Tonight marks the close of the 7th day of NaNoWriMo 2011.
So, I have just completed week 3 of this craziness. I had every intention of doing a week 2 report, as well, but I just didn’t have time. You’ll see why in a moment. After day 7, I had 44,717 words, less than 6,000 words shy of “winning” NaNoWriMo. Here are my individual story word-counts as of midnight, November 22nd.
“A Is for Anchor” – 10,574 words – incomplete – Magic Realism
“B Is for Bard” – 10,092 words – incomplete – Fantasy
“C Is for Clowns that Creep Through the Yard” – 5719 words – complete – Horror
“D Is for Dragon” – 6,369 words – complete – Fairy Tale + Humor
“E Is for Egg” – 4,975 words – complete – Science Fiction
“F Is for Fangs that Are Sunk in Your Leg” – 9,039 words – incomplete – Science Fiction
“G Is for Gravesite” – 2,204 words – complete – Fantasy
“H Is for Haunted” – 5,309 words – incomplete – Horror
“I Is for Investigation: Unwanted” – 6,627 words – incomplete – Urban Fantasy
“J Is for Jackpot” – 3,069 words – complete – Dystopian Science Fiction
“K Is for Kiss” – 3,191 words – complete – Fairy Tale
“L Is for Lucky for a Hit or a Miss” – 3,219 words – complete – Dark Fantasy
“M Is for Moons” – 3,378 words – incomplete – Science Fiction + Fantasy
“N Is for Nocturnal” – 4,151 words – complete – Erotic Fantasy
“O Is for Oath of Service Eternal” – incomplete – Fantasy + Humor
“P Is for Prey” – 3,630 words – complete – Science Fiction
“Q Is for Quest” – 1,557 words – incomplete – Fairy Tale + Humor
“R Is for Ritual Performed as a Test” – 4,598 words – complete – Dark Fiction
“S Is for SkullCosm” – 3,872 words – incomplete – Science Fiction
“T Is for Talents” – 3,622 words – complete – Dystopian Science Fiction
“U Is for Unicorn Imbalance” – 1,826 words – complete – Dark Fantasy
If you add in the 617 words of “Fangs” that I wrote and then crossed out because I had chosen the wrong part of the story to start at and the 1527 words of “Nocturnal” that were an interesting science fiction idea that I could not make work before I changed it to Erotic Fantasy, that comes out to a grand total of 101,066 words as of today.
Here’s what the intervening two weeks of writing fast and furious to get to this many words has taught me.
Write through writer’s block. For the first seven stories (the first week), I had definite ideas (minus Anchor). When I sat down to write most of them, I knew the characters, plot, and world, and all I had to do was sit down and let the words out. It was actually fairly easy. I don’t think I have ever enjoyed writing so much as I did that first week. But then for Haunted, Investigation, Kiss, Moon, Prey, Quest, Ritual, and SkullCosm, I had only the vaguest notion of what the story was. At most I had a notion of character and a glimmer of a world. But I sat down at the keyboard and I just started typing, going with the first thing that popped into my head, inventing as I went along. As I went, I was forced to make decisions, and those decisions forced me to make others . . . and then before you know it, I had character, plot, and world. Do I love these stories? Not all of them. :) I think all of them are good ideas, and with a little work after NaNoWriMo, I may be able to pull a better story out of them, and you’ll notice that a lot of those are incomplete. But the important part is that I didn’t let not having a perfectly formed story stop me. I went with my original ideas and made them work, and I look forward to finishing the stories.
Butt in chair. For Jackpot, Lucky, Nocturnal, Oath, Talents, and Unicorn, I had less than no idea when I sat down to write at the beginning of the day. Not even the words for all but two of those. But I let my subconscious work on it, and each time, a story sparked. It’s interesting that of these most recent 14 stories, my favorite six are Jackpot, Lucky, Nocturnal, Oath, Talents, and Unicorn.
Trust your instincts. For Nocturnal, my first glimmer of an idea was involving Nyx, the Greek personification of the Night. I did a lot of research on her, but the story kept turning into erotic fiction, and I couldn’t figure out the POV. So I abandoned it and forced another interpretation, which I then tried to write. I got 1527 words in and said, “No. This isn’t working. This isn’t what I want to write.” So I scrapped it and started over using my original idea of Nyx, but told from the POV of a man she picks up from a bar. I’m not comfortable writing erotic fantasy, but apparently that’s what I needed to write, because that’s what came out. And other than the very last paragraph or two, I really like it.
Two—or sometimes 17—heads are better than one. I needed help on some of my ideas and I enlisted friends to help me out. I used names suggested by my Facebook friends in Dragon. The entire idea for Fangs came from a friend on LiveJournal. Kiss got its twist from yet another friend who made a typo to me in IM while trying to help me out. For Ritual, I used many suggestions from my friends on Facebook, although never in quite the way they probably intended. :) Not only did my friends make direct contributions by coming up with angles I wasn’t seeing (I need to work on that, clearly), but merely opening up for that to happen seems to have gotten my own creative juices flowing more.
I’d like to stress one thing in relation to the first point above. “Writers Block” doesn’t mean you don’t have ideas. It means you don’t have ideas that you can work with right now. Or at least for me, that’s what it means. I had plenty of ideas for, say, the letter J, but nothing that worked for me until a tiny voice in my head said “Jackpot” and showed me the entire story from beginning to end.
That’s pretty much it for weeks 2 through 3. I typed this mostly because I need to keep all these points in mind for the upcoming week. I have nothing at all for V, only a faint glimmer of a world and situation for W(itness), zero for X(enogamy) and Y, and then the beginnings of a notion for Z(ombie).
Tonight marks the close of the 7th day of NaNoWriMo 2011.
When I first started making posts about it back in . . . probably August? Maybe even July? . . . I had come to the decision that I did not want yet another incomplete novel sitting on my hard drive, especially with four current ones in development. It just seemed silly. Irresponsible. Overwhelming. And probably a few other choice adjectives as well.
So I decided to do a collection of 26 short stories. I’ll spare you from me repeating the idea again. The idea was that they were supposed to be short stories. You know, 2000 to 2500 words on average. I’d do one per day, maybe not even in order, and at the end I’d have around 52,000 words. Ample to win NaNoWriMo and it would give me 26 new short stories to play with.
“A Is for Anchor” currently sits at 10,574 words, and it’s not even close to done.
“B Is for Bard” currently has 7,547 words, and is also not complete. I know where I’m going with it, at least.
“C Is for Clowns (that Creep Through Your Yard)” is at 5,700 words even, and is complete.
“D Is for Dragon” boasts 6,369 words, complete.
“E Is for Egg” weighs in at 4,975 words, complete.
“F Is for Fang (that Gets Sunk in Your Leg)” halted at 6,731 and is not complete.1
“G Is for Gravesite” came in at just 2,204 words, complete.
At least one of the stories came in around 2000 words.
This puts me at 44,717 words in just 7 days. If I keep writing at the same rate I’ve been writing so far this month, I will surpass the monthly goal of 50,000 words tomorrow at some point.
To say that this is unexpected would be tantamount to calling the Pacific Ocean “a bit damp.” I had no idea I could write this much in just 7 days. Hell, I had no idea I could write > 7,000 words in one day (a personal best).
In just one week of NaNoWriMo, here is what I have learned:
At no point in my life can I ever again utter the phrase, “I just can’t find the time to write.” That, to put it bluntly, is bullshit. I’m working the same job for the same amount of hours this week as I was two weeks ago. I still have the same social obligations. I haven’t missed anything important that I normally do. The difference is that I didn’t find time to write; I made time to write. I get up a couple of hours early in the morning and I write. Instead of futzing around on Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal, YouTube, Google+, and GoodReads during my “free time,” I write. During lunch when I would normally read a book after finishing my meal, I write. When I come home from work, instead of relaxing with a DVD or reading or listening to podcasts, I write. Do you see a pattern? I certainly do. The thing that is important to me—writing—is what I’m spending time on. Anything less important goes bye-bye. I reiterate that during this week, I did not miss one single social event. I attended both writers group meetings, went to a party, socialized with my housemate, socialized with people at work, spent time with my cats, listened to some podcasts (but only in the car or while working when I cannot otherwise write), kept up in a limited way on Facebook… I intend to attend three writers group meetings this week as well as working an extra hour at work for monthly maintenance on some servers I’m responsible for. But right under all of that on my priorities is writing.
Never again will I be able to utter the phrase “I just don’t have any ideas.” That is also bullshit. The trick isn’t having ideas, it’s turning them off. The truth is, I get ideas for stories all the time. Usually I dismiss them because they aren’t something I want to write right now or don’t go with anything I’m working on. Sometimes I write them down for ‘later,’ but we all know ‘later’ is never coming. Well, I needed 26 fresh ideas for NaNoWriMo and with the exception of a few tough letters of the alphabet, the problem hasn’t been finding an idea, it’s been finding a good one among all the crappy ones. For ‘S’ as an example, I had to sift through Sulfur, Saturn, Sinister, Silo, Silver, Sylph, Sand, Scraps, Solid…for each word that occurred to me, the tiny sliver of an idea would come with it. Was Silver a story about werewolves? Did Solid involve an alien able to exist in any state of matter? Did Silo have to do with an abandoned missile silo in a post-apocalyptic world? Maybe. Some of the others were probably just as good. But when Skullcosm finally came to me, I knew that was my S-word. And even inside that world, the story itself could take any of a number of shapes, one of which I’ll pick. Perhaps at the moment of coming up with a character name on the morning of the 19th. So, yeah. I have ideas. I just discard most of them. This week has taught me that some of those stories should probably get written sooner and not later, and certainly not never.
I also know that I cannot sustain 6000+ words per day. It is too wrist-intensive for one thing, but it also promotes quantity over quality, which is just fine and dandy for NaNoWriMo; not at any other time, however. Sure, there’s something to be said for getting a story down that’s way too long and then whittling away all the parts that aren’t the story I want to tell and leaving the only the bits that are behind. And that will most certainly be done with each of these when November is in the rearview and Christmas is hurtling ever closer.
December is always about the loss of momentum for me. NaNoWriMo is over! Whew! Time to parTAAAAAY! And by ‘parTAAAAAY’ I mean goof off. But I am going to try to make an effort to at least keep the momentum going.
Sometime in December, I’ll be recording myself reading one of my stories for a podcast. I haven’t decided which one, yet, but I’m heavily leaning on “D Is for Dragon” or “G Is for Gravesite” right now. It’s a pretty low-key podcast called The Quillian Chronicles, and is produced by members of my Second Life writers group as a way to foster participation by producing our stories in audio format for free distribution to the listening public.
Have I mentioned that I loathe the sound of my recorded voice? <sigh>
I had a false start with this one and got 617 words in before realizing I had started at the wrong spot and with the wrong POV, so I started over. I count the 617 words in my total word-count (this is NaNoWriMo and every word counts), but not in the story total given here.
I was driving my car to work, listening to podcasts, as I do every day. Today’s podcast happened to be one I’ve been putting off listening to because it’s lengthy. Over an hour and a half, and calls itself an interview with Jim Butcher. Butcher is, currently1, my favorite living author, creator of the fantastic urban fantasy series The Dresden Files.
The “podcast” turned out to be a recording of a radio show. The interview with Butcher started over an hour in, so I was doing a lot of fast-forwarding over a lot of inane babble.
When I finally got to the interview, only one of the three hosts of the show has read any of his books, but at least that one person is asking intelligent questions that indicate he did, indeed, read the books.
One of the questions was about vampires. In Butcher’s world, there are four “courts” of vampires, roughly divided into “Stoker-esque, Dracula-type” vampires (the Black Court), blood-sucking demon-types (the Red Court), psychic vampires who consume emotion and sexual energy (the White Court), and asian vampires (the Jade Court, which has not yet made an appearance in any of his books).
Now, when I designed my urban fantasy world, I decided up front that I wanted it to have a kind of scientific feel. No ghosts, fairies, demons, angels, gods, etc. And therefore no curses, which means no vampires or werewolves. Mostly, no sexy vampires or sexy werewolves. I’ve had my fill of those.
My one-line description of my series is, “It’s an urban fantasy set in modern Atlanta where magic works, but there are no sexy vampires or sexy werewolves.” People generally say, “Oh, thank God” at that, which seems to indicate to me that other people are getting tired of the whole ‘sexy cursed creature’ trend in fantasy, as well.
So, to re-iterate, my entire premise is based on how vampires and werewolves are simply not allowed. Just so we’re clear on that.
So, I’m listening to Jim talk . . . and my subconscious mind—which is generally free to wander indiscriminately while I’m doing something boring like driving, showering, or eating—looks up at me and grins. “Mutation,” it says, and then goes back to . . . I don’t know, playing jacks with Bigfoot or whatever it is that it does in there.
I, of course, knew immediately what this meant, because we share a brain. But for those of you out there who aren’t me, allow me to elaborate.
The way my magic system works is kind of complex and convoluted and I won’t go fully into it, here (because I might decide to change something later), but basically, you need energy to do work. Each person (animal, even plants) has energy. There are basically three types of magic users to draw on this energy: psionic, magic, and necromancers. Psionics draw on their own life energy, mages draw on their own and others’ life energy (slowly, as it’s naturally given off), and necromancers draw on their own energy, others’ energy, and can absorb the sum total of energy “released at the moment of death” as well.2 There’s a whole bunch of stuff about who can and can’t use what, how they access it, how the three mutations can all exist in the same person and what that means, etc. that I will probably never put in a story, but which I have to know for consistency.
What my subconscious was telling me is that there’s a fourth type who can draw energy forcefully, not all at once, but over a longer period of time than “at the moment of death,” but much higher rate than “as it is given off normally.”3
Yep. Vampires.
My subconscious is subverting the entire premise of my series.
But it does open certain very intriguing plot lines…No! No, no, no!
Talk me down, people. Talk. Me. Down. Before my subconscious whispers something that makes werewolves possible within my system.
And by ‘currently,’ I mean currently in the sense of being my favorite, not currently living. He’s younger than I am. He should be around a while. :)
The astute observers among you will no doubt be wondering what the “catch” is. With that much power out there for the use, what’s to stop magic-using people from taking over? And the answer is that there are serious physical consequences to using any type of magic, and there’s an addictive quality as well.
Which implies, of course, that some people give off more, some less, and others can hoard energy like a battery.
References
As you may be aware (because I keep telling you), NaNoWriMo rapidly approacheth.
I’ve been hanging out on the forums a little this year, hoping to participate a bit more than I did last year (which was not at all). I ran across a whole forum for asking questions. Otherwise known as “The Reference Desk.” These are questions where you’ve exhausted what you can find out yourself and are now hoping someone else participating in the forums is an expert—or is at least knowledgeable—in that area.
This is why I love writers. There’s a quote I’ve seen recently, but I could not find the source, no matter how I flogged Google, but Rick Castle on the awesome series Castle paraphrased it nicely.
There are two kinds of folks who sit around thinking about how to kill people: psychopaths and mystery writers. I’m the kind that pays better.
Here’s a sampling of some of the subject lines that I find particularly amusing.
Help with a new fictional element or molecular compound
Scars – from accidents, in non-obvious places
Anyone born in the forties
Things that knock together
Why would a married couple cook two different meals simultaneously?
Decomposition of Human Bodies?
How Does One Sustain Optic Nerve Damage?
Werecat Myths
Pregnancy – Funny Moments
Poison Which Doesn’t Quite Kill You
Tourism in Egypt
Slit Veins – How Long Do You Have Until You Die?
Killing Someone to Drive Down Stock Prices
Maybe it’s just me, but I find that extremely funny. And this goes on for more than 32 pages of threads, where each page displays 20 threads.
I honestly hope that I’m never suspected of committing a murder, because if the authorities were to obtain my search history from Google, it would be all over. I’ve searched many topics similar to the ones above, such as “What chemicals are used in lethal injection?” “How long does it take pentobarbital to kill an adult male?” “How long does a person live if shot in the lung?” And that old standard, “Where to dispose of a body.”
That kind of thing. This forum and those thread topics tells me that these are mah peepz, yo.
I have a feeling I will be using the forums a lot this year. :)
As it turns out, H is not for Hive, as I thought it would be. H Is for Haunting. The whole story popped into my head last night while I was dropping off to sleep, and I managed to retain a good bit of it, and am writing down ideas in my Moleskine notebook (of awesomeness) as the day goes. I was stuck on H for days. Maybe the remaining 17 letters will come faster.
Moleskine
<This is where you all say, “Hi, Gary!” at the same time.>
<No, go on and do it.>
<I’m not going to continue until you do it.>
<I’m waaaaiiiiitiiiiiing.>
<Thank you.>
Some people collect unicorns. Some collect turtles. Some collect mementos1 from a favorite movie or TV show, or autographs.
Others collect everything, and we call these people “hoarders.”
I have always been a fan of notebooks, notepads, clipboards, different types of paper . . . as far back as I can remember. I have a whole closet in my office at home replete with this kind of thing. It is with some degree of difficulty that I’m able to stop myself from buying more even though I have enough to last me many, many years.
Of course, when I buy really cool notebooks or notepads, I don’t want to use them because . . . well, they’re really cool. Somewhere in my house I have a notebook where the covers are made of computer circuit boards sanded smooth. No one has ever seen this because it’s really cool and using it would reduce the really coolness.
You see how this could become a type of trap, I’ll bet.
The other night, I went to a special Thursday night session of my Tuesday night writers group. I thought I might need to take notes, but alas! alack! I had no notebook. At all. (Because all of my really cool notebooks are locked in a closet in my office at home.)
The book store didn’t, of course, carry simple legal pads, which is all I wanted, really.
But what they did have were Moleskine notebooks. A lot of them. I neeeeeeded something to write on. Really. So I bought a three-pack of dark red Moleskine notebooks. But this time, I was determined to actually use them even though they are really cool.
Of course, I needed to take no notes at all. So at the end of a more-than-two-hour meeting, my Moleskine was unsullied by ink or graphite.
I wanted it sullied. I wanted it sullied in the worst possible way.2 But every moment of unsullied . . . ness was one moment closer to these three really cool Moleskine notebooks finding their way into my closet.
I brought them to work with me on Friday morning, thinking surely I’d find a way to sully them. Or at least one of them. Surely.
But . . . I didn’t want to use them for work. (There. You see how this starts? A really cool notebook shouldn’t have mundane things written in it, like notes from a silly meeting or phone conference. A really cool notebook needs to have really cool things written in it.)
When I went to lunch, I took one of them with me. The intent was to use the notebook to work through some ideas for my alphabet series of short stories I talked about the other day. I was stuck at the time on the letter F.
I took along my favorite pen. (Which, incidentally, I also seldom use because it’s really cool and I might lose it or chip it or damage it in some way. See how this goes?)
Well . . . I did it. I wrote “F Is for Fangs” at the top of the first page and . . . and . . . took notes! In my really cool Moleskine notebook using my really cool ACME Writing Instrument. And then put “D Is for Dragon” on the next page. And “H Is for Hive” on the one after that. And “G Is for Gravesite” on the one after that.
Sullied! I have sullied my Moleskine notebooks! I even crossed some stuff out so it’s not perfect.
If you knew how big a step this is, you would not now be making that face and thinking about rotating one hand at your temple in the international symbol for “one ring short of a binder” or making that “cuckoo” sound. Yes, I know what you were thinking. I mean, come on . . . it was obvious.
I thought I had lost said sullied notebook, but today I found it and made some more story notes, including a snippet of dialogue for “D Is for Dragon,” which I’m going to have a lot of fun writing.
One page for each letter of the alphabet will use 26 whole pages.
Oh, and Z? It’s for Zombie, and these are the stories that keep sleep from me. “Zombie” and “from me” kind of rhyme . . .
Disclaimer: This post may not be used to establish or confirm any lack of sanity that may be hinted at by the contents thereof.
Every time I see this word, my mind says, “The Fresh-Maker!”
Well, that’s not true. The worst possible way would be to give them to Snooki and have her pen her next best-seller on them. Oog. I think I just threw up a little in my mouth. But I digress.
Linear
Golly! Two posts in one day? Will wonders never cease?
My posts here are automatically cross-posted to my LiveJournal account. Over there, one of my long-time friends very casually gave me “F Is for Fangs. I got bit in the leg” to give my subconscious a little help on the stanza currently troubling me.
Now, I had already thought of “Fangs” and rejected it. “There are way too many stories about vampires,” I thought to myself, then told my subconscious to just ignore “vampires and fangs” and go on.
I said as much to my commenter. She then said, “Oh, I never thought of vampires. I was just thinking Dragon → Egg → (baby dragon) Fangs . . .”
Well, duh. Even though that’s not something I can use because the Egg story that I want to write has nothing to do with the Dragon story that comes before it, I never saw the progression. It was staring me right in the face, too. Either me or my subconscious should have seen this.
Then, just as I was getting over that, she added one more comment. “You know what else has fangs? Snakes. :)”
Again, duh. You know, I’ve been a snake online for so long that you would think that would have been the first thing that occurred to me. But no, “fangs” to me implied only vampires.
This comes back to something Holly Lisle recently said in one of her excellent writing newsletters. She was talking about a technique for generating story ideas that she calls “Calling Down Lightning.” It’s when your conscious (left brain) says, “I need to write a story about <topic> of about <word count> words, and I need it by <deadline>.” The subconscious (right brain) hears this, cogitates on it, and starts tossing out concepts.
The conscious then either says, “Yes,” “No,” or “Maybe . . .”, and the subconscious goes back to refine the idea or provide new ones.
It’s a pretty good personification of the process creative types go through when trying to generate ideas.
In that newsletter where she introduces the process to her readers, she tells a story of how it broke down for her. She needed a “paranormal romance” idea, but told her subconscious to avoid a certain topic because she already had a couple of other stories about that. Her subconscious went into a four-day sulk, refusing to give her anything at all to work with.
Because her conscious tried to limit her subconscious. Exactly what I did when I said, “F, but not ‘fangs’ because I don’t want to write a vampire story.” So my subconscious mind may have gone off in a huff and worked on something else just to spite me.
Or I’m overanalyzing and my shipment of ideas from Poughkeepsie simply hasn’t arrived this week.
I don’t know how I got so locked into “fangs = vampires,” but it clearly has caused me to miss a couple of good ideas. Which my commenter helped me see.
See, NaNoWriMo is coming up soon, and I have 26 short stories to plan out. I am flogging my brain on what to do with ‘e’ and ‘f’ (the story I want to tell could go with either letter, but I can’t come up with a suitable rhyme for the other one, no matter which one I assign the story to). I was at lunch, reading a book on writing horror, and hoping that my subconscious mind was hard at work on the ‘e’ & ‘f’ problem. Oh, it was hard at work, all right. But I digress.
The passage I read is as follows and is reproduced without any sort of permission whatsoever, but I think it’s covered by fair use.
But it’s the job of writers to imagine how it would feel to be all their characters, however painful that may sometimes be. It may be a lack of that compassion that has led some writers to create children who are evil simply because they’re children, surely the most deplorable cliché of the field.
I got to the end of that and was interrupted by my subconscious. It tapped me on the shoulder, metaphorically speaking, and very quietly handed me a memo, then went back into its (dank, dark) lair.
It wasn’t about ‘e’ and ‘f’. Not at all. In fact, what it was was a completely reworked motivation for my antagonist character in the novel Perdition’s Flames on which I’m currently working, and am about 60,000 words into.
So, you know, now is just the perfect time to inform me that my motivation for this character has been all wrong, and that I need to introduce yet another character . . . in chapter 4 or so.
I’m writing chapter 21.
To be fair, my subconscious knows that I needed to introduce this character in this book to establish her so that my main character and she could have a relationship in the second novel. But still, really, subconscious? Really?
So I wrote all that down in my ever-handy notebook. And now I really need Mr. Subconscious-guy to go ahead and work on this stanza:
D Is for Dragon,
E Is for Egg;
F Is for [Something], [a phrase ending with a rhyme for ‘egg’].
Or, alternatively
D Is for Dragon,
E Is for [I don’t even know];
F Is for Fertile, [some phrase ending in a word that rhymes with the E-word]
So, get right on that, Mr. Subconscious. I know you’re listening. You always listen.
Stage
In my last post about Orson Scott Card’s MICE quotient, I talked about The Idea. As I said in that first post, MICE represents the four elements every story must have at least one (but preferably more) of: Milieu (Setting), Idea, Character, and Event.
The next one of the four items I want to talk about is Milieu, or Setting. As I said before, Card only chose “milieu” instead of “setting” because SICE doesn’t make a word.
There are a lot of stories I can think of that are inextricably rooted in the setting. The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit spring immediately to mind. These stories were as much about Middle Earth as they were about the characters and the events and ideas that they involve. Mirkwood, The Shire, Tom Bombadil’s wood, Smaug’s lair, Khazad Dûm, the Ents’ forest, Mordor…such riches of setting, and so beautifully described by Tolkien. Chances are, if you’ve read them—and if you’re reading this and you haven’t read them, then stop reading this right now and go read them—as soon as you read the words “Mirkwood” or “Smaug’s lair,” you knew exactly what I was talking about, right down to the creep factor. Because they were so vividly described.
Another that fits in this category is Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Green Sky trilogy. Again, if you haven’t read these wonderful books, go do so. The world of Green Sky is vividly described, and is as integral to the story as any of the characters. The characters are of Green Sky and the stories evolve from Green Sky.
The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis. I mean . . . come on. I’d still go to Narnia as readily today—as a 46-year-old with a mortgage and several thousand dollars in credit card debt—as I would have as a 12-year-old suffering through the Chicken Pox first reading them. Because Lewis made the world of Narnia come alive for me. It is a real place to me, every bit as three-dimensional as my own hometown. And I think I’d recognize Cair Paravel, the Beaver’s Lodge, the Lamp Post, or The Stone Table if I saw them today . . . off on the horizon . . . beckoning.
I think therein lies the key. To matter, the setting of the story must be at least as integral to the story as any of the other aspects. The characters must exist in the world described by the setting, and the events and ideas must interweave with it. Unless you have this, your story could literally happen anywhere.
Would Dune have been as good if it had been set on a lush, forest world like Yoda’s Dagobah? Perhaps. But it would not have been Dune; it would have been some other work. Because the desert planet with its Fremen and its worms and its place in the empire were the solid foundation upon which the story we know—again, go read it if you haven’t—was built.
If Idea is the framework of a story, then surely Milieu must be the foundation. And without a strong foundation, it doesn’t matter how sturdy the framework is.
As much as the stories I mentioned above depend on their settings to be the stories we know and love, there are those for which the setting is more of a convenience, and it’s fairly easy to tell when that is the case.
Take, for instance, The Belgariad and The Malloreon by David Eddings. I thoroughly enjoyed all ten books and can’t recommend them highly enough . . . but they did have a certain sense to them. A sense of, “I drew this map, and I spent a lot of time on it, and by god I’m going to make you read about every square centimeter of it!”
I was going to mention some settings from the books to see if they’d immediately put as much of a picture in your head as “Mirkwood” or “Narnia” did. But the only ones I could think of were “the farm where Garion grew up with ‘Aunt Pol,'” “Belgarath’s tower,” and “the forest of the dryads.” I can’t even remember the names of these places. Ten books. I read all ten book—multiple times, I admit—and I can’t recall one single place name that is more than a suggestion. But I remember the events, the ideas, and mostly the characters. As far as Milieu goes, these two series could have been set in Cleveland and it would probably have been just as entertaining.
Well, OK, maybe not Cleveland.
Sometimes it works for other reasons. Take The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever and the sequel series both by Stephen R. Donaldson. He spends a good amount of time describing how wonderful The Land is in the first book because his character, Thomas Covenant, is a leper in the real world, but in The Land, he’s not. So everything there is new and fresh and he experiences it all in a rush of heady abandon. And in the second trilogy, The Land has been destroyed and it is only in the ugly contrast to the first books’ descriptions of The Land that we are led to despair as much as Covenant does to see how it has changed. He uses his Milieu as a tool to show us, the reader, how everything has changed, and to make us feel the change as badly as his character.
C. S. Lewis does this in The Last Battle, as well. We all know how wonderful Narnia is, but in the last book, the wonderful Narnia of old is . . . diminished. The dryads are dying because their trees are being chopped down. Aslan is believed to be a myth because He hasn’t visited in so long. The horrible creature Tashlan has been gathering followers, and as readers, we are as upset as the characters living there because our Narnia has been blighted.
Sometimes the Milieu can take on a life of its own. For instance, in Star Trek, the Milieu is a utopian future wherein all mankind is happy and fulfilled. Aliens live and work side-by-side with humans on Earth and other planets. Transporter technology, replicator technology, holodeck technology, and a myriad of other technologies have made everything perfect for everyone everywhere. No one wants for anything they can’t get instantly.
So what stories can we possibly tell? There can’t be a story about a regular guy living on a regular planet with a regular job because he can’t want for anything. He can push a button and get whatever he wants, whenever he wants it. So the only stories that can be told are the ones on the fringes of the utopia. The frontier. During conflicts with alien races who—for whatever reason—want to destroy the Federation Way of Life™.
Superman would be bored in the Federation. He’d have to become a Q to have any fun whatsoever.
This is why every episode of every Star Trek series was an exercise in how to subvert the utopia to get to a problem. We have infinite power . . . but what if the dilithium crystal submatrix decrystalized because of an isolinear ovolithic radiation discharge that destabilized the anamorphic subspace field? Chaos, that’s what! Or so we were led to believe, until the end of the 45-minute episode, at which point the problem was solved by the application of good old-fashioned human—or alien—ingenuity and technology.
Or, you know . . . Wesley.
I lay most of this on the utopian society in which the Star Trek shows and novels were set. (Which, incidentally, is what was intended. It was literally Gunsmoke In Space™, so the whole ‘frontier’ thing wasn’t an accident.) Where there is no conflict, there simply is no story. The biblical story of Solomon and the two women who claimed the same baby could not have happened in the world of Star Trek. Solomon could simply use the transporter to create an exact replica/clone of the baby. Then both women could have the baby. Problem solved. No wisdom required.
I could (continue to) expound at length on Star Trek, and drag in the three Stargate series and Babylon 5 as well. My point is this: when the world—the Setting, the Milieu—is well-developed, it and the characters, events, and ideas will be inextricable from one another.
I seem to have stumbled into writing urban fantasy. You can’t talk about urban fantasy without Milieu. That’s the ‘urban’ part. The city in which the stories are set is an inextricable part of the lives of the characters. The events take place in that city.
True Blood, The Dresden Files, the Greywalker Series, the Anita Blake series, the Kate Daniels series, the Kitty Norville series . . . all of these take place in a known city or one very similar to one we know. The authors weave the stories into the real cities, overlaying them with magic and fantastical creatures, but they are still Chicago, Seattle, St. Louis, Atlanta, and Denver. True Blood takes place in a fictional small town in Louisiana called Bon Temps, but anyone from the south will recognize the town as being like every other small town in the south. With very few name changes, it could be set in my hometown of Eutaw, Alabama. (Population: 1800! SaaaaaaLUTE!)
The difference between Milieu and Idea is, I believe, that while Idea can ‘carry’ a story by itself, Milieu can’t.
Not entirely. Dragon’s Egg by Robert Forward is set on the surface of a neutron star. I mean wow! But he had to have characters, ideas, and events to make me want to keep reading past the first few pages. Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott is almost entirely Milieu, but to carry it, he has to develop equally interesting characters and events and ideas (mostly ideas). Vernor Vinge’s Zones of Thought books depend deeply on his Milieu, but again, without interesting characters, ideas, and events, it wouldn’t be readable.
Imagine a novel written like a travelogue. Travelogues are fun if you’re, say, in Greece, and you want to know more about the place. But then, you are the character having your own ideas and making your own events. You wouldn’t read the travelogue of Greece if you weren’t either in Greece or going soon.
Unless someone comes up with a really interesting second-person-POV Choose Your Own Adventure book in which exploring a place is the only goal, I don’t really see Milieu as being capable of carrying a story. Not a very long one, anyway.
So, to sum up: Milieu = foundation. Idea = framework. We still have Character and Event to go. Stay tuned!
M = Milieu (Setting, but S.I.C.E. doesn’t spell anything useful.)
I = Idea
C = Character
E = Event
Good stories will have more than one of these present. Novels may have all four. But one will usually stand dominant above the rest.
I was thinking about this as I was driving to work the other day listening to a totally different podcast (Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing). They were talking on that podcast about whether published authors ever give negative book reviews.
And I got to thinking about what makes even a book I wasn’t overly enthused about worth reading all the way through.
I can forgive a lot of things, but I think Card’s M.I.C.E. quotient is a pretty good indicator of what I won’t forgive.
In this post, I’ll talk about Idea, because it’s what came to mind first, and I think it’s the most unforgivable deficiency in these genres when it’s not there. Subsequent posts will deal with the other three components.
CSISThe July challenge for The Quillians was to write 250 to 350 words inspired by a song. We had to postpone the ‘judging’ meeting twice because the first time, only two people had entered, and the second time, our Fearless Leader–Luta in-game–didn’t show up. Speculation about where she was ran rather rampant. I suggested that the only thing that could keep her from us was that she had been kidnapped by pirates. Or perhaps clowns.
Or pirate clowns.
One thing led to another, and the challenge for August was to write a 350 word story explaining just where Luta was. :)
As usual, I was given a word count, and I met said word count exactly. So here is my entry in the “Where’s Luta?” challenge.
Oh, I should mention something: Luta is Canadian. From Nova Scotia, specifically. That will make the story make more sense.
Stephen Harper, brows beetled, chewed his lower lip. “Are you sure it has to be her? She hates it every time she’s activated, and besides that, it’s Monday.”
“Oh, for the love of God, Steve. If you’re afraid to call her, just hand me the phone and I’ll do it! Canada could be on the brink of ruin, and you’d worry about one woman being irritated with you.”
Not just one woman, he thought.
His wife stood, hands on hips, glaring at him through narrowed eyes, her foot tapping soundlessly on the carpet. He supposed she was right. It wasn’t every day that an agent so deep undercover was activated, but this one was special. He picked up the phone.
* * *
Luta folded laundry with one hand while checking her daughter’s math homework with the other. “No, honey, you need to carry the two,” she said as she checked the clock again. Only a half hour to go.
The phone rang, interrupting her thoughts. Oh, for the love of…it’s nearly 10 on a Monday. What now?
She laid down the sheet she had been folding, and, dodging dogs and trailing a daughter with an open notebook and a pencil, she marched upstairs and into her office. The phone blared twice more. If I answer it, it’s going to be something bad, and I have a Quillians meeting on Second Life. I can’t let them down!
It rang twice more before she picked it up. With a heavy sigh, she said, “Hello?”
“Um…” came a harried, tentative voice, then a fumbling sound. She thought she heard someone say, “Really? This is the activation phrase?”
“Hel-lo?” she said, emphasizing each syllable.
“Yes, um…’Yo ho ho and a big red nose.'”
Luta’s face, which had been a mask of irritation and impatience, instantly relaxed into one of supreme calm, her eyes narrowed. “Prime Minister. This had better be damned good. Last time—”
“I-I know, Luta, but…it’s that situation in Moose Jaw.”
She closed her eyes. Crap. I thought I took care of that last time. “Tell me.”
“Well, [REDACTED]
I knew from the moment I came up with the idea that the last word of the story had to be [REDACTED]. :)
Anyway, I presume this will be judged toward the end of August, or possibly the first Monday in September. Wait. What is that in Canadian?
