Head Space

One of the things I find interesting (and a little scary) about writing is the way worlds and characters can take over one’s mental space. For several years now, the characters of my post-peak oil fiction have so dominated my consciousness that I’ve had a hard time moving on to new projects. Oh, I’ve been able to turn out a bit of unrelated flash fiction, but my attempts at anything longer came to nothing. My other characters were too dominant, their world too easy to slip into and get lost in. Every time I tried to move on, my old characters would pester me, tug at my sleeve and whisper in my ear, telling me new stories and begging me to stay just a little longer.

But finally I got a new idea that was compelling enough to stick with and I began work on a new novel. I’ve struggled with it, not knowing this new world very well and not able to “hear” my characters. After so many years with Amalia, Will, Diana, and their friends, I was used to being able to get answers to my questions with ease. Not so with my new characters! I was almost to 30K words before the first of my new characters started opening up to me. To my surprise, it was one of my male characters. I had expected my female characters to be more accessible, but they were more cautious and still remain a little wary of me. They've probably heard the rumors of how I like to torture my imaginary friends!

But now as I come upon the 35K mark, I’m reaching a place where getting information isn’t such a struggle. When I ask what happens next or when I request a bit of backstory so I can understand some future action, most of my new characters tell me. Some go on at great length, not willing to shut up even when I point out that I have important spreadsheets to work on or an email to answer. For the last two days they’ve taken over my head space every time I’ve quit thinking about the needful things of daily life like work, food, and not getting run over by a bus as I cross the street. They’ve quietly taken over in the way my old “family” used to do.

This doesn’t mean I’m done with my old characters, only that I’m finally achieving the distance from them that I feel every writer needs at some point. It also means I’m finally on a roll with my new WIP. The nightly writing sessions are less of a struggle. I’m no longer forcing myself to write something, anything, just to make a minimum word count for the evening. My characters now spend all day filling my head with stories of past and future adventures, their thoughts, hopes and dreams. My nightly word counts are getting longer and the writing flows more easily.

I’m not out of the woods yet. Characters can be touchy creatures and they could clam up on me at any moment. I might get bogged down in a plot conundrum and the story could suck when it’s all over. But it’s a relief to have pushed past the most critical barrier to find that yes, I can make new characters that are just as real in my mind as the old ones. I can enjoy the ride as a new group of imaginary friends introduce me to their screwed-up world.

I’m finally having fun on my new journey and it looks like it’s going to be a fine adventure, indeed!

So who is occupying your head space today? Old friends or new? Are they real, and are they trying to take over? Will you let them?

World Building and Peak Oil

With apologies to my dear blogfriends who say I make them smile...

For those who read my spec fiction and wonder where I draw my worldbuilding inspiration, there will be a show on the History Channel this Tuesday, November 13. It's called Oil Apocalypse and some info about the show is here.

Petroleum is the bedrock of our current society and it's so much more than just your car! It's food-- fertilizer, tractors, and trucks to ship the stuff to your grocery store. It's home heating oil. In some parts of the country, it's electricity. It's the cheap goods from China that came here on a diesel-fueled ship. It's our military, no matter where they fight or whether you think they should be fighting at all. It's our space program. It's asphalt roads. It's the plane that takes you on vacation or to visit your relatives. It's medicine. It's plastic. Look around you right now and imagine what it would take to replace every plastic item with something made of something else. We'd need rubber (brought by diesel ship), wood (shipped by truck and rail), metal and glass (created in our mostly-defunct factories). Not so simple, is it?

The problem with an oil supply crunch isn't that we can't come up with alternatives but that we aren't. We're not rebuilding our factories and railways, we're not cutting back on use of plastic and petroleum-based fertilizers, and while we're doing better at making solar panels, what are they made of? Yeah. Plastic. When the raw materials get scarce, what's our next plan?

As a nation, we're standing next to the cellar door while the tornado approaches, refusing to take shelter because we don't believe the tornado is real and because going down those stairs might be scary.

I can't speak to whether we'll make the necessary changes in our economy and lifestyle in time to save ourselves from the tornado. But in my fictional world, action came too late and the result was war, disease and a lot of poverty. It didn't happen overnight. People didn't go to bed in the 21st century and wake up to find the lights all out and a medieval world outside their window. The collapse came in fits and starts, with some places doing just fine while others devolved into chaos. Historically, this is how most great societies collapsed, and it's the model I went with for my fictional world.

This isn't a plug for any particular party, politician or policy. I try to keep my blogs non-political. This isn't even a plug for Peak Oil, per se. If you think there's "plenty of time" and it's not our generation's problem, that's your right and privilege. I hope our generation's children and grandchildren feel the same way.

But if you want a better understanding of what prompted me to imagine Will and Diana's world (and for those with access to "Tin Soldier" the world of Amalia and Carina), check out Oil Apocalypse this week. Check your local listings for times.

World-Building Reference

This week I found a reference somewhere (I don’t remember where) to Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong. I did a little investigating, and it’s a fascinating world-building reference for writers of speculative fiction.

It was razed in 1993, but it was basically a high-rise slum, controlled and modified by its inhabitants and subject to its own laws. People added onto the buildings with no attention to building regulations, they dug wells and built plumbing systems that snaked through the alleyways and were subject to no codes. The homes and businesses had no addresses, yet a postal delivery system was developed and postmen left marks by the doors to help them navigate the warren of shops and residences so the mail could be delivered. There were gangs, stores, schools, and medical facilities, all subject to no control from outside political entities. In fact, medical and dental care were supposedly quite good after the Communist takeover of China. Doctors fleeing to Hong Kong without papers ended up in Kowloon, where no one checked your immigration status.

In sum, Kowloon was both an architectural and social entity that built itself, free of outside control. The solutions the people came up with for day-to-day problems and needs are fascinating and a great jump-start for anyone looking for world-building ideas.

Here are some references to get you going:

Kowloon Walled City (article and photos)
Wikipedia entry
City of Darkness (book)

Thinking Bloggers and Thoughts

The incomparable Thomma gave me a Thinking Blogger award! I don't know why (she must have been desperate), but thanks, Thomma!

I don’t do as much thinking and posting here as I probably could, but I’ve been mulling over a worldbuilding issue for awhile, and now is as good a time as any to commit my thoughts to pixels.

Any fiction setting requires some degree of worldbuilding, although the term is used most often in conjunction with science fiction and fantasy because of the complexity of the undertaking. But creating a future version of our own world poses its own set of problems. And setting my stories in a low-tech, post-peak oil future presented some special difficulties for me in terms of character development.

Each of us in American culture makes certain cultural assumptions about the people we meet. We assume a shared knowledge base that includes at least a passing familiarity with Romeo and Juliet, World War II, Gilligan’s Island, the Rolling Stones and pizza, just for starters. There’s a shared understanding that nearly everyone you meet attended a school where children sit at desks in neat rows and learn math, history, science and English. We take it for granted that everyone has been to the movies, watched TV, talked on the phone, ridden in a car, and used a computer.

But in my fictional world, none of these things can be taken for granted for any character under the age of fifty. Now what?

For some of my worldbuilding, I’ve been able to draw on the past: how did people go about growing and preserving food before electricity, for example? But placing such things as iPods in the living memory of my oldest characters posted a dilemma no writer of Victoriana ever faces. Not since the collapse of the Roman Empire in Europe has there been a loss of technology on a grand scale. What would it be like to live through such a happening, or to be the grandchild of someone who lived through it? What would it be like to never have been to school and to never be sure if your radio will pick up a signal today, knowing that your grandmother went to university and had hundreds of TV stations broadcast into her home by satellite? Would you be capable of understanding your grandmother’s experience, or would it sound like a fairy tale?

It’s been a constant challenge to develop characters who are smart, competent and savvy, yet distressingly ignorant of things we take for granted in our own world. In some ways it would be easier to create a true fantasy world because I wouldn’t then have to wrestle with questions like: Should he know who Abraham Lincoln was? Would she recognize a zebra when she saw one, or would she think it was a striped horse?

What would a young, uneducated person raised in the desert think upon seeing their first picture of a lighthouse or the ocean?

Will and Diana found scorpions and birds' nests in the room, but were more interested in the dusty pictures on the walls. "Here's what we need in this country," Diana said, examining a seascape. "Look at all that water! Where do you think it came from?"

"A flood, maybe?"

"Like Noah and the Ark?" Diana considered. "It looks even bigger than the lake we camped at last year. You think it's a real place?"

Will shrugged. "No telling. If I had paint and knew what to do with it, I suppose I could make a picture of anything, whether it was real or not."

I have no words of wisdom on worldbuilding. It’s tricky. It’ll make you crazy. But it can also be fun because it’s your own world and you’re in charge. Shut off the computer, walk out the door, and all bets are off. But right here, right now, the world is yours.

Blogging Writers Who Make Me Think:

Written Wyrdd
Paca True
Allie Boniface
December Quinn
Paperback Writer

Note: I'm not tagging anyone, per se, since so many folks in my circle have already been tagged and I can no longer remember who got tagged and who didn't!