Drawing inspiration from video games (Part 2)

Hello internet!

In Tuesday’s post, I talked about how video games can be fertile ground for inspiring your own writing. Today I’m going to talk about how you can adapt your in-game experiences into unique stories which can stand on their own legs outside of the context of the game world.

My motivation for wanting to talk about this is that I feel like there might be a lot of imaginative gamers and writers out there who love coming up with their own complex internal narratives while they’re playing through video games, and then get frustrated because they feel like they can’t turn those narratives into written story material without it being fan fiction, set in a pre-existing universe. If that’s the case, then I hope I can prove otherwise, by taking you through the sort of process that I go through when a video game inspires me to write something original.

So I’m going to give you an example of an in-game event that inspired me to write something, and then describe how I might go through the process of removing it from the game world and adapting it into a story. I’m going to stick with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, for the sake of continuity.

I’ve played a lot of different characters on Skyrim, including a stealthy assassin and an erudite Argonian fire-mage who liked to try and find diplomatic solutions to his problems. But I wanted my latest character to be more of a classical warrior hero, drawing on headstrong figures from epic poetry, like Beowulf and Odysseus. So I created Throdnar, a full-blooded Nord with a strong sword-arm and very few motivations beyond the acquisition of treasure and personal glory…

…who got spotted by a hungry dragon while I was trying to get a decent screenshot of him…

…and ended up getting the flesh charred from his bones.

I won’t be adapting that particular episode into prose any time soon. Throdnar probably wouldn’t want his embarrassing defeat to be remembered in song and stories. He’d probably prefer to be memorialised in tales of his cunning and warrior prowess.

Usually, the kind of incidents that inspire me to want to write stories are a lot less exciting than being burned to death by a dragon. While I was playing a few days ago, I accepted a fairly simple bounty contract to kill a giant who’d been eating local livestock. I stole a horse, rode out to the giant’s camp, and used a technique that I like to call “giant-baiting” to wear down the giant’s health with a bow and arrow, riding away from him on horseback and leading him on a merry chase, until he was dead and I could ride back to collect my bounty.

For those interested, it works a little like this:

Step 1) Shoot a giant and incur his wrath.

Step 2) Gallop away, pursued by a giant.

Step 3) Stop, turn, and shoot the giant, enraging him further, but slightly lowering his health

Step 4) Gallop away, pursued by a giant…

And so on until the giant is dead, never allowing the giant to catch up and hit you with his club, however tempting it might be to linger and get off two or three arrows each time you stop.

Already here I’ve invented something that isn’t actually an inherent part of the game, which I can then use in one of my own stories.  I have no idea if other players use the same technique (but if you’re a regular Skyrim player and you hadn’t tried this yet, it’s a great way of getting your hands on a lot of mammoth tusks). Giant-baiting is just something that I’ve come up with while playing in Skyrim’s sandbox, so I can insert the term, and the technique, into a fantasy world of my own creation. If my fantasy world has giants who prey off the land and steal livestock, then I can imagine that giant-baiting is a practiced rural way of life, like poaching or deer-stalking. I can extrapolate that it’s an art with seasoned practitioners who know all of the best ways of doing it without getting themselves killed. An old giant-baiter is necessarily a good giant-baiter because he’s avoided being squashed into jelly by an angry giant. That’s quite a good basis for a character, and I certainly enjoy imbuing Throdnar with those characteristics when I’m baiting giants in the game. I can imagine the thoughts going through his head, the calculations of a veteran giant-baiter doing what he does best.

But it wasn’t actually the giant-baiting that inspired me to write a story. Believe it or not, it was the part before the giant-baiting, where I had to steal a horse.

I could have bought a horse, but that didn’t seem like the sort of thing that Throdnar would do. He seemed like the sort of cunning adventurer who would prefer to steal a horse and pay off his bounty later. But more than that, I’d have preferred to have the option to try and work out a deal with the groom at the stable – I’d have liked it if Throdnar could use his wits and his sharp tongue to steal a horse without just crudely making off with it in broad daylight. I wanted him to be able to say “I’m doing the Jarl’s work and going to hunt down that giant that’s been eating livestock – can I borrow a horse and leave 500 gold with you as insurance that I’ll bring it back?”  Whether or not I brought it back would have been another question. But it was one of those instances where my options were limited by the game’s programming, because that wasn’t a dialogue option I could choose. There’s almost certainly a mod that I could download if I wanted to have that kind of option in game, but that’s not the point. My frustration with the game’s limited options didn’t make me want to alter the game world, it made me want to write a story where a character could have that kind of conversation. So I started writing.

I didn’t want to write a piece of Skyrim fan-fiction, so I needed to strip the world away and create a new setting for this scenario to happen in. That meant changing things like place names, environmental conditions, the general aesthetic of the world, and anything else I could think of to distance myself from Skyrim and make me feel as though this story was happening inside a world that I’d created.

One thing that I decided to change right away – simply because it was easy to do so – was the animal involved. Why have my character steal a horse when they could be stealing something more interesting?

My first thought was some sort of unicorn, and a brief internet research session revealed that historical legends about the unicorn might have been based on a real-life extinct species of megafauna called the elasmotherium.

I speculate that ‘elasmotherium’ means ‘hairy rhino of death’ in latin

I thought that it looked pretty cool – I can definitely imagine it domesticated, saddled up, and turned into a formidable beast-of-war, especially with that horn – but I didn’t think “elasmotherium” was the kind of name that would be used in everyday conversation by hardy Northern giant-baiters in a medieval fantasy setting, so I dug deeper and found out that the elasmotherium might also have been the inspiration for a mythical Russian beast called the indrik.  “Indrik” has a nice ring to it, and a brief Google revealed that it hasn’t been widely used in any other popular fantasy media – only for one card in Magic: The Gathering. So I felt safe using it.

So now I was writing a story about Throdnar using his wits to trick a groom into giving him an indrik for half of what it was worth. But what else could I change, to really make it feel like I was creating my own story, set in a world of my own creation?

I decided that my story was going to take place in a bleaker Dark Age fantasy world rather than a generic medieval setting. That meant downgrading technology: replacing brick-built houses with mud bricks and drystone walls. Remembering to make sure that Throdnar only used weapons and tools that had been invented by the time of the 8^th or 9^th century. The landscape that I’d been riding over in Skyrim was a craggy plateau of rocks and hot springs. I decided to set my story in a forbidding moorland, with rolling hills covered in bracken and goarse. And to fit the bleaker setting, I decided to change the weather. Here, I drew on another encounter that I’d had in Skyrim – I rode out to clear an abandoned fort that had been occupied by bandits, and rain had started falling in sheets by the time I found them. I remembered fighting them in the driving rain and ending up standing my ground in a deep pool, whirling my horse around in the water and hacking down at the bandits as they tried to attack me. That had been a dramatic fight, and I decided to steal the weather, applying it to my fight with the giant, which had happened while the in-game weather was bright and sunny.

Finally, I wanted to make sure that I depicted giants in an original way. Giants in Skyrim are dull creatures who don’t seem to have human levels of intelligence, and they spend a lot of their time herding mammoths. One easy way of differentiating my giants was to cut the mammoth-herding aspect, and I also decided to make my giant a little more cunning. I’d already decided that Throdnar is a warrior who likes to rely on his brains as well as his brawn, so I wanted to give him a more challenging opponent who could match his wits.

I also changed the outcome of the fight. But to find out more about that, you’ll have to come back on Sunday, when I’m planning to post at least part of the story.

I hope this post has given you an insight into what I do when I’m inspired to adapt my video-game experiences into prose. And my assignment for you today is go and try it yourself! I wish you happy gaming, full of moments that you can harvest and insert into your stories.

Drawing inspiration from video games (Part 1)

Hello, internet!

Cards on the table: I completely forgot that this week was my week here on The Art of Writing. As such, I’ve prepared absolutely no material for you, and I’m going to be making it up pretty much as I go along. I feel a little like Gromit, the anthropomorphic dog in the treasured British clay-animation film Wallace & Gromit in the Wrong Trousers, speeding along on an electric train and laying track hurriedly in front of me as I go, as illustrated in this helpful gif.

Hopefully it will be a fun experiment for both of us.

One thing I have been doing a lot of in the last week is playing video games, so let’s riff off that to start with, and talk about how video games can inspire really good writing.

Before I delve into what I’ve been playing, and how it’s been influencing my writing, I want to quickly discard any stigma surrounding video games. Some people might scoff at the suggestion that writers of literature have anything to learn from the story-telling, worldbuilding, or characterisation of interactive entertainment like video games, but I couldn’t disagree more. I think there’s a general scepticism towards video games among the same demographic who are sceptical of genre literature (the industry term, sometimes used unkindly, for sci-fi, and fantasy, and anything which isn’t ‘serious’ literature).  I know I’m in friendly territory here, among my fellow nerds. None of you are likely to think less of any piece of media just because it contains dragons and challenges your imagination by taking place in a fantasy world. But some people baulk at video games just the same way they baulk at Game of Thrones or The Lord of the Rings, and that saddens me a little. Art doesn’t implicitly lose value because it relies on fantastical tropes instead of the tropes and hallmarks of ‘mainstream’ literary fiction. Stories aren’t inherently less complex or robust because they’re being told through the medium of an interactive video game. Writing doesn’t inherently lose value if it draws inspiration from video games or shares a lot of stylistic elements. Perhaps I’m stating the obvious, but there are some people who still don’t see video games as a valid medium for artful storytelling. And I am sad for them, because they’re missing out. Not just on some great art, but on some lush material which can be mined for inspiration.

Writers can choose how much they want their gaming life to influence their writing, and whether they want to disguise their influences or make them explicitly obvious. If you love a video game world enough to want to write stories within that universe, there’s nothing stopping you, and your stories don’t lose any value just because they’re set in a pre-existing universe. A close friend of mine has been writing some excellent fiction set in the Mass Effect universe and posting it online for fans of the series to enjoy, and I’ve been reading it with relish, even though I wasn’t a fan of Mass Effect when I started. (Although, binge-gamer than I am, I have since played through the first two games of the series and enjoyed them both tremendously).

Nathaniel is unlikely to make any money from this particular story, but that’s not why he’s writing it. Not all art is intended for publication, and once again, it doesn’t necessarily lose any value as a story just because it’s available freely on the internet. But if you’re planning to publish your writing and adapt your gaming experiences into your own fantasy world, then it’s probably a good idea to distance yourself from your influences: lest ye fall foul of the thin line between emulation and plagiarism.

That becomes a lot easier when you’re drawing inspiration from an open-world game. Recently, I’ve been playing my favourite video game, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. It’s now five years old, so I’m not going to bother with a belated review. Suffice to say I adore playing it, which I’ve been doing sporadically since 2013, but I have yet to complete it, so packed is it with excellent content. My fondness for Skyrim is perhaps best illustrated by measuring the slightly destructive influence that it has had on my life: it became my favourite form of procrastination during my third year of university, and was instrumental in the deterioration of at least one romantic relationship. I regret neither of these things. I spent my evenings reading books of magical lore in my study at the College of Winterhold when I should have been reading about seventeenth-century economics for an upcoming exam. By night, I crawled through ancient catacombs in the darkest bowels of Nirn, destroying undead wights and uholy Draugr with the righteous purity of cleansing fire. As the sun rose outside, I fought with fearsome Dragon Priests on storm-wrought mountaintops, because their aspect seemed less daunting than the hardships of writing my dissertation. When I play Skyrim, I have private little adventures, and then I’m often inspired to write about them.

If I adapted my adventures into prose word-for-word, using the same name for every character and location, depicting events in the very same order, then I would be committing plagarism. But that’s never what I’m inspired to do. The important thing with roleplaying games is that you can take away the role-playing element and leave the game itself behind. Role-playing games are designed to provide you with a bare skeleton that serves as a scaffold for your adventures: they give you the building blocks of a story, and you can assemble them however you want. As I’m playing through the story that the developers have created,  I’m imagining the thoughts and feelings of my character and the other characters that they encounter. I’m wondering what might be different if the events were happening outside the confines of a pre-programmed environment. Sometimes, even with a vast open-world game like Skyrim, I’m raging at the limited choices that the game allows. I’m thinking “if I had control of this story, my character wouldn’t be picking any of these options” – and at that point, my interpretation of the player character has become something separate from the game itself. It’s become something that I can extract from the game and insert into my own writing.

I’m sure that many gamers do the same thing when they’re playing a role-playing game, especially if they also happen to be writers. I can guarantee that your experience as a player – your interpretation of the game’s events – will vary dramatically from the experiences and interpretations of any other player. Your character’s progress through the game world, the story that you decided to create in the sandbox that the game provided, is unique, and it belongs to you. And that’s where you stop plagiarising and start creating your own content. You’re drawing your inspiration out of your gaming experiences like a sword being drawn out of a forge, which you can then temper over time, refolding and reheating until it’s become something that’s entirely yours.

I’m running out of room here, and I still haven’t got to my point – so I think I’m going to elaborate on this over the course of the week, and put it into action for you to watch. Come back on Thursday to see how I go about adapting my in-game experiences into prose. Then on Sunday I’ll actually post a short story that I’ve adapted from in-game events.

In the meantime, I suppose I’d better log into Steam and gather some more in-game experiences that I can adapt. Purely for research purposes, you understand…

 

How to avoid cultural appropriation when writing historically-influenced fantasy stories

Hello, internet. I have another slightly philosophical post for you today.

Following up from my last post, I’m trying to force myself back into the habit of writing a solid 500 words every day. I currently have two book concepts in the forefront of my mind, and I’m trying to work on both of at the same time. I might have to drop down to one if juggling two books proves to be too much of a hassle, but at the moment I’m enjoying the freedom of being able to hop between worlds, or to focus exclusively on one project for a while if I’m having trouble with the other. It also means that I can’t use the excuse of ‘book problems’ to slack off from writing.

One of the projects that I’m working on is a continuation of the story that I shared with you last month, set in a fantasy world that shares a lot of parallels with 19th century Europe. I’m essentially taking the Crimean War (the original one in the 1850s, not the more recent Crimean conflict) and adapting it into fantasy, with fantasy analogues for most of the belligerent factions and major events of the war.  This is a fun concept and I’ve been enjoying the process of fleshing it out into a complete story. But a while ago I started to wonder if there were some awkward problems with the initial concept.

My story features a large empire which resembles an industrialised, centralised version of Sauron’s empire from the Tolkien legendarium. In the events of the story, this empire plays the same role that the Russian Empire played in the Crimean War. Due to events that occurred before the start of the narrative, the orc empire is at war with an alliance of other nations who have landed an invasion force on the empire’s shores and laid siege to an ancient city. These events are intentionally similar to the 1854-55 Siege of Sevastopol, and the allied forces are fairly transparent fantasy analogues of Britain and France. But I’m concerned that my story might have unintentional racial undertones if the Russian Empire is ‘replaced’ by orcs, whilst the British remain mostly human. I’m not trying to use my story as a piece of anti-Russian political commentary and I’d hate for any Russian readers to think that I was comparing them to orcs, at least in the common cultural understanding of what an ‘orc’ is like.

Boo

My own depiction of orcs is quite sympathetic, but that’s the sort of nuance that might not make much of a difference to someone who’s angry with me for appropriating Russian history.

Other writers tell me that I worry too much about this sort of thing, but I think it’s very important for authors to consider that their work can have unintended cultural aftershocks. Even if I’m only intending to write a harmless swashbuckling fantasy novel, it still has the potential to cause offence, and that’s not something that I want to do. Some people roll their eyes at ‘political correctness’, but for me being PC just means ‘wanting to upset the smallest number of people that I possibly can’, and I don’t want to belittle or dismiss things that are hurtful to other groups of people. I’ve read enough to know that turning someone’s culture or history into a piece of set dressing in a fantasy novel can be very hurtful. Just today, JK Rowling has come under fire for appropriating the “living tradition of a marginalised people” by writing about the Navajo legend of the skinwalker in a new short story. You only have to look at the responses from Navajo Americans to see why they are upset, and why this isn’t something that Rowling should have done. Navajo writer Brian Young wrote “My ancestors didn’t survive colonisation so you could use our culture as a convenient prop.”  The people of Russia aren’t a marginalised people who survived colonisation, but the same principal applies. I’m taking part of Russian history – a war in which many Russians lost their lives – and using it as the inspiration for a fictional war in which their sacrifices will be attributed to inhuman fantasy creatures.

Fortunately, there’s a lot that writers in my situation can do to make their writing more culturally sensitive. The most obvious way is to avoid homogeneous depictions of any factions or races within my fantasy world. A lot of fantasy writing doesn’t do this very well, and it’s hardly surprising, when we’re all just following the example set by J.R.R. Tolkein. Tolkein’s orcs and goblins are uniformly nasty, brutish, savage, and deformed. His humans are mostly noble warriors, with a few odious exceptions. His elves are mostly wise and fair. His dwarves are mostly avaricious and argumentative. This obviously isn’t very representative of reality: “racial attributes” are the stuff of tabletop roleplaying, not real life or nuanced fiction. I’m going to do my best to present orcs as nuanced characters rather than savages. I’m planning to present many of our own cultural stereotypes about orcs to be racist misconceptions. When we think of ‘orc’ we think of the caricatures from the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings adaptations – slimy savages with foul habits and no morals, who are born out of holes in the ground. I’m going to present this image as propaganda. Ordinary soldiers in my story will believe these things about the orcs as well, the same way that soldiers always believe their enemies to be murderers and rapists who roast babies on spits, but these ordinary soldiers will find out that they’re wrong. One of the things I want to say with this story is that misconceptions and generalisations of other cultures can lead to unnecessary suffering, and I hope that message  is enough to make amends to any Russians who might be upset by my initial decision to replace them with orcs.

Another step that I can take to make things more realistic is to diversify all of the factions in my own story. Different factions in fantasy novels are often divided along racial lines – there’s not much overlap between different races and political entities – but this has never been the case in real world history. If the armies in my story are made up of human and orc soldiers, it would reinforce a lot of unhealthy colonial attitudes that still linger in our cultural subconscious, which I’ve talked about this before in a previous post. To combat this, I can make sure that each army has a varied racial makeup: the allied army has humans, but it also has dwarves, gnomes, half-giants, reptilians, or whatever other interesting fantasy races that I want to throw into the melting pot. The opposing army has orcs, but it also has humans. This doesn’t just increase the cultural sensitivity of my writing, it also makes both armies much more interesting, and much more realistic: a ragtag, multi-ethnic army with a diverse racial makeup is much more fun than an army made up entirely of orcs or humans.

 

I’m running out of space, but I hope I’ve made you think about how you can avoid cultural appropriation and racial homogeneity in your own writing. If you want to read more, there are lots of places that you can go online to educate yourself about the issues. Tumblr is a good place to start: blogs like Writing with Color are a great resource for finding out how to handle these concerns sensitively, and also a great place to go and remind yourself of exactly why authors should be so careful to avoid cultural appropriation: the team there are very eloquent at setting out the issues, and they are very quick to inform you if they think your story concepts contain anything problematic.

That’s all from me today, and I’ll see you on Sunday!

The Siege of Gordul Nor, Part 1

Hello, internet!

I have a story for you today, but I’d like to begin my post by offering massive congratulations to Tobias, who – if you didn’t see his post yesterday – is expecting a baby! I wish his whole family several metric British tonnes of health and happiness.

Now! Down to business: I am writing stories set in a new fantasy world at the moment, and I thought I’d try some of them out on you. So this week you’re getting three instalments of a short story which I’m provisionally calling ‘The Siege of Gordul Nor’. I hope you all enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

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Bournclough had figured out that if he kept every muscle in his body clenched as tight as a drum, he could stop himself from shivering. And if he stopped himself from shivering, that stopped his teeth from chattering, which meant he could smoke his pipe without biting through it. Thus he sat, on an upturned crate stamped POWDER, DRY FOOT, INFANTRY, with his greatcloak draped backwards over his folded arms and his pipe clamped in his mouth, warming the crags of his face with a healthy glow whenever he took a draw from it. He was firmly ensconced in the blind end of a trench, with soggy wicker ramparts doing their best to keep back the mud on either side, and he wasn’t intending to let man, dwarf, elf or beast move him from the spot for the night’s duration. No. 4 Company would be turning out at dawn as their relief. After he’d had a quick word with Colour Purding and handed over possession of the upturned crate, Bournclough would make his way straight back to his billet, where he was looking forward to sleeping until lunchtime, if not later. Then when dusk came around again, he’d march right back out and plant his arse back down in the exact same spot.

This routine had been repeating itself for nigh-on three months, ever since the army reached Gordul Nor and started digging siege lines. Bournclough’s company always got the night watch, and he knew full well why. It got him riled up, sensing the lads around him in the dark every night, shivering from the cold. They squatted all the way down the length of the trench, muttering to themselves, boiling tea, trading smokables, coughing the damp out of their lungs, still on duty when they should by rights have been asleep on their bedrolls. Just because he’d the had the bad fortune to be born with a bit of Broonie blood in him, people thought that he could see in the dark, and these lads suffered. “Put Bimhead’s company on piquet,” the major had said. “He’s got that twerg sergeant, send him out. I’ll say this for twergs, they’re bloody useful for night excursions, if not much else.”

The arrangement suited their lieutenant very well. He turned up each evening to nod his head when they stood to, saying “Carry on, Colour Sergeant” with a very dignified bearing, then turning on his heel and making straight for the mess tent, to keep the sherry decanter company until the small hours. It suited Bournclough to a point, as well. He could deal with officers who were drunks and wasters. They didn’t stop him from running the company the way he liked. It was the interfering sorts that he couldn’t stand.  Or worse, the ones who tried to be heroes. The safest thing for that sort of officer was a bayonet in the back before they got anywhere near the enemy.

He got the sudden sensation that there was someone new in their trench. He couldn’t see in the dark, despite what the major thought, but he did have a bit of the old Broonie sense. Even when it was dark and when the company had fallen silent, he could still sense the lads around him. Still knew where they were, could still avoid stepping on them like everyone else did as they stumbled down the trench in the dark. But it also worked like a barometer. He got a pang in his chest, or a quirk in his eyebrow that drew his attention to something, as though he was being tugged on a fishing hook. Now his thoughts were being drawn towards the communications trench that led up from the rear lines. Someone was approaching. Bournclough watched the opening with patient focus.

His senses proved to be less than necessary. The new arrival nearly tripped over Private Burrows as they entered the trench, and Burrows drove them away with a torrent of abuse. Bournclough could see vague shapes in the dark, and could feel that there was somebody approaching him, getting closer.

“Hullo!” said the new arrival.

He sounded like a nob. Cut-glass accent. College boy, Bournclough thought. Nobs like this didn’t come strolling down to the siege lines just to say “hullo.” There was almost certainly something that he wanted. Bournclough, and the rest of the company, waited silently to see what it was.

When the answer wasn’t forthcoming, Bournclough reached up to twist the key on a naphtha lantern that was hanging above his head. He turned up the heat, casting the trench in a dull green glow and revealing the features of the men who were squatting nearby. Most of them had features which looked better in dim light, but not the nob. He was all cheekbones and wispy hair. Bright eyes and pale skin. He was young, but tall. He looked like he might be trouble.

The nob managed to figure out that Bournclough was in change, and smiled. He covered the last few steps towards him, walking confidently over the duckboard floor of the trench, and avoiding getting his boots any dirtier than they already were. He reached Bournclough and extended his hand.

“Gildersleigh,” said the nob.

Bournclough’s eyebrows crept up into his hat. He stared at the nob’s outstretched hand, then up into his face, and took his time doing it, sucking thoughtfully on his pipe. But the nob had that kind of friendliness that didn’t know when to give up and go home. Eventually Bournclough relented, and shifted himself forward off his perch, hitching his cloak over one shoulder and standing to his full height. Which was roughly half the full height of this Gildersleigh character.

He offered his own hand, far rougher than Gildersleigh’s and wrapped in sweatsoaked bandages for warmth.

“Colour Bournclough,” he grumbled.

“Well,” the nob smiled, “it’s a distinct pleasure to meet you, Colour Sergeant Bournclough.”

The nob reached down and shook Bournclough’s hand companionably. He didn’t seem to mind the bandages, and he actually seemed sincerely pleased. Corporal Mogget snorted under his breath.

“…and you, sir,” Bournclough said, then cleared his throat, feeling embarrassed on the nob’s behalf.

There was a long silence.

“Cold, isn’t it?” said the nob, trying civility once again.

“We hadn’t noticed,” said a scornful voice from somewhere further down the trench. It was probably Corporal Mogget once again. Bournclough chose not to reprimand him. The nob was wearing the uniform of a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, so unless he’d stolen the togs from somewhere, he’d probably just come from the rear lines of the siege camp, where the engineers had set up their tents around a nice warm steam engine that they’d brought ashore from one of the ships in the harbour. Mogget had a right to be jealous.

“We’re the Egremontshires,” said Bournclough. “Second battalion, number three company. If you want Lieutenant Bimhead, he’s, er, well…”

He nodded his head westward, to where the regimental mess tent was pitched behind the safety of the earthworks. The nob must have passed it on his way down, must have seen the glare of candles from inside and heard the clamour of the regiment’s subalterns banging the table, drinking their way through their private supplies of wine and brandy.

“Er, no, I don’t want Lieutenant Bimhead,” said Gildersleigh. “I shan’t think that I will need to bother him for any reason.”

“…oh,” said Bournclough, feeling confused. “Then, er…how can we help you, sir?”

“Oh!” Gildersleigh smiled, and looked up at the edge of the trench. “It’s very kind of you to offer, but I was just thinking of going out by myself and taking a look at the enemy’s positions.”

There was an even longer silence.

“…oh.”

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Taking notes from history

Hello internet!

If you read my last post you’ll know that I’m on a quest to move away from the books that I’m familiar with and branch out to other writers, to see if it has a positive effect on my own writing.

So far, I’m sort of cheating. The first book that I’ve delved into since Tuesday isn’t actually another fantasy novel. I want to write fantasy  but for whatever reason I’m bad at actually getting myself to read fantasy novels by other authors, and so I have a wide variety of award-winning fantasy books lying around my bedroom in unread heaps. It would have been easy to pick up one of these and get stuck into it, allowing the author to transport me into the world that they’d created. But instead, I prized open the covers of a book so heavy that it could be used for construction purposes.

The Honourable Company is a 475-page narrative history of the East India Company, written by the journalist and historian John Keay. It’s a comprehensive, entertaining history of the early expeditions that led to the establishment of the trading company which eventually bought control over most of India and Southeast Asia.

I’m ‘cheating’ by reading it because I’ve already read the first few chapters, and because I love reading books like this. I studied history at the University of Manchester, and when I was in a productive frame of mind – rather than procrastinating or panicking under the weight of imminent deadlines – there was nothing I loved more than selecting a weighty academic tome off my course reading list, checking it out of the library, and plunging head-first into history. (I enjoy learning new things, but only when I’m not expected to write an essay on the subject.) There’s something wonderful about reading the culmination of somebody else’s painstaking research, knowing how much effort they put into scouring through history and recording it, with the honest intentions of simply producing a book that would improve other people’s understanding of the past. I also find history very entertaining. Perhaps this makes me a huge dork, but history isn’t necessarily dry and boring, particularly when it’s written by an author who has a sense for the ridiculous, which John Keay certainly does.

I’m of the opinion that everyone ought to read as many history books as they can. Defeating your own ignorance about the complex history of the human race is always a good thing, and studying the efforts of the generations that came before ours can lead to a renewed appreciation of the world we live in. History also has a habit of repeating itself, and forewarned is forearmed. But history is especially valuable to aspiring authors, no matter what genre you’re writing in.

Firstly, history provides us with exquisite morsels which can be shamelessly plundered and inserted directly into books. John Keay’s book has provided me with several of these which I’m almost reluctant to share with you, lest you steal them. For example, in the early days of the East India Company, when poorly-coordinated expeditions often led to ships sinking, sailing to the wrong parts of the world, losing most of their crew to scurvy, or bringing back merchandise which had gone down in price on the London markets, the company decided to improve their internal communications by leaving a single man on an island off the coast of South Africa, for several years, with only penguins for company.

A 17th-century sketch of a very sassy penguin

Keay writes that ‘Whenever a ship anchored in the Bay he quickly donned jacket and hose and pushed past the penguins with whatever messages had been left in his care’ by ships passing in either direction. If you’re in the business of writing humorous fantasy novels, or historical fiction, or even contemporary fiction – perhaps you want a quirky back-story for one of your character’s ancestors – you could have a character marooned for years on an island full of penguins. Or if you’re writing grimmer, more hard-hitting stories, you could create an impactful story about the loneliness or depression of someone struggling to stay alive in a similar situation. And that’s just one story from one history book.

Isolated incidents aren’t the only realm from which we can draw historical inspiration, however. If you’re struggling to add a sense of background realism to your fantasy, you can go and read up on real-world history and see if you find anything that fits your setting. Towns and settlements often spring up for odd reasons. The first British trading post in India was built in a harbour exposed to typhoons and blocked by a huge sandbar, which made it a terrible location for trade ships to land. It was built there because the leader of that particular expedition had managed to acquire a mistress in a nearby Dutch settlement, and he wanted to make his visits easier. Despite it’s poor qualifications for a trading port, this little settlement eventually grew to become the city of Madras, now known as Chennai, with a population of 6,000,000. Perhaps a city in your world could have similarly unlikely origins. Or if you want a story that’s slightly less absurd, history books are filled with geopolitical intrigues and details of the birth of nations, many of which might fit the story that you’re trying to write.

Finally, I also find history to be a source of insights into the kind of complex characters who I want to create in my fiction. Studying the history of real nations, real organisations or sub-cultures, is a good way of ensuring that we don’t fall foul to the crimes of stereotyping or creating unrealistic, monolithic portrayals of large groups of people. Even in a group of people like the merchants who worked for the East India Company – men who wanted to make money at other people’s expense and weren’t afraid to sail halfway around the world to do so – there is a surprising range of motivations and a surprising amount of moral integrity. It might be tempting to paint all historical figures with the same brush, and assume that even the most highly-celebrated figures from history held ideas that we would deem to be morally reprehensible in the modern age. This is the kind of assumption that fuels the current trend of ‘grimdark’ fantasy, where fantasy worlds are depicted as brutally indifferent to the fate of their protagonists, and most characters encountered by the protagonist are shown to be intolerant and unprincipled. Grimdark is, of course, a backlash against earlier tropes in fantasy, where fantasy authors brushed over historically-accurate unpleasantness such as plague, slavery, skin tumours, and open sewers. But it’s equally disingenuous to present history – or fantasy worlds based on real-world history – as wholly dark and unpleasant. Reading history shows us that even insides the most insidious organisations and maritime empires in history, most people were complex characters, and there were still isolated individuals who were acting commendably by our own moral standards as well as their own.

I’m not an apologist for the misdeeds of colonial empires, and it’s important to record the dark side of history – but it’s also important to make sure that we don’t make our fantasy settings into wholly bleak worlds, bereft of the kind of characters who act with good intentions. By reading history, we can learn about how real people acted in difficult situations, and we can use their struggles to enrich our own stories.

How well do you know your bookshelf?

Hello internet!

I have missed you. Due to the new schedule, it has been aeons since Tobias allowed me to post anything. But now my patience has paid off, and I have you all to myself for a week!

’tis the Christmas season, and if you’re a writer who goes through the gift-giving traditions of Christmas every year, you’re probably expecting to find at least one book under the tree.

I love acquiring books, and I am hopeful of my chances of acquiring some more on December 25th. But I seem to acquire them at a much faster rate than I can actually read them.

Unlike many writers, I didn’t really discover the joys of reading until I was already in my twenties. In my teenage years I fairly scorned reading (apart from Star Trek apocrypha) and thought, with the arrogance only possible in teenagers, that I didn’t have anything to learn from contemporary authors, even those writing the kind of books that I wanted to write.

Since leaving university I’ve come around to accepting that I am the merest novice, and I’ve learnt to welcome the lessons in the art of writing that can be gleaned from devouring as much fiction as possible. As such, I buy a lot of books. If I see rave reviews of a fantasy novel by an author I haven’t heard of, I’ll usually order it on Amazon (or get my bookseller sister to get it for me half-price 😉 ). I also have a big back-catalogue of classic fantasy to get through. Until a year ago, I hadn’t read anything by Neil Gaiman or George R.R. Martin, and I have a lot of catching up to do to get through all of the excellent fantasy that was published during my arrogant teenage years, or indeed before I was born. And as a history graduate who wants to write fantasy that’s very historically-informed, I also buy a lot academic texts.

All of this tends to pile up.

I apologise wholeheartedly to any readers with OCD

Currently, amidst the ever-expanding entropy of discarded chocolate wrappers, scrap paper, unwashed teacups, and loose change on my desk, I have unearthed:

• Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
• Herodotus’s Histories
• Saladin Ahmed’s wonderful Arabian-inspired fantasy novel Throne of the Crescent Moon (artfully arranged here on top of a novelty flashing Santa hat)
•  The City Stained Red by Sam Skyes
• Simon Armitage’s translation of Le Morte d’Arthur
• Bernard Cornwell’s The Last Kingdom
• Marvel’s 1602 by Neil Gaiman, on long-term loan from my sister’s boyfriend
• The Promise of Blood by Brian McClellan
• The Incorruptables by John Hornor Jacobs
• The Terror by Dan Simmons
• The Iron Ship by K. M. McKinley
• Throne of Jade by Naomi Novik
• The 722-page academic behemoth Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India by Lawrence James
• William Shakespeare’s ‘The Empire Striketh Back’ by Ian Doescher

And (inexplicably) the dog-eared manual for Star Trek: Starfleet Command III, a PC game which came out in 2002, and which I haven’t played for at least half as long…

On top of all of those estimable volumes, though, is The Thirteen-Gun Salute by Patrick O’Brian, and therein lies the problem.

Out of that entire list of books, I have read only three from cover-to-cover: The Empire Striketh Back, (because it’s hilarious) Throne of the Crescent Moon, (because it’s amazing) and The Incorruptables (because I read it one sitting and couldn’t put it down). The rest are lying about forlornly under sheafs of paper, in various stages of chronic neglect. Perhaps I can be forgiven for not having finished the meatier academic books on the list, but I feel a certain guilt about seeing The Iron Ship or The Promise of Blood accumulating dust when I’ve only peered inside their covers once or twice before putting them down in favour of another book. And the ‘other book’ is almost invariably by Patrick O’Brian.

I love Patrick O’Brian. The Times called him ‘the greatest historical novelist of all time’, and I’m not inclined to disagree. If you don’t believe me, just listen to award-nominated British YA and adult author Lou Morgan! (who I follow on Twitter!)

Heed her words

For those who don’t know (and there can’t be very many of you, given how many times I’ve mentioned him on this blog), Patrick O’Brian was the author of the Aubrey/Maturin books, a series of historical novels starting with Master and Commander and ending with The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey. It’s always hard to describe a series without bias (and without going into too much detail) when you think it’s among the greatest works of literature ever conceived by the human mind and committed into prose, but I’ll try.

At their core, the Aubrey/Maturin books are about a Royal Navy captain in the Napoleonic wars, and his friend, a surgeon and scientist who is also a shadowy operative for Britain’s intelligence services. The series is naval military history at it’s very best, but it is also so much more than that. Captain Aubrey and Doctor Maturin go on voyages around the world, confounding the naval enterprises of Napoleon, but also struggling to overcome the human faults that make them into such interesting characters. Jack struggles with his weight, his finances, and his conceptions of honour, while Maturin suffers the ravages of drug addiction, depression, torn loyalties, and an unstable marriage. Their adventures are a sublime journey through history and through the human condition, with bold forays into naval warfare, but also into romance, philosophy, scientific discovery, and abstract existential musings on every subject under the sun. They’ve become two of my favourite characters in fiction.

Most of the action takes place on ships at sea, which is a setting that O’Brian brought to life in vivid detail, drawing on his amazing reservoir of technical knowledge about the age of sail. His characters navigate the world, crossing oceans, rounding Cape Horn and passing through the freezing southern latitudes in almost every voyage, against a constant backdrop of everyday naval life:

‘the old pattern fell into place again, and the ship’s routine, disrupted by the violent, perilous race eastward through sixty degrees of longitude, soon became the natural way of life once more, with it’s unyaring diet, the cleaning of the decks before full daylight, the frequent call for sweepers throughout the day, the piping of the hands to witness punishment on Wednesdays (reprimand or deprivation of grog; no flogging so far in this ocean), the ritual washing of clothes and the hoisting of clothes-lines on Mondays and Fridays, quarters every weekday with a certain amount of live firing still, mustering by divisions on Sunday, followed sometimes by the reading of the Articles of War…

…Day after day they travelled slowly over a vast disk of sea, perpetually renewed; and when, as the Diane was approaching Capricorn at four knots, Captain Aubrey ended church with the words ‘World without end, amen’, he might have been speaking of this present voyage: sea, sea and then more sea, with no more beginning and no more end than the globe itself.’

As a reader, it’s easy to let yourself be lulled into the same comfortable routine as the characters. The books are laced together with masterful character arcs and strands of overarching narrative that draw you gently onwards, making it easy to coast from one book to the next without intending to.

This can become a little bit of a problem, considering the length of the series.

O’Brien wrote twenty Aubrey/Maturin books before he died, leaving another unfinished. Twenty-and-a-half books is a lot of books. I’ve been reading this epic saga since January and I still haven’t got further than the fourteenth installment. It’s been hugely enjoyable, and I’m sure that my own writing has benefited immeasurably, but I’m beginning to wonder if too much exposure to one author’s writing style can start to be a bad thing. 

For writers, reading books is necessarily a case of monkey see, monkey do. You can tell what an author has been reading by looking for clues in their own writing, the same way that forensic scientists can find out what someone’s been eating by analysing their hair. After reading his books for almost a year, all of the clues in my writing point to Patrick O’Brian.

Everybody has a favourite author, but I think it’s important to diversify the books you read, just as it’s important to…diversify the foods you eat…if you want to have strong hair….?  This metaphor is creaking slightly, but I hope you understand what I mean.

The late great Sir Terry Pratchett said that authors should ‘read with the mindset of a carpenter looking at trees’, and the best way to do that is probably to venture out into the forest and look at as many different trees as possible, rather than admiring the same tree over and over again because you like it’s particular shape or the way that the moss grows on it. As such, I’m going to make a concerted effort to tear myself away from the adventures of Captain Aubrey and Doctor Maturin, and launch some exploratory forays of my own, into the umplumbed depths of my bookcase, uprooting lost books from the bottom of piles and actually getting around to reading them. I may blog about the results. And I encourage you to do the same!

Adapting our imaginations into prose

Hello, internet!

I’m slightly frazzled from travelling, so today’s post might be a little disjointed.

After several weeks of intense travelling (and sleeping off my intense jetlag) I’ve finally got myself back into a healthy sleeping pattern where I actually see some daylight now and then, and I’ve found that – perhaps unsurprisingly – it’s really benefiting my writing. I sat down this morning determined to begin a fresh new draft of my book and I shot straight out of the starting blocks, writing 1,000 words and only stopping because I had to go and buy myself a shiny new phone.

I’m back now, with my shiny new phone successfully purchased, and I find myself eager to get back to writing. This is almost a novelty, because I’ve had a few weeks of fairly intense writer’s block, where I’ve been asking myself a lot of crippling existential questions about my writing and my desire to make a career as a writer, and it’s been tying me up and stopping me from getting any words down on the page.

I think there are a few factors which have renewed my creativity, as well as just having a healthier sleeping schedule. One was all of the advice and inspiration that I got from attending NerdCon: Stories in Minneapolis a couple of weeks ago. It’s only now, with all of my travelling done, that I’m really finding time to apply all of the lessons that I learned to my own writing. Mostly the authors speaking at NerdCon just reaffirmed a valuable lesson that I already knew, but had perhaps forgotten: every writer, even your favourite writer, sucked to begin with. All of the great writers in history began with a crappy first draft, which probably didn’t even get published after they’d rewritten it into a well-polished final draft, but the only way they eventually got published was by writing, and writing, and rewriting, and rewriting. As Maureen Johnson always says, as an aspiring writer, you have to “give yourself permission to suck”. You have to abandon the idea that you’re going to like what you write, at least at first. The only way to get good is to be bad, and then improve.

I find that advice very empowering, so whenever I get a fresh dose of it, I’m always raring to go and write pages and pages of my crappy first draft without worrying about the quality, which is exactly what young aspiring writers should be doing.

As well as that, though, I think I’ve stumbled across another important lesson, in my recent writing.

I’m really enjoying the latest redraft of my story, which I’ve only just embarked upon, but as I get it down onto the page, I can’t help but shake my head at how different it is from how I originally imagined the story, when I first envisioned the book and the world it’s set in, about two years ago. I like this new envisioning of my book, and more importantly I think it’s the ‘easiest’ incarnation of my world that I’ve ever come up with, in terms of how well the plot and characters melt down into a story that I can actually tell. It’s more malleable, and less troublesome to mould into scenes and plot arcs, linked by a consistent narrative, which of course are all of the essential bare-bones elements of a story that can eventually be turned into a book.

That doesn’t change the fact that the book is very different from the one I was writing a year ago, or even six months ago. The narrative voice is very different, the events have changed sequence dramatically, characters who were in the background have moved into the foreground and vice versa, the technology that they use has regressed by about a century in terms of it’s level of advancement, and I have introduced some explicitly supernatural elements that were completely absent in earlier drafts. All of these changes have made it easier for me to write, and easier to actually tell the story, but they have moved the book further and further from my original conception of the story and the world that it takes place in. And I’m completely okay with that.

I think when authors first conceive of a fantasy world, and think it out, their original idea can be a very beautiful thing. Perhaps that’s fantasy at it’s purest – when it is just mere fantasy, in a writer’s head. But it’s a mistake to think that the world in our heads at the moment of conception is going to be exactly the same world that appears on the page once we’ve finally written the world into prose. The world you’ve created has to be filtered through you if it wants to get into print, where other people can experience it, and you’re an imperfect vessel for that transition. You can’t just open the floodgates and let it pour out unchanged or undiluted. You’re a human being with wants and needs and time constraints and bills to pay, and ultimately you have to change the shape of the world you’ve created so that it’s easy to draw out of yourself as quickly and efficiently as possible. It’s no good having a vast, wonderful and expansive fantasy world in your head if you find it impossible to turn into a story which you can actually write: if you can’t mould it into a format that will actually flow through your fingers and out onto the page. Ultimately, I think writability must come first, before any kind of integrity to our original vision. Sacrifices must be made to get the world out of our heads and onto the page.

In short, the important thing is to create a faithful prose adaptation of whatever fantasy world exists in our heads, the same way that a movie director would try to create a faithful cinematic adaptation of a fantasy world that exists in prose. There’s a certain nobility to preserving our original idea as much as possible…but it can be a useless nobility, if our goal is to get published. Sometimes characters must be swapped around, plots must be truncated or rearranged, and extrenuous dragons must be mercilessly excised, in order to make a book writeable. And, for that matter, publishable.

What are your thoughts?

Fantasy vs. Literature: Terry Pratchett in the eyes of serious literary criticism.

Hello, internet!

Let me start today’s post by telling you about a man called Dagobert D. Runes.

He had a delightful name, like something out of an urban fantasy novel, but he was every bit as real as you and me.

He was born in a part of Austro-Hungary that is now a part of Ukraine. He was a philosopher, and a writer, and he spent most of his life writing dictionaries of philosophy full of radical opinions about the art of thinking and the history of thought. In 1941 he founded a publishing company called The Philosophical Library, which exists to this day, and has published more than 2,000 titles.

There’s some controversy about Runes. In 1959, he published the first English translation of a text by Karl Marx, entitled “On the Jewish Question”, which was either a defence of the rights of Jews in Prussia or an early piece of anti-Semitism, depending upon which historians you listen to. Runes’ translation was published under the title of “A World without Jews”, and this choice of title did not bode well for him. Although he’d only translated the book, the title sounded distinctly anti-Semitic, and Runes’ reputation suffered extremely. Runes wrote an introduction to the translation that gives historians reason to believe that he was not himself an extreme Marxist, nor an anti-Semite – but this doesn’t seem to have saved his reputation.

I’m a little cynical of Runes and his opinions, but this post isn’t really about him.

I only mention him because, in 1955, he published a book called The Treasury of Thought, a kind of dictionary containing subversive definitions of many common words. One of the entries was for the word CRITIC.

His definition reads:

“A eunuch judging a man’s lovemaking. A skydreaming Eagle without wings. Pygmies with poison darts in the valley of the sleeping giants”

Even if we disregard everything else that Runes ever wrote, these definitions seem to ring true today. And perhaps it proves that people with objectionable opinions can still sometimes give us valuable insights into the human condition.

Let me get to my point. I don’t know how many of you are fans of the late, great, Sir Terry Pratchett, but I certainly count myself among their number.

A week or two ago, shortly after the publication of Pratchett’s posthumous final novel, The Shepherd’s Crown, a literary critic called Jonathan Jones wrote an article that even he himself has now described as “a snort of contempt”, calling Terry Pratchett an “ordinary potboiler”, accusing him of “mental laziness” and “robbing readers of the true delights of ambitious fiction.”

Jones’ logic seems to have been that the kind of people who spend their free time reading Pratchett – and, by implication, all fantasy novels in general – are wasting their time. Jones feels that people should instead be dedicating their time to reading great works of literature by the likes of Jane Austen and Charles Bukowski. Jones openly admitted at the beginning of his derisive review that he’d never condescended to even reading a single Discworld novel before he formed such a negative opinion of their author. In his own words, “life is too short.”

I have to dispute this.

In the week that Mister Pratchett shuffled off his mortal coil, I was cooped up in a little room in Bristol where I was doing a residential internship at a publishing company. I’d bought a couple of books from a stall down by the harbourside and I was reading them in the evenings. One of them was A Farewell to Arms by Ernst Hemingway. The other was Post Office by none other than Charles Bukowski, the profane and gutter-mouthed and utterly brilliant American everyman who Jonathan Jones thinks that we ought to be reading instead of Mister Pratchett. I was halfway through Post Office when somebody else in the office looked up from their computer and said, “oh, Terry Pratchett’s dead”, in the kind of tones that one would use to remark upon the death of a minor television personality or a B-List Olympian. I was crushed.  When I returned to my room that evening, I wrote a tearful blog post, then downloaded an e-book of my favourite Discworld book (Guards! Guards!) and read it in one sitting whilst enjoying some Bristol cider apple brandy that I’d bought during one of my excursions.

Guards! Guards!

Then the day afterwards, I went back to reading Bukowski. Then I read Hemingway. And I’d finished all three books by the end of the week.

So the first thing I have to say to Jonathan Jones is this: if he thinks that people don’t have time to read Terry Pratchett and read Charles Bukowski, clearly he isn’t spending enough of his time reading. As a full-time literary critic, I find it a little disturbing that he spends less of his time reading than an overworked, underpaid publishing intern.

I enjoyed Bukowski just as much as I enjoyed Hemingway, and I also enjoy Austen – but enjoyment can take many different forms. And whilst I appreciate Bukowski’s dirty everyman humour, and Hemingway’s frank “no-frills” depiction of war, and Austen’s achievements as the first writer to indulge the reader in letting us know what her characters were thinking at any given time, I can’t say that I enjoy reading their works any more than I enjoy reading a stokingly good Pratchett novel.

Of course, for critics like Jonathan Jones, enjoyment isn’t the end goal of reading. When he published his article a few weeks ago, my initial reaction was incandescent rage. I tweeted a rebuke which included a certain unsavoury four-letter word which is perhaps best kept to heated disputes between differently-opinionated Englishmen, and which perhaps ought not to be repeated on a respectable site like the Art of Writing. If he saw it, he didn’t see fit to reply.

Whatever your opinion of Mr. Pratchett, surely a literary critic is not doing their (blisteringly well-paid) job properly if they don’t even deign to read a book before they publish a condescending criticism of it. A lot of people pointed this out to Jonathan Jones, and he eventually relented, and agreed to read Small Gods, one of Pratchett’s books which has earned acclaim from fans and critics alike.

If you haven’t read it, do!

After reading it, it seems that Jones’ opinion has remained largely unchanged.

He writes “In the real world, as opposed to the Discworld, people have complexities, contradictions. A whole art form has evolved to explore them. It’s called the novel”.  He says:

“…for some reason, the fantasy genre is a graveyard for the English language. Even Tolkien himself – and yes, I have read him thoroughly – wrote an ordinary, flat, Hobbitish prose.”

When I read this, I bristled. This was more than just a condescending invitation to be referred to with unsavoury four-letter words. This was a direct attack on the fantasy genre. It was an insult to everything I held dear. I’m sure a lot of followers of this blog will feel the same way. Insulting Terry Pratchett is bad enough. But insulting Tolkien? Insulting the genre spawned in Tolkien’s wide wake, and all of the authors who write books in that genre? That’s fighting talk.

Rather than picking up my axe, sounding my war horn, summoning my bannermen and marching forthwith upon Jonathan Jones’ house, I decided to take the Hobbit’s approach. I sat back and thought about his reviews for a while, sucking on my proverbial pipe weed and ruminating upon his opinions.

I think it’s interesting to note that when Terry Pratchett was awarded his knighthood in the 2005 New Years Honours list, the official justification was for “services to literature.”  The newly knighted Sir Terry himself commented that ” “I suspect the ‘services to literature’ consisted of refraining from trying to write any,”

Even Mr. Pratchett seems to have conceded that he was not actually a writer of literature. He was a writer of amusing stories, of entertaining tales, supposed to be enjoyed with a wry smile, but not to be regarded as fine works of art. Jones agrees. After reading Small Gods, he writes “Why would anyone confuse this with the kind of literary prose it so emphatically does not want to be?”

That made me think. Perhaps fantasy authors should just accept that we’re not writers of great literature – and nor are we obligated to be. Perhaps we should accept that our work exists as entertainment, not as art. That our books are meant to be enjoyed, cherished, read by the kind of people who love a rip-roaring adventure story – not by the kind of people who read books because they want a unique, raw, tragic, multifaceted insight into the deepest unplumbed crevices of the human soul.

But then I remembered the sheer range of fantasy novels that have been written since Tolkien invented the genre. The sheer range of topics, experiences, insights, human emotions that have been explored in the wealth of fantasy writing that exists in the world. Because the very best fantasy and science fiction stories – whether it’s A Song of Ice and Fire or lesser-known novels loved by their small, dedicated audiences – always go beyond their fantasy setting. Their authors always strive to write about the whole broad spectrum of the human experience, whether the humans are fighting in a medieval crusade or sailing across vast oceans or travelling between the stars. There are wary soldiers and disenchanted princesses and unsung heroes struggling through adversity and finding out that their happily-ever-afters aren’t as as shining and golden as they thought they were. There is raw emotion there, and raw humanity, in all of it’s infinite diversity.

Jones concludes his second review by writing “I prefer writing that rubs up against the real world, that describes what it is to be alive in all its unpredictability, wild comedy, longing, grotesqueness, exhilaration – and shame.”

Jones thinks that fantasy readers don’t take the time to read enough ‘serious’ literature. But if Jones thinks that fantasy can’t ‘rub against the real world’, that fantasy can’t present all of the bizarre and wonderful extremes of what it is to be human…then I have to say, I don’t think he’s taking the time to reading enough fantasy.

Writing ethically about warfare and violence in science fiction and fantasy: Part 1

Hello, internet!

I’ve been thinking a lot about violence recently.

Muaahahahaha

I promise that it’s not as creepy as it sounds.

I’m endeavoring to write a book series that features – among other things – a goodly amount of shooting, stabbing, explosions, death, and organised warfare. Characters engage in battle, participate in acts of bloody violence, and deprive each other quite liberally of life and limb. I am trying to write about war at its ugliest, but I am trying to depict it thoughtfully, and in a way that doesn’t disguise my opinion that there’s no such thing as a good or necessary war.

Some of you might be thinking “great, pass the popcorn.” But if you’re anything like me, and you have a propensity for overthinking things, you might be wondering why I’d choose to write about something so violent in the first place – especially if I don’t believe in the idea of a necessary war. I’ve been wondering the same thing.

Fantasy, of course, has its origins in violence. The earliest fantastic stories are of the warrior fighting the beast: Beowulf and Grendel, St. George and the dragon, or Rostam and the White Demon. Here we have three examples of human heroes who embody all of the heroic masculine virtues of the cultures who created them, pitted against supernatural creatures of unknown origin which are depicted as vile, murderous and often entirely unsympathetic. We do not, generally, want the monsters to win…although we might briefly come around to the monster’s side in the moments where classical heroes throw tantrums about treasure or honour or shouting their name at cyclopeses that they’ve recently blinded. Despite their occasional idiocy, we still support the hero, and we still cheer when the monster is brought to ruin.

Hurraaay!

This has its problems, as I’ll discuss below. Stories of organised warfare have also featured in folklore and fantasy since the earliest oral storytellers, the earliest example I can think of being Homer’s Illiad. The Illiad actually does a decent job of depicting neither side in the Trojan War as being ultimately evil, which is more than can be said for a lot of fantasy that has been written in the centuries since. I’m going to start this series on violence and warfare by taking a few shots at a relatively easy, low-hanging target: the Tolkien legendarium.

Tolkien offers us a fairly clear-cut, simplistic idea of good and evil. When Tolkien’s audience is presented with a choice between the desperate armies of men and the dark hordes of Mordor, few of us would suggest that the Fellowship of the Ring were unjustified in lopping off all of those greasy orc limbs or blithely counting off their kills atop the walls of Helm’s Deep. Anyone who’s seen the movies will remember Frodo’s vision of what the future would look like under the reign of Sauron: the Shire despoiled and the Hobbits impressed into slavery.

Visit New Zealand!

Faced with such a foe, the fellowship never seem to doubt the morality of their crusade against the orcs, and neither do we as the audience.

And therein lies the problem.

Warfare in the real world is never as clear-cut as it is in the War of the Ring, and I think fantasy authors are under a very important moral obligation to avoid depicting violence or warfare in ways that simplify war into a battle between good and evil. I’d hope that this is obvious to many writers, and it is true that very few contemporary fantasy authors are guilty of writing about war in these terms. Even if they did, publishers would be unlikely to take them on, and politically engaged modern readers would probably be very critical of their books. But it can happen, and it’s worth remaining vigilant against it and analysing why it’s a bad thing when it does happen.

The problem with creating a race like the orcs – or a villain like Sauron – is that it encourages attitudes deep in the western cultural subconscious that are leftover from the time of colonialism, or from earlier medieval attitudes towards the Islamic world, which probably have their basis in the rivalry between prehistoric tribes. The attitude of ‘otherness,’ which morphed into Orientalism during the 18th and 19th centuries, has been written about at length by cultural historians like Edward Said. It is essentially a racist attitude which allows negative characteristics to be ascribed to groups who aren’t “us,” vindicating ourselves in the process and making us feel as though “we” are somehow morally superior, and ultimately strengthening the divide between “us” and “them,” whoever us and them happen to be. Encouraging the idea of the racial “other” as different, physically repulsive, and morally inferior is a strategy that has been used for centuries to make westerners feel morally justified in engaging in various kinds of colonial exploitation and domestic warfare.

An example of “otherness” mobilised to encourage British men to enlist as soldiers during the First World War

We can see ghosts of this divisive kind of “otherness” when we see the way that the orcs are depicted in the Lord of the Rings film adaptations – they are physically repulsive, greasy and black-skinned, and they seem to be universally morally bankrupt, delighting in violence, theft, cannibalism, and tormenting their captives. They are literally birthed from holes in the ground, which is a stereotype that used to be applied to people of Asian ethnicity during the European middle ages. We don’t see any sympathetic orc characters throughout the entire trilogy, and so, at the end of The Return of the King, we cheer when we see the surviving orcs being swallowed up by the ground outside the gates of Mordor. In short, the idea of a genocide against orcs seems entirely justified.

Whenever fiction leads us to believe that a genocide of any race, even a fictional one, seems entirely justified, I think we have to take a step back and ask some serious questions about the fiction we’re reading, or watching on the screen.

The greatest risk is that our attitude towards orcs bleeds over into our attitudes towards other nationalities or ethnic groups in the real world, allowing us to ascribe negative characteristics to them and make sweeping generalisations about them in the same way that we felt comfortable making sweeping generalisations about the orcs. Even on a very small scale, orcs can be used as a way of insulting subcultures that we don’t like. In the UK, I’ve heard fans of Manchester United Football Club refer to fans of Liverpool FC, and people from Liverpool generally, as ‘orcs’. If humans can draw those kinds of comparisons with the supporters of rival football teams, it stands to reason that we can draw similar comparisons with disadvantaged ethnic minorities, or members of other cultures.

Peter Jackon’s casting decisions for the orcs and Uruk-Hai in the Lord of the Rings films stray uncomfortably far into this territory. Amazingly, orcs were the only speaking parts given to actors of colour in the entire trilogy. If you don’t believe me you can watch this fairly depressing video by Dylan Marron on Youtube:

We should be very worried that Peter Jackson didn’t see fit to cast any black actors as hobbits, Rohirrim, or soldiers of Gondor – especially when people of colour were very much present in all of their real-world analogues, such as the Anglo-Saxon and Viking armies of the late first millennium. What was it that subconsciously led to black actors only being cast as orcs? What was it that made Peter Jackson think, “If I need actors to play characters who look disgusting, act immorally, make guttural chanting noises, and terrify my main characters, I should definitely hire some black actors”?

There are also the Haradrim and Easterlings, who are mute throughout the films – but if anything, they represent an even bigger example of divisive orientalism. Within the universe of Middle Earth, we’re forced to wonder why any humans would realistically ally themselves with Sauron, who appears to be a manifestation of pure evil. The disturbing implication is that the men of the east somehow have more in common with the orcs than they do with the men of the west.

I have a lot more to say on the subject, but I doubt that Tobias would thank me for turning this post into a 5,000 word essay. I’ll talk more about this topic in future posts. Until then, think hard about how you’re presenting the bad guys in your own writing. And write well!

Starting in the middle: worldbuilding and fluid storycrafting

I know I promised last week that I’d review some flintlock fantasy books, but sadly they have not yet arrived. I’m looking forward to reading them, and to finding out how much they resemble my own writing, or differ from it.

I’ve recently made an interesting creative decision with regards to my own writing. As some of you may remember, I’ve been writing the first draft for an epic fantasy novel. I started in April and I’m now the proud author of a jumbled 23,000 word mess of fragmented extracts from all over the story. I’m alternately pleased with it and disgusted by it, which is normal, but I’ve had the lingering feeling for a while now that there was a certain something lacking from it. A few days ago, while I was sitting at my desk, trying to scoop the sad remnants of a kamikaze biscuit out of my tea, and pondering what to do next with the story, I figured out what the problem was. I needed to do some more planning.

Apparently planning isn’t optional. I don’t know, this sign says so.

This surprised me, because I used to be the kind of writer who did far too much planning, spending all of my time worldbuilding and plotting but rarely doing any actual writing. I know a lot about the universe I’ve created, its history and its social structures, and a lot of the worldbuilding that I did is still invaluable to what I’m writing. Other parts weren’t – I created characters, subplots, even entire nations which seemed unnecessary when I found myself struggling to insert them into the story. Plot and worldbuilding should always furnish your story, not the other way around. About a year ago I realized that excessive planning was holding me back, and I began to view planning as a trap, something I should avoid like the plague.

I know that there are many authors who do very little planning for their books. They simply launch into the story like an erudite penguin sliding off the iceberg of comfortable certainties into the cold sea of creative possibility, seeking out juicy narrative fish with only their raw gumption to guide them on their way. From what I’ve heard, I believe Neil Gaiman is one such writer. It seems to work out well enough for him, so I thought I should try it. I held my nose and plunged into the water.

Diving right into it like a proper penguin

It turns out, perhaps predictably, that the Intrepid Penguin approach isn’t the best method when you’re trying to write a ten-book fantasy series with a plot that contains a lot of complicated colonial geopolitics. For five months I’ve been typing away without any preconceptions, letting the story develop on its own terms, and trying to let it unfurl as I wrote it. I did find a few metaphorical fish that way, and it did allow me to make more progress with a first draft that I’ve ever made before, but I was slightly troubled by the vast depths of the uncharted ocean that I’d jumped into. The scenes that I was writing felt devoid of context. Each one was an island of detailed narrative in a ghostly world which seemed featureless and uninhabited, shrouded in mists of uncertainty, entire continents changing place around it on a whim. My protagonists (though I use that term loosely) had journeyed across the sea to the realm where most of the series will be taking place, only to find it barren. What next?

Whatever it was, it felt too nebulous for me to get a grasp of it. I knew that they had to go somewhere, so I accepted, glumly, that I needed to apply myself to a task that I’d been avoiding for months: drawing a map. Until then I’d viewed a fully drawn-out map as a hindrance. Why set down in stone the exact placement of certain key plot locations, long before I knew how the story was going to unfold? What if it became a narrative imperative for two provinces to be near each other, after I’d drawn them at opposite ends of the map? How could I draw a map before I knew what was going to happen later in the series?

Paige boy! Bring me my crayons!

As soon as I’d asked myself that last question, I knew what needed to be done. I needed to apply myself to yet another task that I’d been putting off for even longer: plotting out all of the later books in the series, and doing it in fine detail. It was a vast undertaking. I felt very daunted, but knew it needed to be done. I set myself to it and began with the third book in the series, which was already a little more developed than the others.

I was amazed to find that, in the year since I did all of my original worldbuilding and storycrafting, the plot of the third book had been coalescing somewhere in my subconscious, bubbling along nicely like a stew left to boil, getting more tender with time. When I set my mind to it, the plot became clear. It fell into place almost instantly, and before I knew it I’d written over a thousand words of detailed plot notes. Enough perhaps for a quarter of the book, or more. The demands of the new story made it easy to know where one or two locations needed to be on the map, and I eagerly filled them in.

Looking at my new plot notes, I felt excited about the prospect of eventually writing this third book. It seemed a shame that it would have to wait until after the first and second books, especially as I hadn’t yet figured out what their stories were going to be. After thinking this for a moment, a new thought occurred to me – why not just write the third book now?

So that is precisely what I’m doing: setting the first book aside, and writing the third book first. Over the last few days I’ve already written several thousand words, mostly by stealing a few hours now and then to write clandestinely at my desk when I should be writing about radiators. Thanks to my planning, I can see the story stretching out in front of me, scene-by-scene, inviting me to write it down. It isn’t a feeling I’ve felt for a while, and I’m going to make the most of while it lasts.