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

[ecosophia]

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