Fantasist’s Scroll

Well, and fantasy, too.
I recently read a very good article about religious and spiritual belief and how that fits into science-fiction and fantasy fiction. The article was really an interview, in slightly modified form, with award-winning author and well-known Mormon, Orson Scott Card. (You can read the article here: SciFiEditor.com.) The article brings up some very good points about why religion is often left out of modern fantasy and science-fiction, namely that the SF and Fantasy “Establishment” are practitioners of American Intellectualism, which “rebels” against religious thought and belief. I think he’s quite right in that regard. Also, I agree that such a view is quite unrealistic, considering how widely spread religious beliefs actually are in the world and how deeply they effect our culture and planet. Look at both the Crusades and the current political unrest in the Middle East. Indeed, in many places in the world, political strife is a direct result of conflicting religious beliefs and methods. As important as these factors are in our real world, can we afford to ignore them in a created world? I don’t think so.
In any case, I highly reccomend reading the article if you plan on writing speculative fiction of any kind. Religion in such settings is a very important, but overlooked, topic.

This is cute!
While looking for water gardening resources, or an old t-shirt that I can only half remember, or something, I found a fifth grade class’ creative writing assignment called The Island Project. The project was for the kids to imagine themselves stranded on an island and to describe the island on which they found themselves. Many of them also drew maps of their island. The project is from 1995-96, but, somehow, is still up on the web. It’s fun, actually.
And, not a bad way to get some creative juices flowing for a story setting, either. I have often gotten ideas for things to write by drawing maps first. So do Orson Scott Card and Holly Lisle, both successful writers, so it’s not just a fluke or a gimmick. It’s also a bit of fun.
So, if you’re stuck for something to write about, why not draw a map? Or, heck, if you’re not too full of yourself, why not just do the same exercise that the fifth-graders did? You might just be surprised at the results!

I just re-read this last week.

How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy is good enough that I’ve read it three times now and I still picked up something new. In fact, I always pick up something new when I read it, or almost anything else about writing.
This book, though, is different. For one thing, it’s fairly focused on speculative fiction, which is just a euphemism science-fiction and fantasy. Also, the author, Orson Scott Card, is not only a writing teacher, but also a Hugo and Nebula Award winner, so he really does know what he’s talking about. But, beyond that, it’s a damn fine book. So, I’ve read it again, after two years, and this time, I’m doing a bit of a review.
If you’re just starting out, this is a great book to start get you started the right way. If you’ve been at this for a bit, it’s still a great book to read, because it will show you some things that you may not have noticed about writing speculative fiction. At the very least, it’ll be a good refresher course for you. I know that I use the MICE “rule of thumb” when I look at my own story ideas, such as they are these days. This book really taught me quite a bit about making realistic fantays settings and, I think, contributes to the strength of my story, The Chrome Girl.
In any case, I cannot reccomend How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy enough. It’s well worth the price.

What is MICE? Well, it’s an idea that Orson Scott Card talked about in his book How To Write Science-Fiction and Fantasy. So, what does it stand for? MICE stands for Milieu, Idea, Character or Event, and it describes the four basic kinds of stories that occur in speculative fiction. Let’s break them down!

Milieu stories are about the world the author has created. They’re all about exploration and seeing wonders. What matters is the journey through the world of wonders. Card gave the examples of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Clavell’s Shogun. What matters in both cases are what the main character sees and experiences and, to a certain degree, how that changes them. Remember, this story’s main focus is the world in which the characters exist. Other things are secondary to exploring that world. If you’ve built a really detailed world from the ground up and want to show it off, this may be the kind of story you want to tell.

Idea stories focus on a particular concept or question that the main character wants to solve. Notice, it’s about the main character, not the author. As an author you may have an idea that you want to get across or explore, but if you use the Idea story to do that, you have to make your characters care about the idea. A prime example would be the murder-mystery, where the main character is a detective trying to solve the question of “Who killed Mr. Body?” Characterization is not as important in Idea stories as it is in other kinds of stories. What matters is the Idea, or puzzle, to be solved. If you’re writing this kind of story, you might read up on mystery writing, as well as fantasy and sci-fi.

Character stories are about just that: the characters. But, more than that, character stories are also about the changes the characters go through during the course of the story. Putting an interesting character under some kind of pressure and watching them react can be both challenging and rewarding. These kinds of stories can generate some really touching tales. Coming of age stories fall under this category, but so do mid-life crisis stories. Think Death of a Salesman or, for a fantasy example, Lawrence Watt-Evans’ With a Single Spell. Remember, the Character story is about character. By that I mean that the story is driven by the characters and how they grow and change. A character must change in some way during the course of a Character story.

Event stories are about some great and earth-shattering event. They quite often include Character stories or Idea stories as sub-plots. These stories are about a big event of some kind that changes the world. The story, then, is about what happens leading up to the event, or how the world changes after the event. A science-fiction example is the “Wild Cards” series of shared world books edited by George R.R. Martin. In those stories, the Event was the release of a micro-organism that changes a significant number of the population into super-powered beings. Another example might be The Day After, which is a movie about what might happen after World War III.

So, in a nutshell, any good speculative fiction story should fit into one of these categories. If you’re writing a story and can’t figure out where it fits, you might need to re-think how you’re telling the story.

Until next time, keep writing!

Okay, so I’ve got writer’s block.

It’s not a crime. It’s more like a disease. An insidious, creeping disease that steals my creativity and locks me away in a horrible nightmare of sad, soggy prose. My problem isn’t that I don’t have ideas galore for stories. And, it’s not that they aren’t original and interesting. The problem is, when I go to put them on paper, they sound different than they did in my head. There’s something missing. I have no idea what it could be, because I write basically like I speak. It flows naturally and easily, but when I read it, it sounds flat and dull in my inner ear.
Maybe it’s because I’m trying to write fantasy stories in a world that I haven’t fleshed out enough. Maybe I’m not seeing my characters and world clearly enough. I’ll be damned if I know. If I did, I would be writing fiction right now, not this blog. In fact, I started making entries here in the hopes that it would get my creative muse flowing and let me get back to the stories. So far, that hasn’t really worked out, but hope springs eternal.

While trying to smash my writer’s block, I’ve been reading. I’ve been reading history. Mainly Chinese and Japanese history. Those “Daily Life In…” kind of books. It’s really interesting for me, a Westerner, to see how advanced those ancient civilizations really were. Ancient China was far, far more advanced in many ways than Europe during the same time period. Sometimes, I sit and try to puzzle out just what happened and how we, the West, got the technological edge over Asia. It’s a strange, convoluted thing. And, ripe with story ideas.
The other subject I’ve been reading is writing. That is, I’ve just finished re-reading Orson Scott Card’s How to Write Science-Fiction and Fantasy. In fact, I’ll probably do an entry tomorrow about the MICE “rule”. It’s fairly usefull for speculative fiction authors. It helps keep persepctive.
And, finally, I’ve been reading fiction in between the non-fiction. Mainly, I’ve been re-reading Lawrence Watt-Evan’s Ethshar series. They’re really nice books that deal with normal, everyday problems in a fantastic setting, but they don’t get too nasty. I mean, they’re realistic, but I wouldn’t hesitate to reccomend them to my 10-year-old daughter.

So, until the next time, keep writing!