Randy Ellefson's Blog, page 38

What Does Your Species Look Like?

Appearance

When creating a species, start with physical characteristics; bodies influence the minds that develop. Like it or not, appearance plays a crucial role in life, even if no one’s likely to draw our species or otherwise see it. The overall impression and details combine to add characterization opportunities that shouldn’t be overlooked. It’s okay to start with envisioning a specific character, but try to get a sense of how the species generally looks, too. This allows us to not only define them all, but then comment on how our character matches or defies expectations, without which, our audience has a limited understanding of how this person fits in (or not) with their own kind or others.

For example, if your species is generally slovenly but this character is neat, maybe he gets more respect from other species. And what does it say about him? Do his kind find him arrogant? Does he care? Why is he like this? Does he aspire to be better? Or does he dress neatly to keep people from suspecting his character is bad? Does this provide him better opportunities?

A neat species but a sloppy character can have the opposite effect. Maybe his own kind think he’s a slob in personal and work habits, but other species find him more down to earth. Maybe he’s a gambler and wants to fit in with lowlife friends. Or he’s disguising himself like an undercover cop. Is he so consumed by his work that he doesn’t pay attention to his appearance (a cliché)? He’s just clueless or indifferent to the consequences?

Are They Humanoid?

There’s a tendency to create humanoid species like elves and dwarves instead of spider-like ones, for example. This is preferred for most species because otherwise things might get too weird for our audience, or too much like a cartoon. While there’s always room for these, non-humanoids have their challenges.

With humanoids, we don’t have to decide what they eat, how often they sleep, and other biological basics. They mingle well with humans, being able to live in similar buildings, use horses, and need fewer unusual physical things. By contrast, would a giant spider sleep in a bed, or eat with utensils, or consume the same food? How would one travel if not on foot? Such considerations might be needed if we go this route. It could make things more interesting for both us and the audience.

With a non-humanoid, our ability to quickly and skillfully describe them matters because readers have to imagine them, unless we’re in a visual medium. While it’s great to have explanations for anatomical features, audiences are used to bizarre things without getting one iota of explanation. Be forewarned that such creations have a tendency to be monsters, or viewed as one, a subject discussed more in Chapter 5, “Creating Monsters.”

What is Your Species’ Attitude?

Disposition

Is our species good, evil, or more complicated? Our intended use of them will help in subsequent decisions.

Something violent, uncivilized, and uneducated may not be welcomed in society. Maybe the idea of them is used to frighten children into behaving. They’re a danger for travelers, especially non-warriors. Characters might have relatives injured, killed, or even eaten by this species. People go missing, in the wilderness or in space, whether there’s a gruesome crime scene or no sign of the body. Its presence causes caravans to be armed and scouting patrols to be around the community’s borders. Settlement or space station defenses will take their abilities into consideration when arranging armed forces. Weapons might be designed with them in mind. People can be skilled in tracking and scouting for them. The species will have a reputation that affects the lives of those they threaten.

A pleasant, communicative, and benevolent species will be welcomed by other societies, though possibly with reservations. They could be bringing supplies only they have access to, like plants, gems, or special weapons and armor of their creation. They may exchange information on recent activities by obnoxious species. Our characters might have friends in that species, who could’ve saved, trained, or befriended a relative. Maybe people aspire to be like them.

The caveat here is the human model—we can’t be predicted to be nefarious or benevolent as a whole. Some like to believe mankind is basically good, and while not getting all philosophical about it, this obviously doesn’t mean we don’t do horrible things to each other and even animals, plants, and the Earth. Is our new species more predictable than us or equally complex?

If they have a uniform disposition, is there a reason for this? Did a set of gods with the same disposition create them? If evil gods created ogres, maybe that explains their attitude. Were they the result of an accident that influenced them? Did they result from breeding sentient life with animals or monsters? Did someone evil or good create them and use magic or something else to ensure their disposition? How strong is that disposition? If they were created ten thousand years ago and something situational at the time made them evil, hasn’t that situation likely passed and maybe now they’re different, less extreme? Or is it perpetual and they’re even more upset?

An evil species might be less useful if shunned by society, effectively relegating them to a smarter monster out in the woods. This places creative limits on us that might be undesirable, particularly if we intend to use our setting for many stories. That species can’t do things inside a city without sneaking in, for example, but how many times do we want to use them that way before they become a predictable caricature of themselves? This can be solved by creating two races of similar appearance but with opposing dispositions, such as elves and drow (dark elves).

This can greatly extend the reach of a uniformly good or evil species, allowing new uses for them. It also creates a problem for those on our world: does the person we’re looking at belong to the good one or the evil one? Can the person standing before them be trusted? Using elves and drow as an example, the first all good, the second all evil, elves would be trusted, but now people know that drow exist. A drow could pretend to be an elf to gain access to somewhere or something. An elf could pretend to be a drow to infiltrate somewhere under drow control. If you like this idea but also like races that can be physically distinguished from others in the species, just create additional races: one that looks different and one that doesn’t; for example, elves and drow looking the same, and a third kind of elf that looks different from both.

Creating a Habitat for Your Species

http://www.books2read.com/creatinglife

Does your species live in settlements with other species or keep to itself? Learn why and when each scenario makes sense. If living in joint settlements, consider the factors affecting their integration, or lack thereof. What sort of terrain and climate do they prefer and how does this affect their choice of settlement?

Why Create a Fantasy or SF Species?

Creating Something Different

Inventing unique species can help our work stand out (hopefully in a good way) and even invigorate love of the genre for both us and our audience. With so many people using public domain species, there’s probably little we can say about them that hasn’t been said before. How many authors have used the long lives of elves to comment on how impatient humans can be? There are constraints on us from these species, possibly making us long for our freedom. But there’s also safety there, in the comfort of familiarity, and an assurance that if our audience doesn’t like our work, the species won’t be their reason. There’s risk to invention, but reward, too.

If our species will be alongside public domain ones in our work, comparisons are inevitable. Doing a good job is even more important. The standard species are high quality and set a high bar for us. This chapter is designed to help us get over it.

How Often the Setting Will Be Used

It doesn’t make sense to spend many hours developing a species for a short story. We’ll never have a chance to reveal much of our work. If we’d like to develop a detailed species anyway, then we should invent for a setting we’ll use repeatedly across multiple works. Creating a thinly developed species for shorter works on a single-use world is another good approach, which can work especially well if the species is bizarre and might face resistance from an audience.

We might invent a species to tell a specific story, which allows us to tailor our invention to our use. This keeps down unwanted or unneeded invention but might also restrict us, when freedom is one reason we’re creating species. Conversely, we might invent a species first and begin to think of story ideas or ways we can use it. This latter approach might yield more material than intended, but having ideas is never a bad thing. We can end up with multiple stories while retaining the freedom to invent. Regardless of our approach, we shouldn’t feel that building a species is a waste of time because it can take our work to unexpected and great places. Everyone benefits.

Scope

How much effort to expend on creating a species will depend on intentions, but there’s a range of possibility from extreme world building to hardly any.

The Minimum

At the least, we must decide on physical appearance and an overall disposition that’s shared across members of a species. Such life forms are often used as little more than a beast for characters to overcome in their quests. Ogres, orcs, and other henchmen types from fantasy are good examples. They seldom talk or do much more than get killed by the heroes. A more benevolent species can also have limited use, like Chewbacca from Star Wars.

He’s a Wookiee, but in the original three films, we never see another Wookiee (George Lucas may have added more in the background when he altered the films later). That we only saw one Wookiee made Chewbacca synonymous with his species. We had no Wookiees to compare him to and his personality traits might as well have been the traits of all of them. That he never spoke a word we could understand eliminated cultural, societal, and other issues that minimized the effort needed to create him. He is useful primarily as a constant physical companion who can fight and do things while Han Solo has conversations without the distraction of doing Chewbacca’s tasks.

It is Harrison Ford’s acting talents that make Chewy work as a character; his funny responses to Chewy’s nonsensical growls are what really characterize the Wookiee. The same can be said of C-3PO’s responses to the unintelligible R2-D2. Despite all of this, Chewbacca works, but this approach arguably succeeds onscreen better than on paper, due to the inflections, body language, and tone used by actors. In books, a character or species with such limited use is hard to make memorable; our readers may forget the character is there or wonder what they’re for. The character is little more than a henchman, albeit a positive one.

As a side note, Wookiee is capitalized for some reason but your species or races should not be; that’s not a title or proper name. You never see “human” capitalized unless it’s the start of a sentence. One justification for capitalizing it is when the name is synonymous with a region. For example, Germans are from Germany so we capitalize it. Wookiees are from Kashyyyk so this rule doesn’t appear to apply, which just shows you we can get away with things like this.

Continuing with Star Wars as an example, there are countless other species shown but never named. They are extras on the set, many with compelling appearances, and that is all we experience of them. This works better onscreen than on paper; a picture really is worth a thousand words, which we don’t want to waste on a multitude of characters who have minimal impact on our story.

The Maximum

At the other extreme is a fully-developed species, including their habitat, climate, settlement preferences, appearance of head, body, and clothing, their gods, society, languages, customs, history, relationships with other species, supernatural and technology talents and attitudes, and combat skills. It can be easy to go overboard inventing things we might never use, but it can also make a great impression of depth and believability.

A major issue with this is not only hours but months, even years of refinement, weeding out the lesser aspects that don’t stand the test of time while rounding out and improving the good ideas. As with most things, world building skill grows with practice, making this culling part of the process; this book is designed to give you a head start. As we go on to invent sovereign powers, monsters, animals and plants, we’ll continuously update our species, integrating everything and improving realism.

In Moderation

If done right, splitting the difference can be a sensible choice. The next section and species template (in the appendix) can help you can make an informed decision about which areas to work on. I recommend deciding on habitat, whether the species lives in joint settlements, overall disposition, appearance, and their relationships with each other and your other creations. Areas to skimp for now can be clothing, gods, characteristics (like agility, intelligence, and morale), language, customs, history, combat, and details on their supernatural and technological level.

“Skimping” ranges from overlooking a subject altogether to jotting down a few words about it. You’ll have to decide what is skimped based on your needs, but it’s worth it to think about every subject to see if you have any concepts. Sometimes ideas beget ideas, meaning that the act of writing down one subject causes you to think of other details. This happens more often as you develop other aspects of a world, resulting in an integrated setting that could stand out in the crowded marketplace.

Should We Create a Species?

In SF, we may need to create new species, but in fantasy we have the option not to. This section helps you decide on whether to do it or not.

In Science Fiction

Aside from little green aliens, inventors of SF have no public domain species available. We can’t use Vulcans from Star Trek or Na’-vi from Avatar because someone else owns them. We either have only humans or must invent humanoid (or not) species. Do you want your planet-hopping characters to encounter unique lifeforms on different planets or on other spacecraft? That and aliens arriving on Earth are the only scenario where we must create them, as there are plenty of SF stories with only humans, especially those involving explorers from Earth.

In a universe like Star Trek, some species are ever-present while others are episodic, only appearing in one or two shows. The latter need far less development time. It might be wise to create a few well-developed species (who are part of a crew we use repeatedly) but then spend less effort on everything else. Some ideas might have limited use anyway; rather than discard them, use them for one story and move on. Riskier ideas are well-suited to this because if our audience doesn’t like them, we’re not revisiting them anyway.

A caveat here is that the opposite could happen: we might find ourselves using them more than initially intended, in which case we must be careful not to box ourselves into a corner. Don’t make unnecessary comments in early uses of them, such as, “They never leave their planet.” Unless that’s part of that story, this restriction could come back to haunt us when we want them traveling. There are ways around that, like deciding they’ve been driven from the world, but you get the idea. A side-effect of thinly developed ideas is accidental conflict when we decide to more fully develop them after (italics) publishing them.

In Fantasy

Fantasy species are well defined, popular, and mostly public domain. No one can stop us from using them, which is one reason why seemingly everyone does. Does this make them over-used? Are people clamoring for something they haven’t seen? Are you? If so, you could skip to the next section, “Creating a Species,” right now, but there are a few other points to consider.

Is it okay to present the usual species but with minor or significant changes and still call them the same thing? For minor variations, yes (see “What’s In a Name?” in Chapter 1). For more significant alterations, we might want to just strike out farther on purpose and add a new name. Once freed from the original concept via a name, it becomes easier to reimagine an elf or dwarf. Remember the rule of three when using an analogue: at least three changes so people are less likely to realize it’s a modified elf.

Sometimes it seems like we can read ten books by ten different authors and get ten slightly different versions of an elf. Is that good or bad? They’re on different planets, after all, and might develop differently, but it begs the question of why the humans are usually the same as those on Earth. And the horses. And plants.

There is an important caveat to species that aren’t public domain, like Ents and Hobbits from The Lord of the Rings. We can create a very similar species and then give them a different name. The treants and halflings from Dungeons and Dragons come to mind, Tolkien. This has been done for legal reasons, as the original species belong to their creator. We run the risk of legal trouble with this anyway and it goes against the idea of creating something new, but the option remains. It is arguably best to put our own spin on an analogue while renaming it; with enough changes, audiences won’t immediately think of a known species.

Species Bio-Diversity and Hierarchy

Bio-Diversity

To make a decision, consider how diverse your creations are. If they’re all humanoid, it suggests shared DNA and they are races. Elves, dwarves, hobbits, orcs, humans, and other fantasy tropes have two arms and legs, one head, and no tail, etc. But if we create one with wings, another with gills and other adaptations for the water, and another with four legs, these suggest different species. Wouldn’t a dragon be a different species from Homo sapiens?

On Earth, we distinguish between Caucasians, Asians, and more with the word “race.” If such races exist on our world, we should also call them race. But if we also have elves and dwarves and call those races, too, isn’t that confusing? Wouldn’t humans, elves, and dwarves be species, and Caucasians, Asians, and blacks be races of humans? High elves and drow would be races of elves. This makes more sense than saying they are races of some unnamed parent humanoid species.

A Hierarchy

A hierarchy can illustrate the problems of using race and species poorly. Consider this list where everyone is lumped together as races:

Daekais
Kadeans
Humans
Mandeans
Morkais
Nideans

Can you tell which ones are related? If so, it’s only from my naming convention; two of them have “kais” in their name and three of them have “deans” in theirs. This lack of structure results from seeing everything as a race of one species despite their differences. As it turns out, two of those humanoids have wings, and three of the others live in water, having gills and other adaptations. Doesn’t the below make more sense?

Humans
Kais

Daekais
Morkais


Mandeans

Kadeans
Nideans

The first numbers one, two, and three are species. The differences between them are enough that no one would confuse one for another. The sub-numbers of 1 and 2 are races under their respective species. I refer to daekais as a race of kais, not just a generic “race” of…unspecified. If I want to refer to daekais and morkais simultaneously, I can use “kais” to do so.

Let’s take a look at some traditional fantasy races. Ask yourself which is better among these organizations:

Drow
Humans
Hill dwarves
Mountain dwarves
Wood elves

Or this:

Dwarves

Hill dwarves
Mountain dwarves


Elves

Drow
Wood elves


Humans

You may have little reason to point out such distinctions to your audience; a paragraph of explanation is not advised. Using “species” has an added benefit of pulling readers out of their comfort zone of expectations. Some who feel strongly one way or another will tell you otherwise, but it’s your world and you are its ultimate god.

Creating Species in Fantasy and SF

Chapter 3—Creating a Species

Creating a species is one of the most rewarding but challenging aspects of world building. This chapter focuses on ensuring your species is close to the competition (such as elves and dwarves) in quality and depth. We can feel daunted by all that we could invent, but remember that we can always ditch things that aren’t working. Having fun with it and taking it one subject at a time go a long way toward keeping it fun.

Appendix 2 is a template for creating a species. It includes more comments and advice, and an editable Microsoft Word file can be downloaded for free by signing up for the newsletter

Species or Race?

Terminology affects perception and our ability to organize our creations. Fantasy readers are familiar with “race” denoting the difference between an elf and dwarf, for example. These races are very different in physical features, temperament, and society. They seem totally unrelated except for being humanoid. By contrast, on Earth, we only have humans, a species, and use the word race to distinguish between different biological variations of us. This section explores the difference between “race” and “species” and when we should use each term in our setting, though there’s no right or wrong answer.

The Terms

What’s a race? The answer can be complicated, but on Earth, race has been described as nothing more than a social construct to describe different versions of Homo sapiens (i.e., humans), who are 99.9% the same, having no genetic differences to warrant classification (into races or anything else). In other words, genetics has nothing to do with the term race and more to do with the word species. This means that if two humanoids are genetically different, they’ll be considered separate species.

Separate DNA = different species.

Shared DNA = races of a species.

In SF, humanoids originating on different planets will have different genes, so calling them species makes more sense. In fantasy, humanoids are most often from the same world; it’s possible for them to share genes and therefore be races of one species. Since elves, dwarves, and others are invented, no genetic material exists to determine if they are, in fact, genetically different. One could assume that the pointed ears of elves must mean there’s a genetic difference, but this is superficial. On Earth, human races have different eye shapes, noses, and more while still being genetically the same. Fantasy humanoids could indeed be races, sharing DNA.

Small people, also known as dwarves, exist on Earth, but their distinctive height and other characteristics are caused by a medical or genetic disorder, which is only sometimes passed down from parents (due to genes). It is not a definite outcome, but in fantasy worlds, a dwarf is a different race with a guaranteed passing down of their different genes to children, which suggest they are really a species. We wouldn’t expect a fantasy dwarf to give birth to a human, but Earth dwarves have done exactly that.

In some books, authors will say that elves, dwarves, and humans all derive from the same ancestry (same DNA) and they are therefore races, which seems a good term. On the other hand, if we say that the gods created elves, dwarves, and humans separately and that these beings didn’t divide themselves during evolution, they probably aren’t races. They are different species. Our audience may be indifferent to this and exposition to explain it will bog down our story. They will expect “race” and might balk at “species,” so consider this, too.

If our gods are capable of creating one species, why haven’t they created two or more? Did some event stop them and they never got around to it? They just did one and let it separate into races on its own? Or did the gods cause those races to develop? Are the gods taking a hands-off approach to the world and not interfering beyond inventing this one species? If they’re involved in everyday life, why not create more species?

If races don’t exist on a biological level, species is the other obvious term to use, but even biologists struggle with what is known as the “species problem.” There are over two dozen definitions of the word “species.” If scientists can’t define it, how can we? The word is just used to group similar organisms and is what the average person thinks of when considering a cat vs. a dog, for example. Both races and species can interbreed, producing offspring, rendering the distinction between them a moot point, so this shouldn’t figure in our thinking.

Creating Gods – Where to Start

http://www.books2read.com/creatinglife

The final section of chapter 2, “Creating Gods,” from Creating Life, discusses how to get started with creating gods.

How Do Your Gods Behave?

A god who never does anything might as well not exist from a world building standpoint. For your pantheon, decide what is considered acceptable and unacceptable behavior and whether the gods generally obey this. Each deity will have a different viewpoint, with some being very lawful, others agreeing but not overly caring, some chafing but agreeing, and others outright disdainful and either openly thwarting such rules or doing so secretly, possibly while being amused that they’re doing so. We’ll need to know our gods to make these decisions.

Do gods punish offending deities? Do guilty gods submit to the punishment (respecting the law they’ve broken) or resist, possibly by fleeing? We might decide that there’s a prison for deities and what its properties are and what, if anything, is preventing other gods, or their followers, from doing a prison break.

How do gods punish their species? Death, a nasty afterlife, misfortune, or removing talent, like one for magic? And for what offenses? Swearing with a god’s name is a good one except that so many people might be doing this that the gods would be awfully busy. Failure to undertake a promised mission makes sense for adventurers. Not defending a temple is another. Destroying one is even better. These more serious offenses are more likely to attract divine punishment. Myths about famous people who’ve suffered a given fate serve as cautionary tales that can be mentioned to spice up our narratives.

Reputation

Some gods and their followers have a reputation that immediately comes to mind if they’re mentioned. A god of cruelty might force self-mutilation on its priests. For a god of love, this might be orgies. A god of wrath might be prone to outbursts of anger, making people afraid to even say his name. Does anyone demand sacrifice? Decide how people think of each of your gods (positive/negative) and why that is. Whether or not the god obeys godly rules will come into play. This is where myths can help shape their reputation, too. For some deities, this will be easier than others.

Interaction

Do your gods ever visit the world and peoples they created? Why, how often, and for what? Do they have to be summoned or can they appear wherever they want? Are there restrictions on where they can go? Only other gods are likely to have created a restriction powerful enough that another god must obey. Are there time limits on how long a god can remain here? These limits should have a rationale because we assume gods are without limits.

World builders sometimes decide that the gods will not directly influence events; it’s too convenient to have them swoop in and fix things or cause issues when our characters are doing well. One way to avoid this is having the god’s behavior be that which caused the story. Past events can also have set something in motion, and this is where myths come into play, with our characters discovering the details or truth of a legend, maybe the hard way.

Creations

Gods are assumed to have invented the world and its life, whether by accident or on purpose. We don’t need to give a reason for this, but our world building can be better if we do. We can take some reasons that we have for our own creative work and attribute it to gods, such as a love of doing so. We’re curious how our children will turn out while guiding and shaping the result, so the gods can, too.

We can decide which god(s) created what life forms. This really means cherry-picking ones to make decisions about, since no one cares which god invented tomatoes, for example. On the other hand, a plant that devours species might be improved by deciding an evil god invented it, especially if it only eats certain species—namely the ones that god doesn’t like.

While a god of war is an obvious choice for the one who invented a weapon, even a god of love could do so if it’s reminiscent of Cupid’s bow. Look at your god’s trait list and imagine what items they might possess for themselves or have given to the world. Decide if there’s a limit on what can be created; maybe plants and animals are okay, but the gods must agree to invent a humanoid species. Our god of chaos might be forbidden from creating anything but do it anyway, resulting in some unpredictable monster.

Places

Our gods can create special places, which are typically supernatural. These can be on the world, between worlds, or an alternate reality. Prisons, meeting places, means of travel, and hiding places are some possibilities. Explanations are typically better but not needed, as inhabitants often won’t know the truth; it’s unlikely they’ll even learn of these locations, but our characters will or there’s no point inventing them.

Temples, whether abandoned or not, are places where gods are likely to visit, and sometimes their religion will build these up extensively. Can the gods be reached here? Is there anything special about the place where they appear? What about the altar where sacrifices to sinister gods were made? Is a church the way to enter a portal to where that god dwells?

The afterlife is a unique place that will be covered in Cultures and Beyond (The Art of World Building, #3).

How to Invent Other God Traits

http://www.books2read.com/creatinglife

This section of chapter 2, “Creating Gods,” from Creating Life, discusses other traits your gods might have.