Weird Worldbuilding

Most of the advice about Worldbuilding out there seems to come down to geophysical and climatological advice about making you fantasy world physically plausible.

This is all very well until you want to do something non-standard. The world I'm working on at the moment is very non-standard, and the lack of suggestions and advice is making me feel like I'm flying blind.

Now some people would say that to be plausible a world has to follow mundane physical laws. But what if the world isn't a mundane physical world? Leaving aside completely implausible physical setups like Terry Pratchett's Discworld or the roleplaying game Exalted's Creation what about world's that are not physical in the mundane sense? The Matrix and similar fictional virtual worlds only obey's mundane laws (if the do) because they are programmed that way.

Well I would say that a non-standard world still needs consistent rules to underpin it even if they differ radically from the laws of physics. It's consistency not mundanity which makes even the implausible plausible in my opinion. So I'm currently coming up with the laws that rule this particular world I'm developing - which is great fun.

About Opening Scenes

One of the most common pieces of writing advice you'll hear today is "hook them on the first page". In fact it's often phrased as "hook them with the first line". This is why writers often spend so long labouring over their first lines, because they know you have to catch the reader early or they'll close the book and move on to the next one.

However it is important to note we writers sometimes worry about it far too much. A great first line is a good thing, but it's no good if you don't follow it up with a strong first scene. And a weak first line may well be forgiven by the browsing reader if the rest of the first scene delivers on the tension. I know we live in the sound bite generation, but even today most potential readers will skim at least a couple of pages before deciding (or at least that's been my observation in bookshops).

So I think that when thinking about your opening it's more important to think about the first scene and the reader hook holistically rather than just focusing on the first line. If you can pull of a brilliant opening the first line should take care of itself.

And of course concentrating on the scene should help with avoiding first lines that are supposed to be hooky but come off as contrived. I'm sure we've all seen some of those before now.

But all this is by the by. How do we make our opening scenes hook the reader?

Well I've come across several suggestion - all of which can work solely or in combination.

1. Open with a bang. Many thrillers do this literally. They open with someone in mortal danger. The theory is it hooks you, because you want to know if the person lives or dies. However you have to make the reader care you have to get them to empathise very quickly. If they don't they won't be anxious and will shut the book. But if you do it too well then kill said character they may be disgusted and shut the book instead of reading on to find out who did it. It's even worse if the dust cover tells you the person dies. It makes it hard to get attached if I know the outcome (for me anyway - people's reactions vary).
2. Open in a moment of change. The theory here is that change, even good change makes us anxious and so opening a story in a moment of transition will hook the reader. Of course again this depends on building empathy for the viewpoint character. If you don't why would they feel anxious about the change in the character's life?
3. Open in a moment of unease. Maybe nothing changes per se, but the character still feels uneasy about something. This should also hook the reader for similar reasons to points 1 and 2.
4. One of the most common pieces of first line advice is to give the reader a question to ask. Make the reader read on to find the answers. This is good, but as I said it only works if you follow through on it.
   

In fact most pieces of advice I've read about about opening scenes involves getting the reader to empathise with the character. Give the reader someone they can care about and something to care about and write it well, and they'll read on to find out what happens. Even with the question raising one the reader isn't going to stick around to find the answers if they don't care about the characters. It's characters that make us care. Which makes sense in the end, but like most things it's easier said than done. It's all about practice, practice and more practice like any art.

Links

• A Manuscript's Opening Scene - How to Use the First Five Pages to Sell your Manuscript
• Opening Scenes: An Overview This one is a book excerpt.
• How to Start Your Novel
• Writing a Great Opening for Your Novel or Screenplay
• How to Start Your Novel (Different article, same title as number 3)
  

The problem with titles.

I've written the detailed synopsis of the first chapter of the project I've been outlining for the past few weeks. So I'm making good progress.

There's just one thing bothering me about it.

It doesn't have a title. I'm not very good at thinking up titles. Oh, occassionally, a project will come to me with a title already attached. And sometimes a title appears and inspires a project. But it's far more normal for my projects to either have really bad working titles or more of a generic label than title attached to them.

But I have to bite the bullet sometime, and I'd kind of like to have a title for this one by the time I put the detailed synopsis on the shelf to rest. So I'm asking for help.

How do you come up with your titles. I'm sure there's no magic trick to it, but I'm hoping that hearing how other people find their titles will help me find a way that works for me.

Quick Update

Not much to report today.

I've nearly finished the one line summaries of each scene, so tomorrow I'll be able to start work on the big long outline (yes I am using that redundancy deliberately). I'm looking forward to that bit.

And I've been in research mode. I've bought two awesome history books specifically about women in the medieval period and I've been devouring them. They've been very useful in sorting out some questions pertaining to the outline and characters (well one character).

I've also did some worldbuilding today for another idea I've got. It's a bit of a challenge, because I have to figure out how to make the weird way this particular world works seem believable when it really isn't. This particular world is made of magic (for want of better way to explain it) and while it seems physical it doesn't always act like the physical world. I do wonder if having the human characters be as confused as the readers by the impossibilities they encounterwhile there would help. I'll have to think about it.

Fiction Book Review - Double Life

You may remember a few weeks ago I did an interview with a 14 year old self-published author named Dawson Vosburg. At the time I'd only read an excerpt of his book and some good unsolicited reviews (also linked in that post), since then I've read the entire thing. This review has previously been posted on goodreads.com and Amazon UK.

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Double Life by Dawson Vosburg also available on Amazon US and for the Kindle.

I wish I'd could have written this well when I was 14. The world will never see the stuff I wrote at 14 (or indeed at 20), but this is so much better than that.

This is a book written by a talented 14 year old. No, scratch that, it's a book written by a very talented 14 year old.

It's short, but it's aimed at the YA market so the shortness is tolerable. It has an excellent premise and a dynamic plot. Those are both 5 star parts of the plot.

It fails somewhat on the execution. There's an adage often repeated (but rarely properly explained) among writers to "Show don't Tell". In truth this means don't use narrative summary for important parts of the plot - write an immediate scene. At times Dawson summarises events when he should, perhaps, have written a scene. This is especially true towards the end - which feels rushed (and at times confusing) as a result.

Fortunately the overall strength of premise and plot make the flaws in execution tolerable - in my opinion anyway. Other people may be less tolerant but it has "look inside" active on Amazon US so you can see for yourself. Like all artists I'm sure he'll improve with practice and I look forward to the sequel.

My mouse hovered between 3 and 4 stars for quite a while rating this book on Amazon, because in the general order of things it's a three and half star book to me and prevaricated about whether to round up or down. On the balance I rounded up.

Thoughts on where I'm at

The snowflake outline progresses. I'm nearly done with the bit where you write a one or two sentence summary for each scene. This weekend I should be able to get started on the extremely detailed scene by scene summary outline this weekend. Hopefully I can get most of it done in one weekend and can then put it in a folder until September.

Then I want to work on another couple of outlines and do some worldbuilding in August. I also need to get to work on "The King's Head" soon. I'm going to be a busy little bee in August.

I'm a little disappointed I didn't get the editing on "The Sundered Light" done, because I'm not sure I'm going to get any done in August either. The more I look at it the I think a total rewrite may be in order rather than just an edit - but that may just be my lack of self-confidence talking.

And I'm having one of those periods when I'm deluged with ideas - most of which will never see the light of day, because once I examine them they're lame ducks. It's good to have ideas of course, but it's annoying sometimes when I'm trying to work on one thing and my brain is interrupting with other ideas.

Anyway I'll give a fuller report on my thoughts on July at the end of next week.

Writing Book Review - On Writing the Short Story

I bought "On Writing the Short Story" by Hallie Burnett because it was recommended in "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers" as "the best book we've found on the subject". Right now that doesn't seem such a glowing endorsement. It just makes me wonders what the other books are like if they aren't as good. Because while it's a good book with some excellent information and advice it's very thin and around half of it is sample stories. This sounds rather lack my complaints about another book on short story writing "How to Write Short Stories For Magazines -- and get Published" but this book wins over the previous one for several reasons.

1. The quality of the advice is much better, and it's generally better written.
2. Only one of the sample stories is actually by the book's author
3. One of the sample stories is the classic "Address Unknown" by Kressman Taylor which retails on its own for £5.99 on Amazon - it's worth buying for this powerful and tragic story on its own.
4. The internal layout of the book looks like a book.

So it doesn't feel as anaemic as "How to Write Short Stories for Magazines" and I didn't pay anywhere near as much for it, but it still doesn't feel comprehensive. It's an excellent primer, and given you can pick it up for £1.51 on Amazon (well from other sellers selling through Amazon) it's worth the money, but I wanted something a bit meatier.

It's still head and shoulders above "How to Write Short Stories for Magazines" and so I grant it 3 stars.