How do you "write what you know" in SF/F?

When I wrote last week about "write what you know," I got one very interesting comment that made me want to write about the topic again. Conor said, "I sometimes find it difficult to call upon personal experiences when writing science fiction, especially scenarios that are somewhat out of my element."

Yes, indeed. I think that this question might apply in some ways to both fantasy and science fictional scenarios. After all, you're dealing with a completely foreign environment in which all kinds of things are different and unexpected. How the heck do you write "what you know" then?

Well, one answer is that you can always learn things through research in the scientific or folkloric arenas required by the fantastical setting of the story. That is a pretty straightforward answer, and always worth pursuing. Indeed, I recently read an article that suggests we keep things as "real" as possible in science fiction and fantasy worldbuilding. It's an excellent point.

A more fundamental answer, though, would be that many "things you know" are hidden just underneath all the foreignness. When I read a story, the thing that strikes me most strongly is usually not the trappings of the environment, but the nature of the human experience that I'm sharing. That "human experience" is something I know. Even my aliens have human-like experience and psychology, and emotional states and reactions that resonate as familiar. Otherwise I'm not convinced anyone would want to read stories about them!

Here are a few examples of "things I know" that I have put into stories just by adding an alien twist:

• I know what it is like to speak a language and not have a native speaker recognize me as a legitimate speaker. I put David Linden in precisely this situation in "Let the Word Take Me."
• I know what it is like to be treated unfairly, like a second-class citizen, and not have any reasonable recourse. I put Rulii in this situation in "Cold Words."
• I know what it is like to have a superior not understand the worth of my contribution to a project. I put Lynn Gable in this situation in "At Cross Purposes."
• I have personally witnessed the in-between culture that can form between foreign visitors to a country and natives of that country - a context in which actual cultural engagement is not welcome. I am putting Adrian Preston in that situation in my story-in-progress called "The Liars."

When you're working in science fiction or fantasy, you can take elements of human experience and turn them into themes that you can then push much further than you might be able to in real life. That is one of the incredible strengths of the genre - it both extrapolates from real life and causes readers to reflect back on it. I believe that "what we know" lies at the core of what makes such stories successful.

It's something to think about.

The expansion of global information, wars, and the "decline" of epic fantasy

Over the last few days I've been watching the discussion of modern fantasy which began with Leo Grin's dramatic decrying of the state of the genre these days, continued with a response by Joe Abercrombie (whose work Grin roundly criticized in his article), and many comments from others (summarized here at Black Gate).

To summarize quite briefly, the idea put forward by Grin was that Tolkien (Lord of the Rings) and Howard (Conan the Barbarian) wrote works of genius that upheld a sort of superior morality, and that modern fantasists who subvert visions of good versus evil and clear-cut morality are a sign of the decline of modern Western civilization.

"Post-modern deconstructionism," a concept that came up in this discussion, is not an unfamiliar term to me. As someone who has spent time immersed in academic discussions of the history of Anthropology, Discourse (a la James Gee), Cultural Capital (Bourdieu), and how to define Literacy, I feel rather as though I've witnessed the fighting on the front lines of this discussion. The arguments on both sides of this sound very familiar to me, but filtered through the lens of fantasy fiction.

I was most intrigued, I think, by the following quote from the response of Philip Athans:
If fantasy has evolved to take on a darker tone, matured to address adult themes, isn’t that more likely a response to the world around us now—that the myths of the early 21st century will be different in some way from the myths of the mid-20th century—than that there’s some kind of conspiracy to pervert a genre that apparently not only peaked but effectively stopped with Tolkien and Howard?

The force at work here, as I see it, is the general change in what we call "Western" culture, much of it driven by the expansion of information transfer on a global scale. Tolkien and Howard did their work in the 1930s and 1940s, subsequently to the first world war and during the second. This was a world culturally very different from our own - one where feminism was just beginning, and one which had yet to feel the influence of cultural relativism. Several of the commenters in the debate have mentioned that they don't feel Tolkien and Howard's work are quite as pure as they have been portrayed, and I feel this also. Certainly I recognize the mournfulness of The Lord of the Rings (which is brilliant, but I could never really enjoy until I was an adult). I have read articles arguing that The Lord of the Rings was some kind of allegory of the world wars, and counterarguments to that position. My sense is that even if Tolkien was not deliberately referencing historical events, those events had an enormous influence on the cultural ambiance of the time, and that can be seen in his work.

As culture has changed, so have wars. World War I was "The Great War"; in a sense, World War II was the last "great war." In both of those conflicts, there was a sense of good and evil - a kind of clarity which had changed drastically if not entirely disappeared by the time of the Vietnam war. For better or worse, wars have changed. Perhaps it's because the motivations behind our entry into conflict are more widely debated and better understood by the general populace (something I relate at least in part to the expansion of global information). In any case, the earlier wars referenced a very clean and clear-cut morality, while more modern ones are commonly questioned, and their morality seldom is reducible to good-versus-evil. I believe this march of history runs parallel to the developments in fantasy fiction.

I don't really see this as a cultural decline - it is a cultural change. More voices are heard these days than in the past, from more people of different cultures. Morality seen from the viewpoint of several involved parties looks a bit different from what it was when we used only one lens. We're starting to hear women's voices, and the voices of those traditionally ignored or considered "other." To me this is a welcome change. I'm sure some feel threatened by it, but on the other hand, I've never felt that cultural capital was something finite. Giving voice to groups who have previously had none doesn't mean we don't hear the voices we always have. It just means that those voices will ring differently.

Fantasy reflects history, and it reflects reality. Neither heroes nor anti-heroes are new. Hercules himself was a hero who happened to cause terrible collateral damage. I happen to be someone who welcomes the idea of questioning cultural assumptions, and though I've read books where the attempted "realism" in terms of bodily injury etc. is too much for me, I'm glad those books are out there.

Books open our minds and make us think; their compass helps us better understand our own.

Reflections on "100 mostly small but expressive interjections"

I found this link today, to a list of tiny expressive interjections. I think this list is lovely, long, and quite comprehensive. I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

One thing I notice, however, is how many of these expressions are 1. relatively new (weren't around when I was a kid) and 2. highly culture-specific. For example, when I see or hear the expression "Boo-ya," I don't think of success in any general way; I think of a sports commentator cheering over a score in NBA basketball.

The result of this is that the utility of these expressions can be highly dependent upon context. A list of expressions such as these, but that would also be usable in fantasy or science fiction settings, would be much shorter.

Fantasy settings require the most commonly used, most generic and non-context-specific of expressions (and also of words in general). In fact, this is one of the reasons why a sense of generic setting is such a pitfall for fantasy writers.

Science fiction settings can use slang expressions, but if they fail to take into account language change over time, they end up feeling anachronistically dated. It appears, indeed, that science fiction settings commonly have slang, and usually that slang is specially designed for the setting in question - shortenings of all kinds of gadgets, for example. Slang is much less common in fantasy contexts, at least in my experience.

Worldbuilding is not just Fantasy: the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

In the last two weeks since I started my worldbuilding workshop (Submit here!), I've run into a number of comments about worldbuilding on the forums where I've announced it. One of those comments is that genre people should head over here and check out the workshop. Of course, I do actively encourage this! But the flip side of a comment like that is that if you're not writing science fiction and fantasy, you must not be doing worldbuilding, so you might as well give it a miss.

I couldn't disagree more.

Every story builds a world. The only difference is that a mainstream world has many more known or expected elements. So, if you're building a fantasy or science fictional world, each word that contributes to worldbuilding will be expanding or refining the reader's sense of what that created world is like. The reader can't reasonably assume that all rules of our own world will apply, and will continue to have a sense of the fantasy world expanding. By contrast, it doesn't take more than a few words to establish that we're in a mainstream world. Each word that contributes to the world thereafter comes with a lot more automatic baggage. Thus, our focus in mainstream shifts quickly away from "what world are we in?" and starts to focus more on the specifics of the location and time period, and on the particulars of the milieu we're exploring.

To demonstrate the importance of worldbuilding in mainstream fiction, I've decided to do a little worldbuilding analysis - in roughly the same style as my workshop - on a book which immediately impressed me as having fantastic worldbuilding: Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Think about it. The title alone doesn't tell you what world we're in - I could easily imagine a science fiction or fantasy book with the same title. Imagine if you found this book and had read no clues as to when and where it takes place. How much could you learn about the world of the book in the first 500 words?

In fact, you could be certain it occurs in our own world within the first three words - "A Friday in November" - since these time measurements are restricted to our own world. But it doesn't end there. This book may have been written by a Swede, but it wouldn't necessarily be set in Sweden. So what I've done below is taken the first (roughly) 500 words of the book and blue-highlighted the words that I feel contribute to an ongoing sense of world, time period, specific location, and social context. Some of them provide new information to refine our sense of location. Others simply confirm and reconfirm what has already been established, but are words that might be used differently for worldbuilding in a genre work. Either way, they are everywhere. Take a look:

***

A Friday in November

It happened every year, was almost a ritual. And this was his eighty-second birthday. When, as usual, the flower was delivered, he took off the wrapping paper and then picked up the telephone to call Detective Superintendent Morell who, when he retired, had moved to Lake Siljan in Dalarna. They were not only the same age, they had been born on the same day – which was something of an irony under the circumstances. The old policeman was sitting with his coffee, waiting, expecting the call.

"It arrived."

"What is it this year?"

"I don't know what kind it is. I'll have to get someone to tell me what it is. It's white."

"No letter, I suppose."

"Just the flower. The frame is the same kind as last year. One of those do-it-yourself ones."

"Postmark?"

"Stockholm."

"Handwriting?"

"Same as always, all in capitals. Upright, neat lettering."

With that, the subject was exhausted, and not another word was exchanged for almost a minute. The retired policeman leaned back in his kitchen chair and drew on his pipe. He knew he was no longer expected to come up with a pithy commentary or any sharp question which would shed new light on the case. Those days had long passed, and the exchange between the two men seemed like a ritual attaching to a mystery which no-one else in the whole world had the least interest in unravelling.

The Latin name was Leptospermum (Myrtaceae) rubinette. It was a plant about four inches high with small heather-like foliage and a white flower with five petals about one inch across.

The plant was native to the Australian bush and uplands, where it was to be found among tussocks of grass. There it was called Desert Snow. Someone at the botanical gardens in Uppsala would later confirm that it was a plant seldom cultivated in Sweden. The botanist wrote in her report that it was related to the tea tree and that it was sometimes confused with its more common cousin Leptospermum scoparium, which grew in abundance in New Zealand. What distinguished them, she pointed out, was that rubinette had a small number of microscopic pink dots at the tips of the petals, giving the flower a faint pinkish tinge.

Rubinette was altogether an unpretentious flower. It had no known medicinal properties, and it could not induce hallucinatory experiences. It was neither edible, nor had a use in the manufacture of plant dyes. On the other hand, the aboriginal people of Australia regarded as sacred the region and the flora around Ayers rock.

The botanist said that she herself had never seen one before, but after consulting her colleagues she was to report that attempts had been made to introduce the plant at a nursery in Göteborg, and that it might, of course, be cultivated by amateur botanists. It was difficult to grow in Sweden because it thrived in a dry climate had to remain indoors half the year.

***

If I were to comment about the process of world entry for me, it would look something like this:

1. I figure out that we're in the real world by word #2.
2. I figure out that we're in a region of the world where birthdays are celebrated by word #18.
3. I figure out that we're in an era following the invention of the telephone by word #37.
4. Word #51 is our first direct hint that we're in Sweden; for someone unfamiliar with the place, like me, it serves to show that we're not in a place I'm familiar with.
5. The certainty that we're in Sweden arrives for me with word #139, "Stockholm," and word 313, "Sweden."

Other blue-marked words confirm these deductions and start pointing me toward the genre of the book (thriller), as well as the nature of the narrator (detail-oriented observer and examiner of evidence).

This book would not function as it does without these words. Our own writing must reflect the world we've chosen - real world or created world - in details, continually, or it will start to feel vague and disconnected.

Call it worldbuilding or what you like; it's not solely a genre issue.

How will they pronounce it?

You can never really know.

You craft your world with care. You name your characters and locations, and usually you hear the sounds of the words in your head. Maybe you become highly attached to a name, as a particular character grows into it. You've given it a careful spelling, of course, to represent as closely as possible that perfect name that resonates in your head.

Then, say it gets published. Someone walks up to tell you how much they liked the character, and they get it wrong. Badly wrong, so wrong you can hardly recognize what they say.

I suggest that you appreciate the person greatly. After all, they went to the trouble of reading your story, telling you how great you are, and liking your character so much.

You don't have to imitate their pronunciation of the name, necessarily, but don't try to correct them. It's not their fault. English spelling wasn't designed to indicate spelling unequivocally, and fantasy names often use European or other foreign sound systems anyway.

Blame it on the limitations of orthography, not on the person. We don't write in IPA - and if we did, nobody could read it.

I won't blame you if it gives your gut a twinge to hear a name pronounced differently. When I wrote my first novel (still in revisions, because I've learned a lot since then), I created a character and named her Catin. Can you guess how I pronounced it? Well, I got together with friends and discovered they were rhyming the name with the word "satin." I went "aigh!" I asked them for help. I said, "How the heck can I spell this so it will sound like....?" We tried. Since then it's been spelled Catín - but fortunately I've also adopted a new attitude of curiosity rather than prescriptivism.

I'll be looking forward to hearing what you think it sounds like.

A new market for novellas

I'm happy to announce that new market for science fiction and fantasy novellas has just opened up, thanks to my friend Dario Ciriello.

Panverse Publishing will be looking for pro-level stories of fantasy and science fiction between 15,000 and 40,000 words. Those of you familiar with the markets will probably remark on the fact that there are very few novella markets out there, so if you've been looking for one, here it is. They are currently accepting submissions for a Winter 2009 issue and will pay $60 per story. Details can be found at their website, and their page about submissions is here.

Good luck to all you novella writers!

Classic science fiction and the Nebula Awards

I bought three books of classic science fiction today. This was inspired in part by the Nebulas.

When I was in Los Angeles last weekend, I was deeply impressed by the sense of community in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. There was a beautiful song by Janis Ian that mentioned in its lyrics at least ten different titles of famous science fiction stories. There was the gratitude for science fiction as an early life-changing experience expressed (humorously) by Chuck Lorre, who gave the keynote speech. Most interesting in this regard was a speech given by Grandmaster title awardee Harry Harrison. He spent several minutes reminiscing about a trip to South America he took with a large number of science fiction writers - who was there, what they did, even how one of them nearly drowned in the surf. He mentioned many, many famous names. Some people there may have felt that the speech was too long, or that he was name-dropping, but I could have listened to him a lot longer. To me, what he was doing was creating a world for us - a world he wanted to show us so it wouldn't be lost, and one where we now were coming to belong. In a way, everyone there was contributing to the same vision: a vision of science fiction and fantasy not so much as a field, but as a community that maintained its continuity over generations. I found this very touching, especially since I felt I was being welcomed into the group as someone who could help carry this wonderful tradition forward.

I'm looking forward to the arrival of my books. I want to get a taste of what these early writers accomplished, and I think it will help me understand both the SFWA community and writing itself.

Schoolhouse Rock: Pronouns

Last week I got the DVD compilation of Schoolhouse Rock from Netflix. This dates me, but I remember really well watching TV as a kid and hoping and hoping that one of those songs would come on, all the while never quite being able to track when they would appear. So having the DVD at home has exposed me to some songs I was familiar with, and also some that I've never heard before. Blast from the past for me, and my kids love it. Niall is constantly coming out with snippets of songs and information now. It's great fun.

My favorite song of the moment is the pronoun song. For those who may remember, it's entitled "Rufus Xavier Sarsparilla" and the most memorable line in it for me is "'cause saying all those nouns over and over can really wear you down."

Needless to say, that got me thinking. In fantasy and science fiction there are a lot of tough names and concepts, and sometimes when I read I feel people are overusing nouns when I would prefer a pronoun. The trick of course is to have the pronoun link back properly to the noun so the reader can track it. ("It"=a pronoun linked back to "the pronoun" :) ) My son is working on tracking pronouns in his reading right now.

I would encourage people to look through their prose and track their hierarchy of reference. This just means how you refer to something when you introduce it the first time, refer back to it the second time, then the third time, etc. The most flexible element in this hierarchy is the straight pronoun, i.e. he/him/her/it etc. but there are also phrases using demonstrative pronouns like "this man" and "that alien" and of course there are definite noun phrases like "the alien" etc. Generally the complexity of the phrase undergoes a successive decline across the number of references, except when there is a possible confusion and you need to reestablish the reference in contrast to that.

This isn't the only thing that pronouns make me think of.

Since I have a language design workshop coming up in February, I'm going to start doing a few language design topics to get people thinking, and pronouns are wonderful things to play with. The English pronoun system says a lot about our concepts of individuality, gender, and relative position, for example. Compare our use of the word "I" with the Japanese pronouns for "I": we've got one pronoun and we use it all the time, while Japanese has more than six different ways of saying "I" but much of the time people don't use any of them at all. They just drop the subject of the verb completely and leave the listener to infer the information. The pronouns themselves vary depending on whether the speaker is a male or a female and how formal the situation is - demonstrating the importance of gender and formality in Japanese society.

So what do you do with pronouns if you've got a language of your own? Well, think about the social structure of the place and try to determine what identity parameters are important. Do your people think of themselves as individuals? Do they divide themselves primarily by gender, by some other criterion, or both? Do they consider the formality of the situation to be relevant in how they refer to themselves or others? Or are there other factors involved? For example, would they refer to themselves in one way in the presence of a member of an oppressor race, but in another when alone with their own kind?

The tiny little pronoun can do an enormous job in showing (not telling!) how the social structure of your world works.

Pain

Last Thursday evening I took my husband to the emergency room at 2:30 in the morning because he was experiencing intense pain in his left arm. The interesting thing about pain is, although it's adaptively very important because it lets you know that something is wrong, it doesn't always let you know what is wrong, because internal pain is hard to pinpoint and describe. My husband strained a muscle; but for all I knew at the time, he could have been having a heart attack.

It's made me think about describing pain. I remember seeing a TV show once where the host was taking typical descriptions of pain - in particular, I remember "stabbing pain" being featured - and trying to debunk them. Or at least, that's what it seemed like he was trying to do. The show talked about the phrase "stabbing pain" and then went and talked to people who had actually been stabbed to ask if it hurt and what it felt like; then it pointed out that this didn't match the idea of "stabbing pain" at all.

I took issue with their conclusion. "Stabbing pain" doesn't have to mean "pain like that of a stabbing"; it describes the way that the pain is experienced, the way that it seems to move quickly and sharply through the body. Then of course we have "thudding," "throbbing," "pinching," "stinging," "aching," etc. etc. I honestly don't think they all have to follow the same type of derivation. Pinching probably is "pain like that of being pinched." Lots of different experiences of pain lead to lots of different types of description.

This of course makes me think of aliens and fantasy peoples. How would aliens experience pain, and where in their unusual bodies? How would fantasy peoples describe their pain? Even if they felt it the same way we do, their alternate histories and backgrounds could lead them to describe pain with completely different metaphors. A description of pain could show a reader a lot about how a group of people conceptualize the internal organs of the body, and where health comes from.

Short entry today because I've been stressing out, for obvious reasons. My man's feeling better, so that's good, but he's still got his arm in a sling. And I'm starting to feel pain in my head... I wonder how I could describe it...

Pick your species/Pick your tech?

This is such a common thing that I don't think I really have to point it out to anyone, but here it is, a phenomenon common to both science fiction and fantasy to varying degrees:

People pick established species on which to base their alien races, and established time periods on which to base their technology.

There are a lot of great reasons to do this. One excellent reason is an idea I talked about earlier, that of the conceptual "set." If you pick a preexisting set of characteristics for an alien and its technology, one that people are familiar with, then readers will not have to work as hard and they can use their instinctive expectations to guide them in understanding the story. A related reason is that the alien and its behavior will seem more "natural" if you match behavior to species and physiology and extrapolate it into the realm of culture.

On the other hand, as a writer you don't have to feel bound by these constraints. Not necessarily.

Sure, if you're pulling features of physiology, behavior, culture and technology from all over the place, it'll feel like a hodgepodge and not make any sense. That's not what I'm suggesting. I'm just saying that there are novel combinations of elements that can be used with internal consistency.

How do you go looking for a new way? I'd suggest starting with the understanding that physical setting influences physiology, and also influences culture, which also influences technology. As long as it's all connected, you can play around. Changing one aspect of physical setting will create ripples throughout the system. Changing an aspect of technology can be linked back to cultural preferences.

Let the elements of the world grow together organically and they can change each other. Let there be a reason for every departure from the set, and you may find your readers will trust you all the way.

"Show, Don't Tell" - Exposed!

I've been warning you this was coming... The whole idea of "show, don't tell" was something that had been bothering me for a while, as many of you probably saw on the forums. Well, after asking the question and hearing all kinds of interesting answers, I thought I'd just put this all into one super-mega-post. You all contributed. Take your time - I think it should be worth it.

Show Don't Tell, Exposed

"Show, Don't Tell" is clearly a phrase that a lot of people have heard, and I'd guess most of those have done some work on trying to apply it usefully to their own writing. This is not always easy, however, and (like me) not everybody considers the phrase helpful, because it takes a lot of complex, rend-my-paragraphs information and extrapolates it into a beautifully phrased general principle.

This may be harder to apply to one's writing.

Greg Ellis of the Analog forum wrote,
I can hear Yoda in the back of my mind right now.
Try? Try? Do, or do not.
There is no try.

And then there was Josh, from Backspace:
It's like telling someone how to ride a bike: a person needs to try to do it if they want to learn.

So it's a beautiful principle that I need to figure out by doing it rather than hearing about it?
How do I know if I'm doing this right? Okay, let's try the ultimate source of knowledge and wisdom...

WIKIPEDIA
(excerpted)

"Show, don't tell" is an admonition to fiction writers to write in a manner that allows the reader to experience the story through a character's action, words, thoughts, senses, and feelings rather than through the narrator's exposition, summarization, and description.
...
Janet Evanovich: ". . . instead of stating a situation flat out, you want to let the reader discover what you're trying to say by watching a character in action and by listening to his dialogue. Showing brings your characters to life." [1]
...
Orson Scott Card: ...objective is to get the right balance of telling versus showing, action versus summarization. Either could be right; either could be wrong. Factors like rhythm, pace, and tone come into play. [4]

Showing can be done by:

* writing scenes
* describing the actions of the characters
* revealing character through dialogue
* using the five senses when possible

James Scott Bell: "Showing is essentially about making scenes vivid. If you try to do it constantly, the parts that are supposed to stand out won't, and your readers will get exhausted."[7].

The experts have spoken, and they've said first, that telling is basically giving narrative summary, and second, that showing is dramatizing a scene with action, dialog, and sensory information. They have also said that you can't show all the time, that you have to know when to do it and when not to do it.

Clearly, "Show, Don't Tell" is to be taken with several grains of salt, and applied when it's needed, and not when it's not. Here's what I heard about it on the forums:

RALovett of Analog Forum wrote:
I just read a mainstream novel in which the author rigorously showed everything, and the result was a whole book in which precious little of import actually happened.

damiengwalter of Asimov's forum wrote:
I've noticed a lot of writers, particularly those who write novels over short stories, refer to 'show don't tell' as using scene and dialogue instead of narrative voice. IMHO that advice is not very helpful. Narrative voice is pretty essential in a good story, and trying to stick to this idea of 'show don't tell' is a mistake.

Okay, now I have a problem. Because obviously I have to "show, don't tell," but at the same time I have to know when to show, and when to tell, and I bet you any money that readers will be able to tell if I haven't figured it out naturally! Before my head explodes, I think I'll take a step back.

One thing to do is to go and read a pile of books, to look at how others have done it. But as you may already have guessed, I've done that two or three or ten times... The good news is, I think at this point I've figured out "show, don't tell" - but what I haven't figured out is why it stays alive, and is used so often - and more importantly, how to give helpful critique about these issues without using a phrase that so often seems meaningless.

So this whole forum exploration was intended to take all the advice I've heard in a different direction. I asked in four different online forums frequented by writers: Analog Forum, Asimov's Forum, Backspace Writers' Forum, and SFF Chronicles forum (links provided at the end!), to see what people had to say about what "show, don't tell" meant to them. [Note: two Backspace writers asked me to take down their quoted comments. Sorry for the error.]

I came up with four (four!) different meanings.
1. Showing is dramatization, and telling is descriptive summary
2. Showing is story action, and telling is backstory or worldbuilding infodump
3. Showing is using a limited or internal point of view, and telling is using an omniscient or
external point of view
4. Showing is making the reader think, and telling is not making the reader think

Now, let's break 'em down, one at a time.


1. SHOWING = DRAMATIZATION vs. TELLING = DESCRIPTIVE SUMMARY

This is the primary opinion of Wikipedia, and a lot of people at the forums agreed.

Sam Wilson of Asimov's forum wrote:
I think showing happens in realtime and telling is a sort of narrative summary. Both are effective in their place. I got some good advice from a pro once: ration author commentary.

Marian of Analog forum wrote:
In my critique group, I usually say that this paragraph could be a scene (or should be a scene) instead of a description.

Okay, so it seems to me that advice is pretty clear. Instead of saying "John got even with Mary," send him into a scene that shows him achieving this comeuppance. Of course, there are potential hazards involved in showing of this nature, because dramatizing a scene requires the author to pin down a lot of factual and setting details about what happens in it.

As Marian of Asimov's forum wrote,
...that's why novices tell instead of showing. If they just say "One night Harry sneaked into George's house and murdered him" they don't run the risk of getting dinged on errors. Of course they do risk getting dinged on being very boring.

Mike Flynn of Analog forum gave an interesting example:
"Father and brother had a terrible row, and many terrible things were said that could not be unsaid, and in the end brother stormed out and I have not seen him since." This is probably more effective than if the author had tried to show the argument in process. What terrible things could he show being said? No matter what, it runs the risk of not being terrible enough to support the consequences.

I guess what that means is that you can go both ways on this piece of advice. Sometimes taking the reader into a scene is going to make for a better experience, but sometimes it isn't. I guess I have to come back later (below!) to figure out when one might be better than the other. For now, let's look at the second meaning for "show don't tell."


2. SHOWING = STORY ACTION vs. TELLING = BACKSTORY/WORLDBUILDING INFODUMPS

Any of us who have been exploring the world of science fiction and fantasy writing are familiar with the concept of the infodump. The author has some really vital information they have to get across about how the world works, or about a principle of physics which will be vital to a final understanding of the story, or about the main character's childhood which establishes the motivation that will carry him or her through the story, etc., etc. So they put it in. Maybe they write a paragraph about it, or worse, an entire page or more, losing track of the main storyline in the process.

Bill Gleason of the Analog forum described it beautifully:
I think with regard to SF, there's a particular kind of "stuff getting conflated" in the show-don't-tell advice, because in SF there is often the need to convey highly technical information. As has been noted elsewhere, this is why so much SF involves scientists as characters, since it is far more plausible when they drift into discussions of esoteric science than when, say, a couple of professional athletes do it. ... So there does seem to be an inherent challenge that is perhaps unique to SF writers in terms of fiction.

Yes, I can easily see how this one has gotten incorporated into "show don't tell." Here's what some other people were saying on the forums:

Zubi-Ondo of SFF Chronicles wrote:
I personally find myself falling into the "tell" mode when I'm still fleshing out some part of the story or action.

Well, all right. But is it really so bad to write down the things that people really need to know about a world? Here's why Tom Ligon of Analog forum says it's all right:

Telling is fine in a first draft. Go ahead and get the ideas down.

I've seen this a lot in my critiquing experience. The writer starts writing down tons and tons of stuff that's really really important to understanding the story - if you're the writer. Sure. Of course the writer has to understand this! But the reader doesn't necessarily need it. So get it down, learn what you need to, and then write the story as it needs to be written, which is a separate job. About "telling" in that context, Tom Ligon says,

"Telling" can be done well. ... The trouble is, it can be awfully dry and uninteresting if you're just laying out facts or some history. If people are involved, why not incorporate the facts into a personal experience?

Maybe in some sense this is a subset of number one, where we talked about dramatizing instead of summarizing. But dramatizing information isn't the best road, and it often turns into a situation where two people are talking and one is "telling" the other what he needs to know.

Greg Ellis of Analog forum wrote:
Conveying information in science fiction is sometimes, I think, critical to science fiction and sometimes there's just no other way to convey it other than in a "telling" manner (in my case it was a very descriptive scene between 2 scientists looking at the pathways involved - one a specialist in photosynthesis and plant biology, the other an experienced biologist in another field, several years away from his photosynthesis classes).

Zubi-Ondo of SFF Chronicles wrote:
One way to get away with "telling" is to have one of the characters explain something in dialogue. Again, if you do too much of that it will become transparent to the reader, and they will catch on.

And here was RALovett of the Analog forum:
There's also a huge amount of borderline in this whole show/tell arena, that most folks dismiss by stating an overly simple rule. Dialog, for example, is often cited as the epitome of "showing." But the words of the dialog themselves can also be the character "telling" something.

Infodumping is definitely something to watch out for, and I've talked about it in other places on the blog, so I'm not going to be offering lengthy suggestions here. I'm sure it will come up again.

On to the next meaning of "show don't tell":


3. SHOWING = USING A LIMITED OR INTERNAL NARRATOR vs. TELLING = USING AN OMNISCIENT OR EXTERNAL NARRATOR

This one really took me by surprise, I'm not sure why. Maybe I should have realized that "show don't tell" would be linked to the literal idea of "telling" a story. Here's how Mike Flynn of Analog forum put it:

When you can get away with telling[:] I think when the narrator is first person you can get away with this more than when the POV is third person. It may be that omniscient can get away with it, too, because the telling is part of the ambiance of the omniscient voice.
Okay, this is intriguing. When the narrator is first person, it's possible that this person can be cast as a person telling a story about past experiences, in which case that person is literally "telling" the story. In third person omniscient, it's similar - you've got a narrator "telling" a story, even though that story is about other people and not him/herself.

Tom Ligon of Analog forum takes the idea further:
American Indian legends are frequently "told". Just reading them can sometimes be a bit dry. But many of you will remember the opening to a SF TV series years ago which uses a tribal storyteller, and I have a print of a painting called "Buffalo Tales" hanging beside my writing desk that illustrates a storyteller and seven kids around a campfire. ... he is no doubt "telling" with great flare and expression, and the kids are digging it (each affected in a unique way). If you must "tell", try to tell it with a bit of flare.

Bill Moonroe of Asimov's forum added,
I suppose that sort of leaves each storyteller to make their mark via delivery; it's the difference between a gifted preacher telling the Christmas story, and, well, my Shakespearean teacher giving the sermon; one would bring tears to a moai's eyes while the other could put a tiger to sleep. But the use of show vs tell can be the difference between a new look, a new use of the power of myth in a new way and an academic's faithful yet lifeless transcription of ethnic folktales.

Surely, though, there's more to this than just oral delivery of the story in question. Storyteller narrators can be effective or ineffective. Why should that be? This question brings me to the last meaning I found for "show don't tell":


4. SHOWING = MAKING THE READER THINK vs. TELLING = NOT MAKING THE READER THINK

Vague from the Analog forum summed up this definition most succinctly, as follows:
If you 'tell' the reader too much you risk setting them at a distance; because you're interpreting things for them they don't need to think about what they're reading, coasting along, attention drifting.

RALovett from the Analog forum took it further, though, with a terrific example from "A River Runs Through It" by Norman Maclean:

The first few pages of that, available by google on the publisher's website are a classic example of how you can indeed get away with "telling" a story. The first paragraph:

"In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman."

Now, I would bet dollars to donuts (not as strong odds today as when I was a kid, admittedly) that a lot of writing groups would flag that as "telling," and advise the writer to show his father talking about the disciples. And I would also be quick to add that this is a book that you either love or can't get into at all. That's because what it's truly about is voice: Maclean's crotchety old-man voice looking back on his Montana childhood. So ultimately, it is showing, not telling, but it's showing the narrator, via the way he tells about Montana, and fishing, and etc.

Really what we're looking at here is a case of "telling" a story - but this kind of "telling" is actually "showing" something else at the same time. So while the reader is engaged in hearing about the narrator's father and his love of fly fishing, he's also learning about who the narrator is and how he thinks - critical information, as I noted above in the section about backstory and infodumping. So in a sense, here's one great way to incorporate backstory - telling a small piece of the backstory that is highly relevant to our understanding of the narratory himself.

Zubi-Ondo of SFF Chronicles wrote:
I consider the rule of show don't tell as part of a bigger rule which is "keep the reader engaged".

And here's one way of doing it: offer the reader more than just the "flat" story being told. Offer the reader a chance to engage in the narrative by constructing information about the narrator while listening to his story.

All of this reminds me of a class I took in college. It was a class about doing qualitative research, and in particular, about the principles behind anthropological field notes. I've heard people who are familiar with large-scale statistical studies say unkind things about anthropologists who go into situations and study them from the inside, but in fact, I found the entire process fascinating - and empirically solid.

The idea behind writing field notes is this. Don't say "there's tension in the room." If you do that, you'll be drawing conclusions from what you see, and writing them down, and people who read your notes will have to choose whether to believe you or not. On the other hand, if you write down what you see, the evidence for the sense of tension in the room (people pacing, wringing hands, sitting awkwardly etc.), then when a reader looks at your notes, that reader will be able to see what you saw and draw conclusions along with you.

I think that is in fact a lot of what's going on in "showing."

Okay, so we've got four different meanings. What can we get out of the whole process, to take forward into our writing in meaningful ways? After all, the rule of "show don't tell" still stands, but it still stands as something we should do sometimes, but not others, or we should do in one way, but not another.

Are we back where we started? No, I don't really think so.

RALovett of the Analog forum wrote:
... the core word to what I'm talking about is "priorities." Otherwise, you'll never get your character out the door.

Forgive me for being a linguistics geek (but it's what I am!) - all this sends me back to H.P. Grice's Cooperative principle, which I discussed in an earlier post. Today I'm going to take it and turn it into:

THE COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE OF STORYTELLING
"Make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged."

This is actually a direct quote from Grice 1975, via Wikipedia. If it seems obvious, then let me explain.

What we've been seeing up here is a situation where "telling" (of types 1 and 2 at least) is summary material that does not engage the reader's attention and effort as much as "showing." Excellent. But if as readers we're constantly required to engage at the same level of effort, then we'll become exhausted (and with some authors, we do!). So in a sense, dramatizing and "showing" is a way of indicating that a particular part of the story is important.

The more words you put on something, the more attention it requires from the reader. So the question then becomes, "is this where I want the reader to be placing their effort?"

If all the people in a room are wearing hoods to show their social status, for example - here I've got two pieces of information. I could "show" one person, then another, wearing hoods or doing things with them, so that the reader can conclude that everyone is wearing them. But why should I do that, when the fact of the hoods is less important to the story than what the hoods mean? This is a place where I would simply tell a reader about the hoods, and spend more time exploring their social status and what it means to them using various types of information including the hoods.

My friend Janice Hardy would probably say, "focus on the story." Identifying exactly what the story is can be tricky - it's that elusive thing that hooks us and draws us through, following characters through settings and situations of all sizes and shapes, because we CARE about them. So in the end the process of writing isn't much easier, because we still have to figure out which parts of what we write are vital to the story, so we know where we want to have people engaging, expending effort and attention.

But I hope this discussion has shed light on the topic of "show don't tell," and given you some useful approaches to the question in your own work, or the books you're reading.


Links:
Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Readers Forum: http://www.analogsf.com/aspnet_forum/
Asimov's Science Fiction, Readers Forum: http://www.asimovs.com/aspnet_forum/
SFF Chronicles forum: http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/
Backspace, the Writers Place (paid registration): http://www.bksp.org/

Diseases, and the lack thereof

People don't tend to get colds a lot in SF/F. Unless you count that story of the man waking up in a future that has eliminated all disease, only to be euthanized when he says he has a cold. (It's been so long since I read it that I can't remember the author. Help me out, anyone?)

Probably colds seldom appear because the turning point of a plot doesn't tend to rest on whether Captain Whoever has the sniffles at the time. Most often in my reading I see plagues - serious ones - like the one in Anne McCaffrey's Moreta where the entire Pernese population comes under threat. Now that's a disease worthy of attention in a story!

This is not a bad thing. I've only read one series where people got colds, and were hurt every time they were hit by a rock or had a bad fall, a serious battle, etc. By the time I was 100 pages in it was so appalling that I was ready to laugh (or put the book down).

On the other hand, I do get concerned when I see people portrayed in abject poverty, having no visible means of health care or benefits of plumbing in their lives of squalor, yet who seem to have no illnesses. Parasites, anyone? Fevers, or malnutrition? And if not, why not?

I've actually spent a good deal of time agonizing over whether the poor in my Varin world should have good teeth. Cosmetic dentistry? Absolutely not. Orthodontia? Another no. But what about cavities and decay? Varin isn't a possible future earth, so tooth decay isn't exactly required. On the other hand, I don't think of Varin as a fantasy world, where it would be somewhat easier to imagine that mouth bacteria don't exist. And if it's science fiction, well... The jury's still out, but my current thought is that their technological level is high enough - the repressive government has probably fluoridated the water. Plausible, yet unobtrusive. With a high enough level of general societal technology, it's not too far out to imagine their medical profession is up to the task of getting that done.

As far as medical technology goes, there is a lot of room for flexibility. For low technology, you can look at the history of medicine in our world and vary it according to your needs. For high technology, you can extrapolate, which is always fun. Personalized medicine based on DNA is something people are already aiming at now, so I like to think it would be possible in the future.

Then there's medical culture. Who is the doctor? Is his or her role spiritual, scientific, both, neither? What of bedside manners? Is the doctor or the patient considered to know more about the nature of the complaint?

The last thing I want to mention is something I've been working with in a recent novel revision: How do you portray a population with weak immune systems, high incidence of mental illness, and high rate of infant mortality if none of your protagonists are currently sick? Yes, of course you can always say, "this population is inbred and has weak immune systems etc., etc." ...

How to describe the feeling I get from an explanation like that? Clunky, I could say. Or I could brandish my "show not tell" sword. But I think the best word for me is "external," or perhaps "distant." The explanation is something the author knows, but people living inside such a society would probably not be inclined to step back and talk about themselves that way (unless they were doctors making reports to the government, or something).

So instead I try to create a culture of health in the group I'm working with. I have them place labels on the sufferers - people "closeted" with deformities or chronic illness, or spoken of in whispers as "weak in the head." I make an increase in birth rate and infant health the stuff of public propaganda announcements. And I lace every slightest sign of ill health with a sense of fear in those who witness it. I have people make defensive statements about illness, always knowing internally that the diseases that cause minor affliction in others would likely kill them.

This actually forms a nice lead into my next topic, "worldbuilding in foreground vs. background." It's essentially "show not tell" - but I'm hoping to make it somewhat easier to think through, and to implement...

Upcoming posts at TTYU: worldbuilding in foreground vs. background; metaphor

Nicknames (shortening names)

Did you ever hear of a character named Ikiolaraldian Var Orkesh mis Anok'rand?

Of course not, because I made him up - but there are plenty of books out there where the character names are so complex I have difficulty pronouncing them, remembering them, etc. One of my friends typically takes any name over a certain length and remembers it by shortening it to the first syllable, just to simplify things.

My friend T.L. Morganfield works with the Aztec world, so she has to name her characters the way the Aztecs used to do it, leading to names like Acatl-tzin, etc. This is a challenge, and I've seen her take two primary approaches to it: using the names as written, when they're shorter, or translating them into their meanings, when they're so long that they become hard to parse.

Some names are not directly translatable. In English this is typically the case with first names. We've got a number of strategies for nicknaming people.

1. adding an "ee" sound to make a diminutive, which actually can make the name longer, like James (1 syllable) to Jamie (2 syllables).

2. shortening a name, like taking down Robert to Rob, or Elizabeth to Liz, Beth, Betty (two strategies there), etc.

Australia has some interesting nicknaming strategies. My favorite is the Barry->Bazza, Harry/Harold->Hazza, Larry -> Lazza pattern, which I'm less sure how to analyze, but I'm thinking it's a type of diminutive or at least an indicator of solidarity with the person in question.

Japanese also has a name-shortening strategy, which takes a name and reduces it to the first two syllables (or single long syllable), then adds a diminutive suffix. So for Mariko it would be Mari-chan, and for Michiko it's Mi'-chan (double consonant to start the chan). For males you could have Haruki becoming Haru-kun, etc.

If you're dealing with naming in a fantasy or science fiction world, you might want to ask yourself whether your population has a tendency to nickname. Depending on how your names are designed, this could be done in different ways - based on the English, Australian, Japanese
or other Earth-language pattern, or based on a pattern that fits the culture in question.

The example I'm thinking of comes from Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness. The Karhidish character who befriends Genly Ai has rather a long name: Therem Harth rem ir Estraven. Fortunately, and fascinatingly, the pieces of the name have meaning, and this influences who calls him what. Therem Harth most closely matches our first and last name pattern, while rem ir Estraven is an indicator of his geographical affiliation , the land from which he comes. At first, when their relationship is entirely diplomatic, Genly Ai calls him Estraven, but after they become close, he invites Genly to call him Harth, i.e. by his last name. Difficulty arises when they attempt to communicate telepathically and discover that Genly can only refer to him as Therem in this form of communication - in part because using the first name indicates intimacy.

What is so awesome about LeGuin's approach is how each name choice means something different, and culturally specific, because of the way she's put the names together in the first place. I should also note that the names of people from Orgoreyn don't work this way, because the language and culture are different.

Naming and nicknaming don't have to be just for fun and convenience. They can also reveal a lot about the world your characters live in.

Upcoming posts at TTYU: health, worldbuilding in foreground vs. background

Education...

Today will be my son's first day of Kindergarten. All around me are moms with five-year olds preparing their kids to go, many having attended preschool, many without. Some have tears gathering in their hearts at losing their little babies, others (like me) are grinning and excited about the new world that's about to open up.

Education is central to our society. It provides us with meaningful transition events of all kinds. Going to kindergarten for the first time, or graduating from high school, or going off to college and adult independence, and everything in between.

It also informs the way in which we expect to communicate. We get trained in this society to sit in groups and listen to another (usually single) person talk. This is not new; this is OLD. I'm imagining Plato sitting down with his pupils in the agora. And before him was Socrates, and before him...?

The content of what we learn has changed a lot. Or maybe not so much in its fundamentals - still trying to prepare young people to enter society in a meaningful way. Just that the society itself is not the same everywhere, all the time. US education values (or tries to value) critical thinking, exploration and innovation. Japanese education does an amazing job of providing literacy (in a very tough literacy system!), and high levels of performance on many tasks. Do they innovate? Sure - they've been growing and changing for thousands of years, even when they had no contact with the outside world. But the model of educational communication is slightly different.

American teachers value creativity, but they do have to value actually grasping the fundamentals of the topic, also. Too much free thinking and you can start dropping basic parameters of physics or mathematics. I'm only kind of kidding.

Japanese teachers come from a slightly different model, in which the expert (say, an artist or musician) didn't have to take students at all, but those who wanted to learn from him (her?) would have to sneak around, pick up what they could from listening or watching around corners until they could prove their dedication, whereupon they might be taken on as students. It's called "stealing the art." Thereafter the ideal is to duplicate exactly, with all skill and artistry, what the teacher does - and then to innovate. The innovation is still there, but subject to a few more stringent prerequisites.

The master/apprentice model is very common in fantasy and science fiction (and Star Wars, whichever side that falls on!). There are also schools of magic (Hogwarts being quite a standout!). It's important to consider how your characters come about the things they know, and if you think about how they consider their knowledge philosophically, that can really deepen your characters. Someone with super-ninja skills isn't going to get them by falling off a log. And I always wondered how the heck Jason Bourne learned all the stuff he knew before he turned into a doddering old man - but maybe it was the, um, intensity of the education he received!

I'll write more about this later, but for now it's time to go and get my kids started on a very big day.

I'm smiling.

Swearing (dash it all!)

This topic came to me thanks to K. Richardson, whom I encountered on the forum at the Critters critique website. Many of you probably know it, but if you don't, and you're seeking critique for works of science fiction, fantasy, or horror, it's a great place to start. The question K. had was how to get her aliens to swear without using swear words from our own world, yet not have the substituted words sound silly.

I would start by asking, "what is swearing for?" Here are some of its purposes in our world:

1. to express emotion in moments of extreme stress or pain
2. to express dissatisfaction (a less extreme version of #1, I think)
3. to give evidence that one is telling the truth ("I swear by the sword of my father, Domingo Montoya")
4. to get attention (over a wide range - everything from making a word stand out to emotionally injuring someone)
5. to express alignment with particular social groups

Here's an example of how a difference in degree on #4 can cause trouble cross-culturally. I come from a cultural group in which the form of swearing I'd call "ugly words" is used to get attention and injure people emotionally. My husband comes from one where the same words are used to draw attention and even give a certain spice of fun to what is said. So when we first met, and before I figured out the difference, I'd be regularly appalled at what was coming out of the mouth of this otherwise entirely nice (and very interesting) guy.

If you're creating an alien society, you can always go with a model that has your aliens using swearing for similar purposes - but of course, the parameter is available to be played with, so there's no need to hold back!

Next, I'd ask about content. Different cultures use different kinds of swearing content, but these can include religious references, scatological or sexual references, ridicule of others by comparison with animals, etc. Some swear words (like the old fashioned "zounds!") are derived from religious sources but have been euphemized (in this case from the expression, "God's wounds!") to avoid blasphemy.

So back to the aliens. Religion-based swearing is going to depend on what their religion is, whether it has the good vs. evil dichotomy, and how their cosmology works. From the point of view of the hypothetical Gegogian, what would be a fate worse than death? And under what circumstances might someone wish it on someone else? If you're looking for ugly words, then what do these people consider ugly? Are sexual body parts considered taboo in the society, and would they be used for expletive purposes? If someone wants to swear truthfulness, what object or concept do they value so highly that they would not want to sully it by lying under oath?

If you're going to pepper your dialogue with swear words or phrases the way we do in English, it's good to keep them short. But if you want to expand the cultural role of swearing and turn it into a lengthy trash-talking contest, then by all means elaborate them. Personally I would hope such a contest would be relevant to the main conflict of a story, though, and not just there for pyrotechnics!

Tonight I don't have a lot of examples on hand from established fiction - I welcome comments, so tell me if you thought swearing was handled well, or in a funny way, or in a less than optimal way, in any of the books you've read. In my own writing I have one culture where they use wordless sounds for extreme emotion, and insult people by talking about their undesirable physical behaviors. I have another where people are expected to swear by one of a family of deities, and which one to use depends on how the situation aligns with the personality and job of the deity in question.

Exploring swearing and its cultural underpinnings is a great way to give spice and dimension to a world.

Does your technology form a set?

I made it back from Chicago only to find that my home internet was performing intermittently - and nearly screamed. It's funny to think how much I've come to rely on it.

When I was a kid my dad used to bring home boxes of punch cards that he used for the computers at his university. We had a PET computer in my elementary school, and we had a Victor at home for a while, and I did college on a Mac Classic... I remember when email and newsgroups first started to be a big thing, and started sucking up everybody's time!

Now the internet is established and has developed its own culture, language and dialects - just look at how email language differs from spoken language or from letter-writing, or how texting has given us a whole new way to alter our own language. The Acronyms are taking over! Maybe I should create an alien species to that effect; sort of has a Doctor Who vibe.

All this has me thinking about technology and how it's used in worldbuilding for both fantasy and science fiction. I wonder how many authors, when creating a world, intentionally choose what I call a "technology set." A technology set is a complex collection of interrelated technologies that exist together in a given society. "Bronze age culture" might be one type of technology set - generally within a set the presence of one type of artifact automatically means that others are present as well. A bronze knife depends on the presence of mining technology, for example - but it doesn't necessarily entail the existence of bronze armor, which requires much more bronze, and techniques for creating the armor shape. A matter-transmitter device depends on highly sophisticated computers, and would entail that other types of transmitters exist also.

But that brings me to a question: when are the links between technologies necessary, and when aren't they? For example, does the presence of antigravity transportation automatically mean that computers exist in the form that we know?

The evolution of technology begins with basic ingredients of environment and materials, then interacts with culture - what activities are considered important. As it grows from there, culture and technology inform one another. An example: military tanks were invented as a concept, then built, and thereafter it took a while for military strategists to develop a fully mature way of using them.

I was impressed with the transport doorways in Dan Simmons' Hyperion books because they were used in a way that seemed mature: if you have a cheap way to make a door that opens in one place and lets out in another, then why not have a home that exists in seven different scenic locations at once? (Better yet, Simmons uses these doorways integrally in his plot!)

I don't think it would take much for technology to diverge from our own historical path, and once it diverged, it could head in all kinds of unusual directions. I'm very willing to believe that an unusual technology set will work, provided that each element of it is grounded in solid reasoning - reasoning based on materials, culture, travel, early adoption of technology from other races, exhaustion of resources, etc. etc.

Now I'm hoping my internet holds up so I can get back to my routine with TTYU...

Some more mythical creatures

Today I went with my family to the Field Museum in Chicago, where they've been running an exhibit on mythical creatures of the world.  Absolutely wonderful!  This was the second time I'd been through it, and both times I've considered it to be fantastic research for the purposes of fantasy and science fiction.  It gives me some really amazing ideas for fantasy creatures, but also for designing local mythologies and their origins in science fiction contexts.

The exhibit included first the mythical creatures themselves:  amazing statues, costumes, images on ancient coins, and illustrations in old manuscripts.  Then it went on to speculate about possible origins for the legends, showing manatees with mermaids and giant squid with the kraken, and demonstrating the way the backs of dolphins or whales might be mistaken for the coils of sea monsters when they appear in groups. 

I'd been familiar already with the idea that stories of dragons and giant reptiles might have arisen from dinosaur fossils - but this exhibit took it further.  For example, it linked the griffin with fossils of protoceratops, and the roc with giant birds like aepyornis, which lived in Madagascar before it became extinct (mind you, it didn't look much like a roc, but more like an enormous emu).  The cyclops it said may have been a reinterpretation of elephant skulls, which have a large hole in the center (nasal passages) that could have been interpreted as a single eye socket.

Maybe some of you have heard about how Father Christmas used to dress in all sorts of colors like green, purple, brown, etc. until Coca-Cola decided to dress him in red?  Well, a similar thing happened to the unicorn back in the middle ages!  Early stories had the unicorn appearing with a goatlike body and a colored horn (the color varied).  Then after traders appeared on the scene selling spiral narwhal tusks, all of a sudden the unicorn's horn started appearing as a white spiral!  A sign that stories are traded along with objects... Something similar apparently also happened with mermaids, where stories handed from person to person across the world made combs and mirrors common accessories for mer-creatures that had originally been more distinct.

I also saw a picture of a hippocampus, or mer-horse; along with it came the explanation that there was once a belief that every creature of the land possessed a counterpart in the sea.  What an idea - just bursting with possibilities for extrapolation!

There were also some very unusual creatures, many of whose names now escape me, but a few of which I'd like to share.  The Australian bunyip, supposedly about the size of a small cow, usually said to be furred but which is sometimes portrayed with scales and/or feathers as well - this one started out a fearsome abductor, but over time became more benign.  The chupacabra or "goat-sucker," quite a fierce and colorful creature which is said to act something like a vampire for livestock.  The Nasca killer whale, which has extra fins, human hands, and carries a human head.  Barong Ket, a lion-like Balinese good guy who fights the chaos sown by the evil witch Rangda...

If any of you would like to check out photos or learn more, you can either head on over to the Field Museum (if you're in Chicago and can go soon, since the exhibit is about to close) or go to the following url, which has a great collection of pictures and some of the explanations as well:

http://www.fieldmuseum.org/mythiccreatures/

My mind swims with the possibilities.  I hope you can find inspiration here too.