Work In Progress
My Goals, Care of Joe’s Goals
-
Feb
28
Research, or not to research.
Filed Under Art of Writing | 2 Comments
That’s the question, isn’t it.
When you’re getting ready to write, you’ve done a bunch of world building. For the most part, your research should be done. Of course, things always pop up while you’re working on a chapter that you didn’t expect. So what do you do? Do you stop writing and research, or keep moving ahead, leaving yourself a note for when you do your revisions.
In almost all situations, I would recommend forging ahead, and doing the research later. You don’t want to get bogged down and distracted by all the neat things you’ll discover, and the tangents you’ll end up following. It’d be nice if I could follow my own advice, isn’t it.
In working on the script for the Domino Girls, the ghost of a Confederate Army Colonel is being added to the mix. He’s about to introduce himself to the twins, and I suddenly realized I know next to nothing about manners and etiquette from that time period. This is one situation, though, where I can’t just forge ahead. This information will affect everything have this character do from now on, so I can’t avoid it. I have to stop working on the script and do some research.
This is where my old habit of buying reference books for the sake of buying them usually comes in handy. I have a copy of Everyday Life During the Civil War, so I go grab it off the shelf and start looking through it. Lots of info about prices, clothing, and everyday life, but nothing about manners and etiquette.
My Google-Fu is with me tonight, and I find a number of useful links. One of them has links to a site that has scanned in copies of manuscripts in the collections of Robarts library at the University of Toronto. I manage to stop myself after downloading half a dozen etiquette primers (and believe me, that’s quite a feat – having broadband makes it waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too easy to feed my research material addiction). Now I have to read through them all and hopefully find what I need.
Still, there is a point where I will have to draw the line, stop researching and start writing again. If I haven’t found what I need, I’ll just fake it, saying he’s been watching what’s going on for the past two hundred years and had learned the changes in manners, and that will explain why it’s not 100% accurate.
What do you do when you discover while writing that you need to do more research?
Feb
26
The World As Inspiration
Filed Under Art of Writing | Leave a Comment
I am not much of a morning person. It takes me a while to get going, to motivate myself to get out of bed. It’s worse when it’s winter because we keep the temperature at 65 during the day (reducing it to 57, I think, at night), and the upstairs bedrooms don’t have air vents to any heat up there is from convection or space heaters.
Anyway, I drag myself out of bed this morning. I knew we were getting snow. We’d gotten about half an inch before we went to bed last night, and there was a snow advisory. Half asleep, I walk past the kitchen window and glance outside and see the snow on the tree branches. (The picture to the left is the view out of that window.)
The sight serves to remind me how beautiful nature can be – and how much I dislike winter. Don’t get me wrong. I’m Canadian, so I’ve seen my share of snow. I like hockey (though I prefer baseball). I loved making snowmen and snow forts and having snowball fights when I was a kid. Problem is winter is cold, and cold makes my hands hurt.
Winter’s also a great time for writing. When that blanket of white covers the ground, it’s a blank slate for inspiration. A path left by someone trudging through the fresh fallen snow. Where are they going? Where did they come from? What are they thinking? The wind blows the snow into a huge drift that partially covers a car. What if it wasn’t snow, but sand?
Some of great ideas can be found in the world around us. The March 2008 issue of the Smithsonian magazine arrived in my mailbox yesterday. It has an article about cheetahs. From a quick scan of the article, I saw that cheetahs are considered to be easily “tamed”. What kind of stories spring to mind from that tidbit of information (regardless of whether or not I remembered that info correctly)? If you were going to anthropomorphize a cheetah, or create a shapeshifter or race based on the cheetah, how might that define their personalities?
It’s this kind of thing that I think encourages a writer to become more aware of the world around them, and what’s in it. More than just people watching, they should nature watch. Writers should read, but not just fiction. Nonfiction not only helps a writer making her world more “real”, making sure she gets her facts right, but is a source for all kinds of different ideas.
Feb
21
Designing A City
Filed Under Guest Blog, World Building | Leave a Comment
Today we have our first “guest blog”. I subscribe to a vast number of mailing lists, one of which is one for ProFantasy and their products. Bill Wire wrote a very good article/message about designing a city, and I got his permission to post it here. If you have any questions or comments, please do it below. I know we’d both enjoy a discussion about fictional city design.
If you can get a hold of it, the Forgotten Realms Interactive Atlas (FRIA)has many cities – real cities in it. Waterdeep in particular is a very large city that should be a suitable model for what you’re speaking of.
My suggestion is to in a piece of paper, start with the *sketch* of a hamlet. Think about why it’s there, and how the people made their living. The roads, if there even are any will go around trees, hills and large rocks. There’ll probably be a “village green” or something, etc. Either keep using that paper, or a duplicate if you want to keep history, grow the hamlet into a town Make it bigger but don’t change a lot of the original portion. Think about events in the history of the city – has it ever been sacked? If so, destroy a few things.
Now you’ve got a town, time to grow again into a small city. Put in some walls, destroy parts of the town to make way for public works like “city hall” etc. Straighten some of the roads that wandered around things like trees and rocks – leave the ones that wandered around hills, destroy buildings as needed to do this. Occasionally, just leave the twisty way there, AND make a straight one too. Build more buildings, and more and straighter roads. Remember, people don’t really like walking around the block to get to the other side, so leave spaces and back yards in your city at this stage.
Time to crowd your city. Within the walls, start filling in empty spaces with buildings and more buildings. What used to be back yards and paths to “cut across” blocks become alley ways between new buildings only feet from each other. You should still be thinking about the primary industries going on in the city, but there should be other industries moving in as well by now, so allow for them. As the city grows, so will its commerce. If it’s coastal, add docks and warehouses, and “dive bars” along the waterfront. Rip down things as needed to make room for them. If that leaves a blind alley, so be it. 
Now the city is too crowded, build more city close to the walls & gates outside. Destroy some random spots in the city, build something new. Leave a little “ruins” in some of the more crowded sections of town. People want their space, and want protection, but they can not have both. Inside the walls is still more desirable than outside, tear down large swaths of “individual” buildings and construct row-homes instead. This will result in alley after alley that used to cut across the block instead ending at the back of a building. Wealthy merchants will likely take over a block here & there, clear the block & put up a wall & nice house. They tend to congregate together for security to to associate with their peers – keep them clustered.
Time to grow some more, The city planners decide to build a new wall. New walls are expensive, so they’re going to build it as small as they can get away with while still leaving a little room for expansion. Draw a new city wall, Breach the old one in lots of places as the stone will be scavenged for other construction projects. You may even turn the old wall into a road. What was previously poor land outside the walls along the main roads is now expensive land, The poor are shunted away from the main roads – build “shanty” town in between the main gates. Consider whether there is enough external threat to have the city build a fortress somewhere. If there is a large enough threat, a fortress may even exist prior to this point. The rich will move out into the larger spaces, so convert some of their older good places to live into multiple “middle class” buildings, and a few of the closest to the “rest of the city” into solid masses of buildings tacked onto the original main house.
Just keep growing in this manner until you get to the size you want. Keep in mind changes in government, the “revitalization projects”, “public works” like fountains and parks, and the acquisition of properties by the wealthy. Erase & overwrite as you go. Don’t be shy. Bear in mind that old fortresses can be abandoned and new ones built elsewhere, but it’s expensive. More likely, the old fortress will become a city guard barracks, prison, or other “public” building. Also, somewhere along this time, the city will realize it needs to do something about sanitation. The open-channels in the streets in the “old city” might have been OK when the city was small, but out here, they’re going to build sewers to do things right while they have the chance. They may even extend some of them through the old city if there’s a port, river, or other good way to get things “flowing out of the city” off in that direction – or if there’s a particularly wealthy merchant still over there.
Keep reusing the same paper (or copies). The sketch will become more and more detailed. As it does, it will come to the point when it’s time to put it into CC just because it’s easier to edit there than to keep erasing paper. I like to think out the whole life-cycle in broad terms before I sit down in CC so I know where the tangled mazes of alleyways are, where the planned streets are, where the “rich” live, and where things are not so pleasant. The REAL / CURRENT roads are actually simply a result of how the city grew. Where did people need to travel between to do their business, and what was the current shortest route at each stage of the cities life?
What I’m basically saying is that a truly large city is an incredible amount of work. But when you’re done, you know WHY any given part of the city looks the way it does. In one city, “Taris” I even went so far as to make a coordinate system and and index of every business and place of note in the city, listing the coordinates in the index, and having a cross-reference to the page number of the place description. 154.5×12 = Golden Eagle Inn pg:33. 155×12 = Harls Blacksmithy pg:38. etc – with the place descriptions themselves listed alphabetically and noting their coordinates on the map. Unfortunately for me, that was long before CC-DOS even came out and it’s just a huge binder of paper I hadn’t the heart to redo. Taris has been used at one point or another in 5 campaigns.
I did do a town to this detail – Garvuns Rest. But that campaign died out when the entire party of first level adventurers all killed themselves trying to cross a series of 20′ deep pits with undead at the bottom. Why they didn’t destroy the undead from above (shooting fish in a barrel) before trying to cross the pits, I don’t know… …they had the time… …and when the player says “I can only fail my balance check on a 1″ well… …Murphy is always listening.
Or, alternatively – you can try to go straight for the end-run. I find I’m much happier knowing why the city is laid out as it is, and that you wind up with more “real” mazes of alley and streets if you “grew” the city instead of just “building” it. If you go for the end-run, start big and get smaller and smaller. Which sections of the city are more open? Which more crowded? Draw mazes of streets, then fill in every nook and cranny with a building to create your alleys and dead-ends in the crowded areas of town. As you go, plan – how do the people living on this block make their living? Where do they work? Where do they get their food? Where do they go on a date with their girl/boyfriend?
Feb
20
A Late Start
Filed Under Stuff | Leave a Comment
I can’t believe it’s Wednesday already. So much to do. Chapter 13 is progressing slowly. I still plan on having it done by Friday, but we’ll see. Much of my time today will be taken up by doing an emergency-speed crit for a member of my writing group, and starting work on a new “job”. More about that at a later date.
Feb
14
Best Laid Plans
Filed Under Art of Writing | Leave a Comment
You know how the phrase goes, the best laid plans of mice and men, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and so on. Well, they all apply here. Getting a blog entry done yesterday didn’t pan out, and I doubt I’m going to be able to come up with anything for between now and Monday. Even Monday might be shaky. So there it is.
I hope everyone has a great weekend, and see you on Monday!