Politics, Religion, Economy
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- Category: The Voice of the World
- Published on Friday, 27 January 2012 20:35
- Written by Sam Justice
- Hits: 1185
Fred is at a poker game. It’s dark, dingy, and everyone except him is smoking a cigar and drinking whiskey. Fred is only drinking whiskey. Mostly, Fred knows these people only casually, from his new job. Some of them he doesn’t know at all. Denise, he wants to know better.
This is the first time Fred has attended this poker game, and he isn’t sure what to expect from his fellows. However, everything has gone fine for the first few drinks, until Denise starts complaining about the Emperor’s (may he live forever) new decree raising taxes on gambling.
Big faux pas.
Politics, religion, and the economy. Three things you should never talk about in good company. They are, however, three wonderful things to think about for world building. In a broad overview, these topics, and others similar, set a stage for your characters to act in. Without an understanding of these things—why is there an emperor? Do these taxes affect back room gambling such as this game?—the world that your characters end up in will feel somewhat flat.
Not everything that you decide and create will show up in your show up in your story. Tolkien had entire artificial languages for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. This will certainly be true to a much lesser extend for most people, but still true. However, the deeper the author’s understanding of the world that he’s writing in, the richer the world will be for the reader.
Take a minute to think about your current work in progress and feel free to jot down a few notes to yourself. What is the governing structure like? Is it like the US, with three branches of government—judicial, executive, and legislative. With various levels, federal, state, county, and city? Or is it like medieval Europe with a king and fiefdoms run by vassal lords? Or something entirely new? Something familiar might take less thinking than something new, but even a familiar structure can have very different results based on laws, how the economy is run.
Think about these too. Write who is in charge, who was in charge, what laws have been passed. Keep in mind how people think about these things, and remember that different groups—and individuals—will view all of these things differently.
A Voice, Any Voice
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- Category: The Voice of the World
- Published on Monday, 09 January 2012 15:11
- Written by Sam Justice
- Hits: 725
The Voice of the World is a column about world building: how to set your scene and mood, and make sure that your reader will follow. World building is all about setting, voice and setting are intimately tied together. The setting will affect the nature of the voice, and the voice will effect how the reader experiences the world that you've created.
Think about how different people see the same thing. I'll give you an easy example; the current campaign for the upcoming US Presidential election. How do you feel in regards to the Republican candidates? How about the incumbent? What about the supporters of either side, how do you see them? Take a minute to consider this, and try to see how it is that you see this part of our world. I'll be here when you finish.
Done? Good, now take a different point of view. Whichever side of the issue you're on, try now to think about how someone on the opposite side sees all of this, and how they would feel about someone with your point of view. This one might take a little longer to get your mind around, but try. I’m not going anywhere, so take your time.
Harder, isn't it? Now you’d looked at our world from two different points of view, one of which you are very familiar. If you were to write the same story centering around the election twice, once with each point of view, the voice that described the events to the reader would change, drastically in some cases. This will shift the opinion and experience of the reader.
Now, because reading isn't writing, I want you to try this. Choose your own situation, issue, or topic - anything that can have more than one point of view about it - and make up two characters with very different opinions. Give them entirely different life styles. It doesn't matter how they got to be where they are, through choice or circumstance. Think about their background, and give them a detailed history. Now, tell a short scene, five or six hundred words should be enough (and you’ll have your 500 for the day), centered around your topic with one of your created characters as the point of view. Then, write the same story from the other character’s point of view. How are they different? How are they the same? What do the two points of view reveal to you, the author, of the setting you've created?
