There was a discussion on sartorias ’ LJ some time ago about Elves in current fantasy. What makes them different than being “ordinary humans with magical powers”? This led to mentions of Elves being immortal. (I'd meant to get this written and posted for weeks, but better late than never.)

Now, one of the things that has always fascinated me is the huge differences between the experiences of immortality and mortality. And certainly, Tolkien’s choices in his works have something to do with my outlook. But I was always left feeling that he had not resolved the matter of what happened when an Elf had his or her body destroyed in some fashion. It wasn’t clear in Tolkien: there apparently was some sort of “reincarnation”, but it was not clear how it worked.

( So what does "Immortality" mean? )

Recently, I was reading the first chapter of a friend's current work-in-progress, in order to give her notes on it.

So, let me say that first off, I did like her story.  She is a good storyteller.

But something about the chapter nagged at me, because the descriptions felt flat.  On the one hand, it was clear to me that she has a sure vision of her characters and setting.  And the chapter was not lacking in the details.  But on the other hand, something just wasn't working.

( Read more... )

One of the things about creating a totally new fantasy world is that you don't want it to sound too much like "this world".  And I certainly didn't want to sound like I was copying Tolkien bit for bit.

Today, I was going along, working on some new text in The Ring of Adonel, moving the story forward, and I had a character say "I will go tell the lords."

And I stopped.

Because, the reality was that he was doing more than just talking to those the common folk would consider "lordly".  He was going to talk to the leaders of the three Fynlaren Houses.  One of which now is actually a woman.  And suddenly, I realized that I wanted a term that was not quite as laden with gender baggage as "lord".

So, I wanted a term that would refer to these specific characters as the principal figures of their "tribes".  And I didn't want it to be a really obvious borrowing from real world cultures.

After running through the thesaurus looking for possibilities, I decided to start mining Old Irish.  I'd studied it in graduate school, and have a grammar book, that glosses a lot of the vocabulary.  So I drew up a list of English words that had meanings that could be applied to the position under consideration: head, crown, leader, first, lord, one, master, rule, sight, voice, king.  As I grazed through the book, other possibilities of meaning suggested themselves: high, great, very great, highest, treasure, gift, I judge, holds fast, hero, forehead.  In the end, I went with one of the words for "high", ard, and a term for "prince", mal.  Combining them, I get ardmal (sing., with ardmalen for plural -- the "-en" ending for plurals has already been established).

Of course, after coming up with the term, I then had to go back through the manuscript as it stands and replace the terms.  Except that not every instance of "lord" is being replaced, because it is still used as a generic honorific.  And then, also, there's the decisions about when to capitalize it and when not to. 

I believe it's these little touches that are important to creating the sense of place, the sense of existence, of a fantasy world.  Especially for dealing with things that we don't have. 

It's also one of those things that I felt satisfied with. Probably a detail others won't be interested in, but there it is: today's achievement in my work.  :D

When I turned up the chart of my undergraduate course of studies, I though posting the list would be of mild interest in showing some of my background.  But inevitably, I suppose, there was the impluse to talk at least a bit about the events of those years, and some of how they effected me.

I'd meant to post this all a couple of weeks ago, but got sidetracked.  And then I started reading Gladwell's Outliers.  I'm still only part the way into the book, but it's been in the back of my thoughts as I've looked at my own history.

I find it interesting to see the confluence of chance and intention that combined to fill out my education.

I had always been interested in mythology and mythological stories.  Yet, it's a big question as to when I might have encountered the works of Joseph Campbell, and whether I would have read Levi-Strauss and Eliade at all, if I had not had that particular mythology course (they didn't repeat it while I was at UH, I don't think).  A key turning point in my understanding and thinking about literature and storytelling lay in that class.

Would I have taken Old English at all, if the retiring professor had not wanted to teach a section of it his last semester while I was an undergraduate?  I don't know.  I do know that at University of Houston, while I was there, it was the only section of Old English that did take place.  Having had it, it made a difference when I got to graduate school.  I at least had the inital grounding for Old English studies, which qualified me for a seminar course I and two other students took (translating bits of an Old English text and studying the prosody) with Ruth P.M. Lehmann, who was my advisor on my Beowulf thesis.  Would any of that have happened without that undergrad class? I don't know.

That I even wrote the Senior Honors Thesis was a spur of the moment decision based on nothing more than wanting more instruction from an excellent teacher.  Yet, it became my education on preparing a scholarly work: reading, noting, citing, considering.  In doing it, I at least learned how to step further out of that basic essay structure learned in high school, that useful but uninspiring tool.

The chance conjunction of the Philosophic Issues class with taking Formal Logic.  The latter polinated the former.  I might fail and slip in presenting arguments and ideas from time to time, but at least I know it, can see what I skip over, and pin-point my own flaws.  I can also usually find where someone else's logic falls apart, where they're making an assumption without supporting it.  That actually turned out to be useful in doing Jeopardy! research, where I needed to be able to distinguish between an assertion of fact and a presentation of theory.

I stated in Part 1 that I had plotted my course of study to train myself for writing fantasy and science fiction.  Looking back now, I'm very satisfied that the plan "worked".  It's not that it is a guarantee of being really good at such writing - obviously, I still have to "prove" that by getting some work in front of a reading audience. 

Gladwell indicates that 10,000 hours of practice is needed to master a skill.  I was on campus these years pretty much 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, some 40 weeks a year, for 4 years.  And I read almost all that time, or was in class taking notes. I was an eat-while-reading type person, propping books up against each other while feeding. And if I wasn't reading I was writing. I figure, just in those 4 years, I racked up 6,400 of the "needed hours".  The time spent in graduate school would fill out the rest.

Do I agree with that 10,000 hour proposition?  I don't know for sure, but it seems likely.  I do know that it was in my second year of grad school (under a similar diet of study, reading and writing and my undergrad course), that I produced what I consider to be my first "masterpiece" (the long narrative poem "The Marble Don"). I would probably have been hitting the 10,000 hour mark about that point, or been close to it.

Is it important what I studied, or that I studied?  I don't know.  I am so fond of my education -- really, I did get a lot of pleasure out of it, Dreaded Professor X notwithstanding - that I like to think that it has been important in my development.  And yet, I realize that the hours spent, the willingness to apply myself to a course of study, that also was important. And that is something I should remind myself of a bit more often.  It does take some work to "master" something. And I say that as one who has been procrastinating learning PhotoShop and PowerPoint.  Neither of these require the degree of study that delving into Beowulf did, yet I put it off, simply because I can't absorb them by osmosis.

I hope I haven't bored everyone with these rambles down memory lane.  I have to laugh - after recently complaining about Proust and whether there was any point to Remembrances of Things Past, here I am, wandering through similar detritus of my experiences.  I will say, the point for me was to look back and evaluate how I got to this point.  I've been surprised at the implications of some of the things back there, not realizing or remembering their importance for me (like realizing my first encounter with Lewis was his study of Paradise Lost). I'm still not sure what to make of it all, other than to say, this is pretty much how I got to where I am.

Oh, and the jump from the scholarly track of Academia to that of Hollywood screenwriting? That was laid in too: a long time interest in theater, all the time during the undergraduate career spent hanging out in the Drama Department, and my love of Shakespeare.  That ran as an undercurrent to all the rest.

We don't "just happen" to end up somewhere.  Our choices and opportunities both contribute to the journey.

I recently completed a chapter of The Ring of Adonel that had a goodly share of exposition (this is chapter 14).  Not only that, when I got into the writing, I realized that what on the outline was supposed to be one chapter was going to have to be split into two.  Part of it was that I had underestimated the time it would take the characters to get from Point A to Point B (as in averaging about 25 miles a day), so I had to write in stuff to fill the time (things that would happen anyway, I just thought some of it would be later).

Anyway, after finishing chapter 14, I started feeling anxious about the flow of the story.

You have to understand, most of the first part of the book was written years ago.  Then I got stuck at a major point.  Once I got past that point, I started moving into "new" parts of the story.  New in the sense that I haven't had it on the page before.  I've been thinking about the rest of the story a lot, but that's not the same thing as living with it on the page.

On top of that, it has been quite a while since I read the work straight through, the way a reader would.  I've reread sections, to refresh myself about character attitudes and discussions.  I've reread chapters doing revisions, correcting typos and tweaking sentences.  But all that is not reading the work for the story.

So, I decided that to help me move forward into the next chapter, and to find out if chapter 14 really is as "slow" as I was thinking it was, I needed to reread the whole to myself.  I'm reading it out loud.

The first thing that surprised me was that it really DOES move along nicely.  All these years, I'd been concerned by the first three chapters -- there are a lot of characters and relationships being introduced.  I'd wondered if they were slow.  Happily they are not.  I'm now up to chapter 10.

The main thing that struck me about doing this is how easily I can get removed from a sense of the whole when I'm working on the immediate portion of the story.  Yes, the "Big Picture" of the story sits there in the background, holding everything together.  But the nature and quality of the work previously done becomes almost invisible, because I'm so focused on making the immediate portion work. 

Another thing that struck me is that in the years since I began the story, my skills as a critic and editor have grown a lot.  And it pleases me to exercise those skills on my own work, and find that ... it is not bad stuff.  (Okay, I know every writer thinks that of their own work - we wouldn't be able to do it otherwise.  But I do feel the work is "good enough".)

These are encouraging things to find.  They energize me to keep going. When I have lots of projects on my slate, all in various stages of "production", it is too easy to get discouraged and shift to something else.  And I really want to finish this book at long last.  Reading the work aloud to myself is helping me keep on track for that.

I was sorting through some stuff today, determining what I could throw out, what could get packed up and moved to the storage unit, and what I wanted to keep at hand.  I ran across a box on an upper shelf in the hall cupboard, and pulled it down to check it.  Oooo, boy, am I glad I did!
( More about reading maps ). 

So, there I was, reviewing the visitor stats for my website ( www.scribblerworks.us/_index.htm ), and I checked out the search strings that brought some people to the site.  It's kind of interesting to see how people get there (well, once you get past realizing that the high number of hits are spambots prowling about, alas).

Anyway, one thing that shows up consistantly are searches for "heroines"  - and "heroes" and "quest".

These are aspects of mythic patterns in stories, of course, which I wrote a whole book about (heh -- hype! hype!), www.scribblersguidetomyth.com.  But that book grew out of my studies into matters connected to heroes and heroines and quests.  Because of that, I thought it would be interesting to do some musing on the nature of heroines these days, particularly in modern fantasy works (whether set in pseudo-medieval worlds or in contemporary urban settings).  What's going on with them?  What has changed in how heroines function in stories these days?

So, first off, I went back and reread the column I wrote a long time ago about heroes and heroines.  It's posted on the website at http://www.scribblerworks.us/articles/Mythopoesis-Heroes.htm .  Admittedly the "writer's voice" in that column is much more scholarly and impersonal than the one I use these days.  But once I got past that, it did set me to thinking about some things.

The "traditional" role of heroines was that they were the objects of the quest, the princess to be won, or rescued, or freed.  She was certainly not the active character in the story, making the choices and moving the plot forward.  In the column, I described the function she served in the story as being the representative of the Essence of the tale.  The nature of the heroine served to represent the goals of the quest the hero pursued.  Dividing the Action and the Essence of the story into gender roles was a convenient shorthand for storytellers.  It didn't really reflect the capabilities of either sex when confronted with real quests.  But for a long time, because the social position of women was limited greatly, no one thought about that distinction.

These days however, women have the freedom to do almost everything that Society allows men to do.  I say "almost", because in America, women are prohibited from direct combat roles - mostly because in many ways, America is a very conservative society.  England, Israel, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Ireland, Iceland -- (and that's just off the top of my head) all those countries have had women heads of state, long before America, the supposedly progressive nation, has even put forward a truly viable woman candidate for national leader.  But when it comes to stories, we do put women to the forefront.

The thing is, what we have now are "female heroes", not "heroines".  We have female characters who are taking the principal role of action, driving the story forward.  But forward to what?  What is it these days that serves as the embodiment of the goal of the story's quest?  The figure that personifies the socialization of the Hero at the end of the quest?  Because we do not really cast male characters into that somewhat objectified role.  We still shy away from putting male characters into the position of being rescued, freed, won for marriage and, in a word, inactive in the plot.  There are very few male counterparts to Sleeping Beauty.  Perhaps the Prince Charming of many Cinderella versions does serve that purpose, but even in that story, he does have to go out and find the owner of the magical footware.

Now, don't mistake me.  I do think it a good thing that modern stories allow female characters to be more active, to be, in fact, the hero of the story. I've always liked stories with strong female characters.  But I've been wondering what we're losing on the symbolic level by transforming the Figure of Essence into the Figure of Action. 

I don't have any answers on this.  The modern sensibilities would certainly sneer at the immobile traditional fairy tale princess who only exists to be won.  Quite rightly, from the social perspective.  But I don't know that we've found a substitute for the Figure of Essence in stories yet.

(Yes, I guess I've just now coined two new story terms: Figure of Action and Figure of Essence. I wonder if they'll be useful?)

As I've been re-reading what is written of The Ring of Adonel, and working on the rewrites/polishes, I've also been thinking about some of the choices I made in the story. Particularly the scope of it.

 It seems there is a powerful impulse in fantasy writers to make the major conflict in their stories the most important clash of good versus evil that their world has ever seen. The Ultimate Confrontation with Evil. A total Save The World story, with the whole of the world as the stakes.

Now, it's not that this is necessarily a bad thing. There have been some good stories from such confrontations.

But....

What happens when the author finds that he or she wants to go back to that fantasy world? The heroes in the first story have already take out the Major Evil. So, isn't any evil figure that follows going to be a lesser one?

Tolkien got around this by having his Uber Bad Guys, Morgoth and Sauron, be (in effect) fallen angels, immortal and not such as could be completely destroyed by those born in Middle-earth. But not everyone goes to such lengths, and they have their heroes manage to destroy the Looming Evil.

And there's a really big problem when the apocalyptic fantasy involves prophecies as well. If all the prophecies are fulfilled in the original story, what the heck is going on when the author returns to visit the world? What does happen next? And why didn't anyone know that there might be something beyond the apocalyptic confrontation? Wheren't there any prophecies that apply to this new conflict, and why didn't anyone mention them the first time around?

So, some of these questions were part of what led me to shape my story as I did. Sure, my hero is indeed in a bit of a conflict with my Uber Bad Guy.  But this conflict does not involve the idea that my hero would ever be able to destroy or even severely diminish the Uber Bad Guy. And, actually, the main myth that underpins the whole of The Ring of Adonel will, in the end, explain why the Attondar (the major resident angelic Powers) do not engage in direct conflict with Caimcadar (the Uber Bad Guy).

But I still think about the problems that apocalyptic plotting can create for a writer. And basically, I didn't want to irritate my reading audience by having heroes win a complete victory over an Uber Bad Guy... and then come back with a sequel where I was asking them to believe that "Ooops, the victory wasn't quite as complete as they thought." , f

I've been nose-to-grindstone the last couple of weeks, working on getting the manuscript of The Scribbler's Guide to the Land of Myth (plug, plug!) ready for BookSurge to do their magic on it. So, working on my fantasy novel has been simmering quietly on a back burner. And it'll wait a bit longer. I'm almost done with the spell-check on The Guide, and then I need to beef up an outline for another project. But, I'm hoping in a few days to get back to it. 

Still... in the back of my mind, I've been mulling over a minor problem. What shall I call my created world? Tolkien called his "Middle-earth", but mine... isn't "middle" anything. 

I began writing my first fantasy novel in high school. Inspired mostly by Tolkien, actually. In the sense of ... it was reading Tolkien's work that nudged me into actively focusing my writing impulses on creating a fantasy world. I loved the work of many other writers, and over the years they have had major effects on me. But it was Tolkien that really stirred up the storyteller in me (which had already made some piffling attempts at writing).

So here I am slowly working my way through revising the completed chapters of The Ring of Adonel, and I find that I don't have chapter three completely typed into the computer. So I scrounge around for the manuscript to see how many pages have to be entered (I know it's not many). Now, you have to understand that I'm doing this during breaks from sorting papers and deciding what books to put into storage and get out of the apartment. So there are piles of things around. I hauled out a notebook that was the right size and sat down to skim the handwritten pages.

It wasn't The Ring of Adonel manuscript. 

Nope, instead, it was a notebook I used for developing some short stories. Mostly fragments of them, actually. Still, there are the early forms of the two comic book short stories I've gotten into print, "Tsalosha" (a fantasy set in a pseudo-Native American world of shapechangers) and "Zeus' Box of Deceit" (the Prometheus / Pandora myth). But there were other stories I'd forgotten about, or hadn't thought of in a long time. One of them I have been mulling over, to possibly turn into a graphic form, so it's handy to have this notebook turn up now. But there was another bit that intrigued me, but for the life of me I can't remember where I was going to take the story. I'm considering posting that fragment here later (like tonight, when I get home).

Still, it seems strange to run across these incomplete snippets of creativity.

I need to remotivate myself to get back on track on various creative projects. And there's nothing like "public exposure" to assist in that.

Much of the opening third of the book takes place on Midsummer. The ceremonies and mythology of the day are important to the story as a whole, which is the principal reason for that focus. The following poem was (inside the story) composed by Caoin Il-lyran (one of Darael's sons) for the celebration.

One of the things about being both a writer and an artist is that eventually, the artist gets an itch to draw something that the writer has written. Of all the possible scenes, characters, and events in The Ring of Adonel that appeal to me, however, I did not expect the first one to be the following one. Mainly because the character is quite fantastical.

But I've now done a preliminary sketch for an eventual pen & ink drawing. I'm not going to start on that for quite a while (at least, I don't think I will be). But it amuses me to put the sketch before you, my friendly readers. :)