Thursday! Between the 'Zines: Merry Christmas and A Happy Verisimilitude!
V4, I4
I promised you some thoughts on legend and worldbuilding and a certain ghostly bear guardian, but let me do something else first.
Merry Christmas. Happy Hannukah. I hope the season has given you ample reasons to feel delight, gratitude, wonder, and grace. Remember, though, that the Twelve Days of Christmas doens’t start until Christmas Day, so you have a few days to pick up a little wonder and grace if you don’t get your fill all in one day. That’s my little holiday efficiency gift to you!
I give. I’m a giver!
Okay. So, about that bear story. I’m not sure quite where to start that will end up in a place helpful or insightful to you, but let me try this. I’ve a world in my head and I can’t get it out. Usually, that’s the kind of thing that puts you in a padded room, getting visited by men in lab coats, clipboards, and butterfly nets; however, I’m a writer and it’s allowed. Well, until it starts impinging on my ability to write other things, which it’s done lately.
On the other hand, I’ve also had a fascination with lore and legend — urban legends, campfire stories, nursery rhymes, walking songs, etc. — and how they give a created world verisimilitude. This isn’t a new discovery for me. I’ve loved those little “background” details in stories ever since I read The Hobbit, which is full of songs and rhymes and legend that make Middle Earth not only big but also deep12. In reality, a story can’t give you all the details of the world around it, because you only have so much time and you really don’t want to spend that time reading a hundred thousand words about the ecology of the planet3. A fictional story set in a fictional world will never be as full nor as complete as ours, but you can make it seem more real by giving it a little bit of seeming history. If you do it right, you also leave yourself opportunities to tell more stories in the same world, thus making it even bigger. Maybe that nursery rhyme is rooted in a deeper tradition. Maybe the monster of legend is real and there’s a bigger story. Maybe that folk hero wasn’t quite so heroic.
My problem is that I have a few cool little ideas for background in this world but not a very solid idea of how the world actually works. It’s like I can only glimpse the world through a dense fog. Every once in a while the fog lifts and I can see a little of it here and there — the bits of legend or rhyme that come to me. They don’t form a cohesive whole, but they do suggest there’s a lot behind that dense fog bank for sure. That is how I got to “Smokey the Haint”. I know this world is ours, but in the far flung future4. I know there was high technology far beyond what we know now. I know that something terrible happened, an apocalypse that nearly cracked the world into pieces (either literally or metaphysically). Magic is now a real thing, and though I don’t know exactly what form it takes I know it collects like it has physical form and can be tapped or harnessed for various uses, good or evil. I know that some humans can sense and access it, and they’re called Wanderers. Yonder is a Wanderer and the boys with him in the camp might be Wanderers if they survive to adulthood but I don’t even know the perils those boys will face aside from nature itself. For that matter, nature might be touched by the release of magic in ways I haven’t considered, which would make The Woods even more dangerous. I know there are beings that may or may not be humans who are bent toward harm and ill and they’re called Spoilers. There is a vast area of forest called The Woods that “feels” in my imagination like the Black Forest of Germany felt to folks who lived in and around it in the 1600 and 1700s. The stories I want to tell probably take place in something like our Colonial Era, but before the American Revolution.
Seems like I know a lot, doesn’t it? I really don’t. What I know is scattered and the pieces don’t fit well together. I’m writing the bits of fable and legend hoping they’ll add connective tissue to the bones of the world I have. I really don’t know whether that will work, but it’s the only way I can see to go forward. If nothing else, I’ll have shared with you some cool little pieces of a world we may never see fully. We will have visited a far off, distant land and come back with some nice souvenirs. Maybe that’s okay. I certainly hope it will be because I can’t promise more.
I have the same issue with my Lighthouse story. The world of that story might be the same world of “Smokey the Haint”, but I’m not sure and I probably won’t be sure until the very last minute, when they snap into where they fit quickly and without any fanfare, like magnets slapping together.
Again, that story might not have a place in a larger world. Maybe it’s a little piece of a world left unexplored, beyond our current reach. If that’s true, I think it’ll have to be okay, because that’s all it can be. Well, it can be a source of frustration and a thing I denigrate as an incomplete scrap of a wonderful whole that ought not exist on its own, but where’s the fun of that? Why can’t you enjoy the little treasure brought back from my imagination’s voyage? Heck, why can I?
It would certainly be nice to be the fictional equivalent of Marco Polo or Lewis and Clark, exploring vast tracts of lands unknown, sending home mesmerizing accounts of that I see and hear. I have explored a New World, I might trumpet! Behold my Travelogue! I’ve wanted to be that writer since I discovered places like Middle Earth, Arrakis, and The Land5. Maybe I’m not. Maybe getting to that point takes time, or a particular background, or a deeper education than I have right now. I don’t know. What I know is this: I can only write what I can write. Anything else leads to frustration and, more importantly, not writing anything cool at all.
Ugh. Let’s not do that one, huh?
So where does this leave us? I think we writers need to do what we can, whether it’s big, bold travelogues or little tchotchkes we picked up on a brief visit to a new place. Either one can be cool and entertaining, even useful, and isn’t that what we’re really after? All of us?
After the break, a reading of “Smokey the Haint”. The quality isn’t top-notch, but it has a rough, “sit down right here and let me tell you a story” quality I kind of like. I’m sure, if I ever attain SuperWriter status, someone will release a professional version, with effects and a proper voice for Yonder. Until that day, you get me. It’s okay. I think you can enjoy it anyhow.
Smokey the Haint.
Though with Tolkien, those background tidbits led to full-blown history lesson in an appendix or The Silmarillion.
In my opinion, most fantasy and sci-fi stories fail because they skimp on the little bits of lore. Reading those stories is like watching a cheaply-made TV show in which you can see the storefronts are all flats and the mountains in the distance are painted on a curtain.
Probably. A couple writers really tested that statement of mine — Frank Herbert and Tolkien himself some to mind — but even they knew our limits.
Hi Chris and Erich!
From Stephen Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. The Land might be the most captivating fictional world I’ve ever seen, and the one that conflicts me the most because Donaldson’s protagonist is easily the most despicable fictional character I’ve ever met.