Roderick T. Macdonald's Blog, page 25

Why I Write Fantasy: Inspirations – The Art of Fantasy, Part 1: Masters Old and New

So yes, now I’m dotting around. Last week I talked about a fragment of the music that inspires me, and began with that avatar of fantasy infused metal, Ronnie James Dio. I once wanted to design a tabletop roleplaying game campaign around a number of his songs. Maybe I’ll talk about that another time.

This week I want to talk about art as inspiration to write, and specifically visual art, the traditional image on canvas. I have had the great fortune to be exposed to the art of masters from a relatively young age, free to visit and revist them at will. When I travel, itself a constant source of inspiration, I always find myself drawn to galleries of art, mostly old, sometimes new, and from the creativity and expression of artists I gain great solace, and can feel creatively invigorated myself. I believe that the act of engaging with art that speaks to you, or that you find a way to interact with meaningfully, lights up the creative centres in your brain, or resonates with your artistic soul and calls forth your own impulse to create, however you wish best to imagine it. I can go either way. Art inspires art, seeing the creative expression of others can, and does, inspire the desire in me to produce my own. I just turn to my prefered medium to express my visions.

Now some things you see you just don’t like, or are as bad as can be in your opinion. It happens. Not everything in a gallery is sublime, there’s plenty of chaff to thresh our way through sometimes. The worst thing is for a piece to say nothing to you, for it to be inert. But then, like a book that does nothing for you, you can simply move on. It might speak to someone else.

As a pre-teen I was, for some reason, taken into the Scottish National Gallery, at the bottom of The Mound on Princes Street in Edinburgh. I remember walking into these large vaulted rooms, and being met with vast expanses of paint, detailed pictures of other worlds, some mythological, some of times long lost, but the lives of those people, or fragments of life and emotion captured on that still canvas made a huge impression on me. I always used to say it was a Titian that I was first transfixed by, and the gallery did possess a few, but now I can’t really be sure. I do know that I did return to that gallery as a teenager, as it was free to drop into and I could go there on my way to the train station and home, spend some time sitting and staring up at the works of Titian, Durer, El Greco, Gainsborough, Constable, Cezanne, Monet. I loved the colours of Titian the best. Yes, there were naked ladies, but if I’d gone there to be aroused I’d have blushed furiously and fled the building! No, I went there and my imagination burned with thoughts of who these people were, what those scenes meant (the gallery potted explanations were usefully vague), what had happened off camera, so to speak, or where the stories the paintings told me went next. I was amazed by motion captured in stillness, hands reaching but never moving, the contradiction creating a strange high, a heightened awareness of the visual I had not appreciated before.

Nothing made it directly into my writing, I don’t think, but the sensations of art lingered, became something I wanted to recreate with words after I discovered that I had a hard time with proportion when trying to produce a pen and ink of a stag beetle. The wings, well lets just say I got the detail vividly right, but did not match one wing’s size to the other!

In my 20s I lived in Glasgow, and became acquainted with the Gallery of Modern Art, another institution I could freely wander into at any time. Free access to art is an incredible gift, and one I am eternally grateful for. Here I met art installations, wooden imaginings of Laurasia and Gondwanaland (you sit on them), and massive canvases of single colours, washed out or broken with strong lines, Rabo Karabekian’s Windsor Blue Number Seventeen for real. I loved them, the thought behind washing machine parts and cigarette butts piled together, the visual meditation of standing in front of an abstract wall and letting it wash over and perhaps partly through me. That gallery helped me realized art didn’t end with Picasso, who at the time I didn’t care for that much anyway. It took a trip to Paris many years later for me to appreciate him a little better. (Not that I mentioned him in my Paris blog!) It was also fun to walk down stairs randomly decorated with the busts of Roman Emperors – an interesting contrast to all the modernity – or were they in another gallery? It kind of blurs together sometimes.

The figurative art of my youth fired my imagination, made me wonder about the lives of those strange people in odd clothes (or lack of them), but it also made them real, their experience across centuries as human as my own, making me realize that stories are as universal as the people who inhabit them. Modern art, with its challenge of expectations, and demand for the viewer to participate in making the art work made me realize that you can find wonder in the strangest of places, appreciating modern art helped me appreciate the beauty of the everyday more strongly. Both of these things became deep wells of remembered thoughts and feelings, especially yearning: art in me inspires yearning, to know, to see, to feel what the artist felt, or wants to inspire in us, and that became part of my own yearning to write, and to show others fantastical worlds, enough like our own for the people who live there to become real, but just out of reach, that we can experience, but never quite touch.

The Writing Life: Hey, Aren’t You Writing a Book?

Why yes, yes I am. Except I had this deadline for a first draft that expired in January, unmet. I think the gods are mocking me for answering a goodreads question about writer’s block and saying “I don’t really suffer from it, but here’s what I do when it kind of strikes…”

Bazinga! It struck, and my proposed solutions, well they didn’t work as well as hoped. I sat myself down sternly and told myself to write any old rubbish quite a few times, but magically decided to read the news instead. The internet is a terrible thing for the not-fully-motivated. Of course I did do writing adjacent stuff – this blog for instance, and getting some stuff done is an easy way to excuse yourself for not doing the main work ahead of you. But after a while you can’t help but notice it is an excuse!

So I feel rather foolish now. I could go back and edit my answer, but I feel my ill-advised hubris should be allowed to stand and act as a reminder to me in future to not take the ability to write for granted. Maybe I should add in a link to this column as a mea culpa.

I’m normally so full of ideas that it never really occurred to me I wouldn’t be able to write them down. I mean for the last month and a half I’ve basically ground to a halt, but I didn’t stop having ideas, running dialogues in my head, thinking about scenes to come etc., but when faced with the task of writing them down, I balked. I really should talk to my phone when daydreaming book fragments. I really really should do that! *Makes emphatic note to self*

Was I succumbing to doubt? There was some perfectionism going on, not wanting to write shoddily, but a first draft is allowed to be shoddyesque – I ignored that memo however. There was definitely procrastination going on too, but I’m not sure the origin of the procrastination was doubt, I think it rather more distraction – I’m seeking employment, and the process, after a few glorious years of freedom, has been quite daunting. Plus other stuff of life happening, as it does.

I was rather stymied by my fixation on writing the draft in a linear fashion. I could have jumped about and written the scenes I woke up daydreaming about, or the conversations I had in my head, and even though I have in fact already done that this draft, (a first for me, and I found I’m not really a fan of writing things out of sequence and then stitching them in when the main narrative meets them, though it is fun when you get to marry a fragment to the main text – you get a sudden boost to the page total, and feel something akin to the satisfaction of finding a particularly stubborn puzzle piece and slotting it home.) I did not do that this time, my characters were stuck in a spot, and I was stuck with them.

But no more! Yesterday I cranked out a chapter and a half – finally escaped that scene – via a chase, finger harvests, and immolating a bloodied skeleton. As you do. Plus a flood. Got to have a flood.

Does it count as spoilers if it’s in a first draft?

So: progress has returned. A couple of boxes in my outline ticked off. Far fewer remain than have been completed. I would say I hope to be finished by the end of this month – but I’ve tempted that fate already!

And then the first pass of continuity and timing fixes. I’m looking forward to that: having the entire story written out, no matter how much gets altered eventually, will be a great relief.

I don’t have a magic solution anymore for being blocked – I just showed up every day and looked, tinkered, fussed, and distracted myself until eventually the catalyst to write came. Not very useful, but it’s what happened. Knowing I was wasting precious time hadn’t worked for weeks, but maybe the knowledge that much more time wasted would push back my publication date back also finally got me going.

Speaking of, I think I should get back to it! See you guys on Monday!

Why I Write Fantasy: Inspirations – the Music of Fantasy, Part 1: Ronnie James Dio

I’ve done a fair bit about morality in fantasy recently, and though I have at least another three meditations on that theme, I think it’s time for a break. Let’s get back to the origins of why I write fantasy. I’ve written a few columns on my literary influences, but I have been led to the land of fantasy by other routes, through art, film, and most especially by music.

I am unashamedly a child of the late 70s and 80s. Rock, and then metal were the dominant forces in my musical world, and though I explored and appreciated many other areas of music later in life, I have to be honest about my first love in music, and what a huge effect it had on my fledgling imagination.

My elder brother was a massive Motörhead fan. Every surface of his room, including ceiling, was covered in Motörhead posters, memorabilia, and articles about the band torn from the pages of Sounds magazine. He had an ancient turntable with a built in speaker that had to have an emptied spool of thread glued to the end of the tone arm above the stylus to keep the needle from jumping. However primitive it might have been, it was loud. The things you remember.

However, before he became an acolyte of the church of Motörhead and abandoned all other musicians, my brother had possessed other slices of 70s rock history, and the images of these album covers lingered in my memory as something to be rediscovered when I myself reached the age of 12, with enough money from my paper round to keep me in sweets for the week with a bit left over. I remembered two covers in particular: one was a glass head with a rod of strange lights going through it – Judas Priest’s Stained Class, the other a pencil drawing of five faces looking out from an interlinked mass of hair. Rainbow’s Long Live Rock ‘N’ Roll. I vaguely remembered it, and thought I’d liked it, most memories of earlier music having been almost obliterated by a wall of constant Lemmy & Co. (Capricorn is a fantastic (and fantastical to me at the time) early tune, I always wanted them to play that rather than Metropolis when I saw them live. I dimly think my wish was granted once.)

So I wandered up town, and found that I had enough money to buy two Rainbow albums. I bought Long Live Rock ‘N’ Roll and Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow. I don’t know why I didn’t get Rising that day, but I’m glad I didn’t, it was a treat saved for a few months later, and appreciating Rainbow’s first album meant I wasn’t always looking for bombast in future – though in my teens that was mostly what I wanted! I went home. My mother and sister were out, off to the Usher Hall to listen to entirely other music. I put on side one of LLR’N’R, on mum’s good record player (no spools required), and was blown away by the voice that soared from those speakers.

I thought I was in heaven, this was amazing, I couldn’t believe how good everything sounded, right down to my gut, even as my mind sparkled and shone with the images bursting from Ronnie James Dio’s lyrics. Then the last song on side one began. Gates of Babylon. If there was ever a chance I would not be a lifelong fan of RJD, it was gone then. I mean, Ritchie Blackmore is amazing, and I love almost anything with his playing on it, but this is about first loves, and that love was Dio’s incomparable voice tempting me to look away from the sea and go with him anywhere. Get ‘em when they’re young. I was hopelessly hooked. The song ended, I lifted the needle, put it back to the start of that song, turned the volume up, and moved the speakers so my head was directly between them. I wanted to be inside the song. My odyssey into hearing loss had begun, but I didn’t know it then, all that mattered was how I felt, overwhelmed by the song, wanting to be part of it, to go where that incredible voice could take me, make the images that burst into my mind real. Music, like reading, offered a powerful avenue of escape from the humdrum daily life, a portal into other worlds that could exist in my mind. I was glad of another entrance, something else to daydream about as I stared out of that classroom window. The first of thousands of writing prompts were born right there, something not torn from the books I read, but borne on waves of sound into my eager consciousness, the first mixing of two huge imaginative influences in my life.

First with Rainbow, and then in his time with Black Sabbath, and on into his solo career, Ronnie James Dio wrote and performed songs that were the inspiration to, and soundtrack of my first writing efforts. The imagery of Tarot Woman, Stargazer, Temple of the King, Catch the Rainbow, Man on the Silver Mountain, Lady of the Lake, L.A. Connection, and A Light in the Black by Rainbow fuelled my dreams, helped at times to shape my imagination. Neon Knights, Children of the Sea, Heaven and Hell, Lonely is the Word, Mob Rules, Sign of the Southern Cross, Falling off the Edge of the World by Black Sabbath brought passion and intensity to the stories I wanted to tell. Holy Diver, Don’t Talk to Strangers, The Last in Line, One Night in the City and many more songs from Dio’s solo band continued to hit home emotionally and fill me with the yearning to be creative, and for me that was to write. Though I have moved on a long way from naming magical items in my first book after a Dio album and song, the wonder of those first impressions has not left me, and his turn of lyrical expression can sometimes still be found here and there in my writing style. I may not be obsessed with rainbows as RJD was lyrically, but I’m sure my own tics will become more obvious with time, just as his did. It didn’t stop him being excellent, even in later years when I was afraid he’d not be able to cut it in concert anymore, and came away awed and happy every time. He might have lost octaves, but his magic as a performer never waned, and that was an incredible achievement.

I think most us have musical heroes and inspirations, and I firmly believe that the more artistic exposure and inspiration you have in your life the better, as it is all raw material of the best quality for your own creative processes to transform and turn into something new: your unique combination of influences filtered through your own life experiences and forged by your creative will into something fresh and exciting. The music of Ronnie James Dio is a huge part of my creative unconscious now, along with other great bands of the 70s and 80s that I may bend your ear about another time!

The Writing Life: Doubts Part 4: Procrastination, The Thief of Time

I’m going to try to keep this one brief. You know, because I’ve got things to do.

In this fourth installment of the doubt series, (Here are one, two and three) I’d like to say that procrastination can be a profound expression of doubt, of fear holding us back.

I held myself back for 25+ years. From the age of 19 when I first started writing The Crystal Fruit to last October when at 46 I published The Thief and The Demon. I spent years telling other people, and more importantly, myself, that I wasn’t quite ready to submit, or to publish. Why? I had material, but always I was ‘most of the way’ through various edits and revisions, never able to find my way to the finish line. Did I really want to finish? On reflection, I don’t think so. If I’d been serious I’d have got help sooner, would have exposed myself to criticism in order to improve myself earlier. Instead I talked a good game about writing, waxed rhapsodic about my ideas and imaginings of execution… but didn’t actually execute.

That is meta-level procrastination, the refusal to take the final steps to put your work out there. I was afraid of failure. There is a common saying: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.” For me it was “Better to never finish and think yourself a writer, than publish and be found out as a fraud.” I was invested in not discovering the worst. Doubt robbed me of optimism. The uncertainty of doubt is a weapon, but also, once you are used to it, it can become something of a security blanket. Back then I’d rather remain unsure of whether or not I had any talent than submit to agents and be rejected, than publish and find no readers, or a wall of negativity and derision. Better to do nothing, than do something and risk having all your cherished illusions shattered. When you are suffocated by doubt it becomes all you know, and you’d rather live in doubt than be exposed to certainty and discover, once and for all, that your dreams are broken.

Did I say doubt sucks?

So you procrastinate. If you don’t get to the end of the line, you don’t have to know what the outcome will be. Waste some time instead. Do all the common-or-garden procrastination ploys. Allow distractions to take you easily away from your writing. Make excuses for your failure to hit targets and deadlines. One more cup of tea. One more episode of that TV show. Oh, is that another evening gone with no writing? No problem, I’ll get at it tomorrow morning. Right after checking my email. And what is that headline? I need to find out the football results too. And what’s happening in the Supreme Court? I’ve been sitting too long. Maybe go for a walk. Need to make lunch. Have a shower. Play some pool. Anything, anything except write. Computer games: yes let’s replay Baldur’s Gate in every character class. That was so necessary. Online games. Oh. My. God. The Nirvana of procrastination has been found. A quick quest. I’ll just drop in to see how the Guild is doing. Make some potions. Just click away from that Word document, you’ve just got to click away from that Word document! Because at core, the fear of finishing and finding out you’re a fraud is smothering your desire to write. Who wants to learn that about themselves? No one rational, so the rational act is to avoid facing that possibility. And besides, you’ve got a job. It takes up all your time. You let weeks and months pass without writing. You think about it, though. Wake up with ideas. Maybe jot the odd note down, to pretend you’re still on it, still committed, but always you’re doing something peripheral, never actually moving the body of your work forward. Life is busy, you say, as your writing heart quietly breaks.

Procrastination is the thief of time. The time you steal from yourself, because doubt and fear have convinced you that only negativity awaits you at the end of the long road that is your writing journey.

But they lie. Doubt and fear distort your thought. They try to force you into submission, into inactivity. They kill your dreams by making you fear your dream can never come true, so you stop trying, procrastinating away your life.

Screw them.  

Don’t let procrastination lay a hold on you. Cultivate to-do lists with achievable goals. I started with ridiculously easy ones (put a stamp on an envelope), just so I could check those boxes and move forward. If you bite off more than you can chew, you can get overwhelmed and decide it is all too much and go back to doing nothing – so make your goals achievable, and scale up as you can do more. Get into the habit of getting stuff done. Work your old procrastination tactics into a timetable: they can have their time after you’ve worked. I still make potions.

It’s not easy, and I have backslid into procrastination here and there, but I have also felt the reward of defeating doubt, moving past my own fear, and putting my writing out there. And you know what? Disaster did not strike. My fears did not come true. My doubts were not realized. People have read my story. Some have even liked it enough to say so. (I am always in the market for more honest reviews – contact me if you want a copy of my book in exchange for a review. I am not afraid of an honest opinion anymore, good or bad – my own doubts were a tougher opponent than any poor review would be! (He says now, before harsh reviews arrive and my blotted tears boost the stocks of kleenex!))

There isn’t a universal fix, but I’m here to say that letting 25 potentially creative years pass before finally publishing was a huge mistake. Do not rob yourself of time the way I did. Believe, and act.

Why I Write Fantasy: To Appear on YouTube talking about Morality in Fantasy World Building, Obviously

Brace yourselves lads and ladesses, we’re going in!

If something is missing from your life, it might be me in glorious technicolour! You can view me waffl- er, talking about issues around morality in fantasy, and how it can influence world building, character development and conflict. With random dubious digressions into world history. Extemporising is fun!

For those of you who have been following my so far three part series on morality in fantasy writing, this video covers and integrates a lot of those topics into one rather free-form whole, plus extras I haven’t covered here yet!

Thanks again to my gracious host Jesper Schmidt for being so welcoming, and allowing me to talk without pause for breath in 14 minute chunks. Once you get me going…

Find us talking here. No earlobes were harmed during the making of this video!

If you have any questions about morality in fantasy, feel free to ask me here, or in the comments on Jesper’s most excellent channel. I am always happy to dig deeper into a subject like this.

The Writing Life: Doubts Part 3: Losing At The Comparison Game

Here we are again, wrestling with doubts! This week I’m going to highlight another way that doubt can worm its way into a writer’s psyche: the comparison game.

By now, I hope you are all familiar with my cast of doubt-related characters: General Zod, Sally, and the Toad. Visit here for the primer!

Over many years as an aspiring author, I would pick up books in libraries and bookstores, flip them open, and be astonished by what I saw. In my august opinion, the writing just wasn’t that good. General Zod went crazy, and demanded that the terrible writing kneel before him, and shouted wildly that anything he (I) wrote would inevitably be far superior to the feeble efforts of these pathetic ‘so-called’ writers! Everyone’s a critic, and the General is particularly harsh when he’s feeling otherwise vulnerable. It made him feel better on a miserable Wednesday afternoon when he hadn’t written anything worthwhile in weeks, to rant and rave about someone else’s inadequacies.

This is not, I believe, a healthy or productive practice. Quite the opposite, as what good does it do you to run someone else’s work down? Does it make you go home and work harder, or allow you to rest on some imaginary unearned laurels? I opted for the latter far too often. You’re still holding a published book in your hands, so green-eyed envy is clearly in ample supply when you yield to the temptation to pour scorn on another (often successful) writer’s work.  If your complaints have no relevance to your own current project, or serve only to cause you to do less because you’re already ‘better’ than X in your own not entirely reliable mind, then how have they helped you? Even in trying to build yourself up in comparison to something you feel is badly constructed you aren’t doing yourself any favours if it just causes you to slack off and lose focus.

And this is accepting for one hot second that your opinion is even remotely unaffected by your envy and unfulfilled dreams, which it clearly is. That writer has had the Sally moment you so desperately crave, and you just can’t understand why because under your jealous eye the writing does not justify the accolades. You imagine you’re better, but you’ve done nothing to prove it, and so you rant impotently about something else as a way to release the frustrations you have at yourself for not getting your work done, for not believing in yourself enough, for allowing doubt to hold you back. That writer’s success and self-belief are on every published page, in every line you think is so bad, and though you started off thinking you were criticizing them, in reality the negativity rolls right back around and gets turned on yourself. The unspoken doubts run like this: “If they’re published, why aren’t I?” “What is wrong with my writing – there must be something, if I can’t make it and X has!” You might not even articulate these ideas at first, so wrapped up in Zod’s critiques as you are, but sooner or later the Toad slides into view as Zod runs out of steam, and whispers the negatives into your unwilling ear. This can be avoided if you refuse to play the comparison game, but it is so easy to sit in judgment and ignore your own flaws by focusing on someone else’s.  Just don’t go there, or if you do, shake it off fast and take a humility pill, and remind yourself that even if all your wildest writing dreams come true, somewhere someone will pick up your book and be deeply unimpressed. All you can do is your best, and get your book out there. The rest will take care of itself.

Now it’s all well and good to rag on someone else’s writing to make yourself feel better (a temporary and potentially bitter fix, as I think I’ve shown), but what happens when General Zod reads a book and is blown away by its artistry and finesse? His puffed up arrogance withers and dies as the Toad slithers past him to sit coldly on your shoulder and peer at the beautiful writing too.

Reading excellent and inspiring writers can sometimes be worse than deludedly deciding you are clearly better than ‘bad’ writers, if you allow yourself to play the comparison game.

When you read great writing doubt can rear up and swallow you. The Toad gurgles gleefully that you’ll never match that, so why bother trying? In a universe with such artists, what is the point of your hopeless chicken-scratches? I didn’t write for a year after reading Brent Weeks and Patrick Rothfuss back to back. They blew me away, and then buried me under a mountain of my own perceived inadequacies. They were so good I was nothing but an obliterated shadow, their twin suns leaving me nowhere to hide. It sucked. I still love those books, but have moved past the intimidation of them, because I realized they are not infallible, not perfect, and what choice do you have if after a while the urge to write returns, and cannot be ignored?

In both cases I believe there is a failure of perception when the budding writer compares their output to those who have experienced some success. When running a book down and indulging General Zod you ignore the good aspects of the story, the things that made it a success, that spoke to people. Instead you pick at something you think you can do better, to bolster your fragile ego. Your vision is very selective, its choices determined by your own unacknowledged doubts. When being overwhelmed by glorious writing, you similarly ignore the flaws present in the book, and focus only on the aspects you feel you cannot compete with. The doubt riddled perspective that denies you can match them is as faulty as the one that declares your writing to be the best thing since sliced bread.

So: do not play the comparison game. If you are inclined to self-doubt, and many (all?) writers are, you’ll find ways to sabotage yourself whichever direction the comparison falls. If you think a book is poor for whatever reason, and you cannot make yourself acknowledge its strengths, read positive reviews of it, and be informed. Do the opposite for books you think you can’t hold a candle to, and refuse to find flaws in. Other people will have found them, have no fear. Do what you need to gain some perspective if you find yourself obsessing over other people’s writings and constantly comparing them to your own, and making yourself unhappy. Then do your best not to play that foolish game again. Read for pleasure, for enjoyment, as an educational exercise, just don’t read as a competition, because then you are destined to lose, no matter what the other guy does.

Why I Write Fantasy: A Question of Morality, Part 3: Upon What Authority?

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve looked at morality in fantasy writing and world building. This week I’m going to look at what kinds of things a moral framework or viewpoint could be based upon, what people may experience as the root of their morality. In fantasy, as in the real world, there can be many sources of moral authority, and here I’ll pick out a few that may be useful to consider.

Gods and religion is probably the first port of call as an origin for a character’s moral alignment (and no, I’m not going into the D&D model!). Morality as given to mortals, handed down by the divine. The god or gods she believes in, their teachings and their goals become part of the character’s make up, whether faithful, doubting, or rebellious. The moral structure of that religion is something taken for granted by the possessor of those beliefs often until they are challenged. This is equally true of characters who doubt or are rebellious – their problems with the orthodoxy define them, so anything that challenges their doubt or rebellion is problematic for them, if it has become a key part of their identity.

This of course means that the morality can be as diverse as the god who handed down their strictures. A world (or even area of a world) with a single god, but multiple religions or sects who all worship it, can be riddled with personal and social conflicts as the different sects all promote their version of belief in their god as the best and truest way. Differences, rather than commonalities, are highlighted and become divisive. Our own history is littered with examples of this.

In a pantheon, where gods can act as a large and sometimes unruly family, some people may believe more strongly in one god or another, which could easily cause conflict between characters, serious or light-hearted, (swords drawn versus banter over beers) depending on the relationships involved. Stories of the gods may emphasize punishment for disobedience or reward for faith, depending on the god, and the moral lesson to be imparted, all of which is at the discretion of the author. Greek myth is full of warnings, and betrays a worldview that considers gods as capricious and untrustworthy amongst themselves, and more so to any mortals who come into contact with them. Yet still they were venerated, prayed to, and worshipped for thousands of years, as taken together the stories of the gods provided meaning in every aspect of Greek life, from birth to death. Each god had its place and time of prominence, and so the religion, and the morality it helped to reinforce, persisted for millennia. A fantasy world with this kind of background worked in seamlessly (and there is the trick!) will have more depth, and its characters’ actions more significance, I think.

Of course, there can be competing pantheons present in the world – Greek and Egyptian pantheons co-existed (and presumably competed) for thousands of years in their respective (and sometimes overlapping) areas of influence. The possibilities for how that could affect characters in fantasy are almost limitless, but do not always have to be drivers of the top level conflict in the story, more just part of who the characters are, to make them that little bit more real, the world that little bit more lived in.

Sacred scrolls or writings can also be a source of moral authority. Sometimes divinely inspired, but not necessarily so, which is why I count this as a separate category. Ancient knowledge and wisdom of uncertain provenance (perhaps people, perhaps gods, or other non-humans) could easily shape a society and individuals within it, as the message becomes more important than the origin. Again, this gives the fantasy writer huge leeway in what he or she might want to do with the foundation of people’s beliefs, and can be used to serve the story very powerfully.

Another source could be the lessons of great teachers, handed down through generations. Imagine Buddha or Confucius in a fantasy setting. Of course you could imagine individuals possessed of less admirable qualities who had a lasting effect on their adherents! In fantasy this can also be expanded to the lives and acts of legendary heroes, whose decisions and deeds have been held up to people for centuries as a set of ideals, often as defenders of their nation or faith. The author has huge scope to tailor those heroic acts, (or maybe less than heroic) and the lessons drawn from them, to his or her own purpose.

Moral authority derived from ancestors, or founding myths. Many of our cultures have venerated their ancestors, and through that veneration, have adhered to the ‘traditional’ morality of that people and place. The Romans had their foundational myths, and many aspects of the ‘traditional’ Roman character were ascribed to those origin stories: later eras bewailing the increasing decadence of Rome often tried to hearken back to the traditional values of the founding, and of the Republic after the banishment of the last king: a seminal historical event that was made a part of the national character. As you can imagine, that was just one influence on the Roman moral framework as they too had their pantheon of gods to venerate. Immediately there could be a conflict within characters in such a position – what to do when the values of the ancestral ideal clash with the demands of gods who those same ancestors worshipped? How to square a bloody history of pride and conquest with the present need for peace?

Finally, and this list I’ve come up with is far from exhaustive, simple received wisdom. Morality not derived from anything in particular, but based on what has always been in that local area, passed down through generations as the way of life best suited to survival in that environment, not explicitly tied to gods, scriptures, teachers, heroes, ancestors or national myths. I think this is the quite common default in fantasy writing, as it allows general virtues to be espoused (often oddly modern ones) without tying them to anything specific in the world, and avoids the messy overtones of religious conflict that can attach themselves to other sources of moral authority. I think even this approach, tied into folk lore and the land and passing seasons (nature as a basis for morality hasn’t been touched on!) could be made richer and more rewarding for reader and writer alike: creating characters who are steeped in that sense of themselves as part of a tradition and a way of living, either rebelling against it, or acting to defend it.

To finish for this week, I hope from this brief discussion and examples that you can see ways to incorporate morality into your world and characters in a way that could be beneficial to your story. Story first, every time! In my own writing, I am aware of what moral backgrounds influence my characters, but I try not to ram it down the readers’ throats. In future, as wider stories unfold, the differences in the moral foundations of some characters may well cause friction, and when that happens, I hope the readers will not be surprised, as the characters’ viewpoints and backgrounds will have been built up gently over time. In that way, I’m trying to make the disagreements real, not simply grafted in at a later date in order to serve a plot point. I’ll leave it to the readers to decide if I was successful or not!

The Writing Life: Doubts Part 2: The Perfect as Enemy of the Good, or Great

Last week I talked about the primal doubt all writers face: the “am I good enough?” (AIGE?) question. Unfortunately it is not alone in the doubt-riddled ecosystem, and other forms of doubt can sabotage progress even when you have managed to ignore AIGE? long enough to get some writing done, and even *gasp* have enjoyed it!

So this week I’m going to mention a classic in the doubt-disguised-as-something-else genre: perfectionism. This is “it’s not good enough,” rather than AIGE? You think you’ve evolved and are no longer doubting yourself as a writer, just trying to improve your writing. You tell yourself these are distinct things. So rather than doubting yourself, you become overly critical of your writing. You doubt your writing, but call it criticism instead. In order to defeat your unacknowledged doubt you need to attain impossible standards. If you can’t get it absolutely right you decide that everything is useless. You obsess over minutiae and let it block you from progressing. Yes I’m being repetitive, because perfectionism is like being caught in a loop, you keep going back over what you’ve written and look only for what’s wrong, and don’t stop to praise what is going oh so right. In fact, you can find and manufacture problems in bits of writing you previously thought were entirely satisfactory, if not great. Because you’re not ready to move on. Or are afraid of moving on, and so it is easier to say that what you’ve written down already isn’t quite good enough yet. Not quite yet. This is revision and editing hell, and malignant perfectionism can grow insidiously during that necessary process. What starts out as a good thing (revisions and improvements to your text), can turn very bad indeed, if you let it.

Now critique is necessary, or our old friend General Zod will rampage out of control and think he’s the best thing since sliced bread again. But if Sally’s unfortunate antithesis the fearful toad arrives and crawls across your manuscript convincing you that each sentence and everything built upon them in terms of plot and character is flawed, then you have a problem. (See last week’s column for an explanation of Zod, Sally, and the toad.)

During revision and editing a writer can experience a crazy new high they’ve never encountered before. They ask for help, receive it, and see their writing get better. Yes! This is AWESOME! However. A trap can be fallen into here. You think “well, if it got so much better after the first pass, and better again after the second pass, and the third, then I’m just going to keep going until it is perfect, an impossible not to love jewel of brilliance! Yes! I can do it!” this is General Zod speaking, because he wants to ensure you get all the praise Sally is basking in, and who couldn’t praise The Perfect Book? He’s a sneaky one. You then put yourself on a treadmill of revisions, at first eagerly, but at some point you begin to tire, and the toad hops along and sits on your chest, eyeing you darkly. It whispers coldly in your ear, “You’ll never get it just right. How many times have you been over this and you still can’t get it right? What were you thinking with this ‘making it better’ idea? Are you sure it wasn’t best when you first wrote it? Have you ruined everything now? Maybe you should just quit.”

Thankfully, for me, when the toad whispered such sweet nothings in my ear I did go back and look at my original, and I recognized how much better I’d made my writing and the story it told. Looking at my first draft helped me realize I was fretting over the small stuff, and that the hard work I’d done had been effective, and I was now chasing phantoms of perfection. So maybe, in a sense, the toad helped out there. Not that I’m thanking it, because a lot of the time it tries to tell you to give up if you obviously (in its traitorous opinion) lack the talent to be perfect. Those kinds of message have to be ignored, but when you are allowing doubt to distort your thinking, and your perception of your work, it is easy to succumb to faulty decision making.

This is why having a team, editors and beta readers you trust, can be so useful. You might want to fall down the rabbit hole of perfectionism, but a good team can help catch you, and tell you you’ve done enough. Or at least remind you of the 80/20 rule and ask if you want to expend massive amounts of effort on the last cosmetic changes you are dementedly insisting are essential. “I’ll lose readers if I leave that ‘that’ in there!! That clunky sentence will kill the book!” If Voltaire and Shakespeare recognized that too much work on a thing can mar its beauty, then I think so can we.

Now I’m not saying revision and editing is the only way to fall into the trap of perfectionism, I’m just saying it is an easy way, as I hope I illustrated above. I think all writers and artists have a streak of perfectionism in them: we all want to present our very best to the world, to entertain, distract, amaze, intrigue, whatever our goals may be. We’re not really interested in putting out substandard work that won’t be as successful as we’d want in getting our message across, so we always strive to do better. This is a good thing, but I think we can trip ourselves up over it and have the striving for more get in the way of ever getting our message out there in the first place. The perfect, or the better, can be a paralyzing enemy of the good, or the great, in my mind. Yes, every first draft is rough and needs help, and yes the story, the characters, the themes can all be made better; the sentences tightened and unnecessary words pruned away, but you’re unlikely get every extra word, and run the risk of pruning away some of the excitement, or joy, or rhythm of your work if you get drowned in the details and lose sight of the bigger, more beautiful picture.

Don’t let dreams of perfection block your vision, and don’t let it trap you in never-ending fixes and rewrites. Take a break, ask for outside perspectives, look back at where you started, and see how far you’ve come down the road toward making something great. Good luck everyone!

Why I Write Fantasy: A Question of Morality, Part 2: Beyond Good and Evil

Last week I chatted about the idea that morality in fantasy fiction is often either taken for granted, (painted in simple terms of big evil versus plucky underdog good) or oddly out of step. (Why would 20th and 21st century Western morals be the norm in a variety of quasi-medieval settings?)

I also mentioned that the possibility exists in fantasy to explore moralities based on something other than the good/evil axis. Right and wrong could be measured against something other than promoting weal or woe. This is the aspect of morality I’m going to look into this week.

For instance, imagine being brought up in a rigidly hierarchical society where maintaining social order is viewed as the highest good. Deviating from assigned roles, not accepting your place in society, would be a great sin. Sounds like many dystopian fantasies does it not? Where the plucky hero starts off as a rebel against the faceless conformity everyone else accepts. In this society law and order are king, and agents of government tasked with imprisoning or killing any who rebel against convention would not consider their murderous actions immoral, because the highest good is to follow the law and preserve the status quo. The reader might then ask why is the status quo so valuable to that society? I think if that question is answered convincingly you can put the reader into a position where, although they are inclined to support the rebel protagonist, they begin to understand and sympathize with her adversaries. Especially if the rebel’s actions threaten to destroy that society without providing a clear alternative, or at a great cost of life. Who then is acting more correctly? Our own moral positions are then involved: we as readers can’t really help but think in terms of our own moral compass, normally based around good and bad, and would start weighing outcomes on that basis, and perhaps find our loyalties shifting between protagonist and antagonist(s), depending on the information available. This is a richer experience, in my view, and one that I think will involve the reader more deeply, and make your book more memorable.

Or imagine a society where duty to family is the ideal. What happens to a protagonist torn between two familial obligations of equal strength? How can she satisfy society’s demands upon her? What other criteria can be used to break the tie, and should they be used, or would she be considered selfish to do so? She may love one side more strongly, but still feel obliged either to do nothing, or destroy herself in an attempt to reconcile the demands made upon her. She wouldn’t be deciding based on good or evil outcomes, but on what could satisfy the need to put duty to family most faithfully. This could lead to actions or omissions of action that we as readers could have a hard time sympathizing with, as our own feelings about family would come strongly into play. Another scenario would be how would a character who has been brought up to always prioritize family (and by extension, his extended family, and his nation, or race) over outsiders deal with his prejudice against outsiders when the only way to save his family would be to work with, ally, or even marry into an outsider family or culture? That would be an interesting dilemma to watch unfold, as the protagonist would be likely to make many decisions that might look strange to us, but make sense to him, and could easily result in a tragedy we as readers would be tearing our hair out at seeing unfold, as the character’s code would be incompatible in some ways with our own. We’d be shouting at him to get over his prejudices and save his family, even as he refuses to cross that line, precisely because of the lessons instilled in him at his mamma’s knee.

Of course, both the above examples are simplified. Indeed, they could be combined quite easily. Imagine an ancient Spartan who falls in love with a Helot, who then tries to convince him to free her people, which would destroy the Spartan way of life. In one fell swoop you have order versus chaos, conformity versus rebellion and family versus outsider moral axes all accessed at once. As I said last week, I think of morality as something of a social construct, with ancient roots but evolving through time, and is part of the agreements that keep a society cohesive and the individuals within it linked by common cultural bonds. In the real world multiple different moral or social pressures can exert themselves upon us at any given time. In fantasy we have the opportunity to be as complex, or as simplistic as we like as writers, depending on the goal we have in mind. To examine something in detail it is often beneficial to strip away complicating factors and keep the core conflict simple. There is a reason why monolithic good vs. evil tales resonate so strongly. But in order to reveal the fault lines in say an order versus chaos based morality, it might be necessary to not muddy the waters with too many other moral conflicts, in order to share the essential problems you want your reader to interact with as unambiguously as possible. Of course you may decide to layer multiple different conflicts over each other and have them all intersect in one poor character (like our love-struck Spartan, above) who has to deal with all these things happening at once! If you can do that effectively, greatness awaits!

Next week, I’ll look at where moral authority comes from in any given society, and how it becomes the received wisdom that underpins why people should believe in, and act upon, their version of right and wrong. Religion, spiritual teachers, sacred texts, ancient heroes or pivotal events, national origin myths could all be regarded as the source of moral authority, things to be admired and emulated, their examples passed on through the generations. And of course morality at some stage has to be differentiated from ethical systems that can be developed or taught later in life and that can come into conflict with the morality a person learns from childhood. The more I talk about this, the more there is, but I’m trying to keep it to bite sized chunks! And remember, I am not setting myself up as an authority here, just sharing opinions that could easily be wrong! See you next week, I hope!

Why I Write Fantasy: A Question of Morality: Part 2

Last week I chatted about the idea that morality in fantasy fiction is often either taken for granted, (painted in simple terms of big evil versus plucky underdog good) or oddly out of step. (Why would 20th and 21st century Western morals be the norm in a variety of quasi-medieval settings?)

I also mentioned that the possibility exists in fantasy to explore moralities based on something other than the good/evil axis. Right and wrong could be measured against something other than promoting weal or woe. This is the aspect of morality I’m going to look into this week.

For instance, imagine being brought up in a rigidly hierarchical society where maintaining social order is viewed as the highest good. Deviating from assigned roles, not accepting your place in society, would be a great sin. Sounds like many dystopian fantasies does it not? Where the plucky hero starts off as a rebel against the faceless conformity everyone else accepts. In this society law and order are king, and agents of government tasked with imprisoning or killing any who rebel against convention would not consider their murderous actions immoral, because the highest good is to follow the law and preserve the status quo. The reader might then ask why is the status quo so valuable to that society? I think if that question is answered convincingly you can put the reader into a position where, although they are inclined to support the rebel protagonist, they begin to understand and sympathize with her adversaries. Especially if the rebel’s actions threaten to destroy that society without providing a clear alternative, or at a great cost of life. Who then is acting more correctly? Our own moral positions are then involved: we as readers can’t really help but think in terms of our own moral compass, normally based around good and bad, and would start weighing outcomes on that basis, and perhaps find our loyalties shifting between protagonist and antagonist(s), depending on the information available. This is a richer experience, in my view, and one that I think will involve the reader more deeply, and make your book more memorable.

Or imagine a society where duty to family is the ideal. What happens to a protagonist torn between two familial obligations of equal strength? How can she satisfy society’s demands upon her? What other criteria can be used to break the tie, and should they be used, or would she be considered selfish to do so? She may love one side more strongly, but still feel obliged either to do nothing, or destroy herself in an attempt to reconcile the demands made upon her. She wouldn’t be deciding based on good or evil outcomes, but on what could satisfy the need to put duty to family most faithfully. This could lead to actions or omissions of action that we as readers could have a hard time sympathizing with, as our own feelings about family would come strongly into play. Another scenario would be how would a character who has been brought up to always prioritize family (and by extension, his extended family, and his nation, or race) over outsiders deal with his prejudice against outsiders when the only way to save his family would be to work with, ally, or even marry into an outsider family or culture? That would be an interesting dilemma to watch unfold, as the protagonist would be likely to make many decisions that might look strange to us, but make sense to him, and could easily result in a tragedy we as readers would be tearing our hair out at seeing unfold, as the character’s code would be incompatible in some ways with our own. We’d be shouting at him to get over his prejudices and save his family, even as he refuses to cross that line, precisely because of the lessons instilled in him at his mamma’s knee.

Of course, both the above examples are simplified. Indeed, they could be combined quite easily. Imagine an ancient Spartan who falls in love with a Helot, who then tries to convince him to free her people, which would destroy the Spartan way of life. In one fell swoop you have order versus chaos, conformity versus rebellion and family versus outsider moral axes all accessed at once. As I said last week, I think of morality as something of a social construct, with ancient roots but evolving through time, and is part of the agreements that keep a society cohesive and the individuals within it linked by common cultural bonds. In the real world multiple different moral or social pressures can exert themselves upon us at any given time. In fantasy we have the opportunity to be as complex, or as simplistic as we like as writers, depending on the goal we have in mind. To examine something in detail it is often beneficial to strip away complicating factors and keep the core conflict simple. There is a reason why monolithic good vs. evil tales resonate so strongly. But in order to reveal the fault lines in say an order versus chaos based morality, it might be necessary to not muddy the waters with too many other moral conflicts, in order to share the essential problems you want your reader to interact with as unambiguously as possible. Of course you may decide to layer multiple different conflicts over each other and have them all intersect in one poor character (like our love-struck Spartan, above) who has to deal with all these things happening at once! If you can do that effectively, greatness awaits!

Next week, I’ll look at where moral authority comes from in any given society, and how it becomes the received wisdom that underpins why people should believe in, and act upon, their version of right and wrong. Religion, spiritual teachers, sacred texts, ancient heroes or pivotal events, national origin myths could all be regarded as the source of moral authority, things to be admired and emulated, their examples passed on through the generations. And of course morality at some stage has to be differentiated from ethical systems that can be developed or taught later in life and that can come into conflict with the morality a person learns from childhood. The more I talk about this, the more there is, but I’m trying to keep it to bite sized chunks! And remember, I am not setting myself up as an authority here, just sharing opinions that could easily be wrong! See you next week, I hope!