First-person in High Fantasy

"You know I looked around at the faces I know, I fell in love with the people in the front row." --Hilltop Hoods, The Nosebleed Section

I love it when I have things pre-determined to blog about at the beginning of a day...it just makes it so much easier to post when the time comes.

So right! The first-person p.o.v. in high fantasy. Like I posted yesterday, Buried in the Slush Pile contends that it doesn't work very well, because so much world-building has to happen in a high fantasy narrative, and it doesn't make a whole lot of logical sense for a person to discuss how the world they live in works inside their own head (or to a reader from their own world).

She goes through some limited situations in which it does work for other types of fantasy, but none of them fit my definition of high fantasy (slightly different from hers--I need more than just a completely secondary world. I need magic, pre-modern technology, and non-human sentient races). I agree with her, but only for worlds that haven't been previously established.

If you were to read the first book that takes place in a world from a first-person point of view, it would be very difficult to grasp what's going on. But in a world that's well established, the first-person could work admirably. It would produce a very different sort of high fantasy story, and one that I might hesitate to call high fantasy at all, but in a world that is so well-known to its readers that its rules don't need to be established, the first-person might work admirably, though it would necessarily limit its audience to those already familiar with its world.

...now why you'd want to write a first-person high fantasy narrative is another question entirely. One of the things that sets high fantasy apart and makes it so wonderful is its tendency towards a diverse cast of characters, with different archetypes for different people to identify with, and you would lose that in a first person narrative.

But I don't think it's quite so unreasonable a proposition as she contends.

Tidbits from the Blogosphere

"Get out of my dreams, get into my car." --Billy Ocean, Get Out of my Dreams

Buried in the Slush Pile has done a couple of posts on fantasy recently--one about the difficulties of using first-person narration in it (which I don't always buy--more on that tomorrow), and I thought I'd link to them. Unfortunately I can't seem to link to specific posts on that blog, but they're #2 and #3 respectively as of this post, though sadly that will change. Oh well, you can always search for the key term "high fantasy" there and find them.

Sometimes the Pudding Just Sucks

"I got soul but I'm not a soldier..."
-The Killers, All These Things I've Done

So I watched the season premiere of Heroes last night, and while I eventually got into it (I love what they've done with Sylar, and the transformation of Nathan is interesting as well, as is whatever is going on with Claire), it took a long time to get off the ground.

Most notably, the first five minutes were among the worst five minutes of TV I've ever watched. I mean seriously, the acting, the dialogue, the scenery, the whole shebang, made Sci-Fi original movies look like The Godfather.

Which got me thinking about how entirely unfair it is that once a show (author, book series, director...plug-in whatever noun you want here) has achieved enough success it gets an automatic pass on being good at the beginning. If an unknown show had started off that badly I would have gone back to watching Monday Night Football. I almost did that anyway.

Same applies to publishing, and it's a damn shame. Especially when people get credit that, in my eyes, is entirely undeserved. In my poetry class yesterday a student began his discussion of a book of poetry we were reading with the statement, "I just want to say that even though it seems really dense and doesn't make much sense sometimes, he knows what he's doing. I mean, he's got degrees from Duke and Harvard, so he knows what he's up to."

The sad reality is that this is how a lot of people think. A PhD from Duke in history and an MFA from Harvard in creative writing don't make you a good poet. They don't even necessarily prove you're smart, in my eyes. The proof is in the pudding, but sometimes people change their tastes in order to like pudding they think should be good rather than just saying "This pudding sucks."

I don't know what the solution is, but it's a damn shame.

Soundtracks

"Put me to sleep, evil angel..."-Breaking Benjamin, Evil Angel

Quote today in honor of Crisis Core...and now on to soundtracks and how they build characters!

I'm sure this kind of thing gets studied in a much more thorough and legitimate way in most film schools, but I'm going to share my opinions on it anyway, because it's something that often slips past me when I'm watching a movie or playing through a videogame.

When they're present, soundtracks build characters and soundtracks develop scenes. Sometimes, as much or more significantly than the action taking place. Think about it, would Jack Sparrow be as adventurous without the thunderous trumpets following his one-liners as he leaps into action? Would the love story in Titanic be as tragic without that blasted flute track in the background? Would Jurassic Park be as awe-inspiring without the cymbal crashes and trumpets? (damn those trumpets...they're everywhere)

So. How do we use this information?

...I have some ideas, but quite frankly I'm not going to share them until I see someone else do them first (and I'm confident someone will, because all my other "great" ideas have been turning up piece by piece over the last year. Internet book trailers? Yeah, I thought I was pretty clever with my plans for that. Rats! Foiled again!) on the off chance that no one else will think of them until I can use them for myself. Sorry, but rest assured that once I find someone else duplicating my ideas I'll share them.

And what does this information mean for the future of books?

Well, if you ask me, combine e-books with the undeniable power of soundtracks and you have a pretty obvious answer to that question. Sometime in the next ten years I think we'll see the first e-book that comes with a soundtrack. The technology will have to change to support it, but it will. I'm willing to bet it will start out as an option to store and play music on your e-reader, evolve into a way to control the song you're listening to as you read, move on to soundtracks embedded into the e-book files themselves that repeat tracks while you're on one page a la old videogames, eventually some clever person will find a way to track exactly what point your eyes are at on the page and cue the music that way, and before you know it e-books will be a collaborative creative process involving large budgets, composers, and symphony orchestras.

...and they'll provide something you won't be able to get from a paper copy. Whether and how it'll catch on, I can't predict, but I'm willing to bet large we'll see it happen.

Prequels

"I will try to find my place, in the diary of Jane..."-Breaking Benjamin, Diary of Jane

So. As we speak I have just finished ditching a lecture in order to finish playing through Crisis Core (relax kids, I'm dropping the class anyway). And aside from obligatory zomgwtfamazing fanboy comments I could be making, I realized something very interesting about the way Tetsuya Nomura and crew handled the making of the game.

For those who don't know, it's a prequel to Final Fantasy VII---one of the most popular and beloved RPGs of all time. It's a bit like Star Wars, except for RPGs. It revolutionized the genre and some people are very, very, obsessively dedicated to it. So Nomura et al had to handle it very carefully to avoid stepping on people's toes.

In my opinion, they did a marvelous job of it, in no small part because they left out most of what had occurred in the original game.

For those unfamiliar with FFVII, one of its themes is memory, so there are a lot of flashbacks regarding the protagonist. A significant portion of Crisis Core takes place during the same timeframe as those flashback scenes, and the main protagonist from FFVII actually has one of the bigger minor roles in Crisis Core. So there was significant potential to rehash a lot of the flashback scenes from FFVII.

I was actually looking forward to these, as those scenes and that particular subplot of the game are some of my favorite parts of it. I was surprised, therefore, when Crisis Core left most of those scenes out. Its narrative simply skipped over them---I knew they were there, I knew what happened, but as they weren't important to the narrative of Crisis Core itself, they didn't wind up in the game. At first I was a bit disappointed, but after some reflection I think it was a brilliant move.

It made Crisis Core much more of its own game, and kept the focus on its main character, rather than FFVII's. Rather than the game just being an excuse to relive some of my favorite moments from FFVII, it was a whole new story that didn't really plug into the FFVII story (not in the way I expected, anyway) until its last scene.

I will be remembering this someday, when I write my own prequels, and I think it's good advice for anyone else who plans to as well.

...more tomorrow on another lesson I learned from the game, the use of soundtracks to build characters, and how I think that can be used now in writing, and how I think it will start to be used in the next 10 years or so.

Exciting Times

"Rain rain, go away, come again another day. All the world is waiting for the sun." --Breaking Benjamin, Rain

Alright, well, the greatest upside to being finished with that oh-so-disappointing World of Warcraft story is that I'm back to working on my novel. Yay!

I spent a considerable amount of time last night I should have spent studying instead going back to look over the list of changes I have written up for my next revision and I have to say I'm freakin' excited. I came up with a great concept over the summer that will really set my novel apart from the rest of the stuff out there, and I absolutely can't wait to implement it, despite the fact that it's going to be a boatload of work.

My novel is beginning to look like a novel, and not just like a story. Which is good, I think. I love stories, and I'm a firm believer that it's stories that sell and stories that touch lives and stories that matter, but it makes me happy to think that there will be something to the story I'm telling that stretches beyond the story itself. Hurray!

Moral of the story---it is a good idea to make big lists of changes and then wait to implement them, because you may be freakin' psyched to do it.

Frustration

"Still my guitar gently weeps..."
--The Beatles, While My Guitar Gently Weeps

Alright, I know I already posted about this once, but the situation has now deteriorated to the point of making me quite exasperated, so I'm posting again.

This summer the World of Warcraft website began accepting submissions for the online publication of WoW based short stories. This seemed like a great opportunity to me, especially as I had a pretty good idea of what I might want to do with one, so I jumped on it and started writing.

Now, after a whole summer spent working on this short story (not exclusively or intensively mind you, but still a lot of time put in) I'm having to scrap it completely because the submission directions were unclear.

I posted previously that rather than a 7500 word short story they wanted a 7500 character one. That was a mistake on my part, and rather frustrating overall, but I managed to break my story up into four parts that worked pretty coherently and I felt like the submission still would have been good.

Then this weekend I finally went to submit it and discovered that for some reason, the 7500 character limit was also wrong. They're only accepting submissions of up to 3000 characters.

After struggling with their online submission system for awhile trying to figure out why it wasn't working as advertised, I finally gave up. Splitting my story up into 3000 character chunks would mean it would be in 8 parts, and frankly, it's just not that divisible.

If anyone's curious, this blog post is over 2200 characters. I'm pretty sure that 3000 characters is not a short story, it's a short-short story. Boo to Blizzard and their confusing guidelines.

The moral of the story, I guess, is to be careful about submitting to unknown markets, even if they seem like they should be well-managed. Even large corporate entities may fall pretty flat when venturing into unknown territory, and you should be aware of that.

Personally, I like the story I wrote and I'm happy I wrote it. I may try to find another venue to share it on (there are plenty of WoW sites that accept fanfic) because I think it's pretty good, so it's not as if my work was wasted.

But I'm still frustrated as hell.

%*!(*@ Blizzard....

Writing Every Day

"But that day's not today..."-Missing Time, Here We Are

So I'm sure you've all heard that you should write every day if you want to be a writer. I sign on to that philosophy whole-heartedly. I've only managed to do it once, for a summer, but I progressed more as a writer during that summer than I think I ever have in one short period like that.

The trouble, of course, is finding time to do it. When you work from the time you wake up until the time you go to sleep (oh college, let me count the ways I love thee...), when do you find time to write?

The solution came to me today as I was reading some poetry and pondering whether to put it down and pick up my PSP for a few minutes to play another level of Crisis Core.

First some background on the game---the way it's designed, you can do optional sidequests that take literally between 3-5 minutes to get through. This is great for someone like me, who needs to take brief breaks from studying every once in awhile and do something a little more enjoyable. I can spend a little bit of time playing, and then get back to work, and overall I'm much more happy and productive.

So how does this apply to finding time to write?

Find ways to write that only take 3-5 minutes. For me, I think that's poetry. I can scramble off a short poem in 10-15 minutes. It might not be any good, and it probably won't have anything to do with whatever fiction project I'm working on at the time, but for that 10-15 minutes my mind will at least be engaged in writing.

For you it might be something else---vignettes, a scene, character sketches, whatever it is that both moves you and doesn't take much time, but I'm willing to bet there's something, and finding and taking advantage of it can only help you in the end.

Race in Fantasy

"Some live for the bill, some kill for the bill (girrrrl)..."-Wyclef Jean, Sweetest Girl

Alright, continuing with the theme of how taking classes completely outside the average creative writing curriculum can influence your writing in incredible ways, a discussion of race in fantasy.

I've been taking a class this semester about the origins of race as we know it in society today, and aside from completely turning upside-down my own thoughts on race (and helping me to finally eliminate some issues I've had with race since I first started encountering it), it's really gotten me thinking about how race is treated in fantasy.

Most notably, it's treated as a given. In most fantasy worlds, whatever equivalent there is to God created the different races as different races, and never the twain shall meet. There are half-breeds, but races never get more mixed than that. You never see, for instance, an invidual of mixed dwarvish-human-elvish-gnomish ancestry...the sort of genetic mixing that would happen in any world in which the races were races and not different species.

So most fantasy worlds treat races as species, but still use the term race, and incorporate all the racial tensions and hatreds that have accompanied that term in the real world. My question is, "why?" For all the sun-shiny stories out there in fantasy about interracial marriages and overcoming prejudices and hatreds, the prejudices and hatreds overcome are never really intrinsic to the worlds they're supposed to come from. They're just imported from ours.

I'd love to read a work of fantasy in which racial mixing was treated realistically and one of the major themes of the story. In fact, I'd love to write it. Dibs.

Why Writing Can't Be Taught

"I st-st-stuttered when you asked me what I'm thinkin' bout." -Miley Cyrus, See You Again

So. Why writing can't be taught. There are a couple steps to this one. The first is understanding that there is inherently a gulf between teaching and learning. What someone teaches you may not have anything to do with what you learn. For instance, someone may teach you that the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. Hopefully what you'll learn is that they know very little about astronomy.

That's an extreme example, but it applies to everything you learn. There will always be a subtle difference between what someone attempts to teach you and what you actually learn from them, whether it's the mechanism by which hydrogen and oxygen bond to form water or what the madwoman in the attic really means in Jane Eyre.

So, there is a difference between teaching and learning. Everyone still with me? Good.

In some disciplines, the goal is to bridge this difference. Since 2+2 will always equal 4, the goal is to make sure that when someone teaches that 2+2=4, everyone learns that 2+2=4 (and that hopefully they learn why as well).

With writing, this doesn't work. There are no facts to be memorized, no simple truths, nothing that can be taught. You must learn how to write, and in order to do that what you really need to do is be able to look at your own writing and see its shortcomings, then be able to keep your eyes open enough to find solutions to them in the world around you.

Unfortunately, a class focused on that wouldn't sell textbooks. It might not even sell books of poetry and literary fiction. And what do professors of creative writing write? Textbooks, books of poetry, and literary fiction. And we all know that professors need to sell books in order to keep their positions (not to mention pay their bills).

What's the solution? I don't know. There are economic realities involved here that I'm not really equipped to deal with, but I do know that most creative writing courses I've taken have been a big steaming pile of bad (aside from workshops, anyway, so long as the workshop isn't really an hour-long critique from the professor with a few comments from other students scattered in for good measure) and I certainly wouldn't count on them to improve your writing until the way they're taught is changed.

Selecting Classes

"Just 'cause she dances go-go, that don't make her a ho, no..."-Wyclef Jean, Perfect Gentleman

Alright, admittedly this post is only of interest to anyone in college and looking to improve their writing---but as that's probably a majority of the people reading this, I'm going to post it anyway.

When it comes to writing in college and selecting classes I have two major pieces of advice.

1.) Don't put too much emphasis on creative writing classes and workshops. They can be of great help, or they can be the most frustrating experiences ever, and it will be difficult to tell ahead of time which they'll be. By all means take them, but be aware going in that they may be awful, and realize that there may be other classes out there that will improve your writing more. Writing can't be taught, it can be only be learned, and classes that purport to teach it to you may actually not be the best place to learn it.

2.) Take a wide breadth of courses. This matters especially for those of you writing fantasy or sci-fi, but I really think it applies to everyone. There is nothing you don't need to know as an author. Everything from art history to chemistry to sociology to economics can be used in your writing---but only if you know it. So learn as much as you can. Aim to be a jack of all trades rather than master one. How to work this in with a major of some kind is up to you, but that's my advice.

More later this week on why writing can't be taught and why people who think it can probably shouldn't be teaching it.