Motivation: It’s Not Just for Characters

From the “Illustrated History of Furniture, From the Earliest to the Present Time” by Frederick Litchfield (1893)

One of the biggest challenges aspiring writers face is staying motivated. On the one hand, you face the challenge of cranking out the million words necessary to hone your craft into something fit for public consumption, while on the other hand you (usually) don’t have much external pressure to keep going. You’re essentially a hobbyist at this point and while writing can be rewarding it’s also very often a chore to do, which makes procrastination so very alluring.

Now, you could set deadlines for yourself, but it’s very easy to grant yourself extenuating circumstances: it was a tiring week, it was a busy month, you had a thing. For a lot of aspiring writers, self-imposed deadlines just don’t work. But I have an easy bit of advice on creating more effective deadlines: get yourself an audience.

“You and I are of a kind”

I’ve talked about using history as inspiration for worldbuilding. Now let’s move on to characters. A few weeks back, I ran across a review of a biography of Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto and immediately thought “he would make a good model for a tragic villain.” I often have thoughts like that when reading history.

There’s a lot of interesting information about Yamamoto’s life–for example, he was adopted into the Yamamoto family as an adult, part of a traditional practice whereby a samurai family with no sons would adopt a promising young man to carry on the family name. But to Americans like myself, Yamamoto is best known for his role in planning the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

On Little Cat Feet

The first page of the Peterborough Chronicle, ca. CE 1150. (Paw prints courtesy of Steve Halls, clker.com)

Cats walking across keyboards at inconvenient moments feels like such a modern annoyance. But the history of cats disrupting people’s writing is a long and storied one, with documented cases dating as far back as the 15th Century, when some elegant feline in Dubrovnik, Croatia dipped its paws in ink and then delicately trod across a just-completed manuscript page. Since at the time everything still had to be written by hand, it was too costly to start over and the scribe had to press on to the next page, leaving the paw prints perfectly preserved for 500 years.

It’s little anecdotes like this that can be fun to sprinkle through stories, as they make the world messier, more alive, and closer to our lived experiences. Which in turn draws us closer to the characters. Because every cat co-habitant has felt that poor scribe’s distress.

I’m looking forward to slipping this detail into a story as soon as the opportunity arises.

Same old story

Frontispiece to Chap. 12 of “The Face in the Pool” by J. Allen St. John (1905)

My friend Crow blogged recently about the challenge he was facing crafting characters that would work in a fantasy novel, rather than a JRPG:

So when I’m confronted with the urgency of my own desire to create (recognizing that given my skillset, writing a novel is the option that doesn’t require me to learn a new hard ability like programming or art) I run into this issue where I can come up with characters that are compelling from a conceptual standpoint, with unique voices and viewpoints on the world, but can’t come up with a coherent plot that forces those characters to change over time. You look at the plot in any of the Final Fantasies, and the formula is pretty simple: a group of characters who otherwise wouldn’t have anything to do with each other (due to racial/cultural/social conflicts or physical separation) must come together to defeat an otherwise unassailable evil bent on destroying the world. It’s a plot that works in videogames, but by this point is incredibly cliche in novels.

I’ve had similar issues before where I had a character but no story. I eventually decided that I should look at how she became the person I’d imagined and try to find the story there, which eventually led me to the full plot. The lesson I took was that if you’ve got a brilliant character but no story for them, you might consider whether you’re imagining the character at or near the end of her story, rather than the beginning.

However, I’d like to delve more into Crow’s concern about the “cliche” fantasy plot and how it should be considered and approached.

Puzzling out the story

Frederick Litchfield, “Illustrated History of Furniture, From the Earliest to the Present Time” (1893).

What’s your mental image of the process of writing? Not the act of putting words on the page, but the process of converting nebulous ideas into strings of unchanging letters.

To me, it always feels like assembling a puzzle. I have an idea of what I want to accomplish (the picture on the puzzle box) and I just need to find the right way to fit the pieces together. It feels this way on a macro level — how does this scene connect with that one — and on the micro level — how does this sentence, or this phrase, or this word, fit in with the rest. One major difference with an actual puzzle of course is that while the puzzle pieces never change, the act of piecing together a story typically causes me to find new ways to fit things together that often result in an outcome very different from the initial picture on the box.

The True Meaning of X-mas

Now that I’m back to blogging after an unexpectedly long hiatus over the new year, I wanted to discuss some tricks for using holidays in SF&F fiction. I’m talking about invented holidays, or far-future evolutions of present-day festivities. A festival, celebration, or fast can add an extra bit of flavor to a story while simultaneously fleshing out your setting and providing greater insight into the people who inhabit this world.

But for a few folks like me, this can be hard to pull off without feeling too forced, generic, or derivative. So I’ve had to come up with some techniques for creating holidays that fit organically into both the setting and the story.

Let’s Talk About Hats!

Medieval kettle hat with chain mail hood. (Illustration by Viollet-le-Duc, 1874. Public domain image.)

As the saying goes, history never repeats itself but sometimes it rhymes. In 1915, the various European powers were faced with a particularly ugly limerick. The opening months of what had become the first World War had inflicted terrible casualties on all sides. One contributing factor was a stunning rise in gruesome head wounds, mostly due to falling shrapnel from modern artillery shells.

In the more than two hundred years after the development of the musket, body armor had been obsolete. Ten generations of soldiers had marched into battle wearing only wool or cotton uniforms and caps, often in fanciful colors that would stand out through the haze of black powder smoke. But in 1915, military physicians on all sides urged a return to the use of armored helmets to protect against head wounds. The medieval had become modern.

A Sobering Post on Alcohol in Speculative Fiction

Via Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns & Money, I am reminded that 79 years ago today, the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, repealing the 18th Amendment and with it, the disastrous policy of Prohibition. Naturally, my thoughts turned to the depiction of banned and controlled substances in SF&F.

1874 American political cartoon, “Woman’s Holy War: Grand Charge on the Enemy’s Works,” depicting women in chainmail smashing barrels of booze with axes. I love that the crusading Valkyrie in the center is riding side-saddle!

Whenever speculative fiction depicts a controlled or prohibited substance, the most obvious parallel is to the contemporary drug war. However, writers can look at the other connections that lead to restricting or outlawing substances. For example, supporters of Prohibition and Women’s Suffrage in the U.S. were closely linked. This is because a husband could drink away his wife’s wages and savings, because under the law at the time they did not belong to her, but to him. As a result, women’s rights activists in the late 19th and early 20th Century frequently made common cause with the temperance movement in order to raise the status of women by outlawing drink. During the First World War, prohibitionists also allied with pro-war politicians and supporters, on the grounds that a sober army would fight more effectively. This confluence of interest groups led to the passage of the 18th Amendment, prohibiting alcohol, and the 19th Amendment, granting American women the right to vote, in the aftermath of the war. Consider how a similar intersection of unlikely interests could be driving the prohibition or restriction of substances in your fictional universe.

Women Warriors

Stained glass of Britomart, embodiment of knighthood. Photo by C J Thompson, used under Creative Commons license

So, the U.S. military is finally implementing redesigned body armor for women soldiers serving in Afghanistan. Previously, women had to wear body armor designed for men, which chafed painfully and restricted their range of motion. I’m glad to see this situation is finally being corrected.

This kind of problem is something that SF&F writers have often run up against when trying to portray women warriors. For most of human history, men have dominated the battlefield and have shaped the history, culture, and practice of war. There are relatively few recorded examples of women warriors to draw from, and virtually all of them were operating in a male-dominated martial culture. This can make depicting co-ed warfare challenging for authors who already have a lot on their plates in constructing an imagined world.

I’ll have more to say later about depicting women warriors in genre fiction, but for the moment I wanted to highlight one lesser-known historical example from the 11th Century CE. Sichelgaita (also spelled Sikelgaita), was the daughter of the Duke of Salerno in Southern Italy and a six-foot tall giant of a woman. Growing up in the troubled court of Salerno, she had the unusual freedom to study medicine, horseback-riding, and swordfighting. As a young woman, she entered a savvy marriage/partnership with the Norman adventurer Robert “the Weasel” Guiscard, who was busy conquering southern Italy at the time.

Sichelgaita quickly became the Weasel’s principal political and military adviser, helping him negotiate with the Italian lords and smoothing things over with the Pope, who was still sore about the time the Weasel captured his predecessor. But Sichelaita did more than just advise the Weasel–the two of them strode into battle side-by-side. When the Norman line began to buckle during the Weasel’s invasion of the Byzantine Empire, it was the wounded Sichelgaita who bellowed for the army to “act like men” and led the counterattack that won the day.

There are outstanding women like Sichelgaita throughout history who despite the prejudices of their time accomplished great things in art, politics, scholarship, and warcraft. They should be as inspiring to writers as any of their male contemporaries. (And anyone looking for a swashbuckling fantasy antihero should research Robert Guiscard, whose varied exploits included capturing one Pope and rescuing another, founding what would become the Kingdom of Sicily, and twice defeating the Byzantine Empire on the fields of Greece.)

To bring things full circle, just as fact can inform fiction, fiction can inform fact, as in the case of the military’s redesigned body armor, which looked to Xena: The Warrior Princess for inspiration on designing functional armor for women.

A Fistful of Silver

One of the challenges of creating imagined worlds is ensuring that they feel lived in and tangible to readers who will never be able to visit them. It’s one thing to describe a futuristic cityscape, but it’s another to get the reader to taste the bitter exhaust of starhoppers, feel the wind battering their skyscraper balcony, and see the glittering planetary rings arcing overhead. Getting just the right touch of details can help make the reader truly believe in the imagined world as a place that could exist, even if it not in our reality.

This is where research can come in handy. For example, I once wrote a story about a cynical knight who is hired by a poor village to save them from a dragon. One detail that my workshop group appreciated was that when the villagers gave the knight their pooled savings, many of the coins were still crusted with dirt from where they’d been buried. That little detail helped make the fantasy world more tangible just by noting where the peasants stored their savings.

Roman Republic Quinarius coin. Photo by Wikicommons user Carlomorino; released into the public domain.

I thought to include that detail because at the time I had been studying the history of the late Roman Empire, where periods of instability in the Empire correlated with the frequency of coin stashes left buried in the ground (because their owners had been killed or displaced before retrieving them). I filed that detail away and then brought it out again when I could use it to add texture to my fantasy story.

This is why I keep a file of all sorts of interesting details I run across, because the right anecdote can help flesh out your story’s universe into a place readers can imagine living in.