Writing from the Core – Setting

Previously, I discussed how theme, hooked on a few vivid metaphors, lies at the core of the novels I write. However, a book that was just a bundle of themes and metaphors would be nothing more than an allegory. Or some form of hideous experimental fiction that has no plot or characters only a series of absurd images.

Tolkien once said, “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.” (His opinion of hideous experimental fiction is not known.) I agree. Allegory sucks. It’s thin, it’s obvious, it’s pretentious, and it’s often preachy. Let’s not go there.

But that means that the bones of one’s themes must be plumped up with some meat, truly heroic thews. In many stories, this place of honor would be held by Character, in another kind of story, it might be held by Plot, but I’m writing Epic Fantasy here, so, like Tolkien, my next layer, almost as foundational as the theme, is the Setting. This is not as far from Character as it might seem, since the setting is itself almost a character.

I began writing The Unfinished Song (then called Rainbow Dancer) twelve years ago. (Egads.) I wrote three chapters, then stopped cold. I couldn’t go any further because although I already had an idea of the heroine and her goal (clumsy girl with no magic longing to be a magic dancer) and the antagonist and his goal (the man in black seeking to kill her), I had no clue where they were. Without knowing where they were, what kind of culture they grew up in, I couldn’t say anything more about their character or their goals.

Those original three chapters were set in a Generic Fantasy World. Dindi was a peasant girl (possibly a Long Lost Heir), in a quasi-European medieval village, and Kavio was a prince. (This sounds funny to me now.) It was a burnt-toast setting: completely overdone.

I put the chapters aside and worked on other things, while I wrestled with how to fix my story. I don’t remember how I hit on the idea to make it Neolithic rather than Medieval. I’ve never seen another fantasy story set in that level of technology, which is why it appealed to me at once. 

At first it was a stripping down process. I removed the plows, the forks, the books, the wagons. No iron, no draft animals, no bronze, no writing, no axles. Then I realized I also had to take away Kavio’s crown, because there were no princes yet, nor kings. I had to remove the doors from the doorways because there were no hinges! Some things were on the border: Horses? (Yes, but no reins or stirrups.) Wheels? (Yes, but not for vehicles.) Agriculture? (Yes, but not everywhere.) Cats? (Yes, just because I like them.) Would the germ of my story bloom in this soil? Yes–better than ever. It fit perfectly with the mode of magic (dancing) that I had chosen.

So next I began building the world, up from the bones of the theme. I wanted a raw, primordial faerie world, an amalgamation of many world cultures, as if the birthplace of all our own fairytales long before they were written down and given medieval settings. I began to pore over anthropologists’ reports and ancient histories, archeological digs and missionaries’ letters. I looked for customs to steal and technologies to describe. It has to be admitted that I love this part. I love world-building, I love research. 

Sometimes I simply read and read, just for inspiration, an oddbit here, a detail there, a sound, a smell, a taste, a joke, something which toggled my own imagination, something I could insert into a page or paragraph. Hakurl and mariahs and menhirs. But sometimes I went into my research with specific questions in mind. For instance, I knew I wanted to describe, from an eye-witness, the rise of the Bone Whistler. This meant I had to know, how does a tyrant take power? How does a whole society go mad? We are more used to the modern examples: Hitler, Stalin, Cambodia, Rwanda. But those involve modern tools, such as mass media propaganda, blitzkrieg and gulag. How would the tyrant seize power when he has nothing but the magic of his own lies? Or is it purely modern for a whole society to go mad all at once, to nearly tear itself apart in a cannibalistic frenzy of hate? I suspected not. I found some interesting, heartbreaking examples, and used those as my model. (The result is Tomorrow We Dance, which will be worked in as one of the side-stories in Book 10 or 11.)

When world-building works, it lifts a story out of dreary allegory into (imagined) history–which, ironically, is a much richer field of allegory than mere Allegory Itself. World-building is the source of all the delicious tastes and putrid stenches that fill the page with tactile details. It is also the prerequisite for knowing characters inside and out, so it’s no surprise that Characters will be the subject of my next essay.