should have, how two countries relate across their border, where a great wilderness needs to be. Redraw the map – it’s there for you. Both your map drawing and your text will be better for the relationship between map and story.

And when your manuscript is ready to go from draft to final, your map will be ready to go from sketch to illustration. But that’s a post for another day.

If you want to learn about the art of mapmaking, then check out the Cartographers’ Guild, or my own tutorials.

Jonathan Roberts grew up in a old farmhouse between a ruined castle and a Bronze Age fort, so lands of the imagination were never far away. These days Roberts illustrates maps of real and imaginary worlds for a wide range of clients, from brides looking for an unusual wedding map, to the lands of Westeros and Essos for George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. Along with his own illustration work for books and games, Roberts has curated New York gallery shows of maps by illustrators around the world.