Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "fantasy"

It's hard to write cyberpunk.

Or any science fiction at all, for that matter, but cyberpunk's what I'm currently writing so it's the most relevant bit for this. It doesn't flow out of me as fantasy does: I keep having longer breaks, I constantly second-guess what I'm putting down to paper, my mind drifts to other things, and in the end I get out only somewhere around two thousand words a day at most. Really hard to obsess over, and feels a lot more like work.

A big part of it, I think, is the relative lack of works - books, comics, video games, films - to find inspiration out of. There's just so much more fantasy stuff available than scifi: I have to go actively looking for the latter, where I just keep stumbling at the former by accident - and then I read them and end up getting a couple ideas for some really great fantasy novels that I can't wait to get to writing. My head ends up bursting with all the wrong sort of thoughts. My focus is where it shouldn't be.

I feel like it's a sort of a vicious cycle. There's more fantasy than scifi - and so people get more excited by fantasy, and inspired to write more fantasy, and make the whole problem worse. A dark and nigh-inescapable mire of magic and dragons and wonder, spitting out more of the same, growing bigger and stickier with each new work of fantasy. The scifi equivalent is more like a puddle that you have to actually go looking for, and if you leave you will get lost and have a difficult time coming back... and the whole time you risk being swallowed by the great big fantasy swamp. You have to work a lot harder for that. Or, maybe it's just me and I'm overthinking the whole thing.

Right now I want to write about pirates.

Yesterday I mentioned wanting to write about pirates. Unfortunately, the idea stuck.

Despite modern romanticization, it wasn't much fun being a pirate. You'd spend weeks at a time in a small ship, rotting and rocking and creaking, and filled up to the brim with these brutes and morons that you would hate within a week, if not right away. The food was terrible and there wasn't enough fruit, nobody really knew how to sing but they wouldn't shut up either, the smell was awful but you couldn't afford to waste the drinking water to baths, personal time was right out, and the scenery was the same bloody ocean day after day, maybe a dolphin as a high point. The all too occasional moments of levity consisted of ship battle and raids, storms, cannibal islands, sea serpents or giant octopi, and mutiny - any of them all too viable of getting you killed.

Shore leaves were rare and lasted all too little time before someone upset the locals and you had to flee. Not like you could stay with a bounty on your head. Worse still, your favourite place got annexed by the Empire sometime since you last showed up, and this local voodoo witch was calling all ships to war. What were you supposed to do, ignore this attack on your way of life? Even if you hated every second of it?

If you were lucky, you might have won a few bouts and earned a chest full of silver for your trouble. If you were really lucky, your captain might even have let you spend it all on supplies, alcohol, and women, instead of burying it to some deserted island for some gods'-forsaken reason. If you were unlucky, you would get to hear an Imperial messenger bird cheerfully announce that a torpedo was on its way...

Then, whether because your ship was blown apart and you marooned there, or because you disobeyed your captain about that treasure nonsense, you'd end up all alone in one of those deserted islands. No one to talk to save for some birds and this bowling ball with a face. No more of the songs you once hated; no more being made to perform something stupid in front of a big crowd. Your friends either blew apart and drowned, or betrayed you and abandoned you here: either way it's now just you and your thoughts - and those strange noises of the jungle, unnerving you and keeping you awake at night. No one to keep watch for you here either, reassure you that it was nothing and that it would all turn up well.

Your life used to be as bad as you thought it could get: you thought hell was other people. But now, as the night falls and the mists roll in, you would almost go back to those old days you once hated.

Hell is other people. But hell is being alone, as well. In this chapter of your life, there is precious little middleground to be found. Your attempts at compromise only end with everything going worse for you and everyone around you. All your friends have died. Even love is fleeting and often ends in heartbreak.

There's a theme I can use here. Something to underline all the merry swashbuckling action.

Once upon a time there was a city of moderate size and prosperity. It often came under attack by barbarians, rival nations, conquering overlords, and wild beasts. Its people, forced to spend much their time and effort in city defense, were grim and hardy.

Then a wise king decided to build a wall. It was a hard job, took years, and the barbarians paid for it and cost a fair bit out of the city coffers, but they all figured it was worth it. And it was: after a few futile efforts, all raids and invasions stopped. Peace prevailed.

So the people got to relax for a while. They put down their spears and bows and cheered up. They got to focus on arts and entertainment, create something beautiful rather than ugly, and enjoy themselves. The later kings and queens put up libraries and schools and galleries. The old barbaric foes could just walk through the gates to buy stuff and get washed up. Trade prospered. Good times for everyone, everything is great, and nothing hurts.

I'm not sure where to go from here, though. So far it's nothing new to anyone - build walls to defend yourself, whoop whoop-



-but where does it go from here? Is the wall going to be brought down at last, forcing everyone to realize their own complacency and watching as a great and beautiful city burns? Or maybe the barbarians decide they don't want to pillage it after all because they're all friends now and it really is quite pretty? Or maybe it's never threatened at all and the whole thing stands as more of a metaphor? Like you've got these people inside its walls who suffer with their own personal issues, until they build metaphorical walls inside themselves to be strong and then be happy?

I don't know. It was just one of those thoughts I had when I read Bone, about something that's sort of just brushed away off-handedly in there, but that could make a whole story of its own. I'll probably never write it.

Bone really is a great comic, though.

Imagine if J.R.R. Tolkien had skipped writing The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, or Fellowship of the Ring entirely, and had fast-forwarded right to the Two Towers? And he had no idea what the One Ring even was or what the hobbits were doing with it? And then Eldarion travelled back in time to help them out and tell them of some important bits they could never have known without him at all? Also he already helped kick Gollum into Mt. Doom and he's on the way to give a hand to Bilbo on his way to the Lonely Mountain as well, and then maybe going all the way back to Túrin Turambar and Fëanor as well, except obviously Tolkien is yet to write any of these...

That's kind of like what I'm doing right now. Time travel stuff, involving going farther and farther back in time, except I started writing right from the middle - neither from the chronological beginning, nor from the time traveler's own future home. I think I have a pretty good idea on where the story is going from here, though.

Time travel stories tend to make the entire thing pretty complex: either you'll have to be careful about everything you do lest you accidentally change something really important and alter the lives and memories of everyone you ever knew, essentially making them entirely different people...



...or you're plain unable to change anything at all, the fate of the universe having already been sealed and everything you do failing by default. At best, you already changed the past, everything you do having been taken into account all along. At worst, trying to muck things up results in time paradoxes that can wipe out the universe or send creatures outside of time to fix it and kill you.



So all in all it seems like a pretty raw deal, where all you can do is observe - trying anything more than that will always bite you in the arse - but really I see it as far more simple and also somewhat optimistic, and it's the rule I'm following in the time travel story I write right now, as well as in any time travel story by me.

Here's the essential question: how do you ever know you changed anything, or to what extent? How can you tell what of the present-day situation is thanks to you, and what would've come to be anyway? How much can any of us even begin to comprehend of the tangled mess of time and causality, of events leading to others, and of blame and consequences?

And since we can't possibly know, what harm could we do in the end?

It follows the Already Changed The Past the closest, I suppose, except that you're nearly always allowed to freely choose what to do, since the future you know will not change either way. Unless you start to really, deliberately muck up with things you know didn't go this way, everything will be fine... and even if you do, there's good odds the universe will manage to fix its way somehow anyway.

Let's take an example: one of the very first things people tend to think about, when talking about changing the past for the better, is killing Adolf Hitler. This... almost assuredly wouldn't work, because we all know when and how he died. You can't kill him when he was a child, because that's not how it went and you know it.

But it doesn't mean you couldn't help. Nothing would stop you from infiltrating the Nazi-occupied Europe and helping with the resistance, saving lives, doing the little things you can. After all, it's almost certain that you didn't already know every resistance fighter and every little city skirmish and prison break! Once you return to your time (assuming you survive at all), you could finally read on the subject and see if you could find yourself in the annals of history!

Hmm... this could make for a pretty good historical fiction story, actually. A guy goes back in time to kill Hitler, realizes it doesn't work, but still finds ways to put his future technology and knowledge to a good use. Nazis and WWII really are overused, though, so maybe set it to another time and place, one tragically underused in fiction, and one of which far less material exists so that I wouldn't need to do so much research... see, it works for the convenience of the writer too! The less stuff there already is to be known, the more free I am to do whatever I want!

I enjoy character-based stories and the sort of active and personable characters involved in those. They tend to drive the plot with their desires, aspirations, and dreams - and even when they don't, even when they're bound to the winds of fate, they're sufficiently three-dimensional and developed, with feelings and relationships and woes, for you to feel for them and hope things'll get better for them.

So when I found myself writing a story with a main character that had none of these traits, a blank slate simply content to go along where the plot told her to go, with no friends or personal connections whatsoever... my first instinct was to of course correct all this. I wanted to flesh her out, give her some backstory and people to care for. But this instinct passed quickly, as I got another idea: what if I left her a blank slate? What if I didn't develop her at all?

It felt like a weird thing to do, but the more I thought about it, the more fun I had with it. In a world - by a writer - full of fleshed-out characters, her blandness could actually be a characteristic in itself. It's not like such stories hadn't been written before. More to the point, it would give me practice.

Of course then I would have to make sure the setting - the world around her - was interesting enough to maintain the reader's attention, and I might also need to think about the plot more than I usually do. I can think of two famous examples with relatively underdeveloped main characters - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Alice in Wonderland - and both of them made sure their worlds were weird. I can't match them, for sure, but I can give it an honest try.

A proper time travel story needs a Constant: something that exists in every time - lasting and permanent - to remind the reader that they're still in the same place, just at different times. Great many things change in time travel, but not everything: some things need to stay the same too.

Otherwise it might as well be the same time but a different place: the whole notion of time travel starts to crumble.



I don't have a constant right now. This is a problem.

If I said that I listened to some type of music my every waking hour, it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration. Sure, sometimes I'm outside, or seeing my parents... or does it count as "waking hour" if I'm lying in bed and actively trying to sleep? I don't know. Even in those times I usually have music running in my head.

About a decade ago I got into D&D, and I sort of semi-accidentally ended up picking up a "soundtrack" for the first full campaign I was in. I listened to a bunch of music I had discovered at around the same time (mainly Sonata Arctica), always during games and only during games, or at least while thinking and talking about stuff related to it.

To this day I can't listen to any of Days of Grays without getting a really heavy hit of nostalgia. I've never been in a D&D game as fun as that first.



I began to realize just how much power music held, and how much it could influence the going of my (and probably everyone else's) mind. From there on I started to build myself soundtracks like that first: for every game of D&D (and later other systems), for every story I'd write, for some comics and books I like, even a few video games that don't have soundtracks of their own - I would find something to listen. I have a lot of songs and albums and entire bands, some of which I really liked, that I permanently welded together into one specific work or game, and that I only now listen if I want to feel nostalgic.

Sometimes I carefully pick up my music based on the sort of a thing I want to write, resulting in fairly consistent and well-managed stories that keep well in hand and don't go anywhere weird. Other times I just appropriate whatever I really like to listen at the time, which can easily shoot the whole thing into someplace bizarre and unexpected but not necessarily bad. I've done both successfully.

Often, how well this works out - how completely my brain associates the work and the music together, and how much I manage to listen to that same stuff while I work on it - directly correlates to how much I like the end result, be it something I'm writing or something I'm playing in or something I'm reading. If it goes poorly, it can lead to me throwing a story out altogether.

When I worked on The Straggler's Mask, for instance, I listened a lot of Blind Guardian, Twilight Force, a bit of Blackmore's Night and Blue Öyster Cult, and the soundtrack of a game I liked to play at the time, Risk of Rain. A lot of the sort I'd associate with adventure and exploration, but some of it was spontaneous and probably had a hand in the wilder bits of the story.

For The Vagrant's Wings, I picked up a bit heavier stuff like Bal-Sagoth, Celtic Frost, something more soft but foreboding such as Nox Arcana, and then just to spice things up, a bit more Blackmore's Night. It's one of the ones where I succeeded in picking a pretty fitting soundtrack - something for horror and romance alike - rather than just going with whatever, and I think the fairly grounded nature ended up for its benefit in the end.

One of the less successful drafts of mine - codenamed Shadowland - involved a lot of Manowar, Iron Maiden, Blind Guardian again, and the Balance & Ruin remix album for Final Fantasy VI. I don't know exactly why the interest to this one just sort of petered out: how much of it was because I had listened to all these soundtracks before, and elsewhere, and couldn't pair together with this story effectively? How much was because I just got distracted by other things and ended up not feeling like it anymore? I wouldn't know. I'd guess a bit of both.

(Although listening to some of the soundtrack kind of puts me back on the mood of returning to that story... which is inconvenient because I'm kind of already juggling between a lot of things I might want to write.)

Chaos Star is sort of half-and-half: I had no idea what kind of music could fit for this, so in the end I defaulted to Iron Savior, Hyper Light Drifter soundtrack, and a little something nice I found on Youtube called Edge of the World. I'm sure the music can take some credit of it probably being the most out-there story draft I've managed to complete so far. It's been pretty hard to edit, though.

I haven't begun to really work on Ivar Stormling of Skar yet, but I already know it's going to involve a lot of Magic Sword and Gloryhammer. How well this works, remains to be seen.

The cyberpunk story, as I think I've said, is pretty tough to grasp and maintain interest on regardless of music - but it has one of the more duty-picked soundtracks, taking stuff from Blade Runner and Deus Ex, and interestingly, Command & Conquer series, especially Tiberian Sun. Lately, though, I also started to click stuff on Youtube at random, listening to a lot of synthwave and such while I wrote it... and I'm still doing this, even though my interest in the story itself has largely died away again.

So we come to the pirate story, currently tentatively named Pirates of The Demure Sea. I probably should look into Alestorm and such stuff, but because of the cyberpunk fallout I'm currently listening to things like this. Lemme tell you, it's helping me spawn out some pretty weird story notes and ideas.



But on the other hand, I had already decided that the Demure Sea is a weird place. So maybe it'll all work out in the end.

It's not just the music - when I write, I do my best to dive deep into the popular culture of everything even remotely related to that stuff. I'm going to watch a lot of pirate movies in the next couple weeks.









And of course,



I expect to have a good time.

A friend asked me to find pictures of goats ("they're a menace!") for a small project of his. It has inspired me, too. I kind of want to put something in the story.

I love goats.