Toward Ecosophy

Okay, good. Some people have already posted about their experiences with the exercise discussed in the previous post in this sequence, so I'll go on and talk about what I've done, and where to go from the bare situation that you get out of exercises of the kind I sketched out. 

I didn't start out by doing the exercise, as it happens, though I used the same kind of free association that the exercise is meant to encourage you to explore. My starting place was a little different -- an image from a book that was once a favorite of mine, Faeries by Brian Froud and Alan Lee. One of the many paintings of faery folk in that book shows a critter called an urisk -- yes, that's him on the upper left -- a relatively friendly, solitary being found near pools in wild places in the Scottish Highlands. 

When I first read the book and saw the image, my immediate thought was "But that's a faun!" -- and my second thought was "What on earth would make a faun leave the warm Mediterranean shores and hide out in the cold bleak wilds of Scotland?" I knew immediately that there was a story there, but didn't get around to writing it. Fast forward forty years, and that's the story seed that came to mind when I started mulling over this project.

In terms of the exercise; "A faun hiding in exile..." is my first element. The third is "...an ancient and sunlit land." As I brooded over the various possibilities, I sorted through a good ten or twelve verbs before settling on "sets out to return home to..."  Complex, yeah, but the rules nowhere prohibit that. ;-)

So we have a faun, hiding in a bleak windswept place rather like Scotland, longing to go home. That's my story seed. 

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Once you've got a story seed, the next step is to ask yourself as many questions as you can think of. Write down the questions, but don't be too quick to write down answers. The three rules I discussed in the previous post -- give your writing permission to suck, your first thought is probably a cliché, and nothing's set in stone until the first copies come back from the printer -- apply with full force here. So write down questions, and begin thinking about the answers. Some of the obvious questions for my story would be: 

Why is the faun in exile? 
Why did he choose so distant and bleak a place to hide? 
If he's considering going back now, why hasn't he done that already? 
What has his life been like in exile? 
What are his relationships like with the people and other beings in the place where he's hiding? 
What is his more general backstory? 
Etc., etc. 

Again, at this stage of the game, it's more important to ask these questions than to answer them. 

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Now we take it a step closer to story, and think about viewpoints. What does that mean? Simply this: within your fiction, who's telling the story and how? 

There's a lot of rulemongering out there on this subject. You'll hear plenty of people insist that there's only one right viewpoint for fiction -- usually, they're pushing third person subjective single viewpoint, i.e., the reader experiences everything from the perspective of just one character (that's "single viewpoint"), including that character's thoughts and feelings (that's "subjective,") but the character is still "he" or "she" rather than "I" (that's "third person"). Don't believe for a moment that this is the only option. Revisit a dozen of your favorite novels sometime and see how the authors handle viewpoint. Some authors do an omniscient viewpoint, in which the reader knows what's going on in lots of characters' heads at once -- John Crowley's Little, Big, which won the World Fantasy Award, does this. Some authors put their stories in first person, as though the viewpoint character is sitting there talking to you ("And so I climbed aboard the boat," or what have you); Herman Melville's Moby Dick does this. You've got all kinds of options. 

I generally do third person subjective single viewpoint, because I like the effect. (Not always; Star's Reach is first person all the way, and The Fires of Shalsha is in third person multiple viewpoint.) So I have the faun considering his homeward journey. Is he going to be my viewpoint character? No, because I don't want him to become a human being with funny legs. Fauns in Greco-Roman mythology are minor deities, with all the numinous power and difference from the human that this implies, and I want to keep that. So somebody else is going to go with the faun, and that somebody else is going to be the viewpoint character. 

Now things are tightening up. We have a human character, or possibly more than one, who will be traveling with a faun. What kind of human character? Somebody from the bleak, cold, Scotland-like setting of the faun's exile. (It's helpful to give the country a name; since this is going to be a fantasy novel, the name can be made up. The one I settled on is the kingdom of Raithwold.) What kind of Scotsman or Scotswoman goes off with a faun on a journey of a thousand miles to a place he or she has never been? The phrase "no true Scotsman" comes to mind! So we have somebody who's alienated from his or her surroundings, thus potentially up for going somewhere else. 

Another decision interjects itself here. One of my favorite fantasy authors is Patricia McKillip, and one of the things in her fiction that I admire most is the way that she so often uses human relationships other than boy-meets-girl as the mainspring of her plots. Very often it's the love between parent and child that provides the motive force for her stories. That's not done anything like often enough in modern fantasy fiction. The final novel of my series of epic fantasies with tentacles, The Weird of Hali, has already been plotted out, and a very large part of it revolves around the relationship between Owen Merrill, the main character of the first, third, and fifth novels in the series, and his daughter Asenath. Since I don't want to rehash that dynamic in advance in this project, but I'd like to work with a parent-child dynamic, my human viewpoint character is going to be a single mother in her late twenties, and another character will be her eleven-year-old son.I don't want a father in the picture, so the son was born out of wedlock -- remember, she's alienated from her surroundings, and being on the wrong end of the savage moral obsessions of some close equivalent of Scottish Calvinism will do that! 

This also raises the possibility of sexual tension between the viewpoint character and the faun, since fauns traditionally have a rather distinctly un-Calvinistic attitude toward sexuality. Please note: sexual tension. That doesn't mean they go at it starting in chapter two like bunnies in heat. You create sexual tension by having two characters who feel a sexual attraction to each other but, for some plausible reason, don't act on it. There are other kinds of tension, too; any emotional connection between two characters, from awed reverence to murderous rage, can build tension if the characters for some reason can't express it in action. Tension is good in a story, since it builds anticipation and keeps the reader turning the pages, waiting for the moment when whatever it is either happens or definitely isn't going to happen after all. 

So it's back to the questions. I've named the woman Embery and her son Tay, by the way. Therefore: 

What's Embery's backstory? 
What's her relationship with her son? 
What's her relationship with the local community? 
What's her relationship with the civil and religious authorities? 
Where does she live? 
How does she support herself? 
What drives her to the point of being willing to chuck everything she knows and go on a journey to a place she's never been? 
Etc., etc., etc. 

As I mull over these questions, I come closer to the point when I can write a first scene in draft. 

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Your turn. Come up with questions. Use them to build on your initial story seed. Don't settle for the obvious answers, and be willing to take inspiration from authors whose works you admire. 

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Oh, one other thing. I'm not asking for critique. I don't crowdsource my stories; I write what I want to write, the way I want to write it, for those who want to read it, and those who don't approve of this or that aspect of my writing -- why, they're free to go read something else. I've sketched out my thought processes here to show readers how I develop a story seed into a story, not to ask for anybody's approval, and any attempted comment that focuses on critiquing the story framework I've developed here will simply be deleted. Many thanks, and let's get to work writing.