Tag: fantasy

Writing Lessons from Reading Ray Bradbury

Observations from reading a collection of stories by a science fiction master

Confession: I haven’t read short stories since graduating from college.

This is probably not much of a shock to you. Unless you are a writing professional, you probably don’t read short fiction either. Novels really are the prevailing art of the day. But I’ve been trying to get back into them because they let you see a whole idea very quickly. I will never be able to read as many books as I wish I could, especially since I read so many genres. But with short stories, I can at least get a taste of what an author is like.

A great tool for this has been the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. I recommend it to everyone. It’s like Reading Rainbow but for grownups! And the vast majority of the stories fall into the SFF genre, so I’m getting exposed to a lot of authors I wouldn’t have time for otherwise.

But I set a goal to read one whole collection by a classic SFF author this winter. I wanted to really understand what one author was about without having to spend a year reading their whole backlist. I picked Ray Bradbury merely because I was looking for authors who had written about time travel, and his story “A Sound of Thunder” is, as far as I know, the origin of the butterfly effect as used in fiction.

Well, turns out most of his other stories are not about time travel, but I did enjoy reading A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories by Ray Bradbury. Some of my observations from the collection:

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Turning Darkness into Light: What genre is this and how do I get more of it?

In some ways, I think that my love of Marie Brennan grows out of my love of Brandon Sanderson. The magic in Sanderson’s books is famously logical and scientific. In Mistborn, there are 16 metals and they all have a specific power which is bounded in its possibilities. Warbreaker has a particularly economic magic system where each person has a set amount of magic (“breath”) and in order to get more, you have to literally take someone else’s. In these worlds, you as a reader understand what is possible, the inputs and outputs. The “magic” of the book comes from the clever manipulation of these given tools to solve problems.

Marie Brennan’s series The Memoirs of Lady Trent takes this a step further. Dragons are simply an animal, a creature like any other, and that’s it. There’s no magic, no wizards, only a question of what would it look like if early Enlightenment natural philosophers were studying dragons instead of, well, whatever less cool animals they studied. In spite of the dragons on the covers, the plot of each of the five books is much less about fantastical elements or accomplishing some unknown feat than it is about travelling to an area, doing careful research and observations, perhaps some experiments, and then drawing conclusions from that about the biology and history of the world.

Cover for Turning Darkness into Light

Her new book Turning Darkness into Light is the next logical step. Not only is there no magic or saving the world, but there are hardly any dragons at all, except in the myth that the main scholars are translating. That’s actually the main action of the novel: three people in a room trying to decipher an ancient text and understand the impact it will have on the world. Granted, one of them is a draconean, but his exotic nature matters mostly in his relationship to the text and what he has at stake because of it.

And yet Brennan manages to make this fascinating. Some ways that I think this works:

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NaNoWriMo Week 1 Debrief

Well, I ended the first week of NaNoWriMo with exactly 10,000 words, only 400-ish words behind my personal timeline. Doing my first NaNo has been both easier and more terrifying than I thought it would be. Easier in that laying down a specific scene hasn’t been too bad, but harder in that making up the details of the world building is still really difficult for me. More short lessons from the first week.

  • It’s true that you can do anything for 15 minutes. Sprints force me to stop thinking about things and just put some words on the paper. I’m always surprised what ideas come up when I just press forward. Then 5-10 minutes of planning in between sprints let me recover and reincorporate those new ideas towards the original outline.
  • Writing with peer pressure makes a difference. The sprints channel in our Seattle NaNo discord has been a lifesaver for me for instant competition any time of day to push me to actually get to work.
  • I broke the outline again. And again. I’m becoming more and more of a pantser every day of this NaNo. We’ll see where this leads.
  • Listening to history can give you great ideas. I pulled a Great Courses lecture series on French Revolution to listen to during NaNo, since I wanted to base some of the overall historical narrative on it. The little details, though, are proving ridiculously helpful in sparking new scenes.
  • I should have spent more outlining time defining some settings. My story didn’t have a tight enough focus to be set in one place as originally planned. I should have spent more time on inventing locations rather than world-building countries. Visualizing things in my head is not a strong suit so the locations have definitely been a struggle.

NaNo Prep 2019 Recap: Lessons of a First-Time Fiction Writer

  • World-building is hard. I almost wanted to give up and write a realistic novel because it would be so nice to just do some research and come up with a right answer. Deciding on details past the initial idea is super difficult, without relying too much on classic cliches. Kudos to all the scifi/fantasy writers who make this look effortless.
  • If you don’t like the way your book is going, you can change it! And the sooner you scrap what you don’t like, the more time you have to spend on what you do like. I had plotted out a whole war between three nations in my book. Then my book started morphing into a depressing war novel that I didn’t want to write. Saving that plot somewhere else and starting over was a great choice.
  • Plots require both internal and external action. After scrapping the war, I tried to re-outline my book and found that nothing was happening in it. My main character was still making internal progress because a lot of the plotting advice I was following focused on character arcs. But there was nothing to happen on screen while my character worked on her insecurities. I had to swing my planning away from character for a while to focus on having something happen.
  • Novel planning is a balance between planning and pantsing, even if you are otherwise a heavy planner. In other areas of my life, I have a spreadsheet for everything. After a few false starts with more organized plot methods, I ended up using the snowflake method to plot my book. And the steps where you expand the summary of your book (steps 2, 4, & 6) inevitably led me off in weird directions which turned into whole subplots of the book. The difference between plotters and pantsers is when they take these diversions, not if they take them.
  • Don’t give into the first hour anxiety. Everything you do looks terrible in that first hour because it’s hard to get back into it. Stick with it into the second hour and you’ll fall in love again.

Tomorrow is the big day! I’m terrified but excited.

3 Tools for NaNoWriMo Fantasy Writers, Including the Best Map Maker Ever

As I’ve prepped for NaNoWriMo this month, I’ve discovered something: worldbuilding is hard.

Well-thought-through worlds and logical magic systems are some of my favorite parts of the fantasy genre. Until I tried to make one. It is hard! So much work goes into making up a lot of things that will never go on the page, but that you need as background to even start creating a plot.

My respect goes out to those epic world builders who make this process look effortless. I am not one of those. I don’t have fully formed fantasy worlds and ideas just lying around, and I need to come up with them fast. (NaNo cometh!)

I’ve found a few tools this month that have allowed me to take lots of shortcuts (shh!) in getting my fantasy world into shape and let me spend more time on characters and plot:

  1. Azgaar’s Fantasy Map Generator – Exactly like the title says, this is a fantasy map generator, but it’s really so much more! Not only can you choose the type of map you need (Civilization style–continents, archipelego, etc.) and how many countries, but you can set the number of religions and cultures you want. You can select a base language structure for the names of each country/culture and it will name all the rivers and towns for you, give you historical sites, show you the boundaries on different religions and give you a basic structure. Then you can customize the random map with drawing tools. Not only is it nice to have a map, but the generated religions and cultures can give you great ideas for plot conflict: why is this country split into two different cultures and what do they disagree about?
  2. TV Tropes – If you want to know about a cliche idea in television or literature, it’s here. This was a great way for me to look up what elemental magic systems had been done before and their variations. I found some interesting ideas that I was able to pull into my work. Also great for finding out what promises you’re making to your reader by picking certain tropes so you can either fulfill or play with audience expectations. And I feel like the random trope button is going to be a great tool for when I get stuck during NaNoWriMo. Instant plot idea! Just don’t let the fact that everything has been done before get to you.
  3. Springhole’s Random Generators – This site has random generators for so many different things. I’ve specifically been using the character flaws and motivations ones as I brainstorm characters other than the main character idea I had to start with. They have generators for everything. So helpful in getting creative juices flowing.

So those are the things saving my (writing) life right now. I had to throw out my novel’s plot last week and start over, as it started to become a depressing war novel that I didn’t want to write. But I’m soldiering on.

How’s your NaNoWriMo (or other project) going right now?