Tag Archives: world-setting

Change the Past in 5 Steps

Some time ago I blogged about historical fiction, but today I thought I’d discuss Alternate History fiction, or AH.  In this genre, the author supposes some historical event turned out differently and it affected all subsequent history; the story then takes place in that altered world.  Other names for this genre are Uchronia, Allohistory, and Counterfactuals.

To find out more about AH definitions and terms, go to this great site.  For lists of AH stories to read, go here, where they’re listed not only by author name, but also by the date of historical divergence.  The Uchronia.net organization also issues an annual Sideways Award for the best AH fiction.

The alternatehistory.com site distinguishes AH from other genres, such as Secret History, Future History, Time Travel, and Parallel World stories.  Many of my short stories are Secret History, where the altered event does not affect subsequent history.  I would classify my stories “Alexander’s Odyssey,” “The Sea-Wagon of Yantai,” “The Vessel,” “The Steam Elephant,” “The Wind-Sphere Ship,” and “Leonardo’s Lion” as Secret Histories.  More about that genre in a future blog entry.

My story “Within Victorian Mists” is AH, since it features a Nineteenth Century inventor coming up with lasers and holograms, and demonstrating them on a large scale.  I chose to have the story take place at the Point of Divergence (PoD), but I could have set the story at some later time.

Would you like to write an AH story?  Here are some steps you might follow:

1.  Choose the Point of Divergence.  Select a historical event and imagine it turned out some other way.  Many people choose wars, since much is known about them and they have clear and significant influences on history.  Instead, I generally choose events associated with technological development.  I suggest you avoid the over-used events such as World War II and the American Civil War, or come up with a unique take on these.   Consider opting for a time in history you’ve studied to some extent.  It’s a good idea to select a plausible outcome for the event, or come up with an explanation that makes it plausible.  Having the Incas sail east to conquer Spain, for example, would take some explaining.

2.  List as many consequences for the new historical outcome as you can.  How would this altered event affect national boundaries, culture, language, technology? What subsequent events might happen as a result?  Start to map out a logically consistent chronology of subsequent history along the most probable and plausible lines.

3.  Figure out when and where to set your story.  It can take place around the time of the PoD or relatively long after.  For a story set long after the PoD, keep in mind no empire lasts forever, and cultures and languages always change.

4.  Write the story as you would any other, with engaging characters, vivid settings, tight plots, a conflict for your protagonist to resolve, and the aim of passing the So What? test.  The story can be a romance, steampunk, western, horror, mystery, or anything, really, but it must take place in the alternate world you’ve created.  You need to be consistent with the norms of that world.  There’s no need to show the reader the PoD, or even refer to it in the story, so long as the reader can understand it from context.

5.  Avoid the AYKB trap.  Also resist the urge to have characters speculate on how things might have been if the PoD event had turned out differently.

AH is a fun genre, with infinite possibilities and good readership.  Did this blog entry help you understand how to write an AH story?  Do you disagree with things I’ve stated here?  Leave a comment and let me know.  In the meantime, there’s a new version of the past about to be written by–

                                                                       Poseidon’s Scribe

 

July 22, 2012Permalink

All Your Stage’s a World

Yes, I know Shakespeare wrote “All the world’s a stage,” but my point today has to do with the settings of stories.  The “stage” or “world” or “milieu” of your story is its setting.

The setting includes such things as the physical location, the time in history (including time of year and day), geography, culture, etc.  It includes all aspects of the description of this backdrop for the characters–the effect on all senses, as well as the overall mood.  Setting is, along with Character, Style, and Theme, one of the four fundamental components of fiction.

In my view, Setting is less important to a story than Character, but it’s still vital.  Your readers have a need to see the background, to imagine where the characters are, to visualize themselves in that venue along with the characters.  Without a setting, a story would consist of characters talking and acting in a void, standing before a blank screen.  (That would be interesting if done once, but tiresome if every story was like that.)  Think of the very beginning of almost any movie, just after the opening credits.  The audience is presented with a setting before the camera shifts to the film’s characters.

So how does a writer go about the task of hammering her stage together?  Keep in mind the primary sense for most readers is visual, so you’ll want to describe what a character sees, or would see if the character isn’t present yet.  However, emphasizing other senses besides sight might be more appropriate if a particular character has a keen sense of hearing or smell and you’re trying to work in a little character description, too.  Or if your main character is a dog, for example.

It isn’t enough to provide a neutral, fact-based description of your story’s setting.  This isn’t a news broadcast, so you should imbue your description with a mood or tone in keeping with the story, supporting its theme.  Or you could describe it through the eyes of a character, thus giving the reader a sense of the character’s attitude toward the setting, and how it makes that character feel.

You’re not writing for 19th Century readers, so you don’t get to go on for many adjective-loaded paragraphs describing the setting in pixel-by-pixel detail.  Today you have to keep it brief, and be very selective about the details you choose.  Your aim is to paint a few brushstrokes, as in classical Chinese art, and allow the reader’s imagination to fill in the rest of the world.  One way to do this is to go ahead and describe the scene fully as an exercise (either writing the text or mind-mapping), with all the details, then cut back to a few essential aspects.

You’ll want to place most of your setting description early in the scene, as an aid to your readers so they know where the characters are.  But you can also intersperse brief snatches of setting description throughout the scene.

The setting’s purpose in your story, then, is to form the backdrop against which the characters act.  Don’t fall in love with your setting; stories are about the human condition, and your characters must be in the foreground.  Your setting helps the reader place the characters in a context.  It can also help you bring out the story’s theme, mood, plot, and even introduce some symbolism.

As with all of my blog posts, I could be right or wrong about all of this.  Leave a comment and let me know what you think.  In this particular place and time, I’m–

                                                                          Poseidon’s Scribe

 

 

May 20, 2012Permalink

Book Review – Behemoth

I enjoy a good steampunk novel.  Two years ago I read Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld, and it was high time to read the next book in the series.

That book is Behemoth, and I listened to the CD version put out by Recorded Books and read by Alan Cumming.  This series is aimed at the young adult market, grade 7 and up, and should appeal to either young girls or boys.

Whether you start the series by reading the first book or the second, Westerfeld transports you right into his world, and it’s different.  Some of the World War I setting is the same as our world’s history–the countries are involved in the war, languages and accents, etc.  However, in Westerfeld’s world, the main technologies of the 19th Century have evolved into two distinct branches.  Some countries chose one path, some the other, and some a mix of both.  One branch is mechanized, and includes the technologies of steam, gears, and even walking machines.  This is termed “clanker” technology and is represented by Germany and Austria-Hungary.  The other branch is the manipulation of DNA to form animals into creatures designed to be useful to man, including “message lizards” that can parrot human speech, and even living airships.  These are the Darwinists and are represented by the United Kingdom and Russia.  Other countries such as the U.S. and the Ottoman Empire employ mixtures of both branches.

Deryn is a young British girl who has chosen to disguise herself as a boy named Dylan and serve as a midshipman within the British airship Leviathan.  She is in constant fear of being found out.  Alek is a prince, legal heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, but he cannot claim the throne yet and is driven into hiding from the Germans who want to kill him, as they did his father.  Where Leviathan chronicled the separate adventures of the two teenagers, only having them meet near the end, in Behemoth, the two are together for much of the book when the airship arrives in Istanbul, giving a chance for their relationship to start to mature.

I found the world-building aspects of Behemoth to be excellent, with plenty of details to make Westerfeld’s world believable and interesting.  Deryn’s language is peppered with expressions such as “Barking spiders!” to indicate surprise, “beasties” as a term for various Darwinist creations, and “gone pear-shaped” (an actual British idiom) meaning “gone wrong.”  There’s plenty of action in the book including aerial attacks, secret underwater missions, and a revolutionary overthrow of a sultan featuring mechanical walking machines. The book’s characters are multi-dimensioned and complex, not steampunk tropes.  Westerfeld never talks down to young readers, and the book includes an Afterward that separates real history from the alternative history of the novel.  I found the book’s ending satisfying, which can’t always be said for first or second books of trilogies.  Lastly, the narration by Alan Cumming is excellent; he makes it easy to distinguish the characters by their accents and tone.

The book is so good I am tempted to give it my highest rating.  However, I find the plot to be rather contrived.  Westerfeld is determined to have both characters join up with revolutionaries in Istanbul who are bent on overthrowing the Ottoman sultan.  Their reasons for doing so seem out of character in the case of both Alek and Deryn.  However, the target audience is unlikely to object to this and will accept the situation and read on.

I’ll give this novel a rating of four seahorses using my trademarked seahorse rating scheme.  Still, it is very close to five.  I strongly recommend it for teenage boys or girls, who will find it easy to identify with the struggles of the characters.  Alek and Deryn each want to be accepted, but they also yearn to discover their true selves; Westerfeld conveys these conflicts well.  That’s the assessment of–

                                                                          Poseidon’s Scribe

March 10, 2012Permalink

Write What You Know? Really?

One of the oldest sayings about writing is “write what you know.”  Its originator is unknown.  Is this good advice, or bad?

This much is certain; it’s a lucky thing some great writers didn’t actually follow that advice.  For one thing, we never would have had any science fiction or fantasy, since no writer has gone through the experiences of characters in those sorts of stories.

Or have they?

In one sense, all characters encounter problems and experience emotional reactions to those problems, then seek to find a resolution to those problems.  All writers, all prospective writers, and even all people have done these things.  Maybe you haven’t battled menacing wyverns with a magic sword, but you’ve felt fear, had adrenalin rushes, struggled to overcome a difficulty, experienced a feeling like all is lost, grabbed for one last chance, and felt the triumphant glow of victory.  You’ve had the sensations your character will have.  Even though you’re writing about a heroic knight in some never-time of mystical wonder, you’re still—in one sense—writing what you know.

I suspect some long-ago teacher coined the maxim after first giving students a writing assignment and listening to a student complain about not knowing what to write.  The answer “write what you know” isn’t a bad one in that circumstance, since the students aren’t seeking wider publication, and writing about something familiar can free the student from worrying about research or getting facts wrong.

For a writer who is seeking publication, we’ll have to amend the adage.  Write what you know, so long as:

  • It’s not just a list of boring events from your real life;
  • You give us (your readers) an interesting plot and engaging characters;
  • Your descriptions grab us and insert us right into your setting, your story’s world; and
  • Your writing touches something inside us and helps us feel what your main characters feel.

So what you know may be that ugly incident at the school playground from third grade, but don’t give us the play-by-play of that.  Please.  Instead, use the feelings of that long-ago afternoon, but make the events happen in a different time and setting, with different characters.  If your setting is a far-flung planet and your characters are wearing space suits and packing blaster pistols, you might want to do some research to ensure plausibility.  But if you’re true to the emotions you felt on that playground, they’ll come through as genuine in your story and your readers will connect.

So, Beginning Writer, if you’re stuck and don’t know how to get started, try writing what you know, then edit it into what readers want to read.   Just some more free advice from—

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 17, 2011Permalink

Researching and Writing

There’s plenty of useful information out there about how writers conduct research for their stories.  Still, I suspect it’s a question many beginning writers still wonder about.  I’m one of them, and I still wonder about it!  I won’t repeat much of what is said here or here (both full of great advice) but instead I’ll just mention how I do my research.

If I had to name the two phases of my research, I’d call them “mood” research and “bracket” research. Before I began writing a story, I conduct some general research on my topic time period, geographical setting, etc.  This is to let the world of the story percolate in my mind for a while, to put me in the mood of the story, to immerse me in being there (and then).

This research is online for the most part, though I often supplement it with books from the local library.  The usual caution about the accuracy of information available on the internet applies here.  I’ve never made a trip to the area where my stories are set, but I really should, and someday I’ll do that.  Sometimes I’ve set my stories in regions where I have already been, so some of the mood research is already done.

After I’ve done my mood research and begin writing the story, I always come up against some question not answered by any of my previous research.  This is often some little thing, some detail I’m not sure of.   This lack of knowledge comes at a time when I’m in the zone, writing along and I really don’t want to be distracted by stopping to conduct further research.  Time for bracket research.  For example, say I’m writing about two women in Switzerland chatting in a house, and it’s about the year 1600 or so.  What would they be drinking?  Coffee?  Tea?  Wine?  Rather than puzzling too long about it, or stopping the flow of words to surf for the answer, I just put the question in brackets:  [What are they drinking?] and continue on.  The story might end up being littered by many of these bracketed questions.  Later I just search for the brackets, research each question, and edit the manuscript accordingly.

Some writers hate research and have to force themselves to do it.  Not me.  I love it and will gladly spend time doing that rather than write.  I call it the suction problem.  It’s the same effect I experience when walking through a shopping mall in the vicinity of a bookstore.  A localized variation in the gravity vector causes me to slip along the floor toward and into the bookstore.  I sure get strange stares from other shoppers as I slide along backwards or sideways in the grip of this suction force.  Only by an extraordinary effort is it possible for me to resist.  (It helps to wear rubber-soled shoes for traction, and to find building support columns I can grab.)

It’s the same way with research, both the mood and bracket types.   I have to force myself to stop researching and return to writing.  After all, the end goal is to submit a reasonably good story while I’m still alive, not spend my remaining years combing through every bit of reference material on the subject.  Recognizing that end goal and being aware of my preference for eternal researching helps me focus.

So that’s how Poseidon’s Scribe does his research.  How do you do yours?  Write to me here with your comments.

Poseidon’s Scribe

January 30, 2011Permalink

Why Write about History—Isn’t it Past?

When I was a kid, I wasn’t much interested in history.  It seemed just a bunch of old stuff—old music, ancient buildings, incomprehensible books, crumbling artwork—all irrelevant to modern life.  I wanted new things, modern stuff, the best of my own time.  I couldn’t understand some people’s fascination with people long dead.

I’m not really sure when the transition happened or if there was a single tipping point.  Maybe some of those boring history classes made an impression along the way.  Maybe some of the fiction I read or movies I watched fired some previously inactive neurons.  Maybe my attraction to the novels of Jules Verne had something to do with it.  For those of us reading science fiction in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, it was hard to ignore the flourishing subgenre of alternate history.

In a parallel thread of my life, I had become captivated by submarines, and while learning more about them I soon found out about their history too.  That history includes brave men daring to submerge in rickety craft made of inferior materials, with insufficient understanding of the dangers.  It is a history of bitter failures, tragic disasters, and rare successes.  Some of the men involved are famous, some obscure: Alexander the Great, de Son, Cornelius van Drebbel, David Bushnell, Robert Fulton, Wilhelm Bauer, Horace Hunley, and others.

When my muse first urged me to write, it didn’t take me long to start writing stories with historical settings. As you can see from my ‘Stories’ page, I’ve written a few of them, mostly tales involving the sea and various vessels.

But I want to get back to the ‘why’ of all this.  Why do readers read historical stories?  Why do authors write them?  First, for both reader and writer, the setting and some of the characters come ready made.  The author doesn’t need to spend much time creating the world of the story, and in many cases need not describe some characters beyond stating their names.  So there’s a comfortable sense of familiarity with historical stories.  We can already picture the setting and characters in our minds.

Also, I think there can be—really should be—a sense of relevance to these stories, a sense they share with stories set in the modern day.  We all know we’re connected to history by vast chains of cause and effect; our world is a product of what happened before.  So there’s an attraction to reading about characters in the past grappling with problems, when we know how it all ends up, and when we know what effects linger from that time to ours.  At least we know what the history books say about the events of the time.  The trick for the writer is to bring these characters to life, give them real dimension, and to make a point about life for us today, to relate the story to a modern dilemma.

A major challenge for the writer of historical tales is to get the details right.  Any anachronism or other incorrect detail in the story can make a reader lose interest in the story, and respect for the author, in an instant.

Before I close, I’d like to mention the types of historical stories, at least the types I write.  First is the alternate history, where the story takes place in a world where things proceeded differently than our own.  This website contains some great discussions about alternate history.  In these stories, it is necessary to describe the world of the story so the reader knows which event triggered the split from our world.  But the author need not worry as much about getting details right because, after all, he’s not writing about actual history.  The other type of historical tale, one I actually prefer, is the ‘might have been.’ Here that type is called ‘Secret History.’  In this type, the author uses an actual historical setting and characters, creates a situation for the characters, and resolves it in a way consistent with how history books record the outcome.  In other words, everything in the story might really have occurred.

I’d love to hear what you think about this.

Poseidon’s Scribe

January 23, 2011Permalink