Category Archives: Setting and Milieu

Character Study – It’s All About Soles – Building a Character from the Ground Up

Character Craft & Skills Nancy Greene World-building 3 Comments

The funny thing about sitting with your eyes at street level is what you notice first. The other day I had some time before court and was sitting at a local DC pastry shop. The shop is on a slight hill, and most of it is below grade. As a result, the first thing I see out its window are shoes and pants cuffs. I decided to play, “make-up-a-stranger’s-life-story” based on what I could see. Ask any writer and I suspect he’ll tell you that he plays a version of “make-up-a-stranger’s-life-story” every time he goes out. It’s one of the ways that I come up with character descriptions.

While playing the game using shoes and the edges of pants, I realized how often quick assumptions were accurate. The shoes often did predict the rest of the outfit. A pair of scuffed, mud-splattered work boots pushed a rolling cart up the hill. Frayed light blue jeans hid the boot tops from view. When their owner made it further up the hill, I wasn’t surprised to see a gray-haired stoop shouldered man behind the cart. His face was as creased and lined as his faded blue jeans. The pair of trendy black and white sneakers over pristine blue jeans, on the other hand, belonged to a 20-something student or tourist.

When we create a character we have to visualize everything about him. Our readers need to see the entire character. Outfits matter. Despite the popularization of an unsustainable media image, a warrior princess shouldn’t be in three inch heels. The successful business man shouldn’t be wearing grubby sneakers on his way to work. As writers we can add depth to our characters by upsetting common stereotypes- no, not the racial profiling ones, the ones like a lawyer always should be in a suit and tie.

Writers vary in how much detail they write down in advance about their characters. Some of us do detailed character bios and interviews. Numerous software programs create mechanisms for us to record the information. You might not consciously think about what shoes your character is likely to wear, but your readers will know if you got it wrong. If you deviate from expectations – say, lawyers wear suits and dress shoes to court- you need a reason your readers will accept for the deviation. The scene in My Cousin Vinnie where Vinnie shows up in Court in a purple prom tux is great because the outfit is so ludicrous. It provides additional humor. The audience accepts the sight gag because we know his suit’s been destroyed and Vinnie explains what he had to do to find something not completely objectionable for court that day.

In creating character, shoes are one of those little details that matter. It’s not enough to know that your main character wears sneakers. You need to know whether the laces still have their aglets. Does he tie his shoes or are people always telling him to do so? Will those details make it into your story? Maybe. The fact that your character is always stopping to tie his shoes might be a plot device or character trait that lends depth and reality to your story.

As a writing experiment, go someplace where your vision is restricted like the basement pastry shop I was in before court. Puzzle out the rest of the outfit from on that first limited view of the person. Once you have an outfit, flesh out why your character chose those clothes that morning. Is she out sightseeing? Is she in uniform? Is she taking her son to the playground? Now, what in her life brought her to the moment you saw her? What happens next?

Writers get inspiration from all sorts of places. Sometimes even a fabulous pair of shoes.

As the Years Go By

Craft & Skills Kevin Cioffi The Writing Life World-building 3 Comments

I recently had the pleasure of finishing my reading of Brandon Sanderson’s latest Mistborn novel: The Alloy of Law.  It was fantastic, full of his snappiest dialogue to date, hilarious self referential jokes and a plot that moved forward with the stunning pace of a bullet train.  Taking place some hundreds of years after the conclusion of the original Mistborn trilogy, the world and setting had completely changed, and yet it was at once instantly familiar.

In fact, while the main and supporting characters were thoroughly enjoyable and thoroughly hilarious with all of their requisite Sanderson corniness and wit, I found myself mostly intrigued with the setting itself.  I was stunned to realize: the setting of this book was just as much a character to me as Wax and Wayne and the rest of the cast.  What made that so?

I think, for me, it was the progress, the change and development to the setting since last time I had visited Scadrial in the original Mistborn trilogy.  Without throwing out too many spoilers, within the three hundred or so years between books technology had begun to modernize.  Trains now race through the city and branch out through the unsettled “Roughs”, criminal and lawman alike have dropped their blades and taken up potent firearms, main characters from the original story have faded into myth, legend and theology.  As I said, I found a new sense of conflict and development in the actual world building behind the story.  It had become a living, breathing character.

I tried to pin down how, exactly, Mr. Sanderson was able to achieve this, and I think it boils down to the most obvious aspect: the passage of time.  In a lot of fantasy stories and series, it is sometimes surprising how little time actually passes.  For example, in The Wheel of Time, after twelve exhaustive books, I’m pretty sure only 2-3 years have passed.   Sure, the setting might be growing and changing based on the actions of the characters, but profound change in technology, government and lifestyle usually takes decades, even centuries.

That is why after three hundred years or so “off screen” I was fascinated by my second trip to Mistborn‘s Scadrial, and I’m really interested in finding more stories or series in which time and generations can pass, and the setting is able to develop as a prominent character.  Another one I can think of off the top of my head is Kevin J. Anderson’s Terra Incognita series.  The stories move at a blistering pace and sometimes years pass a decade at a time.  The landscape and inhabiting cultures are scoured by war and the vast scope of the story really gives room for the world itself to develop.

Fictional Holidays

Craft & Skills Matt Jones The Writing Life World-building 2 Comments

Christmas tree
Christmas Tree

With the holiday season passing us, I think it is a good time to look around us and figure out how we can put this in a fiction world. Looking at our own holidays is a great way to help world-build and create believable celebrations in your own world. A well designed world that includes holidays may also provide a look into the history and cultures that exist in the world.

Looking at Christmas, we can see different elements coming from different cultures with different priorities, the two that jump to the front being religion and harvest. Religion has been with us since the first cognizant person witnessed the first lightning storm or felt his first earthquake. To their primitive culture, such acts could only be accomplished via a supreme being. It’s not surprising then that many of the holidays surround the worship or appeasement of a god. Even the name holidays comes from Holy Days.

The date is centered around the Winter Solstace, or December 21st. The Norse celebrated Yule, which focused on the return of the sun. If you watched the sun in the sky, each day it would drop lower and lower as the days got shorter. On solstice, the sun would stop its movement and start rising as the days got longer. To celebrate, they would get large logs and light them on fire and feast until the flames went out. The Norse believed that each spark from these Yule logs, which could burn for around 12 days, symbolized a new life that would be born in the forthcoming year.

The Romans celebrated Saturnalia in honor of Saturn, the god of Agriculture. Since farming and agriculture paused for the passing of winter, it provided time for celebration and feasts. Saturnalia also centered on the rebirth of the sun and the hopes of a good new year. One big part of the celebration was the day of Gift-giving on December 23rd. On this day, people gathered to give gifts to friends, family, and patrons.

Finally, with the coming of Christianity, many of these celebrations were converted in an effort to bring more people into the religion. As society progressed and became industrialized, the rebirth of the sun and the worry about growing crops for the next year subsided. Despite this, the history and concerns of our people in the past is still evident in how we celebrate now.

Looking back at fiction, you can put these same ideas into your holidays. If the people of your world never had to worry about food or the loss of the sun, then having them celebrate a Christmas like celebration wouldn’t make sense. Also, in a world where Gods are not only worshiped but actively walk and affect the lives of their followers, certain requirements may be demanded upon them. Think of how these requirements would change through the years. Perhaps a past god required one thing and was replaced with the current god who actively protested the celebrations. How would this effect the world and those living in it?

Even if you don’t tell the world of all the history, it can help give ideas and really give color to the world. If nothing else, it will give you, the author, a deeper understanding of your world and the people who live there. And that can only help improve a novel.

What Art Can Do for Us

Brandon M. Lindsay Character The Writing Life World-building 10 Comments
Oath of the Horatii, by Jacques-Louis David

It happens to everyone; sometimes, life disappoints us. We can do our best to mitigate disappointment, and we can even achieve a great amount of success in that regard, but at some point, something’s going to come up that wrecks our day.

Indeed, it appears to be a rather prevalent issue these days (the reasons for which are beyond the scope of this post, though I assure you, I do have an opinion on the topic), so much that people unquestioningly equate cynicism with realism. If you have any doubts about this, listen to a politician.

But this phenomenon extends beyond our day-to-day lives to the field of art, and in particular, of literature. In fantasy (the genre with which I am the most familiar), there has even sprung a new sub-genre dedicated to cynicism called “gritty fantasy,” comprised of anti-heroes and more anti-heroes. Those who have helped popularize this sub-genre have done so by acclaiming its supposed authenticity of character motivation and general realism amidst a fantasy backdrop.

Some of the authors in this sub-genre are quite good and a few I buy the day their books come out. More often, though, especially on those wrecked days, I’ll have to take a break from this kind of book and read something that I know will end happily ever after. Why? Because I have enough problems of my own, thank you very much, and it just isn’t worth it to wallow in some character’s misery. In a way, I think it’s (somewhat unsurprisingly, given the nature of these books) tragic that this grittier type of story has come to prominence because it probably contributes to the general malaise that people feel.

So what happened to the stories peopled with characters you can cheer for and want to emulate, stories led by heroes who save the day and vanquish evil in the final act? Many of its critics (who currently outnumber its champions) think this type of story is unbelievable and unsophisticated, that its characters aren’t “flawed” enough. It seems this type of story has fallen out of vogue in recent years, though there are still its practitioners and fans, and I doubt that either will go away. At the end of the day, these are always the stories I gravitate toward. These are the stories that remind me that today can be a good day, so long as I do my best.

Some stories show us how the world is. Some show is how it can be, whether good or bad. Still others show us how it ought to be, and give us the inspiration and the emotional fuel we need to make it that way, to become the heroes of our own stories and live the lives that we want to live.

As artists we have a choice. We can either fall in line with the trends of today, and I’m sure many of you will disagree with me and argue that this is the better path (if you do, please comment. I enjoy a good discussion). Or we can show our readers characters who do not yet exist, but can, doing things considered impossible, yet succeeding.

And who knows? We might just end up saving the world by the time the final page is turned.