5 thought about the craft of writing | Life in the Realm of Fantasy

We have two weeks to go to November 1^st. If you are planning to participate in a writing quest with a specific goal, now is a good time to consider the world in which your prospective story might be set.

MyWritingLife2021B I like to sit somewhere quiet and let my mind wander, picturing the place where the opening scene takes place.

Is it indoors? Are we out in the wild? How can I write this? A few notes about my thoughts will help.

A good way to develop the skill of writing an environment is to visualize the world in your real life. When you look out the window, what do you see? Close your eyes and picture the place where you are at this moment. With your eyes still closed, tell me what it’s like.

If you can describe the world around you with your eyes closed, you can create a world for your characters.

The plants and landscape of my fictional world are partly based on the scenery of Western Washington State because it’s wild and beautiful, and I’m familiar with it. The wild creatures are somewhat reality-based but are mostly imaginary.

Remember, we don’t have to immerse ourselves immediately. All we’re doing is laying the groundwork, ensuring plenty of ideas are handy when we start writing in earnest on November 1st.

Religion is a large part of my intended story, and some things are canon, as the first book in the series was published in 2012. The tagline for this series is “The Gods are at War, and Neveyah is the Battlefield.” The war of the gods broke three worlds, drastically changing the landscape of Neveyah and offering endless opportunities for mayhem.

St_Helens_before_1980_eruption_horizon_fixed The novel I intend to finish this year is set at the end of the first millennium, while last year’s effort was set in the second century after the cataclysm canonically known as the Sundering of the Worlds. This means the world is very different. The forests and wildlife have had a thousand years to rebound, and while some areas are still struggling to recover, most of the west is lush in comparison.

1200px-MSH82_st_helens_plume_from_harrys_ridge_05-19-82 I live only sixty-five miles north of Mount St. Helens, so I have a good local example of how things look after a devastating event. I also can see how flora and fauna rebound in the years following it. Mount St. Helens – Wikipedia

Even if ecological disasters, technology, or religion aren’t the center of the plot, they can be a part of the background, lending color to the world. In Neveyah, my fictional world, the Temple of Aeos trains mages and healers who are then posted to local communities where they serve the people with their gifts.

Those communities are autonomous as the Temple doesn’t run them, but just as in real life, somebody is in charge of running things. In Neveyah, a council of elders governs most towns and cities, and the Temple is run the same way. We humans are tribal. We prefer an overarching power structure leading us because someone has to be the leader.

We call that power structure a government.

When you create a fictional world, you create a culture. As a society, the habits we develop, the gods we worship, the things we create and find beautiful, and the foods we eat are products of our culture.

What does the outdoor world look and smell like? Mentioning sights, sounds, and scents can show the imaginary world in only a few words.

What about the weather? It can be shown in small, subtle ways, making our characters’ interactions and the events they go through feel real.

Once you have decided on your overall climate, consider your level of technology. Do some research now and bookmark the websites with the best information.

A note about fantasy and sci-fi food: climate and soil types limit the variety of food crops that can be grown. Wet and rainy areas will grow vastly different crops from those in arid climates, as will sandy soils and clays versus fertile loams. Look up what sort of food your people will have available to them if your story is set in an exotic environment.

I will be pantsing it (writing stream-of-consciousness) for the month of November, which means I will be writing new words every day, connecting the events I have plotted on my storyboard. I never have time to think about logic once I begin the challenge, so the storyboard is crucial to me.

magic To show a world plausibly and without contradictions, we must consider how things work, whether it takes place in a medieval world or on a space station. Don’t introduce skills and tech that can’t exist or don’t fit the era.

For instance, blacksmiths create and repair things made of metal. The equivalent of a medieval blacksmith on a space station will have high-tech tools and a different job title. Readers notice that sort of thing.

Society is always composed of many layers and classes. Rich merchant or poor laborer, priest or scientist—each occupation has a place in the hierarchy and has a chain of command. Take a moment to consider where your protagonist and their cohorts might fit in their society.

Maybe your novel’s setting is a low-tech civilization. If so, the weather will affect your characters differently than one set in a modern society. Also, the level of technology limits what tools and amenities are available to them.

What about transport? How do people and goods go from one place to another?

Many things about the world will emerge from your creative mind as you write those first pages and will continue to arise throughout the story’s arc.

Consider making a glossary as you go. If you are creating names for people or places, list them separately as they come to you. That way, their spelling won’t drift as the story progresses. It happened to me—the town of Mabry became Maury. I put it on the map as Maury, and it was only in the final proofing that I realized that the spelling of the town in chapter 11 was different from that of chapter 30.

protomap A hand-scribbled map and a calendar of events are absolutely indispensable if your characters do any traveling. The map will help you visualize the terrain, and the calendar will keep events in a plausible order.

Next week, we’ll take another look at plotting so that we have a starting point with a good hook and a bang-up ending to finish things off.

Credits and Attributions:

Wikimedia Commons contributors, “File:MSH82 st helens plume from harrys ridge 05-19-82.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:MSH82_st_helens_plume_from_harrys_ridge_05-19-82.jpg&oldid=912891712 (accessed October 13, 2024).

Wikimedia Commons contributors, “File:St Helens before 1980 eruption horizon fixed.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:St_Helens_before_1980_eruption_horizon_fixed.jpg&oldid=575896084 (accessed October 13, 2024).

I’ve been writing for all of my adult life, but for most of it, not professionally. For the majority of my writing life, I was new, untutored in the craft, writing words that shouldn’t have been shown to anyone. I didn’t have the information I needed to make my work readable and didn’t know how to get it.

I felt embarrassed for even thinking that I could be an author.

One day in 1990, I stumbled upon a book that was offered in the Science Fiction Book Club catalog: How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card. The day that book arrived in my mailbox changed my life. It was possible for me to become a writer, and one of my favorite authors was going to tell me how to do it.

In the years since that book, I have amassed a library of books on the craft. Some are brilliant, some not so much, but I always learn something from them. However, personal experience is a great teacher, and I’ve learned many things by trial and error.

So here in no particular order are five things I would like to pass on to you:

Make a style-sheet as you go, a glossary of words and spellings unique to your story, and be sure to list names especially. I use an Excel spreadsheet, but use anything you like, and that will help you stay consistent in your spellings.

Develop a good system for naming your files and save regularly. Save each version of your manuscript with a different name so you can go back and retrieve bits you may need later. I use a system like this:

Heavens_Altar_V5.docx

That stands for Heaven’s Altar version five, and I work out of Word, so the extension is automatically a docx.

Find a local group of writers to meet with and talk about the craft. Critique groups are great, but they are only one small part of the picture. Authors need to network with other authors because we need to discuss the craft with someone who doesn’t look at you with glazed eyes. I gained my extended author network for by joining The Pacific Northwest Writers Association and going to their conferences. This is how we educate ourselves. I also gained a local support group through attending Write Ins for NaNoWriMo.

Don’t even consider signing with any slick-talking publisher that contacts you out of the blue, saying they want your work if you haven’t submitted your work to them. How can they possibly want work they haven’t seen?

Make use of SFWA’s Writer Beware site. These predators want your work all right—and want to sell you publishing services you can do for yourself. You won’t benefit from the publisher’s “services,” but they will benefit from your desperation to be published. They will publish your work unedited, and your payment is the glory of having it published, as you will never see any royalties. They will expect you to market their product and offer you all manner of for-payment services that are dubious at best. Worst of all, you will have signed away the rights to your work for nothing.

Even though you are writing that novel, write short stories. Short stories are a training ground, a way to hone your developing skills. They’re also the best way to get your name out there. My advice is to build a backlog of work in lengths from 2000 to 5000 words ready to submit to magazines, anthologies, and contests. All those fabulous scenes and vignettes that roll though your head can be made into short pieces. Get the Submittable App and see who is asking for what sort of work, and start submitting.

These are five things that I wish I had known in 2010 but didn’t.