Writing Right Out There In Public: Notes on Scenes 3 and 4, and an Excursion into Fictional Magic

[ecosophia]

So I wrote the two previous scenes in reverse order, as already noted. For me, that happens fairly often -- I'll get a scene very clearly in my imagination, with no clear idea of exactly what led up to it, and then go back later and fill in the details. 

In this case I knew that Embery and Tay would have to flee their home suddenly. Why? Well, partly it's what the story wants, and it's partly because that makes for a livelier tale, and it's partly because it takes a sudden shock to send a single mother and her eleven-year-old sprinting out the door on a trajectory that'll set the overall story arc in motion...but mostly because it's what the story wants. I make a lot of decisions that way: it felt right, so I did it. 

It wasn't until after I'd written scene four that it occurred to me that I hadn't quite shown everything I wanted to show about life in the village, and in the kingdom of Raithwold generally. I have a growing sense that religion is going to be an important theme in this story; since it's a fantasy novel, the gods and goddesses get to be rather more robustly active than they are in sober realistic fiction; so scene 3 promptly took shape, as I realized that a church service would be a really good way to set the stage for the religious dimension, as well as a good bit of local color and a way of giving the reader even more clearly the sense of the gap between Embery's beliefs and those of the community in which she lives. I didn't expect the abbot to start ranting about those horrible stories from the place nobody's willing to name aloud, but now I know that Embery isn't the only person who knows about it -- it's the local form of rejected knowledge, the stuff that you don't talk about around authority figures. 

There's probably going to be a lot more put into that scene referring to bits of myth and tradition, once I figure out more of what the myths and traditions are. I know the gods and goddesses of Amalin are dead now, and I'm trying to get a sense of why. Then there's the figure the monks worship, the source of their Holy Law. I suspect that in later edits, I'm going to drop misleading hints to make the reader think that this figure is yet another dreary Dark Lord, of the sort that cackles in chorus in so many derivative fantasy novels these days. That's not what he is. I'm not perfectly sure what he is, but if I ever do a Dark Lord story -- I've got one plotted, with the working title of Lord of the Crimson Land -- it's going to be a raucous sendup of the entire genre, an epistolary novel told alternately by two characters: very roughly, imagine Frodo Baggins exchanging letters with Sauron many years after the War of the Ring, and in the process revealing to the reader what really happened. 

But that is not this book. 

The mythic figure Eremon, by the way, is Amalin's equivalent of Heracles; Kendath is Thebes, and the story of the sons of Ruon and the sons of Ardaman is more or less derived from the Seven Against Thebes; the ship that sailed from Golin to find the havens of the Sun is more or less the Argo. If there's going to be a faun in the story, we're going all-out classical mythology, seen through the oddly skewed filter of my imagination. 

But that raises another point, one that one of my readers brought up. There's no magic in Raithwold, or at least none has appeared so far; there's the grandmothers' wisdom that the women at the birth practice, but that's it. So far, at least, there's nothing that's appeared in the story that would be out of place in the most grittily realistic sort of historical novel. 

I'm not yet entirely certain why that is. I think part of it is that most of the magic in fantasy fiction doesn't merely suck, it sucks, bites, chews, and spits out the tattered remnants. One of the reasons that so many people go around in real life pretending that magic is whatever they want it to be is that there's so much fantasy fiction in which the magic has nothing to do with actual magic. Yeah, I know, I'm preaching to a nonexistent choir here; the number of people who are interested in traditional occultism these days is small enough that we could all probably sit down in a large auditorium with plenty of room to spare, and the vast majority of fantasy readers just want plenty of handwaving and twinkle dust, since they've been taught all their lives that that's what magic is. Cue Harry Potter waving a wand and shouting "Ungrammaticus Latinus!" 

There are fantasy novels with realistic magic in them. Most of them are quite old. Fletcher Pratt, in his two excellent fantasy novels The Well of the Unicorn and The Blue Star, drew heavily on actual magical traditions; when William Morris used magic -- and he's the guy who invented fantasy fiction, folks -- his magic is always straight out of the medieval literature; E.R. Eddison put a fine demon-summoning scene, one of the best in fiction, in The Worm Ouroboros, and I've commented before about the vividness and accuracy of the scene where Ransom and Merlin summon planetary intelligences in C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength. For that matter, Dion Fortune wrote several novels that are all about actual magic -- my favorite, The Goat-Foot God, is worth especially close study in this regard. 

I know perfectly well that no matter how much I fulminate, the vast majority of fantasy authors are going to keep on splashing around Dungeons and Dragons spells, or things even more absurd, in their stories. All I can control is what I put in mine. 

But there may not be any magic as such in The Road to Amalin. There's not that much magic, qua magic, in Greek mythology -- there's some, to be sure, but not that much. Fauns, gods, goddesses, and other mythic beings may be the sources of the fantasy element in this story, and they're in hiding, or dead.

Why?  I don't know yet. Stay tuned...

Comments

Why bad books matter

[(Anonymous)]

One of the best inspirations I have found is the reading of total garbage in a genre related to mine. I mainly write horror, so though I could not stomach Twilight (ain't nobody got time for that) I did read several other popular authors whom I will refrain from mentioning by name. If you are trying to write your first novel, get yourself a pile of literary dung that never should have made it past the slush pile. Take notes on why the characters are vacuous, the story uninteresting, the structure non-existent, and why it generally didn't light your fire. Then compare it with the stuff you actually do like and want to emulate.

-Kimberly

Re: Why bad books matter

[ecosophia]

Works for me! One of the reasons I decided to become a writer of nonfiction books on occultism was that so much of what was in print at that time (the early 1990s) was so astonishingly bad, that I figured I could do better than that without too much trouble. I should probably read some of the latest really bad fantasy fiction, on the same principle, but my attempts to do so in recent years never get far; I slog through a dozen pages of dreary characters doing predictable things in unconvincing settings, reflect on the fact that every minute that passes is a minute I'll never see again, fling the book across the room and pick up something worth reading instead.

Re: Why bad books matter

[(Anonymous)]

I had the pleasure of hearing the late Sir Terry Pratchett speak on a book tour in 1999. He joked that when he was growing up, liking Tolkien was a requirement. "Bur sir, I don't care for hobbits." "Don't care for hobbits? boy. Write 100 lines." He attributed his own Discworld to a determination _not_ to put together another band of unicorn, dwarf, elf and human to seek the lost ring, necklace, sword, crystal; and repair it, restore it to the rightful king, destroy it, etc. One of things I love about his works is the send up of the cliches.

Re: Why bad books matter

[ecosophia]

I'm glad to hear this. Maybe his example will inspire others... ;-)

Curious and should be writing myself!

[ferngladefarm.blogspot.com.au]

Hi John Michael,

Thanks for the explanations of your writing process. For some reason I originally believed stories were written in a linear fashion, even though I don't formulate my own writing that way.

I am curious though on one point. Was the Abbot not attempting an act of magic by shutting down discussion and consideration of the: "place nobody's willing to name aloud"? I'm not 100% sure about that either.

Chris

Re: Curious and should be writing myself!

[ecosophia]

Well, in a sense the abbot was practicing magic -- but in the same sense, so are most of the characters in the book. What I mean here is that nobody's performing rituals, making amulets, or doing other things that usually get slapped with the label of magic.

One possibility

[(Anonymous)]

There may have been magic in the era of Greek deities and heros, but it may have been mostly women’s magic, blood magic of the monthly sort. There have been hints from tv documentaries that are hard to follow up on the internet (it being revealed as a particularly shallow estuary when one is seeking the solid depths of original anthropological research) about monthly rites at night in the lower levels of the Agora, with little niches for deity statues in the walls beside a steep staircase leading down into the dark that young girls trod by the light of the stars and thin moon, no lamps nor candles allowed. What the rites were, no one knows exactly—lots of this stuff was simply not recorded by collectors of “folk and fairy” tales partly because the women would not cough up, same as women failed to do when the Grimms went around collecting stories—the women suppressed the stories that would have revealed the existence of a separate women’s culture probably related to sex and bleeding and women triumphing over men in the fashion that the Canterbury Tales relate so robustly and lewdly. So maybe there is some room for magic later on, if it happens that Embery is an initiate of a old tradition.

Re: One possibility

[ecosophia]

Oh, there was certainly magic practiced in archaic Greece, and there are even a few traces of it in the myths -- think of the story of Medea. There was a vast amount of magical practice in classical and postclassical Greece, for that matter, and some of it's fairly well documented. The myths themselves, though, only rarely refer to anything of the kind, thus my reference to the mythology rather than the culture.

But I'm beginning to think that the absence of magic in Raithwold is a feature, not a bug, and it may be pointing to a major element of the story.

[(Anonymous)]

Dear Archdruid,

You said: "the number of people who are interested in traditional occultism these days is small enough that we could all probably sit down in a large auditorium with plenty of room to spare"

This comment intrigued me! Yet it leaves me unsure as to what constitutes a traditional occultist, and how many such individuals you mean - hundreds, thousands, or ten of thousands? Do book sales give an indication?

Yours in Druidry,
Brigyn

[ecosophia]

By "traditional occultist" I mean those people who are into the sort of occult philosophy and practice that was common in the Western world, say, a century ago, and who study and practice them on their own terms, as whole systems, rather than ripping out bleeding chunks to assemble into some kind of postmodern pastiche. Most of us have trained in at least one of the surviving occult schools, and work within a worldview that would have made sense to people such as William Wynn Westcott and Dion Fortune. How many of us are there? Heck of a good question, but to judge from my encounters with the species, I'd be surprised if there were more than a few thousand of us in North America.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm definitely interested in traditional occultism, on its own terms. I've read quite a bit of Butler, Fortune and co (and of course your own work, which continues in the same tradition). I think I have a few more years of discipline, self-development and daily practice ahead of me before I could call myself a traditional occultist though.

- Brigyn

[ecosophia]

Understood. You can call yourself a student of traditional occultism, though, and that's not a small thing.

Fantasy Magic

[fluiddruid]

John,

my interest in actual magic began with reading fantasy novels and playing D&D games, I admit. But over time I grew to resent magic in fantasy as it didn't feel, well, magical enough. It felt more like a utility, a tool for hand-waving problems away or even as a substitute for a machine gun in the mage's hands. There's been a joke going around in D&D circles that Gandalf should've just cast "Mass Teleport Without Error" to transport Frodo and the ring to Mordor and end the story quickly.

In your recent post on ecosophia.net you wrote "Yet the word “meditation” is good English, and existed hundreds of years before Blavatsky launched modern alternative spirituality (and invented modern fantasy fiction, but that’s another story)". I am intrigued by this connection between H.P. Blavatsky and modern fantasy. Could elaborate a bit on this point?

Re: Fantasy Magic

[ecosophia]

That probably deserves an entire post of its own one of these days. The very short form is that most of the people who invented modern fantasy drew heavily from Blavatsky's Theosophy. L. Frank Baum, whose The Wizard of Oz is far more important in the prehistory of fantasy than most people recall these days, was a practicing Theosophist; Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft borrowed liberally from Theosophical writings about prehistory, and so -- possibly at second hand, but I'm not sure I'd bet on this -- did J.R.R. Tolkien; many less famous figures of the pre-Tolkienian golden age of fantasy laid on the Theosophy with a trowel or, in some cases, a dumptruck. A strong case can be made, in fact, that Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine is the unmentionable ancestress of most of the imaginary worlds of modern fantasy. More on this in a future post!

[drhooves]

Thanks for the notes! Interesting take on constructing the tale, by getting the vivid scenes done in whatever order they come to mind. While it goes against the grain of structure, it should come with the benefit of avoiding writer's block. At least until you run out of scenes. As for comment on lack of magic being a feature and not a bug, I can guess what you mean by that, and I'll be surprised if I'm wrong.

As a side note, I've learned (among other things) that magic is not like Harry Potter's brand, nor do Druids just hug trees and skinny-dip. Speaking of Harry Potter, I broke down and read the first book a few months ago to understand the popularity, as I've got a couple of ideas around juvenile fiction I may start as a project. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was a mystery to me - I didn't find any portion of it compelling. Give me Frank and Joe Hardy any day over that slop.

[ecosophia]

I find that when I have the scenes to either side already written, filling in the gaps is easy -- I know where the fill-in starts and where it has to go, and finding the necessary material to get from one to the other is a lot easier than venturing out into wholly new territory.

As for the Hardy Boys, oh, granted -- that series was as formulaic as they come, but it was by and large crisply written, and it didn't suffer from the kind of literary elephantiasis that's so common among big-name writers these days.

[stefania]

I’m noticing elements of some kind of magic and religion trying to sneak their way into my story. I’m not really sure what kind yet, but I’m trusting that my characters know more than they are letting on at the moment, and will eventually let me in on it too. It’s a bit surprising to discover that these elements seem to want to find a place in my story, considering how little I personally know of the traditional magic you are describing. Come to think of it, the same goes for religion, as my exposure to that has been quite limited as well. It’s definitely an interesting process; trying to listen to the characters and let them tell the story to me.

[ecosophia]

It really does make for more interesting results! Also a more enjoyable experience of writing, at least for me.

letting scenes come to you

[druidtides]

This week really resonated with me. I am working on the next installment of my short stories set in the NOSS solar system. This one precedes that last one because I introduced a ship and it needed a story. This led to the exploration of the inner conflicts in my main character because I had this "and then what" moment. So I am working on the scenes out of order but which I "see" most clearly. As you say then story starts to lead you where it wants, not necessarily where you want it to go! Thanks for these postings

Link to read-along chapters

[(Anonymous)]

Since the GW site is soon to be transitioned to a new home, I agreed with David to put my Write Out Loud posts and chapters on my own website, which I have now begun. Here is the link for those who want to read alongside:

http://gkaybishop.weebly.com/purple-orb-process.html

--gkb--

[(Anonymous)]

"if I ever do a Dark Lord story -- I've got one plotted, with the working title of Lord of the Crimson Land -- it's going to be a raucous sendup of the entire genre"

Careful--like I said on your other blog, according to JK Rowling that's what she intended for Harry Potter to be! You might be setting yourself up to be the next JK Rowling. ;)

--Cary

Non-sequential scene writing

[(Anonymous)]

I just wanted to jump in and say the practice of jumping around in my story is very liberating. From first starting in one scene, then jumping ahead, then jumping backwards to even earlier in the timeline, and then going further to a scene in the future of the timeline, has allowed me to keep up with writing one scene a week. Now I wonder if some of the instances of so-called "writers block" I'd had when writing fiction in the past was from trying to force myself to write the story in a linear fashion. This gives me the motive to write the scene that is compelling to me at the moment. I can piece them together later. Thank you for this tip, and the examples.

Justin Patrick Moore