Like many others, my writing productivity has suffered during the pandemic. I went from having mornings free of kids to pursue my writing (and physical therapy) to suddenly supervising four kids learning at home. (Stop me if you’ve heard this one.) It was stressful and many times it was all I could do to get the kids through their school work in the morning and spend the rest of the day on the couch, obsessively reading Google News and Facebook.
After a month or two, I started building a foundation that allowed me to come out of hibernation. Honestly, I was forced to. I had agreed in February to write a blog post due in June, and my deadline was fast approaching. I had to find some way to come out of my funk and get some kind of work done.
As part of my winter writing goals, I’ve been reading Story Genius by Lisa Cron. Though it has its flaws (assuming that all stories are character driven instead of just most of them), I’m enjoying the thorough take on how to construct a character arc for your story before you start writing. My NaNo novel definitely suffered from a lack of planning in this department–I stalled out 1/3 of the way through because I had no idea how to pull the character out of her depressed funk. So I feel like the lessons learned in this book will be helpful in getting my next book going.
Story Genius also helped me with a problem that’s been rolling around in my head: why I don’t like Frozen 2. Ever since watching the movie over Thanksgiving, I’ve been wondering why a movie with such ostensibly powerful messages ended up feeling so hollow for me. I think Story Genius has given me the answer: what Frozen 2 wants to say, the story it wants to tell, isn’t backed up or earned by the plot that we see on screen. Sure, the songs are fantastic (you can’t fault Frozen on lyrics), and there are some great empowering one liners, but these end up falling flat because there is no substance behind them. It doesn’t come off as believable character growth, which means that it just comes off as a preach fest with lyrical interludes.
And so, without further ado, my attempt to fix the character arcs in Frozen:
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.
Her new book Turning Darkness into Lightis 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:
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:
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?
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.
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?
