Writers think differently. Not just differently, but on a deeper level, about pretty much everything.
That probably sounds very smug to non-writers, but it's the truth. How else do you think all that stuff that comes out of our collective heads gets in there in the first place? Of course it also has its downsides; writers tend to be more prone to depression too (probably because thinking on a deeper level about terrible stuff makes you feel a deeper level of terrible.)
Most writers know all this already, not least because they talk, write, blog and maybe even tweet about it. Tell a fellow writer you know the misery of depression, and the response will usually be sympathetic rather than the long sigh and eye-rolling of many who've never been In The Sad Club. All of which means that it's become okay - at least among writers - to talk about it openly. And we do.
But how many of us are willing to talk about the Crazy Stuff?
What 'crazy stuff?' Well, y'know that first sentence up there - "Writers think differently?" I mean that Crazy Stuff. The stuff that makes us write, the stuff that makes us judge everything we write (and, by association, ourselves) way more harshly than even Simon Cowell in a bad mood, and the stuff that makes us carry on writing anyway. What's going on under the bonnet, in that kooky engine-brain? Not many people talk about that.
Maybe we kid ourselves that 'all' writers have this crazy stuff going on in their heads, and because it's so universal there's 'no need' to actually come out and say it. Or maybe the opposite is true... maybe we're all so scared this stuff is genuine crazy that we're afraid to say it, in case what we get in response is a sea of uncomprehending looks and people backing away slowly with nervous laughs. Maybe more of us should 'fess up to our Inner Crazy...
Allow me to step forward as a guinea pig then. Not a real one obviously - I'm not quite that crazy - but I'm in the mood to start the ball rolling, so let's do this. Allow me to take you on a tour of... the Inside of My Head!
Okay, let's start with the biggie. From a writing point of view, I am not one person. I am three people - three very different people. Yes, you did read that right. I will now introduce you to them...
I'll start with Miss Narcissist. You probably won't like her very much - and that's okay, because she can be hard to like a lot of the time. The clue is in the name, as I'm sure you already guessed. Miss Narcissist doesn't do any of my writing - because in her head she's already been there, done that, got the Booker Prize. Miss Narcissist is me on some kind of fast-forwarded alternate-reality; as far as she's concerned she's already a world-famous and fantastic writer, admired and read by everyone. Oh sure, there's probably stuff she could still learn about writing... but most of it, she already knows. This novel she's currently writing might be the first she's even got to Draft Two stage, but it's an undiscovered bloody masterpiece that the whole world has been crying out for, and it's going to sell so many copies she'll be able to buy a tropical island and still have change for a private jet...
Miss Narcissist is a raving idiot, and an arrogant one at that. If I ever decided to wear her skin for my public persona, I'm pretty sure there'd soon be a long queue of people wanting to punch me in the face - which is precisely why I keep her on permanent house arrest inside my head. And also why I need someone to balance her out, so meet...
Grinch. If you thought Miss Narcissist was obnoxious, you aint seen nothing yet. Grinch is in a permanent bad mood, witheringly sarcastic and damn near impossible to impress because he hates everything about me (which, by definition, also includes him... well, I never said he was a genius, did I?) Grinch's favourite pastime is metaphorically grabbing Miss Narcissist by her knicker elastic and giving her the wedgie of her life at regular intervals - and after he's finished with her, he comes for me.
He places me in a different alternate reality - one that keeps looping like Groundhog Day. In that, I am the crappiest, suckiest writer on the planet, who's always going to be terrible and never going to get any better no matter how hard I try because I had no talent to start with, and I'm just deluding myself that I ever had any... He's like an abusive writer-parent who wishes his offspring came with a receipt, so he could take her back to the shop and exchange her for something better. Or at least get his money back.
And then there's me in the middle - the actual writer. Kind of like Boxer the horse in 'Animal Farm,' just keeping my head down and hoping that working harder is the solution to it all. Most of the time I let the other two duke it out on either side of my brain while I just carry on writing - but occasionally they get me down. Miss Narcissist never talks directly to me, but just hearing her prattle on is embarrassing enough. Grinch, on the other hand, likes nothing better than to tell me personally what's on his mind...
MISS NARCISSIST: Hmmm... I'll probably have to renew my passport ready for interviews on American TV when my book comes out...
GRINCH: Why are you even bothering? This sucks! A five-year-old could write better stuff than this!
ME: Well then I'm going to keep on writing it until I can make it better...
GRINCH: You'll never get better - some people got it and some people haven't. You haven't, you've never had it and you're never gonna get it!
MISS NARCISSIST: Yeah, they said that to J.K. Rowling too... and Tolkien...
ME: Miss Narcissist thinks I'm getting better...
GRINCH: She's an idiot! You're both idiots! And you both suck!
Yeah... a visit inside my brain can be like the worst dinner party in the history of forever sometimes.
But even though they both drive me mad... I also need them. Miss Narcissist's ridiculous fantasy life keeps me going when writing is a struggle and I lose the will to stick with a project, while Grinch stops me getting complacent and phoning it in when it's all flowing just a little too easily to be true. It'd be nice if they weren't such godawful people, of course... but like they say, you can choose your friends but you can't choose your family - and the demons in your head choose you.
Maybe you've read all of this and thought "Yeah, I get it - this is just how it is for me too!" In which case you now know you're not alone. That's got to be good, hasn't it? Alternatively, if all of this has left you baffled and thinking I'm a grade one nutcase... well, at least you can show it to your loved ones and say "There, see - you could be living with THAT instead! Never complain about me again!"
Which is also good - admittedly not so much for me, but hey - I don't mind spreading a little sunshine while I contemplate my fractured mental state...
Showing posts with label Tolkien. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tolkien. Show all posts
Friday, 31 January 2014
Friday, 22 November 2013
When Writing What You Know Is What You'd Rather People Didn't Know
It's a Writing Commandment so old it was probably originally carved in stone by Ancient Neolithic Writer (no doubt with his or her Neolithic mates rolling their eyes in the background and yelling "Stop messing about with that and come and invent the wheel or something!") It's guaranteed to generate debate - mainly due to how easily and frequently its meaning can be manipulated and misunderstood. And, if you're a writer, it has probably been said to you so many times that, had you written it down each time you heard it, you could probably wallpaper a room with it by now.
The clue is in the above title of course, but - it is "Write what you know."
Now before you groan inwardly and click away to watch YouTube clips of cute cats falling off furniture instead, this is not going to be another one of those 'What Write What You Know Really Means' posts. I am well aware that's been done to death already. We all know it doesn't mean 'you can only write about stuff you have personally experienced' and how research and using your own emotions can fill in the gaps for just about any subject under the sun and so that makes everything okay, yada yada and can we get at the coffee and biscuits now, right? Good. Just checking.
No, this post is taking a not-often-travelled side road that branches off from that main highway - although you can still see it through the trees. Today I'm chewing the fat about... *cue dramatic, sci-fi-B-movie-style music* ...when your fictional world and the real one procreate! You went and did that Frankenstein thing - and now you've got the hybrid baby-creature squealing in your writerly arms .
This is something that happens... pretty much all the time when you're writing fiction. Yes it does, because when you're writing about lives and people and places - even fantastically surreal ones - everyone has to start from a basic template, and that template is usually your own life. It has to be, because it's the only one you get given, in its entirety, for free. It's partly why most writers get better at writing as they get older; apart from clocking up the practice, they've lived more life and so have more stuff stashed away in their magic brain-closet.
(It's also why many highly talented teenage writers get those slightly patronising looks from older writers who tell them they won't be able to write 'properly' about 'serious, adult issues' until they've got themselves a mortgage/had kids/complained about something and realised - with horror - that they really are turning into their parents. If you are one of those teenagers... sorry. I kind of get what they're saying - but don't let them clip your wings, okay? They're not right about everything all the time - and sometimes the best way to prove people wrong is to say "yeah, well thanks for the advice" - and then do it anyway.)
Sorry, where was I? Oh yeah. The point is, when you read back any fiction you've written, you can often see where you've drawn on things you've experienced in your own life to cook up the meat and potatoes for events in your story; relationships, career choices, personal milestones - the whole pot noodle. And how you feel about that depends greatly on how you feel about certain parts of your life. And I'm talking in particular about the painful parts.
There are bucketloads of what you might call 'universal' painful life experiences. Being dumped by a boyfriend/girlfriend, the death of a family member, being the only loser in the room not invited to the Cool Club for whatever reason... the kind of thing you'd actually have to work quite hard to not have happen to you at some point in your life. For the most part, those things are reasonably okay for even the most sensitive little writer-flower to write about. The real-life events might still hurt, but often turning them into a fictional event in a book doesn't - in fact it can even be cathartic. And if people read it and assume this event must have actually happened to you, the writer, at some point in your life... well, so what? It's stuff that happens to everyone, so who cares? We're all in that one together.
But what if it's something traumatic and emotionally-scarring that, while it (unfortunately) has happened to other people, it isn't a universal thing that everyone goes through? Something in your life that damaged you so deeply you can't bring yourself to even talk about it?
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "Well, duh! I'm never gonna write about it either then, am I?" Brace yourself. You might just be wrong about that.
When I first started writing my current novel-in-progress, The Renegades, it was, as far as I was concerned, a 100% fictional story. Actually it was a coming-together of ideas from two or three other sci-fi novels that I'd started but then over the years just left to fizzle out and die because they weren't really working. It's the first complete novel I've ever written - okay, it's still got to go through next drafts and edits, but I reached the end of it. I know in my heart that the only reason for this is because, right from the start, it felt like the story I had to tell. It didn't feel like something I'd had to wrack my brains about and plan and invent and devise; it was as if it just unfolded quite naturally in my head and I just wrote down what was going on. I never stopped to wonder about why that was. And I never, for a second, thought of it as even the remotest bit autobiographical....
...Until I got to about the last third of the story.
That was the point when a lot of stuff had already happened, in ways that were destined to shape everything else that would happen after it. I realised that something in particular was, inevitably, going to have to happen; something that couldn't not happen if I wanted to remain true to the characters involved and the situation they'd now got themselves into. And to write it, I was going to have to dig into deeply personal dark places that I didn't want to revisit. Use stuff that only a handful of people in the world knew about me - and that I had no wish to put 'out there' for all to see.
It was a genuine shock; I never even saw it coming until it was staring me in the face. What the hell was I going to do? I couldn't just chicken out and not include it; no matter how nasty it was, having it not happen at all would make no sense and the reader would know something didn't add up and feel cheated. I could go way, way back to a much earlier point in the story and just rewrite it all to go in a different direction.... but then it wouldn't be the story I needed to tell anymore. In spite of where I was with it now, I couldn't bring myself to turn it into something it wasn't - or abandon it like all those others. This story didn't belong inside my head, locked away from the world forever - it needed to be set free.
So I wrote those bloody awful scenes. It was hard, and it felt wrong every step of the way, but I did it. I'll probably change them on subsequent drafts; take bits out, tighten things up, maybe even (god forbid) add bits in. But I'm resigned to the fact that those scenes have to be there, whether I like it or not. I've also since read Draft One in its entirety, and realised there are other parts of the story that draw on darker patches in my life as well. It's still a long way from being an autobiography (I can honestly say I've never lived in a post-oil-crisis New York in the year 2044, for starters) but it's still the closest I've ever come to doing that Hemingway thing of bleeding onto the page.
So, for any writers out there who find themselves in a similar situation, I'm hoping that reading this will reassure you that a) you're not alone and b) you can get through this. Here are some of the things those negative little voices might say, and the best responses I can think of for them:
1. "Everyone will ask me if this really happened to me" - yeah, they might - and if you don't want to put that information out there that can be scary. You can tell them the truth if you feel up to it. Or you can lie. Or fudge it and just tell them it's a novel, and novels are found in the fiction category. Your story, your choice.
2. "I shouldn't be writing about this - it's wrong to put such an awful thing into a fiction story" - awful things happen in made-up stories as well as in real life; it's unlikely you're writing about something that's never been written about before. And this is more awful to you because it's personal to you. Other people won't feel the same way you do, because their experience of it - if they even have any - will be different.
3. "It's just a sneaky, self-indulgent form of therapy" - it might ultimately prove to have some sort of therapeutic effect. But if the end product is also a well-written story that people enjoy reading, how is that sneaky or self-indulgent? And do you honestly think you'd be the only writer ever to have exorcised their demons in their work? That it's something great writers would never ever do - great writers like... ooh, I don't know - Hemingway, Oscar Wilde, Tolkien, Johnathon Swift, Sylvia Plath, for example?
4. "It's going to look like I put it in there just to get attention/publicity" - to repeat the sentiments in point 2, it's unlikely you'll be writing about something that's never been written about before. Besides, unless you've written it in such a way that the scene just leaps up out of nowhere, with no inevitable build-up and completely out of context with the scenes just before and after it (and if you have, that's a problem with the writing, not the subject matter) people will accept that the scene is there because it needs to be, and not just slapped in as a cheap gimmick to sell your book.
5. "People might say in disgust 'Oh god, not ANOTHER one of those books with [insert controversial subject here] in it!'" - well... yeah, they might. That's because people have likes and dislikes, and they're all different. Remember that thing about 'you can't please all of the people all of the time?' Well, that'll be them. No-one on the the planet, in the entire history of the universe, has ever written a book that every human, living or dead, unanimously liked. Can't be done, chum. So don't write your story for them. Write it for the other chunk of the human race who don't feel that way.
Writers feel. Writers bleed. That's how they roll, and - no matter how much it hurts - they're at their best when it's how they write, because it's honest writing. Readers appreciate and connect with honesty - even in a work of fiction. Heck - especially in a work of fiction. It's the golden thread that weaves through the entire garment and holds it all together. So don't be afraid to feel - and don't be afraid of others seeing you feel in the words you write.
Because if you've done it right, they won't be thinking about how you're feeling it anyway.
The clue is in the above title of course, but - it is "Write what you know."
Now before you groan inwardly and click away to watch YouTube clips of cute cats falling off furniture instead, this is not going to be another one of those 'What Write What You Know Really Means' posts. I am well aware that's been done to death already. We all know it doesn't mean 'you can only write about stuff you have personally experienced' and how research and using your own emotions can fill in the gaps for just about any subject under the sun and so that makes everything okay, yada yada and can we get at the coffee and biscuits now, right? Good. Just checking.
No, this post is taking a not-often-travelled side road that branches off from that main highway - although you can still see it through the trees. Today I'm chewing the fat about... *cue dramatic, sci-fi-B-movie-style music* ...when your fictional world and the real one procreate! You went and did that Frankenstein thing - and now you've got the hybrid baby-creature squealing in your writerly arms .
This is something that happens... pretty much all the time when you're writing fiction. Yes it does, because when you're writing about lives and people and places - even fantastically surreal ones - everyone has to start from a basic template, and that template is usually your own life. It has to be, because it's the only one you get given, in its entirety, for free. It's partly why most writers get better at writing as they get older; apart from clocking up the practice, they've lived more life and so have more stuff stashed away in their magic brain-closet.
(It's also why many highly talented teenage writers get those slightly patronising looks from older writers who tell them they won't be able to write 'properly' about 'serious, adult issues' until they've got themselves a mortgage/had kids/complained about something and realised - with horror - that they really are turning into their parents. If you are one of those teenagers... sorry. I kind of get what they're saying - but don't let them clip your wings, okay? They're not right about everything all the time - and sometimes the best way to prove people wrong is to say "yeah, well thanks for the advice" - and then do it anyway.)
Sorry, where was I? Oh yeah. The point is, when you read back any fiction you've written, you can often see where you've drawn on things you've experienced in your own life to cook up the meat and potatoes for events in your story; relationships, career choices, personal milestones - the whole pot noodle. And how you feel about that depends greatly on how you feel about certain parts of your life. And I'm talking in particular about the painful parts.
There are bucketloads of what you might call 'universal' painful life experiences. Being dumped by a boyfriend/girlfriend, the death of a family member, being the only loser in the room not invited to the Cool Club for whatever reason... the kind of thing you'd actually have to work quite hard to not have happen to you at some point in your life. For the most part, those things are reasonably okay for even the most sensitive little writer-flower to write about. The real-life events might still hurt, but often turning them into a fictional event in a book doesn't - in fact it can even be cathartic. And if people read it and assume this event must have actually happened to you, the writer, at some point in your life... well, so what? It's stuff that happens to everyone, so who cares? We're all in that one together.
But what if it's something traumatic and emotionally-scarring that, while it (unfortunately) has happened to other people, it isn't a universal thing that everyone goes through? Something in your life that damaged you so deeply you can't bring yourself to even talk about it?
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "Well, duh! I'm never gonna write about it either then, am I?" Brace yourself. You might just be wrong about that.
When I first started writing my current novel-in-progress, The Renegades, it was, as far as I was concerned, a 100% fictional story. Actually it was a coming-together of ideas from two or three other sci-fi novels that I'd started but then over the years just left to fizzle out and die because they weren't really working. It's the first complete novel I've ever written - okay, it's still got to go through next drafts and edits, but I reached the end of it. I know in my heart that the only reason for this is because, right from the start, it felt like the story I had to tell. It didn't feel like something I'd had to wrack my brains about and plan and invent and devise; it was as if it just unfolded quite naturally in my head and I just wrote down what was going on. I never stopped to wonder about why that was. And I never, for a second, thought of it as even the remotest bit autobiographical....
...Until I got to about the last third of the story.
That was the point when a lot of stuff had already happened, in ways that were destined to shape everything else that would happen after it. I realised that something in particular was, inevitably, going to have to happen; something that couldn't not happen if I wanted to remain true to the characters involved and the situation they'd now got themselves into. And to write it, I was going to have to dig into deeply personal dark places that I didn't want to revisit. Use stuff that only a handful of people in the world knew about me - and that I had no wish to put 'out there' for all to see.
It was a genuine shock; I never even saw it coming until it was staring me in the face. What the hell was I going to do? I couldn't just chicken out and not include it; no matter how nasty it was, having it not happen at all would make no sense and the reader would know something didn't add up and feel cheated. I could go way, way back to a much earlier point in the story and just rewrite it all to go in a different direction.... but then it wouldn't be the story I needed to tell anymore. In spite of where I was with it now, I couldn't bring myself to turn it into something it wasn't - or abandon it like all those others. This story didn't belong inside my head, locked away from the world forever - it needed to be set free.
So I wrote those bloody awful scenes. It was hard, and it felt wrong every step of the way, but I did it. I'll probably change them on subsequent drafts; take bits out, tighten things up, maybe even (god forbid) add bits in. But I'm resigned to the fact that those scenes have to be there, whether I like it or not. I've also since read Draft One in its entirety, and realised there are other parts of the story that draw on darker patches in my life as well. It's still a long way from being an autobiography (I can honestly say I've never lived in a post-oil-crisis New York in the year 2044, for starters) but it's still the closest I've ever come to doing that Hemingway thing of bleeding onto the page.
So, for any writers out there who find themselves in a similar situation, I'm hoping that reading this will reassure you that a) you're not alone and b) you can get through this. Here are some of the things those negative little voices might say, and the best responses I can think of for them:
1. "Everyone will ask me if this really happened to me" - yeah, they might - and if you don't want to put that information out there that can be scary. You can tell them the truth if you feel up to it. Or you can lie. Or fudge it and just tell them it's a novel, and novels are found in the fiction category. Your story, your choice.
2. "I shouldn't be writing about this - it's wrong to put such an awful thing into a fiction story" - awful things happen in made-up stories as well as in real life; it's unlikely you're writing about something that's never been written about before. And this is more awful to you because it's personal to you. Other people won't feel the same way you do, because their experience of it - if they even have any - will be different.
3. "It's just a sneaky, self-indulgent form of therapy" - it might ultimately prove to have some sort of therapeutic effect. But if the end product is also a well-written story that people enjoy reading, how is that sneaky or self-indulgent? And do you honestly think you'd be the only writer ever to have exorcised their demons in their work? That it's something great writers would never ever do - great writers like... ooh, I don't know - Hemingway, Oscar Wilde, Tolkien, Johnathon Swift, Sylvia Plath, for example?
4. "It's going to look like I put it in there just to get attention/publicity" - to repeat the sentiments in point 2, it's unlikely you'll be writing about something that's never been written about before. Besides, unless you've written it in such a way that the scene just leaps up out of nowhere, with no inevitable build-up and completely out of context with the scenes just before and after it (and if you have, that's a problem with the writing, not the subject matter) people will accept that the scene is there because it needs to be, and not just slapped in as a cheap gimmick to sell your book.
5. "People might say in disgust 'Oh god, not ANOTHER one of those books with [insert controversial subject here] in it!'" - well... yeah, they might. That's because people have likes and dislikes, and they're all different. Remember that thing about 'you can't please all of the people all of the time?' Well, that'll be them. No-one on the the planet, in the entire history of the universe, has ever written a book that every human, living or dead, unanimously liked. Can't be done, chum. So don't write your story for them. Write it for the other chunk of the human race who don't feel that way.
Writers feel. Writers bleed. That's how they roll, and - no matter how much it hurts - they're at their best when it's how they write, because it's honest writing. Readers appreciate and connect with honesty - even in a work of fiction. Heck - especially in a work of fiction. It's the golden thread that weaves through the entire garment and holds it all together. So don't be afraid to feel - and don't be afraid of others seeing you feel in the words you write.
Because if you've done it right, they won't be thinking about how you're feeling it anyway.
Tuesday, 1 January 2013
Even In A Pretend World, You Need A Map
I've been having a bit of trouble finding my way around lately.
My sense of direction is pretty rubbish at the best of times, but nothing brings out my navigational doofus tendencies like trying to get to various places in a building I've never actually, physically been inside. Partly because said building is located three thousand miles away, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. And partly because it only exists in my head.
You guessed it - I'm talking about a location in my Renegades novel. A large underground base hidden in the side of a quarry, to be precise.
In its real-life geographical location in New York state where the novel is set it doesn't actually exist, but some specific infrastructure is really there so that, at some point in the future, it plausibly could. (Yep, I did the research for it - God bless the internet!) So even though I've placed it in a real-world environment, the base itself is pure fantasy - mine to carve out of that hillside however I like.
So if it's just a pretend place, I don't need to know exactly where everything in it is in relation to everything else, do I? I mean, it's my secret base; I invented it, so I can tell the readers whatever I want about it, right?
Well... it turns out that no, I can't. Or, to put it more accurately, I can't tell them whatever I want about it whenever it suits me. If I say there's a gymnasium just down from the dining area in Chapter One, then that's where it always has to be - forever, for the entire life of the story. And I can't just blithely assume that, should I make a geographical slip-up at some point, 'no-one will notice a little detail like that.' Because that's like assuming everyone else possesses navigational skills as dire as mine (and that's a hell of a lot of people I'd be insulting.)
To put it bluntly, fans of science fiction novels are smart cookies who aren't easy to fool; some of these people have actually taught themselves to speak Klingon, for crying out loud. They're gonna pick up on every little detail - even those that seem trivial and insignificant to those of us with smaller brain capacity - and if it's wrong, it will jerk them out of the story and that's a bad thing.
I have a fairly flexible imagination, which enables me to create these places in the first place; unfortunately flexible imaginations tend to come with an equally flexible memory. This results in a brain that enjoys creating things on the fly so much, it rarely mentally files anything away so that it'll be the same every time. But, for the purpose of building a believable story, my world has to be the same every time; it can't change from scene to scene. The only way to ensure constancy then is to set it in stone from the start; design and plan it, the same way an architect designs and plans a real-life building.
So, after several hours of: searching through the text of the entire novel for all mentions of the various rooms in my base, cutting out, fiddling with and glueing bits of squared paper, and then faffing about trying to make Microsoft Excel work like a floor-plan-drawing tool (I'm pleased to report that it can, and the results look surprisingly good) I have now made myself a thoroughly detailed map of my fantasy underground location. I could even tell you where the toilets are - if you really wanted to know.
Boring? Yeah, sometimes. Headache-inducing? Oh, heck yeah! But unnecessarily nit-picky? Not on your life. Because now, not only will the map ensure my characters will always be able to take the right route to reach the places they want to get to - but I can make my descriptions of them more interesting. More real, because now I'm properly 'with' them, following them around like a little spy. I'll know, for example, that they can smell disinfectant as they're walking down a particular corridor, because my map tells me they're passing the medical room. And when you're mentally walking through the same environment as your characters, it makes it so much easier to get inside their heads and know what they're feeling and thinking.
Tolkien famously drew detailed maps of Middle-Earth and wrote vast, sprawling back-histories for all the races inhabiting his mythical lands. J.K Rowling did a lot of the same for her Harry Potter series. I can see now that their reasons for doing so went much deeper than mere nerdish pleasure in creating little extra nuggets of trivia for their fantasy worlds. I guess if I'm going to learn a valuable lesson from anyone, it might as well be from two of the greatest storytellers of them all.
Happy New Year, everybody! Let's make this the year that we Get Stuff Done!
My sense of direction is pretty rubbish at the best of times, but nothing brings out my navigational doofus tendencies like trying to get to various places in a building I've never actually, physically been inside. Partly because said building is located three thousand miles away, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. And partly because it only exists in my head.
You guessed it - I'm talking about a location in my Renegades novel. A large underground base hidden in the side of a quarry, to be precise.
In its real-life geographical location in New York state where the novel is set it doesn't actually exist, but some specific infrastructure is really there so that, at some point in the future, it plausibly could. (Yep, I did the research for it - God bless the internet!) So even though I've placed it in a real-world environment, the base itself is pure fantasy - mine to carve out of that hillside however I like.
So if it's just a pretend place, I don't need to know exactly where everything in it is in relation to everything else, do I? I mean, it's my secret base; I invented it, so I can tell the readers whatever I want about it, right?
Well... it turns out that no, I can't. Or, to put it more accurately, I can't tell them whatever I want about it whenever it suits me. If I say there's a gymnasium just down from the dining area in Chapter One, then that's where it always has to be - forever, for the entire life of the story. And I can't just blithely assume that, should I make a geographical slip-up at some point, 'no-one will notice a little detail like that.' Because that's like assuming everyone else possesses navigational skills as dire as mine (and that's a hell of a lot of people I'd be insulting.)
To put it bluntly, fans of science fiction novels are smart cookies who aren't easy to fool; some of these people have actually taught themselves to speak Klingon, for crying out loud. They're gonna pick up on every little detail - even those that seem trivial and insignificant to those of us with smaller brain capacity - and if it's wrong, it will jerk them out of the story and that's a bad thing.
I have a fairly flexible imagination, which enables me to create these places in the first place; unfortunately flexible imaginations tend to come with an equally flexible memory. This results in a brain that enjoys creating things on the fly so much, it rarely mentally files anything away so that it'll be the same every time. But, for the purpose of building a believable story, my world has to be the same every time; it can't change from scene to scene. The only way to ensure constancy then is to set it in stone from the start; design and plan it, the same way an architect designs and plans a real-life building.
So, after several hours of: searching through the text of the entire novel for all mentions of the various rooms in my base, cutting out, fiddling with and glueing bits of squared paper, and then faffing about trying to make Microsoft Excel work like a floor-plan-drawing tool (I'm pleased to report that it can, and the results look surprisingly good) I have now made myself a thoroughly detailed map of my fantasy underground location. I could even tell you where the toilets are - if you really wanted to know.
Boring? Yeah, sometimes. Headache-inducing? Oh, heck yeah! But unnecessarily nit-picky? Not on your life. Because now, not only will the map ensure my characters will always be able to take the right route to reach the places they want to get to - but I can make my descriptions of them more interesting. More real, because now I'm properly 'with' them, following them around like a little spy. I'll know, for example, that they can smell disinfectant as they're walking down a particular corridor, because my map tells me they're passing the medical room. And when you're mentally walking through the same environment as your characters, it makes it so much easier to get inside their heads and know what they're feeling and thinking.
Tolkien famously drew detailed maps of Middle-Earth and wrote vast, sprawling back-histories for all the races inhabiting his mythical lands. J.K Rowling did a lot of the same for her Harry Potter series. I can see now that their reasons for doing so went much deeper than mere nerdish pleasure in creating little extra nuggets of trivia for their fantasy worlds. I guess if I'm going to learn a valuable lesson from anyone, it might as well be from two of the greatest storytellers of them all.
Happy New Year, everybody! Let's make this the year that we Get Stuff Done!
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