Victory Conditions

When you play a game, there are normally rules for how somebody is judged to have “won.” In my favourite genre of city-builder games, this is typically some combination of achieve a certain population and treasury, produce so many of some particular resources, rule some number of of other cities, and build certain monuments. Some games let you create your own “scenarios” where you set your own victory conditions, which you can make as hard or as easy as you like. When I download scenarios from the web, they’re usually aimed at the most experienced players, who want the most possible challenge. But it’s also perfectly OK to want less difficulty: to combine some degree of accomplishment with a level of concentration and stress that’s suited to your temperament rather than the high-end of your abilities.

That principle applies to a lot of other kinds of goals in normal life, too.

Unknown Unknowns and the Dunning-Kreuger Effect

One of the goals of University education is developing the ability to introspect about the state of one’s own knowledge. This can involve very narrow technical issues about “unknowability,” such as the mathematical theorem that it is impossible, in general, for any computational engine to be able to always predict whether an arbitrary computer program will run to completion. But more importantly it involves being able to judge “I know thus-and-so; I know such-and-such exists but I don’t know much about it; I know there are things I don’t even know are out there.” In the famous words of Dick Cheney (actually first stated by others), these are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.

Tropes and Story Planning

In a recent blog post I apologized for linking to “the black hole that is TV tropes.” It’s a highly interlinked site with summaries of hundreds upon hundreds of elements that appear repeatedly in fiction of various kinds, and even sometimes in the real world. Once you follow one link, you’re likely to follow many more, until you notice that far too much time has passed and you’ve wasted spent half the afternoon reading from it.

I’ve heard that some people consider tropes bad, to be avoided, but to me it seems they’re confusing trope with stereotype or cliche. Tropes are cultural elements that have endured for a long time; they’re the background “collective unconscious” from which we can legitimately draw to inspire us. I’m not sure avoiding tropes is the least bit possible, let alone desirable. So in this post I’m going to talk about a few tropes I’ve recognized in my work in progress, and what I’m trying to do that’s at least mildly original.

Science and Sapience

I ran across a quote recently, which I’ll paraphrase: “Knowledge is recognizing that Frankenstein is not the monster. Wisdom is realizing that Frankenstein is the monster.” This is a post reflecting on science, “knowledge,” and sapience, “wisdom.”

Research, Teaching, and Scholarship

I’ve been on the faculty at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario since 1984 – one of the most secure jobs there is, once you get tenure. That makes me a professional scholar: “scholar” in Sense 2a of the Merriam-Webster dictionary (a person who has done advanced study in a specialized field), and “professional” in the sense of getting paid for it. Maybe I can even claim “scholar” definition 2b (a learned person), albeit rather more narrowly “learned” than when the word entered the lexicon centuries ago. But I’ve been a scholar in some sense since I was a child: I love learning new things, and finding ways to explain them. I noticed during this A-Z blogging challenge that I carry scholarly attitudes over into my writing hobby.

Quirks for Characters

I’ve several times heard the advice that characters (in a novel or a role-playing game) ought to have quirks that distinguish them from each other and make them more realistic, more interesting. I can see ahead that on some upcoming edit of my WiP I will need to make sure at least some of my characters have quirks, so as usual when I wasn’t sure how to do something, I did some research.

Planning, Pantsing, and Prototyping

My writing style for most of my NaNoWriMo novels (including my WiP) has started with visualizing a small number of scenes, some of them coming from the mists just before falling asleep or just after waking up. I then have to knit them together into some kind of coherent story. Initially this made me pretty much a pantser (from “seat-of-the-pants”). In the last few years I learned to do more planning, such as using 7-point structure. After a lesson for Mary Robinette Kowal’s Patreon supporters, I wrote an outline for the combined threads of the two NaNovels I’m editing together. And this month I’ve done several exercises that may have a significant influence on the story. I call these exercises “prototyping.”

Overlord Motivations

My style of writing is a mix of planning and pantsing, and for some elements of my current WiP I definitely didn’t plan as much as I now wish I had. One of the elements I introduced without a lot of planning was an invasion of my peaceful egalitarian Great Valley by a warlike patriarchal culture from over the mountains. I based this on a very brief study of one archaelogists view of what happened in ancient Eastern Europe. When I got to the point of editing two NaNovels into a coherent whole, I needed to motivate the invasion – which meant motivating the leader behind the invasion, the Big Bad Evil Guy (BBEG), and possibly Evil Overlord.

Nerdliness On Managing a Timeline

I mentioned earlier this month that I created a spreadsheet to manage the timeline for November 2018’s NaNovel. Most of it was along the lines of “this event happens so-and-so minutes after the previous event” but there were also

• events that had to happen before other events.
• events that had to happen relative to much earlier events.

It also involved a starship accelerating constantly at a multiple of 1g, the acceleration due to gravity, (which is a clue that the Galactic Imperium sneers at our primitive view of the laws of physics). I had to keep track of how far away from Earth the ship was while heading for a hyperjump point in the outer solar system, to take into account lightspeed delays in communication. This post is for those who love spreadsheet hacking; I’ll say a few words about how I did all this.

Mystery Elements in A Novel

The Writing Excuses podcasts have several times talked about Orson Scott Card’s MICE quotient: four different kinds of plot arc. The “I” was originally Idea but the podcasters, particularly Mary Robinette Kowal, now use it for “Inquiry.” An inquiry arc starts with a question; the obstacles and complications in the middle prevent answering the question, and the arc ends with answering it. Two of my recent (very drafty) novels have inquiry arcs – one a significant subplot in an otherwise character- and event-driven story, and one the main arc of a murder mystery on a starship. I wasn’t entirely happy with how the mystery arc progressed in either story, so looked into advice for writing inquiry arcs, primarily from Writing Excuses.

There are two reasons you might want to learn about mystery writing even if you don’t intend to write detective fiction:

Learning Your Character’s Greatest Strength and Weakness

I’m taking a Writing the Other class on “Deep Dive into Diverse Characters,” which asks us to do several short writing exercises each week among other things. We were tasked with reading Stant Litore’s book Write Characters Your Readers Won't Forget, and with following his guidelines to define our character’s greatest strength and greatest weakness. I had no idea how to do this, as with Greatest Desire and Greatest Fear, so as usual I did some research.

Kingdoms and Kinships

In my secondary-world bronze-age fantasy, I wanted a setting significantly different from the standard medieval fantasy world. One particular set of tropes I wanted to avoid was the ones associated with kings, kingdoms, knights, and princesses. But when you eliminate kingdoms, what do you have left that makes sense for an ancient civilization?

Journeymen and crafting

Elsewhere I’ve written about choosing words that reflect the differences between a secondary-world culture and our own. Previously it was about husbands and wives in a matrifocal culture. This time, I want to ruminate about workers: apprentices, journeymen, and masters.

Information Management for Novels

When you’re writing almost anything, you need some way to make the different parts of the thing consistent with each other. You don’t want to keep searching back and forth in your prose; you need “auxiliary information” somewhere, a “bible” that retains ultimate truth, which you can refer to when you’re trying to remember something. We computer geeks refer to this as “external memory” and the process of maintaining it as “information management.” This post talks about the information I need to manage for my secondary-world fantasy (with occasional digressions), how I currently do it, and what I wish I could do instead.

Husbandry

Have you ever wondered what was the connection between “husband” as a noun and “husband” as a verb (and the connection with the phrase “animal husbandry”)?

When you’re trying to create secondary-world cultures, one of the many things you have to do is identify some key elements that are different from your own, and think through the consequence. One consequence is the way people speak, the words they choose, the idioms they use. I’m a word freak, fascinated by word origins and relationships. I’ve learned French, Greek, Latin, and Russian over the years, although they’re pretty much gone from 50 years of neglect. So while creating my early Bronze Age secondary-world fantasy, I started to think about what words and phrases would be different.

Gimbutas on Stone-Age Eastern Europe

A few days ago I posted a brief history of my current work-in-progress, where I mentioned I set it in a magical Bronze Age. When I created (am creating?) my society, I was (have been?) thinking about a long-lost article I read once that claimed an anthropologist named Marija Gimbutas found evidence that the culture of neolithic eastern Europe was matriarchal – and that her work was out of favour. It seemed to me that didn’t matter, since “the world doesn’t work like that” can sometimes be succesfully refuted by saying “this is speculative fiction; that’s one of the things I deliberately changed.” So I went looking for more material, and am glad I did. Here’s some of what I found.

Failure is Mandatory

In the universe of Howard Tayler’s Schlock Mercenary webcomic (and now in our own mundane universe) there exists a book called The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries. Maxim 70 is: “Failure is not an option – it is mandatory. The option is whether or not to let failure be the last thing you do.” In the last few years I’ve been thinking a lot about failure, and that final maxim.

Eliciting Comments from Beta Readers: ABCDE

Once you polish some piece of writing, it’s not done yet: you need “beta readers” to help you find and fix problems. I’ve been lucky to have been on two Writing Excuses cruises, where I got to workshop the first couple of chapters of two different novels, and the beta reader rules we were taught are worth passing along. We were asked to watch Mary Robinette Kowall’s video; the scheme she teaches there has since evolved into the acronym “ABCD” which a few of us alumni have expanded in to ABCDE.

Drafting a Novel: a 4-Year Journey (So Far)

 I’ve said before that I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo several times: 2006-2009, then 2012-2018, “winning” all but twice out of 11 tries. This means I’ve written 9 “NaNovels” – things that resemble novels but aren’t. In my case they’re not even complete first drafts, in that they don’t have a full beginning, middle, and end. But now I’m working hard on editing two of them together, hoping that by the end of October, 2019, I’ll have finished something. This is a brief summary of my journey so far.

Creativity and Groups

When I started writing fiction (via NaNoWriMo) back in 2006, it was mostly a solitary exercise. I would occasionally post answer to questions on some of the forums, but I wasn't really interacting with anyone about my own story beyond the occasional question about some fact or other. That all changed after the 2015 Writing Excuses cruise, where I met a lot of other writers who shared a culture shaped by the podcast and the ground rules for participation in the cruise. After that, I had regular contact with a group of people willing and able to help me work through problems or challenges in my writing. And today that leads me to think about how groups can be thought of as creative.

Blogging: Why Do It?

I got into the A-Z Blogging Challenge because of inspiration by Keith Davies, an internet contact of many years acquaintance (back to the heyday of USENET), who has been involved since 2013. That was my first and only attempt until this year; I got as far as the letter E. I accidentally got the letter A in 2018, and so far this year I’ve reached April 8 and only just started the letter B. At the expected one post a day, I can’t make it all the way to Z, and at my current rate of 1/week, will be lucky to get to E. So why bother? I spent a bit of time today exploring my feelings and working up a rationale (or rationalization; you decide!)

Articulating Your Character's Greatest Desire

Last November I had to do an exercise on writing my character’s greatest fear, and I had no idea how to start, so I did some research and wrote it up as a set of links with brief analysis/commentary. Now I’m taking a Writing the Other class with the same exercise plus another one equally or even more challenging: writing up the character’s greatest desire. So, once again, I did some research.