Blogs sure tell a lot, lol. Very cool post

Did I tell you that’s my main reason for suffering Twitter? It’s a funny story, really. I figured it was good for me, if not for the world at large. I mean, I can’t even describe a bowel movement in 140 characters or less, but I’m learning, the devil take the hindmost and all, but I’m trying.

Yes. Back to the discussion: I see what you mean. As irritated as I can get about fantasy authors who simply unroll a faded photocopy of some D&D map they drew in the 7th grade, where half the names have come off in the wash, and use it as a substitute for actually putting in the hard graft this is involved in making an original secondary world – and Sam, this irritates me, it truly does – there are worse things.

I save my real, vesuvius of ire for those authors who have to explain *everything* in gigantic info dumps, all at once or even periodically like they didn’t listen to the advice about not drinking the magic water (of knowledge). And they do this, oh how they do this to me. They dump, and then they light it, and then they run away and I’m left beating out the hundred and fifty pages of them nattering on about King Blothid XI’s reign of middling terror and how this raised the Company of the Seventeen Hundred and Three to take back the Nasimul Jewels of Power, and blah, blah, blah until my foot is sore and the whole house stinks. This is much worse.

What I was trying to get at is that you need it there, even if you don’t talk about it. I’m not saying you don’t, because I haven’t read the book so what do I know. But character doesn’t stand alone in contemporary novels. This is due in a large part to the fact that they’re based in a complex secondary world we all already know. We should after all, because we live there – or our ancestors did, or perhaps that’s where the kids are headed. The point – see, I told you I’d get there, brevity, – the point is that in a speculative setting the farther you travel from the real world, the more I feel you’re responsible for setting up the signposts for those who follow you into your sick little creation. They can’t read your mind or your notes, so you’ve got to give them enough that they understand the wider world upon which your characterization stands.

No info dumps – or if you’re very good, then you can get away with some. They’re best however when they flow into the story as organically as is possible, bit by bit, so perhaps you’ve struck exactly the right balance, I don’t know.

Finally, I agree with Anna K. I’m not sure if Tome of the Undergrates is for me, but I really think that book you’re writing about the man who works at Lowe’s is one I could get behind, all the way.

Keep me posted.

Eric

Best of luck with Tome.

Character doesn’t exist in a vacuum. They need air to thrive. Cheap wicker chairs don’t import themselves. Existential angst generally is born farther from home than just inside of our lonely skulls. The world outside our windows, and outside the windows of all the windows we open up inside our little boxes, can never, ever, be fully kept from coming in.

It’s an uninvited houseguest but without it – we’re just a thinly drawn sketch, trapped inside a blank, beige-coloured box.

The sneer the man received when he mispronounced the wine’s name – one laid down half a continent and a whole ocean away, like the grapes that died beneath the pneumatic stomp of the chateau’s expensive crusher; the contempt he saw reflected in the clerk’s tired eyes, and mirrored back by his girlfriend’s disapproving gaze, both then and there and later that same night when she threw down her napkin in disgust and walked out of his life; the laugh he saw or thought he saw secretly traded between the two, curling on the corners of their traitorous lips – that’s the point of the knife without which you’re left holding only the cardboard handle of the weapon they screwed into his heart. It’s like having the firing pin, but without a striker.

Market forces which made the crushing alienation of his work place follow him home, like his father before him – influenced in his own case by the financial upheavals of the month which plunged shares both foreign and domestic into a panicked rearguard action – that’s the act that first placed the dull blue metal in his hand.

A rouge trader with an online gambling addiction and a secret transsexual girlfriend kept on the side – working for a French banking house in a gleaming glass-sided tower in now Chinese Hong Kong, he’s the one who mailed it to him or at the very least, bought the bullets that your character took home. His ghost hovers just outside the window, having himself jumped from the 58th story with a nose full of white courage and his dismissal slip in his hand the Wednesday before.

The lowering cloud which isn’t just a cloud, nor just a symbol of clouds, not even a spirit – but a bird, a wind, a nameless dread that he can feel not just see even with the blinds bought last week by his girlfriend from Ikea fastened tight – it doesn’t just blow through the room, across his hand and down the chamber of the gun, it blows right out into the reader’s mind, or maybe, just maybe that’s where it truly is blowing from.

You can say it’s the little things that matter, to both the characters that we lift up on silken threads and make dance across the page, and to our own. You can say that, but it’s the little things that march right out of the room and cry you false when you do.

Even if you never talk about it, you know it’s there. We certainly do. No woman or man these days can be an island unless they live on one – deaf, mute, and receptionless, with hands ending in stumps and not a soul nearby to tap out morris code SOSs on their skin. We’re never that cut off as the man is in your example above. Life, scattered far and wide and like radio waves to which we sometimes tune in to and other times simply bathe in their secret codes, has a way of seeping in through the cracks and under the door.

It’s the same in books, and fantasy needs it all the more, because we don’t necessarily inhabit the same worlds, the same time, the same space. Our readers can’t just assume they know the background score.

That’s why you have to built it, even if your readers only glimpse it on the horizon. Your characters need it as well. They have to have felt the resonance of it in their bones while they were growing, ringed there along with childhood beatings and malnutrition, in order for them to stand alone, seemingly unsupported by the greater world that has in fact had a hand in every atom that’s been stacked up one upon another.

Mood, atmosphere, the language of symbols, and verisimilitude aside, why would we want it any other way? If it’s just about character, and nothing more, then we’re truly alone, blank slates each tucked away in a doorless empty room.

My advice for any writer is to find the world that’s waiting just outside your characters. Fill it in even if you never use it. It needs to be there. It is to a very large part, what makes them who they are.

Eric