On Keeping a Story in Check

Or, more appropriately, how I failed miserably to keep a story in check.

Fantasy is NOTORIOUSLY difficult to shorten unless the differences from real life are relatively small and easy to understand.

Many readers can delve into an Urban Fantasy with werewolf packs and Vampire covens with minimal wordcount spent on explaining. These days, most folks have an idea of what a werewolf looks like, and how a vampire behaves.

However, every NEW thing you expose your readers to needs explanation. And the more of that new stuff happened before your story starts? The more difficult it is to succinctly introduce a character and a problem that should be resolved in a short story. Or heck, for many of us? Even an entire novel.

As an example, if my society is built around horses, that’s pretty much all I have to say. The characters “saddle up” and the horses can stamp and gallop and whinny and even if you’re not terribly equine-educated, you’re good as a reader.

In Zonduth, there are no horses in every day life. There are daks. If I just say “saddle up my dak” you’re going to imagine a horse. Daks are not horses. They’re not even equine.

Riding daks are tall and leggy with long antelope-like horns which can be used by riders when swinging into (or out of) the saddle.

Wooladaks are tiny sheep-like critters. Torodaks are heavy, slow-minded bulls used to pull massive caravans across the plains. Heck, the Herdcats of the northern Plains of Sonu actually have their own specially-bred herds of fat, complacent daks that they protect and hunt from. (See, and now I need to tell you what a herdcat is and how it’s different from a panther).

All of them are essentially daks and could interbreed, but they’ve become so specialized that they seem to be different creatures to our characters.

And NONE of that is abnormal for them. Tannaly hooks a hand around her dak’s horn and scratches him at the base without even thinking about it.

I have to spend time explaining to the reader what a dak looks like, how it behaves, how it is different from and similar to horses.

It was my choice to use daks, and I stand by it. But at the same time it makes discussion of these creatures more cumbersome — especially since I cannot use words like “sheep” and “bull” in the actual novel.

Fantasy eats up the wordcount AND it highlights an author’s ability (or inability) to fold worldbuilding into a story.

I recently attempted to write a sci-fantasy short story. I failed because the amount of HISTORY behind that short story really couldn’t be inserted without getting infodumpy. Sure, the main character is a normal human, but she’s wearing a monitor in a future-ish setting and there are factions of humans and an alien race with symbiotic tendancies towards humans. The history of the aliens landing and the initial wars as humanity attempted to devise ways to tell the difference between a real human and a “slugger” — someone with a “slug” in their brain, changing them into a half-human alien … none of that was part of the story I wanted to tell, but ALL of it mattered for the story I wanted to tell.

It’s a good story, but there’s just no way I can fold that much important backstory into a short. After two solid attempts at it, I had to set it aside. Even being as careful and stingy with worldbuilding snippets as I could be, I was still over 3k into the story and they hadn’t even gotten out of the coffee house yet.

And it wasn’t just a case of authorial worldbuilding blindness — the plot required all of these historical social nuances in order to make sense. (You’ve read those books — the ones with entire unnecessary history lessons embedded in them because the author spent the time making that history and you will by golly READ it.)

Great fantasy CAN be told in short story format (as the Saucy folks have proven!) but it becomes more and more difficult the more unique elements your story relies upon to make sense.

So yes. Sometimes you can rein a story in and shave off unnecessary details and it’s good to know when and how to do this.

But sometimes? A story just refuses to fit in that tiny space. And that’s okay too, though I hope you figure it out before you’re halfway through a second failed draft. =]

Related posts:

In Which Writing Is Not Entirely Unlike Horses
NaNo2010 > Worldbuilding 2
NaNo2010 > The Bad Guys