Writing Right Out There In Public: Notes on Scene #2

[ecosophia]

Okay, let's talk about what I tried to do in this second scene, and discuss worldbuilding a little.

In this second scene, I'm mostly concerned with giving readers some very basic background about the kingdom of Raithwold and the world in which it exists, while continuing to introduce the main character and start the plot moving. It's important for the story that the reader knows that Embery is a capable healer, knowledgeable about herbs and ordinary health care, and the best way to do that isn't to tell readers that -- it's to show her at work. ("Show, don't tell" can be overdone, but it's a good rule of thumb.) So we see her handling a childbirth in a way that demonstrates that she's done this before, is familiar with potential risks such as childbed fever and knows how to deal with them. The little bit about how she got Eman through a case of croup (infected sore throat) sets the stage for that.

It's also a good opportunity to frame the conflict that's going to play a large role in launching her on the journey that will be the mainspring of the story. Remember, the setting's comparable to Scotland in 1700, and so you have the rising conflict between folk healers trained by apprenticeship, who are part of the local social network and can be paid via a traditional gift economy, and university-trained physicians who are outsiders, have no patience with traditional social ties, and insist on being paid in money. Merimer has many equivalents then and now.

Also, of course, once you've finished this scene you have no doubt that Raithwold, or at least this corner of Raithwold, has a lot of very, very poor people in it. I commented earlier on my refusal to follow the First Law of Formulaic Fantasy, which demands that every fantasy novel be set in or around the year 1066, and that refusal remains in place. It's worth recalling, though, that in most parts of the world, in most of history, people outside the aristocracy lived about the same way your average peasant lived in 1066 -- that is to say, scraping by on hard agricultural labor, owning very few personal possessions, and depending on family ties and customary patterns of economic distribution instead of the (allegedly) free market.

It's very common in cheap formulaic fantasy to miss that. By and large -- there are noble exceptions -- fantasy fiction these days is full of people who are for all practical purposes members of the Society for Creative Anachronism -- that is to say, inmates of a modern industrial society who are playacting at being members of a medieval one. To my mind, this makes things a lot duller than they have to be. I like fantasy that brings me into contact with people, places, and events I wouldn't meet in my daily life -- if I wanted the opposite, after all, I'd read realistic fiction! So I prefer to send the SCA members off to the Pennsic Wars, or what have you, and populate my stories with people who live in a world that's not modern and industrial at all. Thus they have beliefs (like the grandmothers' wisdom on display at Sullamy's house) that we'd consider superstitious, and customs (such as the birthing song) that most modern societies have lost. They also get by with a lot less in the way of resources, goods, and services than people in modern industrial societies have at their disposal.

I recommend those of my readers who don't happen to know much about nonindustrial ways of life to do some reading on the subject, if you're going to set a story in any setting that isn't part of an industrial society. Here in the US, it's pretty easy to find books on life in Colonial times, which will give you a very good overview -- look for books for older children and the young adult market; they're better stocked with the lively details that will make for a rich story -- and there are also the Foxfire books, which chronicle folkways from Appalachia. Don't take those details as gospel -- use them as a springboard to come up with your own equivalents.

Worldbuilding generally can be a major trap, in one of two ways. You can do too little of it, in which case you get a world that's mostly clichés you borrowed from other people's books and from the media, or you can do too much of it, in which case your story may get drowned under a torrent of irrelevant details. I prefer to do it a little at a time. At this stage in the tale, I know a little bit about the nameless village above which Embery lives, a tiny amount about the kingdom of Raithwold, and essentially nothing about the rest of the world, except that there's a place called Amalin somewhere to the south that's my stand-in for Greece. There are countries between Raithwold and Amalin, I know that much, and I suspect the largest of them is going to be a little like the Austrian Empire circa 1700, with just a bit of the Ottoman Empire thrown in for piquancy, but that's still just a guess. We'll see when Embery et al. get there. 

Consistency and worldbuilding detail can be put in during the revisions. If you get plenty of ideas while you're writing your early scenes, by all means write them down, but remember Rule #3: Nothing's set in stone until the first copies come back from the printers. A lot of the worldbuilding takes place in retrospect, when you look at a plot twist you've put in and ask yourself, "Okay, what has to be true about the world in order for that plot twist to work?" Then you apply that across the board, and weave in hints and references to it all the way back to the earliest plausible place in the book, so that by the time readers discover that Princess Lilybottom rides a tame Styracosaur, it's the most obvious thing in the world -- well, of course, Emerod Castle has tame Ankylosaurs clumping about the gardens, so a Styracosaur makes perfect sense, and so does the scene later on where the characters go hawking with pterodactyls perched on their wrists. 

Tolkien is a commonly misunderstood example here. People look at the immense efforts of worldbuilding he put into The Lord of the Rings, and think that he did all of that in advance. Psst -- he didn't. All the stuff in the First Age was there when he started writing, but all the elaborate history and culture of the Third Age? He made that up as he went, and then went back and revised it into the earlier drafts. You can do the same thing. Just keep writing scenes, and make stuff up as you go. 

Comments

Tell, don't show

[tiagoantao]

I was wondering if there are good examples of "tell, don't show"? Or it is a lost cause?

Re: Tell, don't show

[ecosophia]

Oh, a lot of old novels in English do that. Nearly everyone these days finds them unreadable, because they drone on endlessly in "author lecture." They were popular back in the day, first, because reading aloud was a common entertainment, and a good reader can put expression into "author lecture;" and second, because when they came out, most people in the English-speaking world were used to spending up to a couple of hours every Sunday listening to the minister of their church preaching sermons at them, and the sheer familiarity of being lectured to helped. Now? Somerset Maugham gets away with it from time to time by making himself a character in his own stories, but balances it against plenty of vividly described scenes in which he shows rather than telling. Beyond that, though, it's usually the sign of a book that isn't going to be published and, if it gets published, isn't going to be read.

[(Anonymous)]

How, or when do you do research for a novel? Do you only write about things you already know, do you stop writing to do research, do you write while researching, do you skip scenes because you are not convinced you know enough about them?

My novel is set during a war and there should be scenes during battles, armies marching, army camps, and so on. However the novel is set in the region where I live, which is tropical jungle, and I know very little of what battles and armies looked like in this context. I've been postponing writing until I read some military histories of my country, which seems a never ending work, the more I study the more I feel ignorant.

[ecosophia]

I'm always researching. Last night, for example, I finished reading a history of opera, so I'll have the historical background for a future novel in which the main character composes one; I've just started a book on sea chanteys and sailor's songs, to provide local color to a novel I'm writing right now; when I've finished that, it'll be on to another book on opera. Most of my casual reading is nonfiction, and most of it is going to end up in a novel somewhere.

As for your story, remember you can always model your battles and armies on specific battles and specific armies from history, which narrows the field a bit. Since I don't know what tropical region you're in, and probably don't know its military history at all well, I'll pull an example out of another context. Say I wanted to do a novel in which there was a war going on, and the setting was more or less central Europe in the eighteenth century, I'd choose one war -- say, the War of the Austrian Succession -- two armies -- the Prussian and Austrian armies -- and half a dozen battles, study them in detail, and use those details as inspiration for my own creations. I'd probably put a week or so into writing out a history of the war, just to have all the details in place: how it started, who the important generals were, how the campaigns proceeded, where and when the important battles were fought, how it ended. Then I'd start writing scenes from the point of view of my characters as they dealt with being in a war zone. Most of the material in the history would never find its way into the novel, but having the background information would make the story more consistent.

You can always skip scenes you don't know enough to write, by the way, and go find a book on that specific topic to help you fill it in later. You can also write a scene and then go back and redo the descriptions later when you know what your soldiers look like, and so on.

My first scene

[(Anonymous)]

Hi John,

I was wondering about what sort of writing pace you set yourself. I always think of King's 2000 words a day minimum. Not really appealing when working full time, but perhaps I could manage 2000 a week? Certainly one scene at a time does not seem so bad. Sometimes, when you get in the zone a 1000 or even 2000 words can come quickly. It might need all sorts of editing to be readable, but like you I find the post-editing relatively easy.

I have written the first scene from my story seed, but I already decided to modify it. There was no real reason for the protagonist to be amnesic, and besides being clichéd it made even less sense when I realised it was going to follow on from a previously written short story. So, for anyones reading pleasure, I give you a scene from Chapter 1: The Stranger

https://zeehanmanse.blogspot.co.nz/2018/04/1-stranger.html

Cheers,
Damo

Re: My first scene

[ecosophia]

I used to set myself a specific amount per day -- 1000 words was a common figure. These days I don't worry about it, as I've established habits that see to it that I get plenty done. Try doing one scene a week, of whatever length it needs to be, and see how that fits your needs and schedule!

A bad scene

[stefania]

Those are some great suggestions. I’ve been wondering about how to find a balance between too many details and not enough in terms of worldbuilding.

One scene is posted here https://stefania.dreamwidth.org/441.html (I think). It almost certainly won’t be the first scene, but I almost felt like I had to write it first and get it out of the way. I’m struggling with clunky dialogue and lots of probably irrelevant details, but I think that’s because I’m not fully sure who the characters really are yet, or what’s going to happen to them. Hopefully I’ll figure that out as I go and come back to edit, as you said.

Re: A bad scene

[ecosophia]

It's very common for a first scene to be clunky; don't worry about that. (Yours isn't all that clunky, for that matter -- it won't take much editing at all to make it crisp and harrowing.) Now write another scene, and see where the story takes you.

[drhooves]

Interesting comments on worldbuilding and "show, don't tell." I agree with your suggestion of research on a particular historical event to keep the setting consistent, especially if the fiction is going to have a realistic edge to it, versus a complete fantasy world. In Raithwold, I can just about taste the barley gruel and smell the steeping herbs.

As for "show, don't tell", that's another thing that requires some balance. Being the lazy, chaotic and intermittent reader that I am (I'm now reading five different books), the fiction that relies more on show than tell can be rather difficult to keep in focus, as I jump around or am interrupted. So while I don't mind minor details demonstrated, having an author that "tells" or summarizes the plot details now and then can be a welcome crutch. If there's a string of minor details that demonstrate a key point of the plot, chances are good it'll soar over my head.

I've got a second scene posted now, and not in chronological order. I'm gonna stick with the scene-by-scene brain dump, and see how that goes - I've never tried that before, so it should be educational.
https://drhooves.dreamwidth.org/1576.html

[ecosophia]

Well, there you are. If you prefer writers to tell rather than show, there are plenty of 19th century novels waiting for you!

On Childbirth procedure.

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe a little something for when you enter revision mode of this tale. Please remember that I am not an MD, and my knowledge is incomplete or even innaccurate, but there it goes.

One thing you should consider when fleshing out the birth is placenta retention/extraction. It is a risk in every childbirth that the placenta or after-birth will not come out whole, and if it is retained within the womb, it will be a cause of infection, which is dangerous or even deathly in pre (and post) antibiotic settings. Standard medical procedure says that the placenta must be checked for wholeness, and that any missing tissue must be manually extracted. This is a painful, laborsome task that is not lacking in risks itself, specially in an environment where chirurgic level cleanliness cannot be achieved.

On the other hand, there is an anecdote I heard from a friend of mine, who's a retired anesthesiologist. When he was a young doctor doing his unpaid year of social service, he witnessed a child delivery by a curandera, a folk medicine-woman. Right after the child came out, the curandera gave the young mother a potion to expell the after-birth. This potion was a strong vomitive, and with the force of the abdomen contractions, the placenta came whole out of the womb at once. My friend recognized that, while unpleasant, this method was fair less risky than standard placenta extraction under the hygienic conditions they were at that time.

Re: On Childbirth procedure.

[ecosophia]

Duly noted -- but retained placental tissue is actually fairly rare, and there are straightforward ways in folk medicine to deal with it. Did you notice that Embery got a bucket in place to catch the placenta (I used the older English term "afterbirth")? As an experienced midwife and healer, you can bet that she checked the placenta when it came out to make sure it was intact, and would have given Sullamy a potion to cause strong uterine contractions (such as cohosh) if there was any question.

There's a broader issue, though. Standard modern medical procedure is based on the assumption that nature doesn't know what it's doing and has to be manhandled and subjected to rigid schedules and checklists in order to do the right thing -- that's one of the reasons why the really quite rare issue of placental tissue retention gets turned into a bugbear that must be suspected in every birth. That's exactly the attitude with which Merimer is approaching medicine in the story; it's not the attitude with which folk healers like Embery approach healing. More on this as we proceed!

Re: On Childbirth procedure.

[(Anonymous)]

Fair enough. Glad to see you have all covered.

[(Anonymous)]

Your notes show that you did a whole lot with this scene. Did you set out writing this scene intending to do all of these things or did they just happen as you followed the "Embery goes to the village and delivers a baby" scene? It seems like the ability to succinctly give background to the story, develop a main character, set up the initial conflict, and everything else is not commonplace. Did you develop it through practice, or is it learnable?

I ask because when I look at a scene in a story I try writing, it doesn't come out nearly as crisp, clear, and concise while still accomplishing all the things a good story scene like this one does.

[ecosophia]

It can be learned, and it also has to be practiced. As you write a scene, keep in mind the questions that you've asked yourself, and see how many answers come spilling out in the course of the work. Also, of course, I've written a lot of fiction at this point (and read vastly more), and so I've picked up some useful habits; you can make a note of those habits, and see about practicing them in your own fiction.

[joelcaris]

I'll echo Anonymous's praise of the scene's accomplishment. One of the bad habits I've discovered in my own writing is that, when I'm not where I want to go in a story but have to get there and am not sure how, I will too often start writing something meandering that feels unfocused and without purpose. It's the writerly form of stalling, I suppose. Probably the fact that I have always written in a strictly linear manner (not always with the scenes in linear order in regards to the story's timeline, but in regards to their procession in the story itself) contributes to this bad habit. It seems to be one of the reasons I stall out at times in stories--I have a sense of future scenes, maybe even the ending of the story, but I haven't quite figured out how to get there.

I imagine the obvious rejoinder is to simply write those later scenes and then see if I am more inspired in back filling my way to them. Whenever I catch myself stalling my way through a flat scene, I remind myself that each scene should have some purpose, illuminating some aspect of the story, moving the plot forward, fleshing out a character, better showing off the world, etc. That reminder doesn't always get me out of the rut, though! I'll see how keeping my raft of questions in mind as I write helps this process. I will say that many times in my writing I'm very surprised to discover connections and threads woven throughout that I didn't consciously intend to put there! Obviously, there are some processes churning in the background whether I realize it or not.

In regards to world building, thanks for the very good advice in this post. It seems obvious on reading it, and yet it wasn't that obvious in my head before reading this!

I still have yet to get my first scene written, but I did have a chance to write out some of the foundation of the novel I'm working on with my new post here: https://figurationpress.com/2018/04/02/writing-right-out-in-public-this-nameless-storys-foundation/

It's helping to get me focused on the actual prose writing and I'm aiming to get that first scene up on Friday.

Thanks for this project, JMG!

[ecosophia]

Thank you! These scenes are coming out very clear, even for me. Tolerably often my scenes are sketchy, and have to have details filled back in as the story proceeds.

I'd definitely encourage you to try writing things out of order, and then fill in the gaps. For me, at least, it's a reliable way to keep from getting bogged down -- and when you know what's going to happen in a later scene, it's easy to fill in earlier scenes with the hints and foreshadowings that make the later scene make sense.

...and I also get stuff showing up in my stories I didn't intend to put there; it's one of the pleasures of the exploratory style of writing.

[(Anonymous)]

Good day everyone,

Just some notes on process here:

I got my first scene written as well -long hand in a notebook. I work at a computer full time, and when I want to do something fun or creative, it's often not in front of the computer again. That comes later when it is time to revise and publish. The drafts are in longhand -where I don't get a word count. So for scenes I'm looking to write three to six longhand pages.

The scene per week is a great pace that I think I can manage. It's an encouraging pace, and will still give me time for my monthly non-fiction commitments of two ham radio-related article's per month and book reviews that have been somewhat quarterly. (At my library day job which is certainly a boon to writing, I've been known to keep some word docs. open on my desktop to putter around in for my non-fiction. I may get to that point with my deindustrial novel)

John, I'm curious as to how you structure your writing time between projects and esoteric pursuits, which also require regular upkeep and work?

Also, thanks for the encouragement to us all who are working on this project. There are so many great nuggets in these posts & threads.

One more note on notebooks that might work for some of you: I like to keep a spiral or composition notebook for my story with one side being devoted to notes, and then the reverse flip-over side for writing the scene drafts. When the two meet in the middle, it's time to grab the next notebook.

With gratitude,

Justin Patrick Moore