More notebooks: the humble beginnings of my fantasy and SF story universes

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been a fan of all flavors of speculative fiction. The first adult book I remember reading for fun was a battered copy of Star Trek 8 by James Blish that contained short story retellings of classic Star Trek episodes, and I still remember how amazed I was that the first story I read was an episode I hadn’t seen yet. My siblings were avid readers, so I had access to lots of classic science fiction and fantasy like Foundation or the Lord of the Rings. Pretending to be Legolas running to rescue the hobbits helped me endure running the mile in gym class (thank you, JRR Tolkien).

What I love about speculative fiction is the whole “what if?” attitude. What if humanity was part of an interstellar civilization? What if elves and dragons existed? What if teleportation worked? Every piece of fiction has a question embedded within, yet the questions embedded within speculative fiction address twists on what we know is real. Sometimes we can learn more about how humanity works by throwing characters into “unreal” situations and seeing how they dance.

While I love both science fiction and fantasy, I tend not to like stories that mix the two. My usual refrain is “Get your magic out of my science,” or on the flip side, “Get your science out of my magic.” I think my objections stem from the conflict between proof and faith. Magic tends to break scientific laws, therefore the use of magic in an SF story feels like a cheat, as if magic comes in to save the day because the science wasn’t enough. Likewise, fantasy stories tend to simply assume that magic works, so if science comes in to explain why magic works, the story loses the sense of wonder and faith.

I write both fantasy and SF stories, and up until now, I’ve been keeping the two universes separate.

Or so I thought.

When I began working on my SF universe, I used my fantasy universe as a springboard for character development. I’ve now come to realize I’ve been writing the SF stories using the same foundation and themes I’ve explored in my fantasy universe. Furthermore, I believe I can place all my stories within the same basic framework and make it work. My fantasy world can exist within the same galaxy as the Earth from my SF stories. At this point, I do not intend my fantasy and SF characters to ever meet, but it’s a valid possibility. By melding the two universes together, I can channel all the effort I’ve already put into world-building the fantasy universe and flesh out the SF universe.

No matter the framework of the story, whether it be spaceships and aliens or dragons and knights, a story is ultimately about people. A good story throws interesting people into interesting situations and shows how they attempt to survive. Both fantasy and SF showcase extraordinarily interesting places and situations.

I believe the mix of SF and fantasy that I’m heading toward is called “science fantasy.” My SF and fantasy characters are all manipulating the same powers, only the SF characters have quantified those powers, while the fantasy characters call it magic and go by instinct. I intend to make sure all the science is reasonable, and that I don’t unintentionally break any known laws of physics. Likewise, I intend to keep my magical system consistent so that my characters can’t simply wave their hands and use magic to solve all their problems. Story comes from characters working to exceed their limitations. I am a firm believer in happy endings, but the characters have to work to earn them.

So I’m now in major world-building mode. I look forward to what comes next.

Play balls, the only equipment needed to play Kick the Can.

One of my favorite childhood games was Kick the Can. Almost every evening during summer, a bunch of us neighborhood kids gathered in my yard to play, although we used a ball rather than a can. The game began with someone kicking the ball away. Whoever was designated “it” fetched the ball and counted to 100 while everyone else hid, then “it” would go hunting. When “it” spotted someone, “it” could capture that player by jumping over the ball while yelling, “Over the can on <insert player name here>.” While “it” tried capturing everyone, free players could rescue the captured players by kicking the ball away before “it” captured them, in which case “it” needed to start over. A round ended when “it” captured everyone, then the first player captured became “it” for the next round.

I loved rescuing captured players. I wore a dark blue windbreaker that helped keep me hidden in the growing twilight, and I was good at sneaking up on the ball.

I absolutely hated being “it.”

The trouble with being “it” is facing the dilemma of staying close enough to protect the ball from rescuers and ranging far enough afield to catch the remaining free players. I wasn’t very fast, so I’d always end up in a futile race back to the ball trying to catch a potential rescuer. I can’t even count the number of times I lost the race to see victory kicked away and everyone I’d already captured running off to hide once more.

I still kept playing.

Nowadays, I’m noticing the same sort of dilemma while working on my writing projects. I’ve successfully written short stories and novel manuscripts, so when it comes time to choose the next project, it’s easy to choose something similar to what I’ve written before. Same characters, same setting, new situations, but mostly familiar.

Thing is, true growth comes from experimentation, yet whenever I try to stretch my writing self by trying something new, I feel the same sort of anxiety I did during Kick the Can whenever I had to leave safety behind to try to catch those elusive hidden players. What if it doesn’t work? What if I write myself into a corner and have to throw all the work away?

No writing is guaranteed to work.

All writing goes through awkward stages. Whenever I work on something experimental, I remind myself that what I now consider familiar was once new and strange. When I first started working on my fictional universe, I wrote a great many false starts. Scenes that never made the cut to stay in the finished draft. Characters who no longer had a place in the story. Ideas that seemed exciting at first but fizzled into boredom. But that’s all part of the process. Eventually, through time, effort, and perseverance, I’ve come up with a cohesive story universe that’s working for me.

I did it before. I can do it again. And again, and again…

The only “safety” is to hide all my pens and notebooks, shut down the computer, and never try writing again. This is not acceptable. Can’t fail if you take no risks. Can’t win, either.

I will still keep writing.

Playing with water color and pen & ink

Painting has a concept called “open time” where the open time of a paint is the time between when you apply the paint to a surface and when the paint dries. During the open time, you can make changes to the brush stroke without applying more paint or scratching off what’s already there. Once the open time ends and the paint dries, that’s it. That brush stroke is set.

Depending on the type of paint, open time ranges from almost instantaneous to very long. Watercolors and acrylics dry quickly so their open time is from seconds to minutes, while oil paints dry so slowly that their open time can be from hours to even days. Making changes toward the end of the open time can be difficult since moving partially dry paint might lead to brush strokes that don’t blend well with the rest of the piece.

Writing also has its own concept of open time. During a rough draft, everything is open while the writer churns ideas and prose together until something gets thrown on the page. But writing is rewriting. During every subsequent draft, the writer refines the ideas and prose until the main concepts shine through until finally the writer declares this piece finished and moves on to the next.

In my experience, the longer the revision process takes, the harder it is to make necessary changes, especially with longer pieces such as novel-length manuscripts. Every time I reread a scene, it’s almost as if I’m using up the scene’s open time. That particular sequence of words and ideas builds a path in my mind like a river deepening its channel until I have difficulty imagining the scene in any other form. That can be bad, especially if the scene does not fit with the rest of the work and must be radically changed.

So how to preserve the open time of a piece of writing?

For early works in progress, I try to limit the number of times I reread what I’ve already written. During the initial draft, I’ll look back to reorient myself, but I focus on moving forward and reaching an ending. I try not to worry too much about continuity at this point since I know I’ll catch errors in the revision. Anything I notice while writing, I mark down as notes and move on. The goal is to get to the ending, any ending, so I can see the work as a whole.

For later drafts that seem set in stone, it’s time for the jackhammer. Figure out a different angle and rewrite. Perhaps change the point of view character and rewrite the scene. One way or another, I retype the scene. I’ll automatically make changes if the words are too tedious to type in again. This is the time for exploration. New angles leads to a reset of the scene’s open time.

And sometimes, for really old writing, the writing is old enough that I no longer have any emotional investment in the words. My loyalty is to the ideas hidden beneath the clunky words, not the words themselves, so the open time is both reset and focused. I know what I want to say, so now it’s a matter of figuring out how to say it most effectively.

This blog post is a prime example of the various types of open time. When I came up with the initial idea a while back, I threw words at the page to capture my thoughts, but couldn’t come up with a satisfactory conclusion. A lot of times, my initial draft is simply me wandering about on the page trying to figure out what I want to say. So I let the draft rest while I worked on other things. Now that I’ve returned, I’ve been able to carve away the half-formed thoughts and awkward wording to reveal a message worth saying.

Open time translates to enthusiasm. Even if the enthusiasm fades, the work-in-progress is still there waiting for attention. WIPs are patient. They’ll wait until you’re ready to return and pick up your tools again.

An extremely early sketch of my character Marvin.

When I started writing my first fantasy novel, one of my goals was to create a non-boring hero. Villains are pretty easy to make interesting – they break the rules and they go after whatever they want, usually in exotic and creative ways. But how to make a hero character, a character that by definition follows rules, at least as interesting as the villains?

My initial attempts were not successful. Marvin, my eighteen-year-old would-be swordsman/failed mage apprentice, had about as much personality as a coffee table. I was seriously tempted to write him out of the story. But, after much work and many more failed attempts, I finally realized the mistakes I’d been making.

My first epiphany was that this was Marvin’s story after all. In the initial attempts, Marvin had been a bystander with no vested interest in the outcome. The inciting incident was the theft of an artifact from a random stranger. Marvin wanted to see justice done (he’s a hero, after all), but success or failure didn’t truly affect him. My solution was to make him the artifact’s guardian, so when the thief stole the artifact from him, he couldn’t help but become involved. He had to act. Active characters are much more interesting than passive characters.

All was going well until I realized I still had not rescued Marvin’s personality from the realms of fine furniture. Something else was wrong. My second epiphany was that I was diluting his reactions. I’d included the character of his cousin, an older woman much respected by Marvin, so whenever the two of them were in the same scene, he would defer to her. Both of them have much the same viewpoint on life, therefore whenever a reaction was called for, she stole Marvin’s lines. My solution was to write her out of the story. She didn’t truly belong in this story anyway, and is a much better fit for one of the later stories. Having two characters serve the same story function dilutes the reactions of both characters. By taking her out of the story, Marvin was forced to speak for himself.

With those changes, Marvin’s character finally lost its wooden quality and came to life. The theft of something he’d sworn to protect leads him into an adventure where he must question his place in the world and his own definitions of right and wrong. Given the response from my writing group, he’s now a character worth reading about.

So if you’ve got characters in your story with wooden personalities who need to be rescued from their own version of coffeetableness, consider whether your characters are passive or active, and whether too many characters are serving the same story function.