The anti-Reveal

A writer always wants their readers to be saying “and what happens next?!?” TV writers have known about this for decades. It is called the cliff-hanger. A drama series with a cold-opening (i.e. a scene before the opening credits) will have a cliff-hanger of some sort. It will ask questions without giving answers. It invites the viewer to keep watching if only to scratch that itch of not knowing why.

This trick of not telling the audience something can also be used in a different way. The popular website TV Tropes has a term called The Noodle Incident. This originated in the comic strip Calvin Hobbes and originally referred to an incident where Calvin got into so much trouble at school he refuses to talk about it. And they had to call the emergency services. Bill Waterson wisely left it unexplained, because in the readers’ minds “it would undoubtedly be more outrageous”, as he put it. The trope is similar: it refers to an incident that is off-stage or off-camera that the characters know about and refer to, but do not explain to the audience. We get to see how characters are defined by their reaction to this piece of unreported backstory.

Of course, some writers cannot help themselves. They just can’t leave things unexplained.

One of the most infamous in movie history is what George Lucas did in the first Stars Wars prequel movie (The Phantom Menace). He introduced the idea of midichlorians as a measurable aspect of the source of The Force. Many in the fanbase derided this and the consensus amongst fans seems to be this was a bad idea. We didn’t need Lucas to explain The Force. This was an anti-Reveal: he tried to explain a Noodle Incident.

David Eddings was prone to it, too. His last three works in the world of the Belgariad were new narratives about Belgarath, Polgara and then an organised subset of his world-building notes. In a lot of ways, the backstories of Belgarath his daughter Polgara were long explanations of Noodle Incidents. We didn’t really need them. The crumbs of both distributed throughout the main stories of the Belgariad and then the Mallorean were more than enough, in my opinion. And Eddings actually telling them diluted their magic as characters. They were anti-Reveals.

In popular TV cult culture, we are on the brink of what could be another. The season finale of series 7 of Doctor Who is a portentious example. It has been titled The Name Of The Doctor. But one thing throughout all fifty years of Doctor Who that we never ever ever discover is the Doctor’s name. He is always known as “The Doctor”. With few exceptions, he introduces himself as “The Doctor”. (If he must use an alias, he usually chooses “John Smith”.) He actually goes out of his way to not reveal his own name. And now we have an episode that is devoted to this most iconic of unrevelable facts.

To be sure, there are people in the Who universe who know his name. His sometime wife River Song seems to know his name. Viewers are fairly sure we’ve seen it written down on-screen, albeit in Gallifreyan script that no-one seems to have decoded.

But does the viewing public need to know? Do we even want to know? I don’t think we do.

Steven Moffat has a chance to completely balls up the franchise by revealing a piece of lore that the original creators and their successors didn’t deem revealable. However, I don’t think he will. Waterson, Lucas and Eddings at least all had the luxury that it was their own franchise they would be damaging. Moffat doesn’t.

Moffat has been doing some creative things in the Who universe. The are snippets of advanced future societies that we see the likes of River Song be involved with. The Doctor, too, and out of these we have some marvellous recurring characters like Dorian Maldovar.

And then there’s the prophecy. This episode looks like it will tell us about more about that prophecy. But some things aren’t meant to be revealed. Like the Doctor’s name.

 

The Edges Of World-Building: Lèse Majesté

Many fantasy worlds sport kings and queens. There seems to be something essentially romantic about a monarch ruling a small country. In the best stories they are adventurers and even heros in their own right. But in our day-to-day existence, us modern Westerners are so far removed from a medieval monarchy that some of the boring logistics of how they worked are forgotten.

C. J. Cherryh didn’t, though. In her Fortress series of fantasy novels (beginning with Fortress In The Eye Of Time) we see a king’s court depicted in quite a lot of functioning detail. Cefwyn Marhanen has an enormous retinue of servants and soldiers just to make his own life happen. And then there are the lord he directly rules over, many of whom spend much of their time at court. And they have considerable numbers of servants and soldiers, as well. And then you have to add the locals of whichever castle the royal court is occupying at the moment who host their royal guests and keep the basic functions of the place working. It is a major exercise for the King to move his court around.

Dizzy yet? Cherryh is known to have an interest in this aspect of history. In this story, King Cefwyn is a major character and the machinations of his court is crucial to the story. That it needs a vast human machinery to function is important to numerous scenes.

That is one depiction of how a king’s court works.

Kings in medieval times had varying amounts of power. Democracy as we know it today didn’t exist. The law of the land in the eleventh century was very different. Terry Jones in his book and TV series Medieval Lives explores this wonderfully. He makes the point that our modern perception of “outlaw” is quite different from what it really was. We tend to think “outlaw” just means someone who had no master and was free to do whatever they wanted. But that was actually a terrifying concept to the average person on the street because it meant they did not have a place in society.

The King’s Court was originally where the king decided matters of justice, remember. Petitioners who could not find any one agreement brought their case before the king. The famous story in the Bible about Solomon deciding between two women as to who was the mother of a child is a result of exactly this arrangement. But this really only works with a suitably small population. As populations get larger, the king must delegate this type of power.

Sometimes this delegation happens naturally, sometimes it happens incidentally. In history, both usually happen at once. This makes it so complicated that I can’t even summarize it.

Kings and queens today are almost always rulers under a special type of law that formalizes their arrangement with a parliament of some sort. One of the earliest was the Magna Carta in England. The Wikipedia article is instructive, but the one fact I want to raise is that the key thing it does today prevents the monarch from overriding the rule of law.

Fantasy stories usually have kings and queens doing what they like. But clearly that’s not the only option.

 

Coming down from a Conference high.

Well, Conflux9 is done and dusted and I thought maybe I should blog about the experience before I start forgetting things.

It was the first time I’d been to anything even like a writers’ conference and definitely the first time I’d stayed at the same hotel. Once I’d checked in, then found the conference registration desk and registered, I loitered in the foyer along with other attendees, making new friends and gradually letting people find me who I knew online, mostly from Twitter. It helped my Twitter avatar was a real pic of me, which was not entirely deliberate.

That first evening also had the panel I was on. I’d seen how panels worked at events run by the NSW Writers’ Centre, so I knew how they worked: they’re basically a conversation in front of an audience. My panel was about Life Transitions In Fiction, although the full title was longer. I can speak to how story is important for turning children into adults, which was why I volunteered. Other members on the panel were interested in how birth and death are depicted in speculative fiction. It turned out I didn’t really need the notes I’d prepared and in fact used almost none of them! Jack Dann was utterly captivating telling stories of the Sioux and how they do initiation, but Jodi Cleghorn and Helen Stubbs were no less interesting, too. I’d like to think we provided an interesting panel. I would have also liked it to have been later, as it was only by the second afternoon that I felt properly part of the conference.

It was also the second day that Patty Jansen finally found me. Patty was the person who first invited me to Conflux all those months ago and I’m stoked we had several good conversations about writing and life as a writer.

It was on the second day that I remembered how to live-tweet panels. This involves tweeting pithy grabs during the panel, suitably tagged. I’m glad I didn’t have any of my followers complain about me periodically flooding their feeds with my tweets, but one thing I did quickly notice is that it gained me a lot of new followers! I think I estimated at least 30 people from the conference followed my Twitter account over the four days, almost all of which I the followed back. This also meant that after it was all over, some of us could keep talking to each other even as people were making their way home. It kind of made the conference last just that little bit longer, in a way.

There are many things I learnt, and it would be boring and tedious to try to list them all here. But one of the things that really stands out is just how non-elitist the writing community is. Everyone is willing to give a hand to those alongside them and coming up behind them. Writers seem to love it when people want to know what they know and also like hearing how differently you approach the same problems. In fact, it was all as much a conference of ideas as writing, because writing – and especially speculative fiction writing – needs ideas more than perhaps almost any other genre. And putting ideas together breeds other ideas. Fact.

We also had a lot of fun. There were numerous opportunities to dress up as little or as much as you wanted – the theme was steampunk, after all. But the panels were often times for not just seriously interesting discussion, but seriously funny discussion, too.

I am so glad I went.

 

The Edges Of World-Building: The Scale Of Things

Sometimes it is a bit too easy to forget how much smaller modern technology has made our world. Modern air travel makes it feasible to travel halfway around the world for a holiday and modern communications makes it easy to socialize with people all over the world.

But this wasn’t always so.

To a very large extent, how far you can easily travel is strongly defined by your world’s society. It is not just the technology, but also the economics that have made air travel affordable for many people. Go back eighty years and it was definitely a luxury exercise. Go back further and it becomes the purlieu of the enthusiast. The world was much bigger for most people.

So who’s going to Conflux 9?

One thing that the Internet has made so much easier is flattening the relationships between readers and authors. Twitter, in particular, helps well-known people of all kind interact with their fans. In fact, it makes it easy to see when celebrities are doe-eyed over other celebrities.

Once upon a time, the only real way to do that was a writers’ convention. Well, they still hold those – and I am going to my first multi-day one in just over a week! It is Conflux 9 and promises to be unforgettable. I got to volunteer to be on a panel on the first day called “Birth, life and death in speculative fiction”. Speculative Fiction is particularly good at exploring life transitions and what they may mean. I mean, its very purpose is to speculate…

For the rest of the con I will be attending workshops and panels and generally faffing around.

Remember to say hi!

 

The story is stuck

Ugh.

I have a wonderful starting scene that sets up a lot of promise, especially what my hero thinks about a few key things. I have an outline of where I think I want to take him, mostly to challenge what he thinks about what I’d already revealed. And I have a few more scenes that start the journey.

Problem is, I’m having trouble making this work.

I find it difficult to write a story in patchwork. I prefer to start at the beginning and finish at the end. Not all my stories happen completely that way; there has been a short story where the last scene was written before I’d finished the third last. But mostly I don’t like to leave gaps as I write.

And that’s why I’m struggling. I need to get my characters past the city that they don’t belong in so that the rest of the story can happen. But coming up with things other then deus ex machina is proving oddly difficult. I mean, the hero wants to go to this city, but he’s a farmboy and really has no realistic idea of what a city is like. His pregnant wife is following along, but she doesn’t want to go to a city. Besides, there is a supernatural reason she won’t survive in a city, too. Have I mentioned this is a fantasy adventure story?

I think I need to refresh my memory of my hero’s character. The opening chapter was written months ago, and I think he was a bit more feisty than I’ve portrayed later. I mean, he isn’t supposed to be the sort to follow along behind others: he does decisive, and I’ve robbed him of that. Ah. Yes, he needs to clash hard with the two mercenary friends he’s acquired because they know cities and he doesn’t.

And that’s not even taking into account the wider story where there are (so far!) at least three groups of people looking specifically for him. And he not only has no idea this is happening, but would have no clue as to even why. I have been calling him my hero for a good reason!

So I think he needs to be presented with the fact that staying in the city is the worst thing he can do. Now to actually put in my story why.

Thank you, Internet, for listening!

 

The Edges Of World-Building: Gods

David Eddings is on record as saying that when he designed the world of The Belgariad, he chose a pagan pantheon because it was more interesting than a christian one (“pagan” just means non-christian, by the way). By that, I imagine he meant he preferred a multitude of gods in his world rather than one single one. For the sort of fantasy world he built, one god was just not going to work.

But that’s not necessarily true.

Most fantasy worlds like Eddings’ have a pantheon of gods – several of them in power, who may or may not be related but certainly know about each other and often fight each other (the Greek mythology would be pretty barren if their gods weren’t so ready to fight and trick each other). A pantheon doesn’t have to be huge: Eddings created less than a dozen. Another fantasy writer, Raymond E. Feist, did the same thing. The godly pantheon of Midkemia has only a handful of gods. By contrast, the world of the Forgotten Realms has dozens – then again, there have been dozens of writers over several decades busy creating in that world. But all the gods in the Forgotten Realms still know each other: there is a basic consistency of existence to all three scenarios.

The same also applies to the pantheon in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. Sir Terry has, though, managed to come up with a neat way for new gods to be made. Gods in the Discworld depend on having enough believers. This is how new godlings get power and can also defeat both neighbouring gods and older gods. Likewise, lose enough followers, and a god will die. This is brought home to the formerly great god Om in the book Small Gods, who at the start of the story has just one, single believer. It takes him a while to come to terms with this, and it could therefore be argued that both Brutha and Om share the rôle of protagonist.

Here in the real world, the existence or non-existence of any sort of god-like being(s) is open to controversy. What is not in dispute, however, is that for many centuries, the teachings of both major monotheistic religions – Christianity and Islam – have staunchly refused to acknowledge the existence of other gods. Both are a pantheon of one. This continues in the face of other major world religions that have multiple gods, for example Hinduism.

World-builders often have more interesting tasks on their hands than creating gods. The peoples over there in those mountains need a god? Okay, there’s a suitable one in the list I drew up a month ago. And the merchants from that river will recognise him. All nice and tidy.

When a writer of a fantasy world starts getting seriously into the anthropology of their invention, a simple pantheon might not be enough anymore. In fact, it probably should get a lot more complicated: there is no reason why your world, depending on how large it is, could not have several competing pantheons of gods. There may well be no reason at the outset for them to be compatible, or to even exist. Or you can take it further and make a suitable subset actually exist in your world, even if they aren’t compatible. Unless your story involves the gods themselves, you will probably not have a need to reconcile this.

It comes down to this: if Eddings had chosen a single-god route for The Belgariad, he would have still had had to create “gods” that don’t exist for many of his people to worship. This is what I believe applying modern anthropology to world-building means.

This might not suit your style of story. It might not suit your world. On the other hand, maybe it will.