Category Archives: Writing

Sci-Fi, Writing

World Building Pt. 1 – The Butterfly Effect

Writing an original work can be hard, especially in genres that present not just original characters and themes but entire worlds. Speculative fiction genres like fantasy, scifi, and even urban fantasy to a lesser extent, feature a great deal of legwork to make something feel believable. I recently wrote about how you would write the future in a realistic fashion, and about how you could introduce dragons into a non-magical world, but both of these are just fragments of a much larger concept that could use some attention.

There are many tutorials out there about how to write good characters and how to make situations feel more plausible, but very rarely do we go to the grand scale of building the entire world these characters would live in. This, in part, is because world building isn’t something you have to do in most genres – the world was already built for you. You don’t have to go to great lengths to build the world around a period piece taking place in the Victorian era. Instead, for those genres, you just have the one piece of advice: “research”.

But for us in the more fantastic genres, there’s a lot of work that we have to go through to make things really flow for our audience. Often we are using old tropes presented by our predecessors to try to assemble them like lego blocks to fill in that world. Sometimes, we may even go out of our way to create an alternative to the tropes we’ve already seen, but inevitably we will still fall into a well worn groove despite our efforts. After all, if you’re using parts of a world created before you and then writing a story that fits the human perspective, you’re going to have a high chance of hitting something that someone else has already done. This is a great deal of why so many fantasy and sci-fi stories read the same.

So how do you create something that feels “fresh” without having to completely reinvent the wheel? Solid world building. Continue reading World Building Pt. 1 – The Butterfly Effect →

FICTION, Mythology, Writing

Mythology Monday: Holy Water?

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Throughout history and across all folklore there are creatures which are supernaturally powerful and capable of doing great harm to mankind. They may be undead, they may be immortal, or they may be invincible to all mortal injury. But as these stories come to light there is invariably also a weakness that they possess, a personal kryptonite which prevents them from being able to just destroy human civilization entirely. Previously I discussed why silver possesses it’s mythical ability to ward off evil, but there are plenty of elements which can do the same.

One of the most common of these mystical weaknesses is, as the title says, “holy water”. There’s been a long history of water being used as a means of cleansing evil and of purifying darkness. We often see it being used to ward away evil, anoint the living, and wash away someone’s sins – especially when religion is applied. But some creatures have had weaknesses to water even before religion was applied and some of these weaknesses don’t even require that they come in contact with it.

Why is it that some stories of faeries say they can’t cross the sea and stories of vampires insist that they can’t cross running water without the help of another? Clearly these sources of water aren’t sanctified like the water being splashed around by a priest. Yet these bodies of water hold the same sort of sway over these creatures despite this lack of “holy”. Is it really the “holy” part of “holy water” that is doing the work in folklore, or is it the water?

That’s where the fun begins…. Continue reading Mythology Monday: Holy Water? →

Observations, Writing

Character vs Plot

When not bouncing off the walls, hating the thing we wrote a few days ago, or daydreaming about fictional people, writers like to talk about things. This is no surprise, we’re essentially professional communicators (or bullshitters) and it’s in our DNA to want to chat about every opinion we have. Inevitably, this leads to us talking about reading and writing at some point. Few times do you talk to another reader or writer without the topic turning towards that at some point. But when we do, there are some debates which appear regularly.

What defines literature vs other forms of prose? Are prequels completely lacking tension, or can you create something powerful in the smaller moments? Are genres guidelines or just methods to organize our shelves? If you’re a writer, you’ve argued with someone about at least one of these. But another one that tends to come up a lot is the time honored question:

“Characters or plot – which should drive your story?” Continue reading Character vs Plot →

Writing

The Realistic Dragon

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[Updated 6/24/18: A few corrections due to outdated information on Pterosaurs brought to my attention by a reader]

One of the most common ideas across human history has been the idea of the dragon. Their appearance, personality, and origins change wildly from one culture to the next, but they as an entity always seem to exist. There are dragons from Europe, Asia and Central America. People have equated several serpent deities to dragons over time. And sometimes, we end up finding creatures that make us stop and think, “yeah, ok, that could be a dragon.”

komodo

But how likely would it be for something like that to actually exist in the world we know? When I was younger I watched several small documentaries about the idea of dragons being able to exist in our world and they all approached it with the general idea of how an exact kind of dragon would be able to get beyond physical limitations. The premise is somewhat sound but it comes at it a bit unscientifically. Too often we fall into the old habits of apologetics where we try to bend science to match our personal vision rather than the other way around.

What would happen to dragons if we approached it the other direction? Continue reading The Realistic Dragon →

Sci-Fi, Writing

Writing Sci-fi: Safe Assumptions of Alien Life

When writing fantastic adventures through space, it’s inevitable in most cases that you’re going to have them step out of that ship and encounter something not of this world. They could find the ruins of an ancient civilization. They could find an unknown spacecraft not of any design they’ve ever seen. And, of course, they could just run into some…

aliens

Yes, aliens, they’re everywhere in space no matter what you may think about the Fermi Paradox. It’s inevitable that there’s something out there, somewhere, which is at least as advanced as we are. Sure, cosmic filters and all that are a possibility, but they’re a possibility born out of insecurity and assumption of facts without evidence. So don’t worry sci-fi writers, even if we haven’t made contact with anything yet we’re more than sure to make contact with something in the distant future.

But when you get around to making these alien lifeforms there tends to be a problem in how exactly we’re supposed to bring them to life. Sci-fi is full of tropes on just what exactly an alien creature is supposed to look like and almost all of them stem from something we’d find down here on Earth. More than one novel has described their aliens as being “insect-like”, quite a few rubber faces have been glued to actors over the years, and one time there was an Outer Limits where the advanced alien intelligence was a talking Raptor.

raptor

There’s just one problem: science says that anything that evolved on an alien world has likely taken a dramatically different turn than anything we’ve seen before. So what exactly should we expect those aliens to look like? How do you go about creating something that isn’t supposed to be like anything you’ve seen before? Well, at that point you’re going to have to make some assumptions… Continue reading Writing Sci-fi: Safe Assumptions of Alien Life →

Observations, Writing, WTF

Why Are We Obsessed With The Apocalypse?

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As of late there’s a general consensus that zombie films, shows, books, and games are becoming over-saturated. You don’t even have to look far to find something zombie related almost everywhere. There’s even zombies under the Disney banner if you remember Pirates of the Caribbean beyond Johnny Depp hamming it up the whole time.

pirates-of-the-carribbean

But I think the line from silly to ridiculous was really crossed recently during the promotion of CW’s new show iZombie. During the promotion, and a lot of reviews, we’d successfully jumped beyond the “fast zombie” and “slow zombie” debate and right into the “sexy zombie” debate. No, seriously, look it up and you won’t have a hard time finding someone referring to the fact the show has sexy zombies. That’s where we are now, we’ve mined the grounds so much that we’ve gone to looking at them as fetish objects.

zombie-2Bsex

But it’s not that we’re obsessed with zombies in particular as we go exploring the various incarnations of the Zombie Apocalypse, we’re obsessed with the Apocalypse part. At the same time that Walking Dead and Game of Thrones are talking about the oncoming doom of the undead, Mad Max is about to make a return to warn us of the impending doom of peak oil – something we hadn’t worried about since the 80s. Back in the 90s we found a whole variety of ways to drop a giant rock on the planet (unless we could throw a Bruce Willis at it). And six years ago, Roland Emmerich finally got to climax after working it for 13 years. Turns out he just needed a little hand from the Mayans.

2012_Poster

Let’s face it, we’re not just afraid the world is coming to the end, some of us are excited about it. We’re looking to make enough different flavors of the Apocalypse that we can finally open that morbid Baskin Robbins parody called “31 Flavors of Woe”. Worse, with doomsday preppers, crazy evangelicals, and zombie survival guides- we’re not just anticipating the end times, we want to watch this bitch burn down around us and have a front row seat.

Just gotta ask, though. Uh… why? Continue reading Why Are We Obsessed With The Apocalypse? →

Futurism, Sci-Fi, Writing

Writing the Future

Good sci-fi is often a metaphor for something in our lives. Star Trek was dealing with a future where we came out of the other side of the civil rights movement and the cold war intact and better for it. George Orwell made a police state so convincing that the modern day governments apparently took it as a how-to manual. Philip K Dick often wrote about worlds where people were often convicted before they had done any wrong and where your identity was up for question – after one hell of a drug problem left a mark on him (seriously, A Scanner Darkly was based on his drug trips).

But writing good sci-fi isn’t just about having a metaphor in mind. There’s often a lot of great work that is based simply on an idea with great characters. Conversely, there’s a lot of stuff with a philosophy behind it that falls short of the mark because the actual sci-fi portion of it is so poorly handled. It’s the ones that find a balance between the fantastic and the relatable that endure for years to come.

This is particularly noticeable in writing the future or near future. When writing about something that’s rooted more in theoretical science it’s easy for that work to shift to just simple fantasy over time. The first true “Science Fiction” Novel ever was Frankenstein, but the casual observer today would sit it in the same category as Dracula and other fantasy stories. But when something is working on an idea of the future and sticking to the mundane, it becomes a lot harder to find a place for it. We couldn’t very well call some ideas we had in the past “fantasy”, but it’s hard to ignore how outrageous it now seems in hindsight.

learning machine

So how do you walk that line? How do you make your portrait of the future something that can withstand that test of time? Continue reading Writing the Future →

Mythology, Observations, Writing

The Enkidu Effect

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A while ago someone asked if there were any things in mythology which were completely untamed, could not be captured, could not be stopped, just wild and perpetually free. They could think of one themselves, but couldn’t think of many others. And, with some careful consideration, I realized the question appeared simple but was deceptively complex, ultimately answering, “no, not really.”

That’s not to say there aren’t beings of chaos in mythology, there most certainly are. But often you find that those beings of chaos are overcome or controlled by others around them. Loki is bound beneath Jormungandr until Ragnarok. Eris is a minor deity in the Greek pantheon, repeatedly stopped or overcome by those that encounter her, left to make grand impact only by tricking others into doing it for her. And Apep, god of chaos in the Egyptian mythology, was the mortal enemy of Ra – who made it a point to attack him every night upon his return to the underworld.

Sometimes as a kitty
Sometimes as a kitty

While mythology often talks about what humanity is afraid of, it doesn’t often leave these forces completely unchecked. In a somewhat optimistic fashion, the mythology of the things that we’re afraid of also tells of how we overcome these things. It’s the kind of thinking that has people make offerings to volcano gods or begin ceremonial dances to call for rain. We like to believe that we can survive whatever nature brings at us and that those with just a bit more power than we have can defeat those forces altogether.

And this optimism comes not just from our desire to survive, but also to overcome the forces that keep us down – both external forces and, often, internal… Continue reading The Enkidu Effect →

Observations, Writing

The Trouble With Modern Pacing

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Pacing, it’s vital to your stories and it will often determine how well received it’s going to be. Even the worst ideas can be received well if you have the right pacing, while the best will often tank because “it dragged in the middle”. This, of course, is a bit of a problem for people when they’re first starting out. Pacing is actually one of the most covered subjects in the writing world, but often we still don’t get it right. The three act structure, for instance, is taught almost universally – but translates poorly to some fields and often leads newer writers astray by having them mechanically plot out their beats without any real sense of flow.

So, of course, we’ve figured out ways to make it even more complicated in the modern day. Because we’re masochists…

Continue reading The Trouble With Modern Pacing →

Mythology, Observations, Writing

Why Is Star Wars Successful?

As I write this, it’s May the Fourth, a day when people all over can come together for their love for Star Wars. It used to be a simple joke when people went around saying “May the 4th be with you”, but clearly that joke got out of hand a long time ago. We now see events based around it, people dress up like characters if they have the day off from work. And bloggers? We shoehorn in topics related to Star Wars for shits and giggles.

But not everyone understands the draw of Star Wars. On more than one occasion I’ve had discussions with people about whether or not the movies deserve the furious support that they get from clearly devoted, even zealous, fans. Why is it so pervasive, so lasting and so powerful as to make grown men giddy with excitement over Harrison Ford just saying the line “we’re home”?

we're home

And the thing is…you’d be hard pressed to put it into words why Star Wars is so loved. Anyone who even tried to debate the matter would find themselves running into road blocks along the way. The dialogue usually bounces from campy and dated to downright pretentious. The action scenes were usually pretty stilted and once they improved in the prequels we found more people angry that Yoda actually had the moves. And speaking of that, we can use the prequel trilogy to go ahead and say that special effects weren’t the magic bullet.

star_wars_revenge_of_the_sith_23766
I mean, shit, they made Hayden look life-like. That had to be expensive.

Eventually you fall back on the idea that the story was good and that the characters were original. But as I’ve pointed out before, George Lucas isn’t the best writer. More over, the characters aren’t really that original – mostly stemming from old archetypes that have existed since the dawn of human civilization. But that last point, right there, may just provide the clue.

You see, I hold that Star Wars is successful because, for all intents and purposes… we’ve seen it before…

Continue reading Why Is Star Wars Successful? →