Category: setting

January 14, 2017 / 2 Comments

Time for Torches and Pitchforks

            So sorry this is a bit late.  Deadlines. They can suck, but they pay the bills.
            Anyway, with some of the awful changes we’re already seeing this year, I thought it’d be good to try some positive changes.  In the next few weeks I’m hoping to do much more regular (and frequent) posts and also address a few different topics people have tossed my way.  And maybe even a big overhaul of this whole page.
            But first, I wanted to talk to you about the little European country of Switzerland.
            I’m guessing everyone reading this has seen some version of Frankenstein, yes?  Maybe the iconic Universal film or one of its many sequels.  Or the Abbot & Costello movie.  Or even the comedy remake Mel Brooks did.
            (For the record Frankenstein here is the name of the movie, not the monster…)
            One standard in all of these is the little nearby village.  It shows up in every version of the story I just mentioned, plus a few dozen more.  And yeah, in the movies it’s in Switzerland.  Weird, I know.
            Anyway, I’m sure most of you reading this can picture it in your minds, yes?  The wall with the big gate.  The houses with the exposed timbers and big fireplaces.
            Okay, got all that in mind?
            Whenis that small town?
            No, no, don’t try to reason it out. Just answer the question.  In what time frame is that little town set?
            I bet that made your brain seize up for a moment.  Y’see Frankenstein was written back in the early 19th Century, and is actually set in the back half of the 18th.  It’s a contemporary of Ben Franklin and his lightning experiments.
            (For the record, Frankenstein here is the name of the book, not the monster…)
            And yet…
            The films kind of updated the story and gave it a slightly more “modern” setting.  The clothes and some of the doctor’s technology hint at a story set closer to the Victorian era.  There’s mention of trains in some of them.  The Abbot and Costello movie is set in “modern” times.  There are cars, planes, telephones–they’re full-on into the 20th century at that point.
            And yet… the little hamlet below the castle looks exactly the same in every movie.
            It’s not impossible.  There are lots of villages in Europe that still look a lot like they did two or three centuries ago.  Even here in the US we’ve got towns that haven’t changed much since the fifties.  Or the twenties.
            What’s my point in this?
            I read a book recently that was set in a village a lot like the one in Frankenstein.  There were even a couple of castles.  And one of the annoying things was I couldn’t tell when this story was supposed to be taking place.  No mention of electricity, radio, or cellphones, but also no mention of horses, woodpiles, or outhouses.
            The author described the clothes on a few characters, but these days having an eccentric, oddly-dressed character is kind of commonplace.  So maybe that woman’s clothing is a hint as to what era the story’s set in… or maybe she’s just really into steampunk or some kind of retro cosplay.  One guy carried a crossbow but… well, kind of the same thing, right?  These days crossbows, longbows, swords—they’re not that unusual in stories from any time period.  Look at The Walking Dead.  Heck, Warhammer 40,000 is set… well, about 38,000 years from now, and people are still using swords in that.
            Yeah, there’s always going to be that time where I want to misdirect my reader into thinking it’s 1944, but Cap really just woke up in 2012.  Or that the high-tech lair is in the future, not inside an Egyptian tomb in 1250 BC.  The thing I need to keep in mind is that these aren’t cases where I’ve just forgotten to mention the time—it’s being deliberately withheld to create an effect later.
            Y’see, Timmy, knowing the when of a setting is just as important as the where.  It’s one of the things we use as writers to help the readers relate to elements of the story. And it helps to define the world I’m creating.  Without knowing when my story’s set, it’s tough to tell when something’s exceptional or important in that world.  A soldier talking on a walkie-talkie isn’t exactly earth-shattering stuff, but if I tell you this soldier’s with George Washington in 1776, that walkie-talkie conversation becomes interesting on many more levels. And it immediately tells my readers what kind of story they’re reading.
            So remember the when along with the where.
            Next time, I’d like to talk about something I’m not going to talk about anymore.
            Until then… go write.
Frankensteinsettingtime
December 6, 2013 / 4 Comments

This Elaborate Fantasy World You’ve Constructed

            Does that title sound a little too familiar?
            Maybe we should talk about that…
            A few months back I read a book that I couldn’t figure out.  It left me completely baffled.  I’m not talking about the plot (granted, I was having trouble with that, too), but the setting. 
            I honestly couldn’t figure out the world.  At times, it seemed like it was the modern world that we all know and love—granted, with some sci-fi/ fantasy stuff going on in the background.  At other times, it seemed to be a sort of alternate history, post-apocalyptic “present.”  It didn’t help that every character was somehow tied directly into that sci-fi/ fantasy thread, because for all of them this was the “normal” world and they didn’t notice anything different about it.
            Why does this matter?
            Well, knowing where a story is set helps me, as a reader, to set my expectations and reactions.  It lets me get a sense of what’s possible, or what might be possible.  The setting is an automatic set of guidelines for the reader, for the characters, and for the writer, too.
            For example…
            A few years back I read an absolutely wonderful essay on Scooby-Doo and secular humanism.  No seriously.  You can read the whole thing here.  The writer made a very interesting point that shows why it’s so key to know what kind of world my story is set in.  He uses it as one link in a larger chain of logic, but for our purposes we can examine it alone.
            In all the classic Scooby-Doo episodes, the supernatural threat is always revealed to be a fake.  It’s someone in a costume (probably Carl the stuntman or Mr. Bascombe) using special effects of one kind or another for an ulterior motive.  It has to be, because in the world of classic Scooby Doo, ghosts and monsters aren’t real.  That’s why it makes sense for Velma, Fred, and Daphne to act rationally and why it’s funny when Shaggy and Scooby get scared and run away—they’re scared of the fake monsters.
            But…
            If the supernatural is real (as it is in some of those later stories), suddenly everything shifts.  The rules of the world have changed, so we have to look at the characters in a new light.  Now Velma and the others are foolish for trying to apply logic to inherently illogical creatures and for exposing themselves to life-threatening monsters like werewolves and vampires.  Not only that, Shaggy and Scooby are now the smart ones, because being scared of vampires is a perfectly rational response in a world where vampires are real.
            Here’s another one.
            I recently read a piece by one of the editors at Marvel comics.  He proudly spoke about how their stories are set in “the real world.”  The characters, their reactions, the world around them…
            And I have to admit, my first thought was… what a bunch of nonsense.
            (I may not have used the word nonsense.  I tend to be a bit more emphatic with my internal dialogue…)
             Let’s consider a few details about the Marvel Comics universe.  It is commonly known that some people can fly.  It’s not exactly secret that magic is real and aliens exist.  Super-powered human mutants are also real and receive tons of media attention.  There’s a large, tropical valley in Antarctica where dinosaurs still live, visible on Google Earth and written about in several textbooks.  Energy weapons are commonplace, as is high-tech battle armor.  There are numerous publicly-known artificial intelligences in the world.  Standing next to detonating atomic weapons can give you superpowers.  Hell, in the Marvel Universe, you can jump off the Empire State Building and there’s actually a halfway decent chance someone will catch you on the way down.
            Does this sound remotely like the real world? 
            Would the people of this world have the same expectations you and I do?  Would they think and react to things the same way?  I live in LA, and when I hear a faint rumble and the building shakes, I normally check Facebook to see if anyone else felt an earthquake.  In the Marvel Universe, I’d probably assume it was superheroes battling a giant monster.  If I got a headache, I’d be checking to see if it was telekinesis or some form of optic blasts.  And then take aspirin.  And then check for telekinesis again, just in case it interacts with drugs somehow. And the thing is, these would be perfectly rational reactions in the Marvel Universe.
           Now, one more example.  Harry Potter.  In this world there are wizards, giants, dragons, hippogriffs, goblin bankers, house-elves, gnomes, and much, much more (no aliens, though).  But the thing is, it all exists kind of… off to the side.  The average person in the world of Harry Potter has never heard of Hogwarts and can’t find Diagon Alley.  The magical world rarely overlaps with the mundane one, and we learn there are whole government departments charged with making sure they stay separate.  The real world for them is the real world we all know about, one where there’s no such thing as magic.
            Starting to make sense?  If I can’t define my world, I can’t define what is and isn’t possible.  I can’t have characters react appropriately if I don’t know what would be appropriate.
            On the flipside, there’s a period show on right now that kind of gnaws at me.  Mostly because it’s set in Victorian London and one of the supporting characters never wears a hat… but also because of the setting.  The main plot revolves around our protagonist attempting to perfect wireless, broadcasted electricity, something Tesla worked on for decades.  Our hero hopes to destroy the fortunes of a group of wealthy oilmen by rendering their investments worthless.
            Now, here’s the thing.  We know broadcast power wasn’t invented at the turn of the last century, so if the show ends with our hero succeeding, it means the whole story’s been set in an alternate history.  But if his broadcast power fails, it implies the story’s set in the real world.  But until one or the other happens, I can’t tell you the setting.
            Of course some of you may know what program I’m talking about and I’m sure you’re going to bring up the larger point—the vampires.  But here’s the interesting point.  The vampires are irrelevant.  Much like Hogwarts and Diagon Alley, no one knows the vampires exist. 
            But the broadcast power… that’s in the news.  There were press releases and huge parties.  Broadcast power changes everything.  That’s a world where, from the beginning of the electrical age, nothing needs batteries or wall outlets.  There are countless changes and repercussions if broadcast power is real.
            Y’see, Timmy, my fantastic story can still be set in the real world provided the events of my story don’t change the world.  I mean, within the world of the show only a handful of people in London know vampires are real.  It’s not public knowledge.  And today in the modern world we’ve never heard of or seen evidence of vampires in the Victorian era, so that part of the story has an aura of truth and reality to it.    
           If you want to set an amazing story in the real world, you need to use conspiracy theory logic.    I’ve used this analogy before, and bizarre as it may sound it works.  Yep, the same reasoning used by moon-landing deniers, “9-11 was staged” folks, and the birthers is what makes for a good fiction story. No irony there…
            By conspiracy-theory logic, any facts that disprove XYZ are an attempt to hide the truth, thus further proving XYZ is true.  The very lack of evidence is the proof that it’s true.  And if I stumble across a few coincidences that imply XYZ might be true, well, that’s just more evidence XYZ is true.
            Didn’t I just describe the world of Harry Potter?
            The vampires hide all trace of their existence.  There is no evidence that vampires exist.  Ipso facto (fancy Latin words) my story rings true because it lines up with all known facts.  Follow me?
            The world of my story has to have its own consistent logic.  Because if I don’t know my world, I can’t know how characters in my world react to things.  And if I don’t know my characters, well… that’s it.
            Next time… well, is there any topic anyone would like covered?  I can probably ramble on about most anything (as this post shows).  Let me know in the comments if there’s something you’d like me to babble about.
            And if no one does, I’ll come up with something worthwhile.
            Until then, go write.
genreScoobysettingtwistvampire
May 12, 2013

The Scooby Ambiguity

            Not a pop-culture reference to the title of a Middleman episode.

            But it could’ve been…
            So sorry I’m behind in the ranty blog.  Between finishing the new manuscript and Texas Frightmare, the past few weeks have been a blur.  I think I’m back on schedule now, though, and you should be getting very regular posts for the next few weeks.
            I was trying to come up for a term for the idea I wanted to get across this week, and my girlfriend suggested the Scooby Ambiguity.  Which fit perfectly and also helped me structure my little rant.  As before, I’m hoping this becomes a standard term in storytelling.
            Allow me to explain.
            I’m sure most of you reading this are familiar with the basic plot of a Scooby-Doo episode.  The gang rolls into town and encounters some kind of ghost or monster, usually three or four times.  Then Velma finds some clues, applies some deductive reasoning, and reveals the ancient mummy to be Dr. Najib, the museum currator, in a disguise.
            (For the record, there’s a fantastic article about Scooby Doo and secular humanism over here at Comics Alliance.  No, really.  It’s also makes some brilliant observation about character and setting, so check it out.)
           Now, every now and then, in a Scooby episode or another story structured like it, we’ll have a moment of confusion, often near the end.  We’ll get one fact that doesn’t match up.  If Dr. Najib was in the costume… then who was the mummy we saw in the old tomb? There weren’t any other accomplices.  The film projector was shut off.  Could that have really been… the mummy?
            (cue spooky music)
            You’ve probably seen this sort of thing in a lot of stories.  It’s a pretty classic “…or is it?” device.  One of the first times I remember seeing it in was the old X-Men/ Teen Titans crossover penned by Chris Claremont, when the ghost of Jean Grey shows up to warn the X-Men about Darkseid.  Simply put, the Scooby Ambiguity is the one element that doesn’t fit in my established setting. 
            Now, when done right, this can be a wonderful thing.  When handled with a light touch, it can give the audience a little thrill of excitement.  It might even count as a minor twist.
            When done wrong, though… well, your story falls apart
            For example…
            There’s a series of fairly successful books I read now and then.  I’ll be polite and not name them, even though they’re kind of a guilty pleasure.  I know they’re awful on several levels, and they always frustrate me for one reason or another, but I can’t help myself…
            Anyway, the series is firmly grounded in the real world.  Real locations, real law enforcement, real problems.  It’s a lot like Scooby Doo, in fact.  There are stories about zombies, mummies, and vampires, but in the end we get a solid, scientific explanation for these things, and more than a few times someone actually gets a mask pulled off.
            In one of the books,  the main character is a passenger on a jumbo jet with an unknown killer on the loose, and a huge stormfront is actually keeping them in the air, forcing them onward rather than trying to land. 
            Then, in the last hundred pages or so, we learn the killer is actually the physically manifested psychic energy of four passengers who are all projecting their Id out into the world.
            No, I’m serious.  Out of nowhere, in the middle of this reality-based story, the killer is a telepathically-created monster.
            On the flipside, consider Dan Abnett’s ongoing book series about Gaunt’s Ghosts.  It’s a sci-fi war story about soldiers during a massive interplanetary crusade.  There’s guns, tanks, ongoing logistics and morale issues.
            And every now and then… a miracle.  Nothing gigantic, nothing that couldn’t be written off as odd coincidence or luck.  Yet Colonel-Commissar Gaunt and his men are following the crusade path of Saint Sabbat, and they do seem to attract a lot of coincidences and a lot of luck.  It never wins the day for them, and it never leaves much in the way of evidence, but it is there and the colonel-commissar is often left feeling a bit confused and in awe of it in the aftermath.
            Y’see, Timmy, the Scooby Ambiguity works great as a thinly-connected side note, but the minute I make it a major element of my main plot, things start to crumble.  Either I’m writing about a world where X can happen or I’m not.  By its very nature, the ambiguity doesn’t fit within my established world, so making it a major part of my plot creates a jarring distraction that breaks the flow.
            This isn’t to say I can’t have a story about homicidal psychic-energy monsters, but if I do it needs to be clear from the start that this is a world where such things can exist.  If not, pulling some bizarre element out of left field is going to alienate a lot more readers than it impresses.
            And alienated readers often find something else to do rather than finish reading.
            Next time, not to sound morose, but I wanted to talk a bit about death.
            Until then, go write.
abnettClaremontScoobysettingtwist
May 6, 2011 / 3 Comments

This IS Ceti Alpha Five!

If you get that title reference, you probably feel an equal mix of pride and shame. Just like I do for coming up with it.

For those of you who don’t get it, it’s from a sci fi movie where the characters suddenly discover they aren’t on the planet they thought they were. They (and the audience) had gone along assuming they were on planet A, only to discover they were on planet B instead. It’s a mistake that costs them dearly—they end up getting little parasitic worms stuck in their ears.

Silly as it may sound, a key part of storytelling is knowing the world your story is set in. I can tell the story of a noble knight on a quest to find the Holy Grail, but depending on the world I set it in, he can be a glorious hero (The Once and Future King) or a deranged madman (The Fisher King). We’d all frown if one of the Bourne books had him stopping an alien invasion and we’d shake our heads if Jack Reacher took on a cult of Satanists that had summoned an actual demon.

One of the biggest ways writers mess this up is to take too long to establish what kind of world they’re in. For example, they’re doing a spoof-comedy, but the first thirty pages have been completely straight. Or (on the flipside) they do establish the world and much later in the narrative try to switch that world to something else. I’ll blab on about that in a minute.

For now, consider the movie Predator. The original, with Governor Arnold, Governor Jesse, Secretary of Defense Carl Weathers, and screenwriter Shane Black.

Predator begins with the team landing in Central America and getting briefed on their mission. They head into the jungle, locate the crashed plane, find the enemy camp, and have an awesome gunfight. Then Arnold discovers that Carl set them up and dumped them in the meat grinder. They head back out for the rendezvous… and that’s when they discover there’s something else in the jungle.

We’re, what… half an hour into the film at this point?

Except… that’s not how Predator begins. If you think back, the movie actually begins with an alien spaceship flying past Earth and launching off a small shuttle/ drop pod. We’re told in the first minute of the film that this is, ultimately, a sci-fi story. We may get distracted for a bit by the hail of bullets, but when the title alien shows up it isn’t a surprise… just a bit creepy.

On the other hand, one recent book I read was 100% set in the real world. Everything about it was realistic. The basic idea was two people who had found the last notebook of a dead research scientist who claimed (in his notes) to have discovered a cure for cancer. The cure for cancer. The entire book was about them trying to figure out what the heck they had while half a dozen pharmaceutical companies chased them—all wanting the notebook one way or another. Well, in the end they escape big pharma, sell the notebook to a group of researchers for a couple million dollars, and cancer is cured across the globe.

Yep. We cured cancer everywhere in the last seven pages. Go us.

I also once saw a script that started out as a dramatic comedy sort of thing. Young woman, single mother, trying to make the best of life even though she keeps getting knocked down… we’ve all seen it a few dozen times. That was the first forty odd pages. Then, on page 44, if memory serves (almost 3/4 of an hour into the movie, mind you), we discover that the old man she just helped cross the street is actually the Easter Bunny, who decides to reward the woman with a wish for her random act of Christian charity.

That’s right. A key point in this story is that the Easter Bunny spends his downtime walking among us disguised as an octogenarian. And the Easter Bunny is all about Christian charity because… well, the brown of the chocolate and the brown of the wood of the cross… or something…

Like any other disruption in the flow of a story, it’s very jarring when a story is set up in one world and then veers off into another one. It’s like discovering that one of your main characters has actually been insane all along. It forces the reader to re-examine what’s come before, and not in a good way. In fact, more often than not, these sudden shifts in tone and world force a story into pure comedy. Again, not in a good way.

Consider this. There’s a classic Saturday Night Live skit which claims to be the famous “lost reel” of It’s A Wonderful Life. In this, just as everyone’s sitting around singing and rejoicing, Uncle Billy remembers that he misplaced the money in the newspaper Mr. Potter took. It only takes a few moments for this realization to turn the celebrating friends and family into an ugly mob, and they march to Potter’s house, give the man a mass beating, and burn his home to the ground. The End. The Simpsons did something similar with a lost final reel of Casablanca. Here Ilsa parachutes out of Laszlo’s plane to be with Rick, saving him from (and killing) Adolph Hitler in the process. The happy couple is married shortly afterwards. The End…?

No, seriously. That’s how they “ended” Casablanca, with the ellipse and the question mark. Which, as Bart points out, leaves them open for a sequel.

So just by (hypothetically) shifting the tone/world of the endings, both of these classic, award-winning films become absurdist comedies.

Now here’s a key thing to remember. You can still have a fantastic story set in the real world provided the events of your story don’t change the world. If I wage a secret battle against lizard men from the center of the Earth and at the end of my story no one knows the war happened, then the world hasn’t changed, has it?

Perfect example—Raiders of the Lost Ark. Not only does this story involve a Nazi plot to seize arcane objects across the globe, it has reputable archeologist Henry “Indiana” Jones finding hardcore evidence that God is real. Think about the repercussions that information would have. If someone went public in the 1930s with absolute, undeniable proof of God’s existence, what kind of world would we be living in today? What kind of story would you be telling?

Which is why that evidence never goes public. We’re left with the distinct impression no more than a dozen people know what Dr. Jones recovered from that island, and that he’s been well-paid not to talk about it. And the Ark… well, we all know what happens to the Ark, don’t we?

I really, really hate to use this analogy, but it is perfect. If you want to set an amazing story in the real world, you need to use conspiracy theory logic. Yep, the same reasoning used by the birthers, moon-landing deniers, and “9-11 was staged” folks is what makes for a good fiction story. How sad is that?

By conspiracy-theory logic, the lack of evidence for X is the proof that X is true. Any facts that disprove X are manufactured by the powers that be, thus further proving X is true. And if you stumble across a few coincidences that imply X is true, well, that of course is solid proof that X is true.

Y’see, Timmy, by this chain of reasoning, the untouched real world is undeniable proof the imaginary world of your story is true. Only the BPRD knows what really happened to Adolph Hitler after the Occult Wars, so it’s understandable that most of us only know the publicized version of events. There are a dozen enchantments that keep the magical world of Hogwarts and Diagon Alley separate from the real world, thus the fact that no Muggle has ever seen Hogwarts pushes the idea that the stories about it are true. Only a worthy mortal can lift the hammer of Thor (bonus points if you remember its name—offer not good after Friday), but we all know we’re not 100% worthy so we accept that we’ve never had the chance to lift it. The fantasy world doesn’t change the real world, so that fantasy world is more believable.

So do amazing things in amazing worlds. Just make sure no one finds out about it.

Next time, I wanted to rant a bit about sounding like a professional.

Until then, go write.

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