World Building 101, with Lindsay Buroker

I am writing and revising two high fantasy novels.  They are set in the same location in sequence but as the second progresses I have added new locations and new characters to push the story forward.  Already, I am stumbling over consistency in my geography, my topology and the political layout of the map of my imagined realm.  Inventing a world is not easy.

Lindsay Buroker, who is my favorite fantasy and science fiction author, seems to create worlds for the fun of it.  I have traveled with her through three of them so far (and looking forward to more). Each one is full and rich as well as consistent and distinct, peopled with characters who are as distinct as their environments.  I could not imagine Amaranthe from The Emporer’s Edge series   strolling down the capital of Iskandia any more than I could see Ridge Zirkander from Dragon’s Blade flying over the skies of the Empire.  Ms. Buroker is a generous author.  Not only are her city- and countryscapes richly described and rendered, but every character is fleshed out with a full and complex personality.  Each is given a full share of humanity, complete with strengths and many weaknesses.  As such, I would recognize Maldynado or Cas or any of her creations if I met them in real life.

Recently with uncharacteristic daring on my part, I contacted Ms. Buroker to see if she would be willing to share some of her experience in writing fantasy novels.  After my initial (and obligatory) gushing, she agreed to answer a few brief questions.  There are dozens more I could and should have asked and I hope for an opportunity someday, but for now please enjoy her responses:

 

Q:  When you are working in a series, do you meticulously plan the world that your characters inhabit or do you discover it along with them as the plots unfold?

LB:  Oh, I’m not meticulous at all. About anything in life. ;) I do try to plot out the basics of a series and have an idea how things will end before I get started, but I find that new ideas crop up along the way, so I like to leave room to explore them.

Since I tend to do a lot of world-building as I go, I’ve started writing the first two or three books in a series before going back to edit and publish them. This gives me more time to discover the world and add some depth. I did this with the series I launched with my pen name last year, and it worked well, so I’m doing it again right now with a science fiction adventure series that I plan to launch this summer. 

Q:  How do you maintain the distinct voices of your characters?

LB:  This is a challenge as I write more and more books. I’m up to 30 full-length novels now and I don’t know how many novellas and short stories. From series to series, I think my heroines will often have a lot of me in them and perhaps be a little similar in that regard, but I try to give all of my characters distinct backgrounds and quirks that make them feel a little different from each other. 

Q:  In addition to very strong female characters, your books always include well-developed male characters as well.  Do you find any difficulty in writing the opposite gender and any tips for doing so?

LB:  Thanks! I think there’s always some guessing and a bit of the unknown when it comes to writing the other sex. I tried listening to the audiobook version of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus once, but mostly I just remember what it was like being in the army. I was the only woman in my platoon for a while, so I was inundated with the guy humor and the guy perspective on life. That scene where Maldynado pees his name in the snow? That happened on a field exercise. :D (The guy had a shorter name, so it wasn’t quite so impressive of a feat.)

For tips? I would just say eavesdrop on some all-male conversations. And the same goes for male authors: listen to some all-female conversations. We often edit ourselves when the other gender is present. You get the genuine stuff when they don’t know you’re listening! 

(Lindsay Buroker’s books are available at bookstores and online.  For more information and excerpts, I recommend her blog at www.lindsayburoker.com).

Commencement

Cameron graduates this week, a studio art scholar at University of Virginia.

I write these words with all the trepidation of any parent.  They are the clarion call of transition.  For him, it is transition to adulthood – the continued “large steps” in the great adventure of becoming him.  For his mother and me, it is a bittersweet transition from active parentage.  He is always our son, but he is no longer our child.

His graduation synchronizes with our great relocation, a thousand miles west to North Texas.  At the same time as Cameron was mounting his spectacular fourth year art show, I was cleaning out the collected clutter of sixteen years in our old house.  In Cameron’s room especially, untouched for the better part of a childhood, I felt that I was dismantling whole worlds.  With his permission if not his wholehearted endorsement, collections of tiny cars were moved out, armies of plastic soldiers were demobilized and Lego structures designed for the intricate topology of his imagination were dismantled.

One aspect of the move that cheered was the opportunity to review his artistic journey, at least in the part that had been preserved by active collection and hoarding.  Works from grade school are stacked with projects from college.  High school art meets art school work.  This fortuitous juxtaposition demonstrates his artistic voice as a continuum.

Cameron’s imagination has never been limited by constants.  His artistic eye has always played with shape and pattern as his creativity explored different materials and structures.  I see the same experimentation in his earliest pieces – all colors and textures, exploring the contrast of shape and hue - that I think are the hallmark of his more recent work.  I can find it also in compiled art compilations like a coat hanger “Don Quixote” or masks made from soda cans (a lot of strange liquids were consumed for that project).

The accidental retrospective was most compelling in seeing his current show.  As always, Cameron uses a broad variety of techniques and media, from prints to collage to painting.  In each set and each individual piece is tension – between colors, between shapes, between positive and negative spaces, between the outwardly stated and the implied.  Even recognizable shapes – faces, hands, a car – are given new roles in the narrative through challenging placement within a work, within a series, within the whole show.  The current art seems to be the logical extension of his elementary school pattern studies – polished and mature but completed with the same playful insouciance.

I am so proud of Cameron’s achievement’s as an artist and a person.  And I feel so blessed for the unique perspective that I have in the viewing of his accomplishments.  No one else at his show besides his mother and I could see his art through the filter of twenty-two years of its creation.  This may be the truest joy of parenthood.

I returned to the old house and careful packed all of the artwork.  The traces of an evolution need to be preserved.

The Moth Cinema

April is National Poetry Month. 

I have dabbled in poetry hardly at all since high school.  Why is it that all children are poets by nature?  In school, prosodic lines flow out like seeds from a dandelion.  Kids who cannot begin to fashion a paragraph can express themselves in reams of vivid verse.  It is not all good poetry, for sure, but it is all personal and genuine.  Where does that go?

Last fall, my son, a Miller Arts Scholar at University of Virginia, was involved in the installation of a Moth Cinema on the Arts Grounds.  The cinema, designed by famed eco-artist Natalie Jeremijenko, consists of a screen stretched across a garden filled with moth-friendly plants and bathed in gentle backlight.  The moths cavort in their playground as their shadows perform their intricate puppet plays.  I attended the groundbreaking for the installation and the artist described the cinema as a continuous love story.  Strangely compelling experimental music was being played at the site and I could imagine the balletic flitting of the elegant insects, spurred by whatever mysterious urges pass through their sightless and soundless existence – to fly, to mate, to lay, to die – a perfect circle of narrative.

The artist asked for student and faculty members of the Arts Council, the sponsoring organization, to contribute a thought or a story about moths.  The stories ranged from reminiscence to romance, all touched by a lyrical quality that anticipated the installation in its full effect.  She did not ask for audience contribution, but my mind searched for some expression of the ethereal novelty that the as yet unborn moths would provide.  It insisted on a poem.  The accompanying piece emerged fully formed, ready to flick its gossamer wings into flight:

Maybe poetry is part of a child’s nature because all the world is new to them.  Like fledgling moths, they flit through their world, sampling the untasted nectar, feeling the vibrations of the undreamed music that surrounds them.  Poetry is the most honest reflection of their developing emotions.  As adults, when we have heard it all and done it all, we close ourselves in the cocoon of prose – solid, comfortable, risk-free prose – and burst out into the light only on those wonderful rare occasions when our hearts chance on the novel, the wondrous, the ethereal.  Then it is our dance of delight which can be reflected in shadows on the screen.

Everything That You Absolutely Have To Know (About Hyperbole)

There are thousands of figures of speech.  Almost everything that a person may say has a term to describe it, often of Greek derivation and known only to a handful of grammarians and rhetoricians, as well as high school students during their once in a lifetime pilgrimage to the shrine of proper English.  It is in turns impressive and insufferable to not only know terms like “anaphora” or “litotes” but also to be able to give clever little examples of their use, but it will not generate a lot of free beer at the local bar.

One figure is universal to all languages and to the human condition.  Hyperbole, the classic overstatement of exaggeration, can be found from our first declarations (“You never buy me candy!”) to our final breaths (“The rest is silence!”).  I think it is a very human response to pretend to expand our own importance in a world over which we have shockingly little control.

For most of us, our first awareness of the word, “hyperbole” comes in grammar class in the ninth or tenth grade.  The word sneaks in with all the other Greek mouthfuls that our instructors try in vain to teach us, but I think it lasts with many of us for two reasons.  First, it is the easiest to remember – a word that sounds well to describe something we all understand, making it almost unique among grammatical terms.  The second reason is that around the same time we learn the English class version, we are also taught a Mathematical variant.  Out of the morass of arcane geometric terms comes the “hyperbola” – a sort of crowning version of the boring arc of a parabola.  In fact both words are from the same Greek root, leading to even more confusion with the adjective “hyperbolic.”   For once we need to remember what class we are sitting in.

All crises pass.  Few of us have need for either of these words in our daily parlance.  We may see hyperbolae (the math variety) all around us but the only part of us that remembers what they

are called is the cringing shadow of our prepubescent memories.  We, as humans, exaggerate in a constant stream, but we only recall the Greek name for our bold expostulations if we are editing or trying to win a bet.

Which is a shame, really, because names do have power.  The act of identifying a statement as a figure of speech allows us to master it.  Not all paper tissues are Kleenex and realizing that we have experienced synecdoche reminds us that variety is the spice of life.  People who answer their own questions (“Where have all the flowers gone?  Young girls have picked them, every one.”) are not be shunned as crazy or arrogant, but recognized as devotees of hypophora.

No matter how bold or brazen the exaggeration, by exposing the hyperbole we can shrink the statement down to a manageable size.

I remember the first North Carolina State Fair that my son (then seven) and I attended.  The very concept of a State Fair is hyperbolic in its implication that the entire state is involved, but we’ll leave that point aside.  The midway is a sea of exaggeration, full of improbable and impossible promises – wonders of the world and never-before-seen treasures magically transported there just for our benefit.

We poised before the ticket booth below a sign boasting the World’s Smallest Horse.  My son read the words and looked up at me.  “Dad,” he asked, “how do they know?”

Hyperbole tamed.

A Small Tragedy

Spring has seized the region and everywhere animals play out their old, old urges.  High in the sky, two hawks cavort around each other delighting in the sweep of the warm breezes as well as each other’s company.  More earthbound, a lush red squirrel gives her would-be lover a breathless chase.  She sidles up trees, dashing limb to limb, ever staying one branch ahead of his lusty attentions.

By my window, three small sparrows swoop and fetch.  It takes a moment to decipher but as the game plays on two males boldly wrestle and bristle, squawking ferocious challenges to each other while a tiny female looks on with jaded eyes.  After posing and strutting, puffing and fidgeting the two take chase again.  One of the males takes a momentary lead, rapidly overtaken by the other.  To their fierce competition, the small gray she is now a fleeting blur that sails just ahead of their wingspan.  Just before reaching her, the males stop and replay their elaborate choreography.  It is not enough to catch her.  They must win her small rapid heart as well.

Stop and chase, stop and chase – the game swoops high into the trees and low to skim the lowest brushes.  Each pass sweeps a widening circle through the yard.

Perhaps she has chosen.  Perhaps the song of one or the head tilt of the other has melted the cruel coyness of her spirit.  Perhaps the males are wearying of the chase, wondering if the small she is worth the effort.  The threesome assays one last broad pass to skim the flagstones on the deck.

A jarring thud.  A small forlorn squawk.  The tiny female lies broken at the base of my broad window.

The two pursuers land at her body.  Each male gives a pallid shadow of his courting display.  Each male tilts a befuddled head at the responding stillness.  With a wistful chirp, each male flies off into an opposite sky.

Back On The Chain Gang

Once, during a summer when I was immersed in intensive organic chemistry, I found myself alone and lonely.  In an effort to connect back with life, I played my then favorite song, The Pretenders’ Back on the Chain Gang, on the stereo I was boarding for my roommate.  As the song would end, I would replace stylus to vinyl and listen again.  After the sixth play, with behavior bordering on obsessive, I reluctantly switched over to the FM band.  In one of the odd serendipities that play in my life, the tune sang out from the airwaves for a seventh time giving me a sense of inevitability, solace and finality.

“Music hath charms” but the magical charms are bittersweet.  On that long-past summer afternoon the instant of sheer satisfaction in my favorite phrase (“Those were the happiest days of my life”) gave my heart each time a warming thrill.  But each instant also left it yearning.  I could anticipate the moment, I could revel in it as it occurred, but I could never hold it.  Music is forever touched by a reflection of an emotion.

With the possible exception of sculpture, where you can physically grasp the object of beauty, most art is enhanced by redolent echoes, the nostalgia for the sensation which you have encountered.  With painting or printmaking, you can stare and dream as long as you wish, but you can never reach in and immerse in the beauty.  In dance or in theater, or the spoken word of poetry, the moment strikes you and then passes.

Writing may be the most permanent of arts.  The word is always on the page and the page can always be in your hand.  In my favorite works, there is always a moment where I pause and savor before moving forward in the story.  In some, I will return to a passage or a chapter even after I have finished the book for the first or fiftieth time.  I will read and relive the moment, attempting both to hold onto and be held by the stirring sensation of completeness.

Perhaps after the seventh time, I will have achieved my goal.

On the Tomb of Mary of Burgundy, Bruges, Belgium.

Not all stories are told in words.  A work of art can have enormous impact where language is simply too limited.

Traveling in the city of Bruges in Belgium a few years ago, I chanced upon the tomb of Mary of Burgund with its marvelous effigy sculpted upon her death in 1482.  I was swept away by its peaceful beauty and the tale of human emotion that it imparted.  For the length of my stay, the tomb became a place of pilgrimage.  My visits to her moved me daily and, when I finally had to tear myself from her side, the memory became a steadfast source of calm and comfort.  These are the words I wrote on my return home:

“Her golden effigy lies in comfort on marble brocaded cushions.  Carvings of filigreed silk cover her body in sumptuous imitation of her living gowns, caught eternally in restful poise on her sepulchral bedding.  Her eyes speak of holy faith, but also of human spirit, lively and playful.  Her blossom mouth, small but elegant is pursed in a wry smile as if the new mysteries were just a continuous part of the rich humor of her life.  The small soft chin, no Hapsburg jut for her, points upward with indomitable courage.

Mary’s hands are clasped in prayer.  Unlike those of her father, Charles the Bold, on the tomb next to her which tilt toward his head in supplicant prayer, her hands reach straight upward as if she is about to open her arms in encompassing embrace.

At her feet, two small dogs lie obediently.  The hounds turn their heads up towards their mistress with cunning smiling faces, lapdogs well-used to play and cuddle looking for a game or a loving chuff of their heads.

What love inspired this wonderful monument!  The effigy is brilliantly crafted from death mask by artisans who worshipped her alive.  Surely their work was guided by the grieved father who sought to capture an eternal memory of her dear form.  Although she may have been insignificant by historical record, her tomb lies centrally in a majestic chapel of an important church in her father’s capital.  The father enshrined her at the very heart of the magnificent edifice, leaving only room for himself to pass the eternity of days next to his beloved daughter.  Mary's hands are worn and polished - grabbed by pilgrims and supplicants seeking her graceful intervention for their prayers.  More moving still, her right cheek has a burnished patch as well.  Imagine her father praying each day by her side and then touching the beloved face as he did in life, until the monument bore the permanent imprint of his love."