The Edges Of World-Building: Water.

Aqueduct of Pegões, Tomar, Portugal (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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Most, if not all of my readers will be accustomed to having clean running water readily available to them. Kitchen, laundry, bathroom, garden – the supply of water in developed countries (especially urban and suburban areas) is almost universal.

But it wasn’t always like that.

This loose series of blog posts has, admittedly, a bit of a focus on fantasy world-building, as that’s my preference. And a lot of fantasy fiction has the European middle ages as its basis. And during that time and for quite a long time afterward, clean drinking water was not a sure thing. Whilst it made sense for a single town to pull water out of the river on the upriver side and put their sewage in the downstream side, what about the next town down the river? And the next?

When the colony of Sydney was founded, we had this kind of problem. There was a nice clean stream flowing down into the harbour that was quickly overrused. People were trying to pull water out of it right next to where others were putting waste into it. Within a few decades, the first of a series of increasingly large engineering efforts to secure clean water for the burgeoning colony were begun. The Tank Stream now runs in a tunnel underneath the heart of the CBD and most of Sydney’s clean water comes from an large dam some fifty miles or more to the west.

But this isn’t a feat of industrialised society. The Romans were widely lauded for their aqueducts capable of transporting clean water many miles to their cities. Rome alone had more than half-a-dozen aqueducts delivering water to the city. Importantly, the Romans had programs for maintenance and repair and prided themselves on their public baths. Yes, public baths. Household plumbing was likely beyond the Roman’s ability, and possibly beyond what they could imagine. But their whole society viewed personal cleanliness and privacy quite differently to our current western secular society.

Of course, in an invented world, you can create as much or as little of this as you wish. Quite how your fantasy world gets its water to those who need it isn’t necessary to describe or even design in detail. However, you probably should be aware of it. A city of two millions souls with huge public fountains and baths would work situated in a fertile landscape within a hundred miles of snow-capped mountains. The same city would ring false situated on a desert coast with no river in sight. Unless you had designed some magical source of water (it has happened).

Likewise, how water is made available to your world’s characters can drive the story. Public baths can be could for cladestine meetings and illicit hookups in ways that could be quite different in today’s world. The frequency of bathing could be a plot point. Amongst other things, it has an effect on how often they change their clothes. Or wash them.

Or cook. The cottages of Lancre in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, if they have an indoor pump will have it in the scullery. This contributes directly to the house design: the washing is done in one room, but the cooking is done in another. This is world-building in the small.

Where your water comes from has a subtle and powerful influence on how a world works. And I’ve barely touched the subject.

 

Related articles

• The history of the Roman Aqueducts (nathandodson.wordpress.com)
• Roman Aqueducts (sheilagarnace.wordpress.com)
• H20 (makinmovesformissions.wordpress.com)

NaNoWriMo Is Coming! (again)

A writer. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Do you want to get the novel you know lurking inside you out onto the page? Feel like doing it within just 30 days? Great! Welcome to National Novel Writing Month! Well, actually, NaNoWriMo, as it is known for short, is November and it’s international, not just the USA. And with hundreds of thousands of people all over the world participating, it is definitely on the radar at many publishers. Just don’t sent them your first draft.

Amongst other things, NaNoWriMo has possibly popularised the term panster. This refers to ‘writing by the seat of your pants’ – kind of a no-belt, no-braces, no-safety-harness approach to writing. The opposite is a planner, which is what most writing courses teach. Many many writers attempting NaNoWriMo start with just an idea in their head and then spend a month spewing out undirected fiction, creating characters, scenery and story as they go. And over the course of the month, the NaNoWriMo forums acquire more and more posts from writers who discover their characters going off in unexpected directions. And towards the end of November there is a shift to writers who start discovering their finished work is really quite crap.

However, one of the really good things about NaNoWriMo is that for a lot of people it shows them that they can create fiction. There is a kind of “unstopping the blockage” that happens when you want to write fifty thousand words in thirty days. That’s nearly seventeen hundred a day and for many people, that is somewhere between one and two hours of writing. Each day. Newcomers who used to struggle to write five hundred often develop their skills needed for ten or a hundred times that through sheer practice. And it is only through practice that it happens. It is quite simply true that the more you write, the more you can write. A thousand words used to feel like an awful lot to me. Now it doesn’t. Not for a story. It can be easy to underestimate the value of this.

Still, one of the recurring criticisms of NaNoWriMo is that it doesn’t encourage writers to plan. That’s not the same as discouraging them from planning. It’s just that the program is focussed around writing and provides little or no support for designing the shape of a novel beforehand. (There is also little support for editing, which can range from fixing typos, tense and terminology, to wholesale re-writing of 99% of the work. But that’s a separate problem.)

And planning does have to be done beforehand to some extent. I know of an author who plans his NaNoWriMo novels over a couple of months from around August. He goes as far as chapter and scene breakdowns and big charts about what is intended to happen. When he reaches November 1, it is  a fairly straightforward matter to turn all this structure into fiction, often to the 85,000 word mark. He has written and self-published five novels this way.

So what I’m trying to say is that if you think you want to have a serious go at writing a novel in the month of November, you should already be halfway through your planning!

I’m not kidding.

Related articles

• 2013 NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) Calendar (melorajohnson.wordpress.com)
• NaNoWriMo (thethoughtsofanerdgirl.wordpress.com)

The Edges Of World-Building: Other Resources.

The writing community is getting better at sharing with other writers How To Do Things, and especially How To Not Get Something Badly Wrong.

I’ve recently come across a Tumblr blog which offers articles about some of the less obvious things to think about when writing. It’s called Write World. And due to the way Tumblr works, the latest article, about fashion in fiction, re-blogged from another blog. It is interesting about a topic that doesn’t come up all that often.

What interesting blogs about writing do you follow?