I’m Eric M. Cherry, the emcee for the Twilight Tales reading series and host of Shop Talk. Shop Talk began in October 2006, it runs on the third Monday each month, and focuses on some aspect of the craft and business of writing. Last Monday, we talked about setting design with Jude Walter Mire. Jude is a fine writer of science fiction and fantasy, published most recently in Book of Dead Things.

Jude’s first observation is that most authors have a blind spot in their creative vision. Consider the antagonist: we’ll dream up nightmarish histories for our evil stalkers, supply our masterminds with cunning ploys and toys, and equip the fantastic aliens or wizards with spectacular powers. To build a monster, we’ll rack our brains for a new twist. Yet when these titanic forces clash with our protagonists, where do our battles take place? In the same forest, on the same plain, and among the same hills as every other writer has drawn upon. Chases between unique enemies will pass through the same old urban alleys, along the same old highways and byways, and into the same old homes, offices, malls, etc.

It’s time to open our eyes and look around our created worlds.

But our long-shut eyes hurt in the light. Jude has some cool shades we can wear until our creative eyes adjust. In order to build better settings, try this tool. He calls it…

Elements of Reality

“When writing a scene, first decide the general location: a room in a hotel, a hillside, a car in a parking garage, a forest,” Jude says. “Once you have a ‘normal’ location in mind, run it through the following filters and see how you can toy with it to become something interesting. As you do so, keep two things in mind:

1. Your overall setting: how would this change work in relation to that? Does it enhance or detract? Is it consistent and viable?
2. The characters in the scene: how does this reflect on them? Would it change their behavior? Does the scene alter the action due to their responses to it?

Color: Simply shifting the colors of something makes it more interesting or appealing. Why the heck is that bridge purple? Yellow pool water is never a good sign. Red lights on nighttime snow create an icy hell.

Scale: Make things bigger and smaller in your mind. In a forest, shrink the trees to saplings. Make your rowboat huge and too wide to maneuver. Give your cop a coffee in a 96-ounce cup from the world’s tiniest convenience store, where he must walk sideways down the aisle.

Material: Go through all the options of what the things in the setting could be made of. Pull up in a bamboo car from Gilligan’s Island. Make the mayor’s house out of brick in a town of log cabins. Dress your sci-fi crowds in styro-foam hats.

Orientation: Tip things upside down and flip them on their sides. Put your homeless people in a fallen-over building that hasn’t been wrecked yet. Have spies meet in a container yard so full that containers are stacked upright like Stonehenge. Watch the Poseidon Adventure and see Gene Hackman have fun with an upside-down cruise ship!

Incongruity: Put something that doesn’t seem to belong into the scene as a focal point. Everyone’s seen the picture of a single red umbrella adrift in a sea of black umbrellas. Pull something out and make it pop. Give your inner city kid in the grungy apartment a state-of-the-art chrome refrigerator. Plant some flowers on the roof of the smoke-belching factory. Keep a grim warlike statue in the town square while the festival goes on around it.

Blending: I also call this Frankenstein Genetics Technique. Basically, you take an item that has nothing to do with your setting and ’squish’ it into the scene. Don’t add it; mix it. Example: You’re writing a science fiction story and want a captivating city set. So you’ve got a city. Make a list of city items, then pick a few. Let’s say you start with buildings. Now you take ‘building’ and squish it with several random things to see what they do to the architecture. Building + Car Engine = Factory-looking, industrial city. Building + Wine Bottle = Seamless, fluted-looking wind chime city. Building + Umbrella = Opening and closing solar city.

Once you’ve brainstormed an interesting take on your setting, go through the details to make sure it doesn’t contradict your overall setting. If you’ve devised something different or odd-seeming, you own an explanation to your reader.”

The Shop Talk Round Table

We spent an hour or more going over some twists on these ideas, seeing how these cool shades worked out. We saw that the reality of the scene isn’t the only facet available for sprucing up. A character’s perceptions of the scenery could be all that’s abnormal: tinted glasses provide new colors to see; short, tall, fat, and thin characters pass through the same room with a different experience of its scale; craftspeople perceive the materials of the world with different focal points; a person in a tree sees a different yard than the person on the ground; etc.

Also, the story’s forward motion can be slowed or stopped, depending on the quantity of description used. For pacing control, establishing mood or suspense, nothing works half so well as description: add some, slow things down. Too slow? Cut the description.

What Else?

There was more — too much to cover here. Jude wrote an article for us (excerpted above) that addressed logistics, sense data, and more. And gathering in the wisdom of the authors at the table is far beyond my scope tonight. But come out to the show sometime to check us out, hang out after to chat, and we’ll get into it again.

  - emc

I’m Eric Cherry, the emcee for Twilight Tales. If you have attended the show when I’ve been there, you’ve probably witnessed a discussion of writing technique. It’s something of a habit: I study the craft by dissecting fiction, interrogating authors, and experimenting with tools. This week, Brendan Detzner read a good section from his continuing piece, “Sleepwalking.” Afterward, we had a chance to chat (read: I interrogated him), and he passed on some observations about magic.

Magic exists in fantasy stories of all sorts, from Conan-style sword-and-sorcery tales to surreal, urban prose poems. Characters encounter magical forces, and some characters wield magic themselves. A character with the power to wield magic can perform impossible feats of wildly varying descriptions, and a story that contains magical elements can cover some incredible ground. Writing a story that contains magic can be its own kind of challenge.

Brendan’s first observation was about the kinds of magic: a good world wherein evil magic intrudes; a neutral world with neutral magic as a kind of natural force; and a wicked world occasionally saved by good magic. As a general description in broad strokes, this strikes me as perfectly reasonable.

Knowing which kind of world I’m writing about can help me to avoid certain problems. In the novel that I’m outlining just now, I’ve been treating my world as neutral with magic as a neutral, natural force. However, that’s a default state for me, and it’s entirely wrong for the novel: my story demands a good world invaded by evil magic, and invaded on a semi-regular basis. A few major events make this clear, and remembering this broad-strokes classification will help me to incorporate this fact into several lesser events for the sake of integrity and conflict.

The second observation has been in my thoughts since we talked, and it strikes me as immensely valuable. Brendan has two rules for magic, which I’ll give in reverse order here.

One: Magic has a cost. This wasn’t new to me, though it bears repeating. If there are no consequences to using magic, then why not use it all the time for everything? Special effects are pretty, sure, but it’s the costs paid by the characters that are interesting.

Two: When things get dull, introduce a man with a gun and make damn sure that the magic-wielding character can’t ignore the gun. This might sound obvious, but how many times have I written exactly this sort of error into a scene? How often have I seen this abomination on screen, or yawned at it in some other story? Magic that nullifies a conflict without a cost also nullifies the dramatic interest.

A counter-example springs to mind: Spiderman. He’s magical, for all that his powers stem from technobabble sources, and his magic lets him ignore all manner of guns, and generally without cost. Now and then, comic book writers and movie makers show off the special effects and let Spiderman wow us, but the narrative purpose is generally to establish the rules. They don’t do it for long, they keep it entertaining, and then they move on. What do they move on to? Costs and bigger guns: personal obligations in conflict with heroic duty, guilt and grief, and sadistic choices. Explosions, magical villains, and one crisis too many to juggle.

My novel’s setting imposes costs on the practitioners of magic: taint. Exposure to magical forces afflicts people with taint, and taint has an array of unpleasant effects. The stuff is evil, and people tamper with it at their peril. So I’m good there, but it’s good to check the basics now and again.

At a few points in the story, assorted non-magical folk use mundane force against magical beings. Do these magic-wielding beings worry about the guns? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. When they can ignore the guns because of their magic, the magic has a cost. For now, I think that my on-again, off-again magic obeys consistent rules, but I’ll revisit that as I go along. The important thing is that I have acceptable magic:guns power ratios.

  - emc

You can catch Brendan’s writing in The Book of Dead Things, published by Twilight Tales, and you can find him most Mondays at the show.