Richard Feynman talks about the beauty of nature, science and why he does not believe in any gods.
Beauty
October 7th, 2011Writing as a design activity
October 4th, 2011I have to say that I started writing this story more or less on a whim. At first, only a single scene popped into my mind – a young man’s fortune is to be told, but the scrying turns into disaster as the fabric of reality itself splits apart by the attempt to see into the future. Then, the setting – a city on the edge of the desert, a southern land, ruled by magic. Who is this young man? He has to be someone important, this is a momentous event, perhaps he’s the son of a sorcerer or perhaps even a king? Maybe the son of the Sorcerer King himself?
That’s was the beginning, but what else do we need? An external threat – enemies descending from the sky, great winged beasts forged by iron and sorcery (Who sent them? I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter yet). But he needs friends as well, maybe a slave girl (Cliché? Prince meets beautiful servant girl? Need to be careful to avoid the worst tropes.) But she is street smart, he has lived a very sheltered life (Perhaps she is not even interested?). Also, we need an outsider, a foreigner, a young man from the north. That’s two boys and one girl, makes for drama. The northern boy is a bit naïve, not dumb, but knows little about the world (as well).
There’s the main cast; a somewhat sullen and cynical prince living in his father’s shadow, a streetwise and beautiful slave girl with attitude and a young barbarian, newly arrived in the big city.
So what’s all this got to do with design? Well, design as an activity is characterized by moving back and forth between detail levels, alternating between abstract concepts and detailed sketches. And this is exactly how a story grows and develops, at least in my mind. It moves back and forth between detailed scenes and background exploration, and both levels require each other – the scenes need grounding in the surrounding world, and the background information needs to be anchored in living characters and plot to find purpose.
So now that I’ve written the scene that started it all, and established the characters, I’ve started drawing maps and exploring the mythology of the world in order to be able to move on with the story. Many questions remain – for example who is the enemy? And why did the scrying end in such a catastrophy? And perhaps even more important, who is really the main protagonist? Is it really the prince?
Coming of the Gardener
October 2nd, 2011Adrift and dreaming for aeons, the Gardener found himself roustled out of his sleep at the mouth of a brilliant river. A thousand lights twinkled as it flowed through the night, and the Gardener saw in it such beauty that he had to follow its course upstream to see where it may bring him. Long he followed it’s winding turns until at one point he sat down to rest. All around him he saw the results of his brothers’ and sisters’ work, beautiful colors and geometries dancing along the fates he had dreamt. But knowing of what would come, he grew impatient and wanted to see his labors come to fruitation.
And by the river he found a smoking ember which he took in his hands and held until its surface hardened, thus shaping the Earth. He sent it spinning, which brought day and night, where only night had been before. But the Earth was hot and dry and not as pleasing as it could be, so the Gardener sent his breath upon it’s surface and then there were oceans of water encircling it. He swam in the oceans and he walked the dark places beneath the earth, and where he moved, seeds of life were planted. The Earth teeming with minute life, the Gardener stood back to watch his accomplishments. And though there was beauty in what he saw, he knew there could be much more. So he sheltered and tended his tiny seeds until they grew into plants and animals, which spread accross both land and sea. And the plants and the animals lived and died by the rules and the laws laid down so long ago and they prospered and spread into every valley and over every hill of the Earth.
But still, the Gardener was not content, so he spoke a Word, and along came Man and Woman, and they listened. Theirs was the power to shape the Earth, and they ate the fruits of the plants, and hunted and ate the animals as well. The Gardener said to them: “The sun will warm you, the Earth provide for you, the moon will guide you and the stars will give you knowledge. I will leave you now, so you will hold your fates in your own hands. Keep your gifts safe, for if you lose them you will lose all.”
And although he knew still greater things of beauty awaited, the Gardener stood back, content with what he saw, determined to let what he set in motion run its course.
Overture
September 30th, 2011In the beginning, the All was Nothing. But held within the Nothing was what it could be, an eternity of frozen fates. Time was born as the All folded in on itself, lighting the spark of life. It spilled into the All, filling it with vast seas of wonder. Brilliant whirlpools battled and flowed through colored mists, spreading fire and smoke, pushing at the edges of the All. Within these first fires awoke the Firstborn, giant sons and daughters of the All. With curious minds they swam across the seas and played within the fires, shaping and creating, building and razing. In concert, they drew up rules and laid down laws, to govern their creations and to give them structure and shape. Eventually the fires turned to embers, which drifted out on the seas, which were now vast and black. The Firstborn, tired from their work, laid down to drift along across the darkness. Satisfied with what they had done, they fell asleep, dreaming the fates of the All.
Adrift and dreaming for aeons, the Gardener found himself at the mouth of a brilliant river…
Formative experiences
September 27th, 2011
Image courtesy of Project Aon
Courtesy of Project Aon, the entire texts of both the Lone Wolf and the Grey Star gamebooks are available for free online, although it should come with a disclamer – if you did read these books as a child, be aware that your rose-tinted memories of these stories might not hold up to an adult reading.
Single line inspiration
September 26th, 2011It seems like one of the most common (and most annoying) questions that keeps popping up in interviews with authors is “Where do you get your inspiration?”. Answers, at least according to Ursula Le Guin in her essay collection Language of the Night, range from elaborate lies involving “Inspiration Shops” to writers sighing and throwing their hands in the air in desperation. Disregarding the lack of imagination of interviewers, one specific source of inspiration that I have found particularily interesting is song lyrics, where sometimes a single line may contain the seed of an entire novel. Take this for example, from the song The Chronomancer I: Hubris by The Sword:
His skin became a prison, where suffers his soul
Or perhaps this, quite visceral line, from the song The Longest Day by Iron Maiden:
All summers long the drills to build the machine
To turn man from flesh and blood to steel
Now, perhaps it can be said that much heavy metal music itself consist of small, self-contained fantasy stories and thus would be considered cheating (or even plagiarism). The question is what kind of music I would have to listen to if I wanted to write high-brow literary fiction? Probably some kind of pretentious art-jazz thing, or atonal modernist compositions I guess, so I am happy that I lack those pretentions. But looking beyond heavy metal there are still many sources of inspiration, which may very well be used outside their original context. Take for example these lines from Bruce Springsteens well known The River:
Now those memories come back to haunt me, they haunt me like a curse
Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true
Or is it something worse
A bit more subtle perhaps than the other ones, but it immediately conjures up all kinds of images in my mind, not all of them connected to the small-town America tale of lost promises that is the original context of the song.
Oceans of time
September 21st, 2011The ideas are all there. As is the motivation. There is a whole cloud of interconnected references from all over the place, just waiting to solidify into a new structure (I am not kidding myself that what I am trying to create is something wholly new). Everything is in place. But there is no time to write.
Ten years ago, say, there were oceans of time. Evenings, weekends, slow days at work. What did I do then? Nothing. I created nothing. Maybe I wasn’t ready, maybe I lacked the references, the knowledge, the inspiration. All I had was time. And I wasted it.
The Freudian tells me that having a child have reminded me of my mortality. That I now crave to make my mark upon the world before I die. It is a vanity, sure, but hopefully one that would give enjoyment to others as well. Even if it is just a byproduct. Of course I might claim that my son is my true legacy, my true heritage, but I can’t claim his future. His future is his own, it will be no proxy for me.
Or maybe the motivation today comes from knowing there is no time. No way to release the pressure, and thus it is “safe” to feel compelled to write, knowing that I can’t (don’t have to). Yearning to escape the everyday drudgery (Hah, the melodrama! Your comfortable middle-class family life, your self-employed job in a creative field hardly amounts to much drudgery. I feel no pity for you.).
But still, I cannot not write. I am compelled to write. There is a hornet’s nest of buzzing ideas in my brain that fills my thoughts from the moment I open my eyes in the morning until (and well after) I close them at night. I must let it out. I am struck with the author’s curse.
The game is afoot
September 13th, 2011After two years, and two and a half false starts, I have finally gotten this off the ground. 5000 words and counting, and I have no idea where it will end. Well, perhaps some idea, but the hard part seems to be how to get there.
So, having a child, starting a company and moving to a new apartment has kept me pretty busy for the past year and a half, perhaps not the best time to start writing a book as well, but that’s how I work. The urge to write gets stronger the more busy I am with other things (analyze that), but I finally managed to get some writing done the other day. It is a story that has been brewing in my mind for a long time, set in a world that I started sketching on decades ago. The thing is though, that the story I initially was planning to write perhaps was a bit too difficult, as I found myself stumbling right at the start as I tried to write it down.
I had thought a lot about the backstory, the history of the world and how it had ended up the way it had, which fortunately gave me a way to go around the problem. I’d write the prequel before the main story itself. There, problem solved! No more writer’s block. So, the first three chapters done, I went to get a cup of coffe and returned finding, arranged around the computer; The Silmarillion, Ian Mortimer’s The Timetraveller’s Guide to Midieval England, and The Bible. Make from that what you want – no it’s on, and only 95 000 words to go…
Archangel
May 2nd, 2010I just finished a book called Archangel, by Sharon Shinn. Now, when I bought this book on a whim after reading about it on a blog I didn’t know that it was mainly a romance novel, it caught my interest because the twist on the fantasy setting seemed intriguing.
As a romance novel it more or less follows Formula 1A (not that I’m a big fan of the genre, but I’ve read enough to recognize the clichés). Head-strong and willful, yet amazingly beautiful and talented servant girl meets proud and brooding noble lord, and there is some sort of connection. Initially they hate each other, and through a series of misunderstandings they fall apart before in the end finally coming together and realizing that they love each other (mainly, the male noble needs to swallow his pride and beg and plead a bit before the stubborn girl relents, but only because he really has a good heart).
What’s more interesting is the setting; the girl is an orphaned slave girl from a nomadic tribe while the guy is an angel lord named Gabriel, soon to become Archangel of the world Samaria, and their love has been ordained by the god, Jovah. Gabriel needs to marry before he may assume the role of Archangel, and this girl Rachel is the one the the god has declared to be his wife. Now he only has to find her and convince her of her duty before the annual Gloria is to be sung to appease the god, the lack of which would bring down destruction and divine wrath from the skies.
There is a conflict involved, and a power play between both other angels and powerful humans, which ties into the interesting part, which unfortunately is spoiled right there in the blurb on the back of the book. (I suggest that if you are interested in reading this book, try to avoid reading any summaries on it, and read nothing on the cover apart from the title).
Now, this revelation is only hinted to in the actual text of the book, and the setting definitely has potential, but it is unfortunate both that the publisher felt the need to spoil it right on the cover of the book, and that the author barely explores the potential through such a formulaic romance story instead of a more interesting one, but there are two more books in the series, so I’m putting my hopes to a more interesting discussion of faith and philosophy in them.
So, apart from some naive anachronisms, and an overly idealized notion of nomadic lifestyles, along with lengthy descriptions of gowns and jewelery as well as beautiful yet moody angels, I found it well worth reading, mostly because of the novelty of the setting. Hopefully the next two of the series explores the potential of it better.
More from Charles Stross
March 17th, 2010SF writer Charles Stross has posted about two more common misconceptions about the publishing business. First, it’s on why books are the length they are, and second on who gets to decide on the title and cover art.
Interesting, as always. I wonder who got to pick the covers of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of time series? I can’t believe how horrible they are.
