A.R. Knight's Blog, page 17

Anthology Week: Why Writing Short Helps You Write Long

One of the most difficult concepts an artist of any kind must confront is that of completion. That the outpouring of random thoughts into story, or painting, or composition can, at some point, be done. Not perfect, mind you, because perfection is a ghoul of an idea that will haunt your steps and rob you of confidence at every opportunity.

Nah, complete is really what we’re looking for. The point at which your work communicates what it sets out to say.

A short story forces you to deliver that message in tight boundaries. No floundering through flowery fields of fancy. No jaunts into side tales and subplots that deliver characterization. It’s a straight line to the finish, and it’s all about how awesome that straight line is.

A novel, or any larger work, requires a certain amount of content. Threads are picked up and put down. Characters appear, disappear, reappear as ghosts, and are finally eliminated in the heat death of the universe. This requires work. Work gets tiring. The next idea appeals, and suddenly your masterpiece is languishing in a folder on your computer that will only be opened in the event of your untimely demise.

A short story, meanwhile, occupies a whole range of lengths. Flash fiction can be as short as a paragraph. A sentence. Novelletes can be twenty pages. A brief encounter only ten, or three. Whereas a 200 page novel can be seen as “too short”, delivering a single-page description of a batter’s duel with a pitcher as a metaphor for his life, is, well, entirely acceptable.

I’m not going to delve into the myriad craft differences between writing short and long here. Not going to get into a debate about which format is better, or how you should go about tackling a short story.

What I will say is this: short stories have great potential for you, as the writer, to explore ideas without committing to weeks of work and thousands upon thousands of written words. They can expand your range, and give you access to new audiences through anthologies, magazines, blog posts, and more. They deserve your time.

I’ll also say that the best way to learn how to write short stories is to, well, write them. And then read a few. Pick up some of those magazines, like The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Perihelion or many others depending on your taste. Try browsing some of your favorite author’s websites and you might find free stories on offer. I’d also recommend collection (not just the anthology above) – like any of Raymond Carver’s books, Chekhov and Hemingway’s collections, Bradbury and Aasimov. It can be easier to tell an author’s style from how they write short work, and you’ll find yourself getting a feel for every word on the page.

Best of all, though, is that when you sit down for a few hours, typing away, you’ll have a completed work. Something you can submit to a collection, put on sale, or even just offer up as a tasty tale for your readers at minimal cost to you.

So give short stories a try, both as a reader and a writer. You might find them a wonderful addition to your literary life.

And if you feel so inclined, you can get some great tales in The Officer, including one of mine, on sale now here.

Happy writing!

Anthology Week: Taking a Walk in Someone Else’s World

As much as an anthology is about the story you write, it’s almost more about the editor. What the anthology’s creator is looking for. They are, after all, doing the considerable work of organizing the collection, reviewing the stories, uploading the piece onto Amazon and other retailers, and generally trying to make the most of it. Least you can do is play by their rules.

This can come in various forms and flavors, but tend to break down along a few lines:

Length:Most anthologies don’t want to be a thousand pages long, so stories included are generally asked to have a maximum length. Maybe that’s 5,000 words, maybe it’s 20,000. Either way, tailoring your story to stick to the word length is a good way to get accepted, and a great way to be respectful of someone else’s time. I’d say you can err more on the shorter side than the longer – think of getting into an anthology like walking through a door. Shorter than the frame, you still get through. Taller, not so much. And it hurts hitting a door frame.

That being said, going drastically shorter than the suggested word count isn’t a great play either. Your 250-word flash fiction masterpiece might be grand, but probably doesn’t belong in a collection of novellas, unless the anthology is intentionally organized in that fashion. Which isn’t a bad idea, now that I think about it. Like a boxer, swinging hard and fast. Lil’ jabs mixed in with uppercuts. Is there anything that can’t be covered by a sports metaphor?

Tone:
Want to submit to The Gross Tales of Edwin Von Slasher, the slayer of Salem Square? Perhaps, then, your short romance about a couple meeting each other after all the paddle-boats are rented out and they still want to go on the lake… may not work. Those two may seem obvious, but it applies to slimmer differences too. Dramatic tales of woe, doom and gloom may fit in Fantasy, but not in an anthology about fantastic battles where swarms of dragons tackle each other in the skies. Make sure to review what the anthology is looking for and submit a story that won’t stick out like a gangrenous toe. Don’t be sad if every other story is funny. Don’t be dark if the anthology is about springtime. So on and so forth.
Being Receptive to Feedback



This is an interesting one – anthologies are generally edited by the person putting them together (perhaps more than one person) and they may have feedback for you. They may decide that your tendency of inserting ellipses into the end of every piece of dialogue doesn’t, you know, jive with their vision for the story. They might love your characters but hate your love of the ampersand. Enjoy your setting but think its odd that you chose to color every single thing the same shade of blue, like a toddler with a single crayon. Point being, changes will be suggested. You do not need to take all of them without a thought – in fact, I’d recommend looking at what is suggested and then seeing how you would like to solve the problem.Maybe they’re right, and those ellipses really do need to go. However, perhaps your tale is set in a world where everyone talks like a deflating balloon and every sentence naturally trails off. In that case, the issue might be that the editors aren’t realizing this element of your story, so you make that part more clear.

Ultimately, if it’s not your anthology, you’ll have to make some concessions to the editors. If you prefer to stick hard and fast to your draft, then you’ll have to make the argument for why that particular arrangement of words is so necessary. Or, you know, consider not submitting for things that give others control.

Make Their Lives Easier



This one is a bit outside the craft box and more in the technical dirt in which we writers must make our beds these days. What I’m getting at here is making sure your story is written and saved in a file format that’s accessible. That you meet what the anthology editor is looking for when submitting. Don’t mail a handwritten manuscript. Don’t save your Word ’95 document and send it from an email address you never check. If they prefer a PDF of your story, then type it out and save it as one. If they prefer a shared Google Doc, make the account and upload it. If you really want to be in the anthology and they demand a Comic Sans font and an elaborate series of file types… perhaps consider not being in that anthology.Seriously, though – the brave souls that put these collections together are generally not doing so in order to make gobs of cash. They’re giving you exposure, and experience, at the expense of their time. The least you can do, after creating your little world, is to give them the story how they ask for it.

A few posts this week are about anthologies because I happen to be in one! The Officer is now out and available, a neat collection of science fiction stories with military themes. You can find it here on Amazon, and I hope you check it out!

Anthology Week: Finding Opportunities

See that picture above? That cover belongs to an anthology, a nifty alternative to collection, that yours truly happens to have a story in.

Unlike, say, entering a contest by texting a number, anthologies typically require a bit of effort on the part of the writer. I’d think it would be rare, even if you’re a short story maven, to have work sitting around that’s perfect for an anthology opportunity that arises.

How do such opportunities arise, you might ask?

Namely, by being present. That doesn’t mean you get invited to these things by floating around parties, clinging to the dark corners and jutting your head into conversations when you hear the word “anthology”. No, it means you float around message boards, jutting your head into threads that mention “anthology”. There’s a big difference.

But really, that’s what it takes. You have to pay attention. Look for authors or anthology organizers in your genre and watch for them to announce other opportunities. Then, of course, you have to do the work to actually write and submit a story.

If you’re thinking that you have to know the right people in order to get into one of these things, well, that’s not always the case. For The Officer, I saw Alasdair Shaw’s post in the Writer’s Cafe and decided to give it a shot. Wrote “Lucky Star” and submitted it. I didn’t know him, nor the other writers in the anthology. Had no “ins”, if you will.

In some other posts this week, which will all be about this anthology and putting it together, I’ll go into how I wrote the story and some of the things one does when one goes into an anthology.

You might also be thinking why? Why bother throwing a short story into a collection?

The answer, believe it or not, isn’t cash. It’s not about making fat stacks so I can finally live out my dream of filling a bouncy castle with dollar bills and, well, bouncing around in it. No, it’s about finding new readers. Getting your work out through another avenue. And getting to network with other authors.

Being a part of an anthology also gives you a chance to assess your own work. To try a different style (matching a short story to a theme). To have someone else take a look at your writing and offer suggestions.

There’s also little risk – if the editor of an anthology doesn’t take your story… you’ve still got a story! You can submit it to other collections, magazines, etc. And if you don’t want to do that, offer it as a reader magnet or put it up for free on your website. No writing is wasted.

So, in short: Anthologies are neat. I’m thrilled to be a part of this one. If you find writing shorter work appeals to you, I encourage you to find and try to be a part of some of these collections – there’s no special ceremony, no badge you must have in order to apply. Only the will to do so.

And if you want to support The Officer (and enjoy some rollicking good sci fi stories), you can find it on Amazon.

Happy writing!

Don’t Forget

This is one of those posts that’s more a reminder for myself as it is for any reader – namely, the whole point of choosing a creative endeavor should be that it’s enjoyable. That it provides a satisfaction of a deeper kind. Like a warm fire on a winter’s day, or just the right mix of sun and breeze in the afternoon.

When you start publishing, or, really, putting any of your work up for sale, at least part of your life becomes a business. Even if you go through a publisher, these are still your words. Your paintings. Your songs. And how well they do in world’s various storefronts becomes, to a degree, part of your identity. Stephen King is known as an author, yes, but he’s also known as a best-selling author. J.K. Rowling has had countless articles written about the money she’s earned thanks to a certain scarred wizard.

It’s easy to fall down the trap of taking dollars and cents as your sole indicators of success. Didn’t get enough sales today? Now you’re depressed. New launch not going to get you a new Mercedes? Maybe not even a meal at Jimmy Johns? Now you’re questioning why you even made the attempt.

But if you take a look back. To the scribblings you may have made as a child, to the stories you wrote in high school and/or college. To the first rambling blog posts or tales you threw up on the Internet. None of that earned you a dime. All of that came out of a joy, a need to do slap these words down, no matter where they were doing to take you.

Don’t forget that.

Passive Aggression

You’ve seen’em. You’ve read’em. You’ve said’em.

The words that create passive voice. That sentence construction that takes away the active participant and leaves you with a wimpy little line.

For example: The pineapple juice was obliterated

OK. We have pineapple juice. Or perhaps, as the sentence implies, had pineapple juice. The problem with passive voice is that we don’t actually know who or what obliterated the pineapple juice. It’s a mystery! Only we don’t need Mr. Holmes for this one.

Now, let’s swap the sentence to active:

Godzilla obliterated the pineapple juice.

Now we have visual action. I’m not going to diagram the sentence because I’m not going to subject you all to torture, but you can see the difference. The sentence packs more energy. We’re more concerned with what is happening rather than the object that it’s happening to.

In short, conventional wisdom has it that passive voice is bad and active voice is good, and that’s more or less that. To which I say, it’s your book. Write what you want. Nobody may read it, but you can put words in whatever order you please.

A touch more seriously – it’s worth acknowledging that passive voice has its place. I tend to veer back and forth between the two, but try to kill some of the lazier passive sentences in editing. Less out of a hatred of passive voice and more because active sentences tend to be more fun. If you’ve got Godzilla in your story, wouldn’t you rather make the King of Lizards the star of all your sentences? Why let the pineapple juice have one to itself?

So if I’m saying that passive voice has its place, then where is that?

I use it when constructing an active sentence that would accomplish the same objective would require all sorts of convolutions. Or when deviating from passive would mean adding information the reader doesn’t need to have at that point.

Consider this sentence:

I felt a punch on my left side, hard and fast. I’d been shot.

Now, if I wanted to make it all active, I could do this:

I felt a punch on my left side, hard and fast. Someone had shot me.

Neither is wrong, but from a narrative perspective, I’d been shot feels more dramatic. Something a character might say to close a scene. You can scour the internet for plenty of other examples, but ultimately it’s your narrative. You ought to use the sentence construction that feels right.

However, if you’re waffling between the two, I would go active more often than not. You’re putting sentences in the perspective of the thing doing the action, rather than the thing being acted upon. Your work will feel faster, you’ll have a better idea of flow, and, really, you’ll probably have more fun writing it.

And isn’t that what this is all about?

Can I write anywhere?

The one that I’m getting at today is the mobile workspace and how I define whether or not it’s beneficial to leave the loving cuddles and claws of the cats to go venture out into the wide and dangerous world. You’ll hear, from starry-eyed writers and laptop nomads, that meandering to a coffee shop or a park can be a great way to juice those creative energies. Caffeine for the soul, you might say. I even mentioned how speaking into the phone while wandering around has given me bundles of extra words to mold into something approximating English.

However, all things are not equal when attempting to type while traversing away from your standard haunts. If I’m looking to break out of the office and actually get stuff done, here’s what I look for (in no particular order):

Temperature Controlled – This might seem strange, but going to a park on a sunny day only works if the temp is actually at a level where you can be productive. If your computer’s going to overheat or you’re going to be dripping sweat after five minutes, perhaps it’s not the best place. We’re not going to get a tan, we’re going to write about some terrible monster from the deep!

Similarly, if you’re wandering about in Winter, perhaps think twice about going to a place that’s too steamy, or keeps its windows open so that you’re largely numb while trying to hit the keys. In other words, be comfortable. Also avoid sitting near the doors – constant blasts of cold air will not keep you focused.

Convenience – Yeah, this is a big one. Ideally you’re trying to shift locations to jostle some ideas loose. Be productive. However, if getting to your new creativity castle means sitting in traffic for two hours, then you’re probably going to lose more time than you gain. Or you’re going to get so tired getting there that you’ll have no energy left to write. I prefer places that are less than 10 minutes away, or (best) walkable.
Ambience – A personal thing, but you’re going to know what makes for your best writing environment. Perhaps don’t choose the place with constant loud music blaring on the speakers. Or the one with a live band, unless those things are what gets your stories spinning. Similarly, I prefer places with a bit of eccentricity – nothing against Starbucks, but their hyper-branded aesthetic sterilizes my mind. I like enough crowd murmur to bubble in the background as soothing white noise, but not constant noisy clatter.
Prices – Yep. As an artist with fluctuating income, I have to pay attention to where I’m choosing to go. That ritzy espresso joint downtown might be amazing, but if you’re paying $10-15 every time you go there (include things like parking and whatnot, and it all depends on where you live), it might not be the best call. You see all those things telling you how much you’d save if you stopped getting your grande triple hot fudge mocha – just because you’re writing when you’re there doesn’t mean that cash goes back into your wallet. Find a dive, or places like parks or libraries where you can enjoy a diverse background at no cost.
Comfort – Think about it. You’re going to be sitting down for this. Do you go to the place that has the little plastic chairs because it’s funky and fun? How’s your back going to feel after a couple of hours in those? What about the cafe that’s only got couches? Or recliners? Hard to type for long in a chair like that. Are you going to be packed in with your fellow artists, rubbing elbows with other novelists as your Macbooks compete for table space? Ideally you can plop yourself down in a solid chair, have a table or counter in front of you, and sink into your own space.

That’s principally what I look for. Here in Madison, because of where I live, I tend to rotate between the following places (just to give you a taste):

Crescendo – a local espresso cafe -> Delicious coffee and their scones are diet-enders. Usually hit this up once a week or so to break up the morning routine.
EVP – it’s a local coffee chain, but they’ve got a spot a couple of blocks away from my house. If I need that early afternoon espresso (who doesn’t) then I’ll jaunt over there, dictate on the way over and back, and get my kicks. The tables and chair setup makes it a little harder for writing sessions than Crescendo, so I’m usually in to get the juice and out again.
The back deck – it’s a bit of a cheat, but basically my shady outdoor spot when I want to enjoy the breeze. Essentially sub any nearby park for this and you’ve got it.

And there you go. I’d say it’s a benefit to any artist to have a few spots that jingle their creative bells, so if your typing’s been stale lately, go out there and find yourself a place to go.

Talking on the Go

Virtually every industry, including cat litter (boxes) is all in on efficiency these days. Every second you can save, we’re told, is a second you get to give your life meaning. Or watch YouTube videos.

Writing isn’t any different, even if the meshing of “efficiency” and “writing” leaves me with a bit of an iron taste in my mouth. Still, the point of what I’m doing, what pretty much any author is doing, is to tell stories. And if there’s an easier way to tell those stories, or get a shell down so those stories can be refined, well, who am I to say no?

Especially when I get to look like a madman doing it.

Your phone. You probably have it near you. Possibly you’re reading this blog post on it. Rumor has it that a phone is a pretty useful device. Some might say essential. Have you ever used it to record yourself?

Not video, no. This is about writing stories and I’m not quite egotistical enough to think people want videos of me stumbling through paragraphs as I make them up.

But sound! That’s the key. Actually dictating into the phone and then, using Dragon, to transcribe the recording into Scrivener. Now that it’s not a frigid Wisconsin winter, I can go take walks. Or pace around the living room, whatever. Point is, the phone and transcription allows me to be mobile.

And when I’m wandering, the mind wanders with me. Maybe it’s about not having a blank page, or tapping into our ancestral roots where we wandered the plains in a hunter/gatherer society. Whatever the reason, whenever I have a block, getting up and moving usually lets me lose it.

Used to be that those jaunts were lost time. I could think about the story, maybe jot it down, but any specific sentences? A scene melding into perfect form in that moment? Nada.

Of course there’s a downside. Beyond my neighbors questioning my sanity as I yammer and wander the sidewalks (that’s what they get for living near a writer). That’s quality. Not just that the mic in my phone isn’t as good as the Blue Yeti I use on my desk. It’s simply more difficult to keep track of where I’m at. My words repeat. If I have to cross a street, it’s easy to lose where I’m at in a paragraph.

In short, what I get out needs a lot more work than normal dictation.

But doing this gives me the bones of a scene, the silhouette of story when I wouldn’t have had any otherwise.

You could boil this down to always being open to new ideas, and being willing to try new things, and so on and so forth. I’m liking it so far, and if you’re looking for a way to get more words down of your own, you could do worse than giving this a try.

In case you’re curious, I’ll paste a raw, un-edited transcription of a recording below – names and whatnot are all kinds of messed up, but the core idea is there. No serious spoilers here, but I wanted to give you an honest look at what comes out from what I speak into the phone:

Shale said the words and frowned. Then turned to one of the larger huts, one that was more than three times the size of Norris. He pointed out it. “Please, follow me over there. We can talk more about the plan.”

“The plan?” Cena said.

“Of course, our grand idea to attack and bring down the right-hand,” Chan said. “It must begin soon. Before they know were coming.”

As we walked through the village the spirits of the left-hand looked over at us and nodded. Some even offered waves. All of them, all of them looked conscious and cognizant. None had the vacant stairs of spirits caught by the cycle. None had the pale fire eyes of one lost to ribbons insatiable hunger. No, whatever the spirits were, they’d found a way outside of what made riven a brutal universe. Cena and I had each other’s eyes and nodded. Molly, Molly must be doing something. Must be creating her own little corner of this dead world.

Inside the HUD was little more than the basics. And by that I mean a pit for a fire, this one unlit. In some sparse bundles of plants and grass forming little circles around the inside. As though someone had put the house together and forgotten how to fill it. Jail sat down on the hard ground and made for us to do the same. I looked for beds, for any sign the usual life comforts. The sort of things that any permanent village would have to have. But I saw none.

“Tell me,” I asked you before he could launch and do his plan. “How long has this village been here?”

Anyway, hope you found this one interesting. I’ll have an update on Riven’s sequel in the next couple of days – including a wildly different cover because I have too much fun with these things.

 

The Voices in the Walls

Nope, not talking about ghosts. I’m talking about me.

One of the fun growing fields in storytelling these days is the ol’ audiobook. A recording of someone telling a story. Basically a return to Homer and the classic oration of tales long and beautiful.

Homer, fortunately, didn’t have to deal with fuzzy mic pick-ups, the neighbor mowing the lawn, and cats that enjoy batting toys around the floor. I do, and so as I get ready to try out narrating, I’m adopting the sage advice of others that have come before who have learned, through hours and days and years of vocal verbosity to hide in the closet while they speak. Clothes, it seams (hah!) are natural sound dampeners. If you want to record something at home and you don’t have a studio, try using your laundry. And a closet, which likely doesn’t have windows and thus won’t pass through all the rumbly vibrations of civilization.

Now, if the thought of spending those hours talking to yourself in a dim closet doesn’t excite you… there’s always the option of hiring narrators. Popular actors and such can be recruited, even whole casts if you desire, to turn written works into marvels of performance art. This, however, is expensive (we’re talking in the thousands of dollars for a single book). As such, it’s worth a shot to see if my voice can make a suitable transition to the spoken word. If nothing else, I can use the audio software to turn myself into a poor man’s HAL 9000, which could be amusing.

All of this comes back to looking at ways to broadcast the stories as widely as possible – just the other day, a member of my frisbee team said he’d love to “read” my books, but that he listens exclusively to audio these days when he’s doing errands, putzing around, etc. That’s becoming more common. Who wants to read when we can listen? Particularly in the car or while mowing the infernal lawn (seriously, the grass just keeps growing!). Narration, like doing graphic design or writing these blog posts, leverages a different skill-set than writing fiction, which means it can be done in concert with working on new novels and short stories, which is, of course, why I’m doing this whole thing to begin with.

As for whether anything will come of the attempt, who knows. I’ll talk about it here, naturally. And the first thing I’ll be recording will be The Metal Man, the novella/short story/Mox adventure that’s free most everywhere. I’ll be posting it where folks can listen to it at their leisure and laugh at my attempts at gravitas.

This is an adventure, everyone, and treading new ground is the best part of it.

Resolution (or lack thereof)

There’s a certain freedom that comes with blog posts – if you have a blog, you can put almost anything on the legal side of life on it. Your angry rant about how the grass grows too fast so you’ve gotta mow every other day? Your typo-ridden screed about Hollywood’s obsession with sequels and remakes? A twenty page essay on the injustice done to the US when General Mills discontinued Dunkaroos production in the country?

Today, I’m going to eschew all of those compelling topics for a brief statement on… never mind, I’m stuck on the Dunkaroos thing. They were amazing. I spent way too much time trying to extract every little bit of frosting from that plastic container.

OK.

So.

Yesterday, Riven launched. It wasn’t meant to be a big fanfare extravaganza for numerous reasons, but, and this is something that could happen with or without a professional cover artist: The initial cover included some atmospheric adjustments to the image that, when viewed on my big Mac with its super-high-resolution screen, looked great. When compressed down by Amazon to display in the thumbnail views on the website and book page, however, things got blurry real fast. The lettering became indistinct. So I swapped it with an alternate version and, in a couple of hours, the switch had been made and everything was wonderful again.

This is one of those miracles of today’s environment, and one of the advantages of self-publishing. I was able to correct a mistake without going through approvals, begging a publisher, or just waiting potentially days for things to be adjusted. Of course, the caveat to that is you, the publisher, know how to make the necessary adjustments, but still. The option is there.

I doubt that’ll be the only thing I correct in Riven. Or in many, many books to come. Part of the benefit of ebooks these days is that the shelf life is infinite. Part of the cost is that these shelves need maintenance. Like trees, they need more care when they’re younger, and you occasionally have to prune them to keep them beautiful. I’m sure I could labor under this metaphor for longer, but you get the idea.

All told, I’m happy the book is out. I’m nearly done with the first draft of the sequel. And am plotting the conclusion (on the scene-by-scene level). With any luck, by July I’ll be done with the trilogy and onto the next project. Which is, right now, a coin flip between a pair of things.

Riven launches, and building its world

Riven, a novel in which space wizards attempt to prevent the apocalypse by splitting the sun (not really. but eventually?), launches today. Like most fantasy or science fiction, it occupies a world that’s to some degree built upon reality, ideas that came before, and bunches of frenetic hallucinating that resulted in the setting for the book and its coming sequels.

Read up on authors that write this stuff and you’ll find multitudes of world-building strategies. There’s the Tolkien dissertation-level deep dive wherein you come up with whole languages, thousands of years of history, and potentially even unexpected books through the creation of your world. You can set the story in today’s world, perhaps with an added (but believable) dose of secret spy organizations.

You can cut between; taking bits and pieces of mythologies, themes, and places to create a composite that builds a “believable” world without the all-consuming effort of creating everything from scratch. Riven is most like this – taking pieces from the real world (Chicago), mythologies (the afterlife and various presentations of it), and existing setting/theme ideas (steampunk/dark fantasy).

With Wild Nines, I used minimal real life “places”, but leaned on somewhat plausible future technologies. The aforementioned space wizards didn’t make an appearance. People didn’t teleport or wave their hands to make miracles happen at will.

Ultimately, the goal of any setting is to support the story. The world has to make your plot plausible – in Riven, the main character often uses a “lash”, a version of a whip, which wouldn’t make so much sense if I’d set the book in the far future. Why would my characters know how to use medieval-style weapons if everything else leveraged laser cannons ala Star Wars?

Creating an appropriate world can also help you eliminate questions that might otherwise create plot holes. Riven, to a degree, is about how humanity deals with the prospect of spirits returning to the real world. If this was an intergalactic sci-fi story, I’d need to deal with aliens, and how a “world of the dead” appears to all of these different species. This isn’t necessarily a poor idea for a story, but it’s not the one I’m trying to tell here.

It’s “supporting the story” that I focus on when considering the setting – I think most stories start off as a sentence or two of an idea: “What if a billionaire was a crime fighter in secret?” “What happens if an evil being depends on a ring to exist?” “What if a band of little blue people were harassed by an inept wizard?”

Yeah, even The Smurfs had to design the setting of their show in line with the needs of that idea. From that sentence, you can start to design a world around your story. A wizard generally demands magic, and if your scope involves “a band”, then you likely don’t need giant continents and countries. Keep the scope in line.

Already, though, The Smurfs has a feel. From there, the setting can grow to answer critical questions about how the little band lives. How do they eat? What sort of homes do they have, etc?

You can, of course, go the other way and start with a setting. The main reason I don’t is because you can wind up throwing out sections of a world that don’t apply, or that are no longer valid once you settle into your idea. You can, for example, look at the Lord of the Rings and all of the various elements of Middle Earth that have no impact on the story. Tolkien wrote other books set in the same world, but many pieces of that setting are described only in passing, or in passages that have little impact on the actual narrative (Tom Bombadil’s section in Fellowship of the Ring, for example).

Obviously, at four novels in, there’s an asterisk to what I can claim as “the best way” to build a book’s world, and I’d probably look askance at anyone who makes such a claim (and you don’t want my askance glance; it’s terrifying). I can, though, say that so far building the setting from the story has worked better than the other way around, and until I get to a point where I can spend my days custom-designing dragons and their treasure hoards, that’s what I’ll keep doing.