How To Write Magical Words: A Writer's Companion

by Unknown

  So how powerful do you want your gods to be? This depends entirely on how the story needs to play out. There’s nothing wrong with using a god as a character, or for human characters to call upon and employ a god’s power. But think about that whole omnipotence problem I mentioned earlier. If your god is so powerful that he can do anything and everything, it might not make a lot of sense for him to bother with sending others to do his bidding. Takes more energy that way, you know. If you do come up with a reason for an omnipotent being to take the long way around to reach his ultimate goal, be sure you make it clear in the narrative.

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  David B. Coe

  The related issue that I deal with when creating alternate worlds is whether I want my gods and goddesses to interact with the human world, as they do in, say, Greek mythology, or in Guy Kay’s Fionavar books. Or, on the other hand, whether they should be more stand-offish; more along the lines of "I/we created the world; our work here is done . . ." I love the idea of the interactive gods, but I always shy away from it because I think it would be very difficult to do well.

  Stuart Jaffe

  There’s also the idea that there is no real god in your world. I don’t mean atheism (which is certainly one way to go) but rather having people worship and believe in a god or gods, but there isn’t one in the world beyond their belief. Or perhaps there are gods in the world but the ones people are praying to don’t exist. I realize the non-existent god angle takes away from the "I’m writing fantasy and want my gods to play" aspect but, for example, in my WIP I have two strongly religious characters locking horns because they are convinced theirs is the real god. In the case of my tale, they both can’t be right, so much conflict is created.

  A.J. Hartley

  Great points, Misty. You pinpoint the idea that religion as we actually experience it is usually a conglomeration of ideas and traditions which have evolved over a long time. Much of the traditions around angels clearly don’t really come from a theology in which omnipotence is central. I like my fictional religions like my actual religions: each with a range of beliefs and traditions rather than an absolute position.

  Faith Hunter

  The problem I have with fantasy books that have an ultimate evil presented as antagonist, (you know, the evil thing that is taking over the world and killing everything) is that there is usually no ultimate good to balance it out. The writer leaves out any question of a good god to balance out the bad god. Mankind (or a man [pick your religious savior archetype]) saves the day, all alone, and I get tired of the ultimate evil, David vs. Goliath scenario. And let’s face it, mankind will never fight evil because true evil is too smart to look evil. Evil (true evil) looks good, looks safe, looks appealing. Adolph Hitler looked good to his followers. They didn’t think, "Let’s go to the dark side today." Mass murderers we’ve met through the TV screen don’t wear bones in their hair or shirts made of human skin. Pedophiles carry candy or pictures of lost puppies. They look . . . ordinary. Not the true evil they are.

  Dang it, I got on my "evil" soapbox, didn’t I?

  Emily Leverett

  I’m a Christian, and I know that is important to me . . . but I don’t find it necessary to have Christ or Christianity in every book I write. Religion varies by world and reading books about fantasy religions doesn’t offend me. I also have no interest in writing for the "Christian" market (for a list of reasons, the biggest being I’m sure that they wouldn’t want me).

  I do, however, feel obligated by my beliefs to characterize some things as good and some as evil. (i.e. ultimate selfishness at the expense of others lives, etc. is evil and the willingness to admit guilt or take responsibility is often good). Now this is, of course, my own limit. But Misty’s post made me think about how my own experiences with religion affect my writing, and my writing of religion.

  A.J. Hartley

  Emily’s second point is an interesting one and worthy of a post in itself. I feel a strong impulse to convey something of my own world view, my own ethics and morality in my books. It may not always be obvious, but it’s there. I’m not sure I could stop doing this if I tried, but if I did I’d begin to wonder why I was writing.

  With Worldbuilding, Every Detail Counts

  David B. Coe

  In many ways I consider the background work I do for my characters, and the work I do for my worlds to be very similar. I was trained as a historian—I’ve got the Ph.D to prove it. And I believe that if my academic background has done nothing else for me, it has at least given me an appreciation of the complexity and richness of the human past and its influence on today’s world.

  People—characters—are, at least in part, the product of where they come from: their family background, their upbringing, their past experiences. Nations—or kingdoms, if we’re in an epic fantasy setting—are, at least in part, the product of their histories: wars they’ve won or lost, political movements and their aftermath, great men and women who shaped cultural trends. A person’s religious background can play a role in defining her outlook on life; a nation’s religious heritage can do the same for its society. Someone can be influenced by the books he reads or the music he hears or the art he loves; a society can be influenced by its artistic, literary, and musical luminaries. The similarities are unmistakable.

  When I do my worldbuilding, I try to take all these elements, and others, into account. Just as I develop detailed backgrounds for my characters, I create histories and cultures for my worlds. I usually start with a map, and I spare no detail.

  My historical work was in environmental history, and so I’m quite conscious not only of how human activity has impacted the earth, but also how climate and terrain shape human behavior—patterns of settlement, economic activity, even cultural expression. I then work out political histories, focusing on relations between kingdoms or nations (wars, treaties, etc.) and, at least for the most important of my countries, internal events (successions of kings, or changes in forms of government—that sort of thing). I work out economic issues—if one country is located along the coast and another is up against a mountain range and a third is in a desert, they’re going to have different economic specialties and needs, right? What does this mean for trade and relative wealth? I develop religious traditions, often several. How do peoples and institutions tied to the various faiths get along with one another? Was religious tension the cause of the aforementioned wars, or did it have more to do with trade or territorial concerns?

  And then there is some of the nitty-gritty detail that can make the difference between a world that seems flat and boring, and one that comes alive for the reader. What kinds of musical, artistic, literary, and dramatic cultural traditions does each nation have?

  A lot of this worldbuilding happens not in those early days when I’m doing background work for the book or books, but as I’m writing, when I discover a need. For instance, in Rules of Ascension, the first book of my Winds of the Forelands series, I have an important character, an assassin, who sings both for his daily bread and as a way of concealing his true profession. Creating the music that he and his partner sang was tremendous fun. I believe that it also enhanced the other aspects of my worldbuilding, giving the world another dimension that readers might not have missed had it not been there, but which they appreciated nevertheless. In my first series, the LonTobyn Chronicle, I mention a literary figure from the world’s past who, I think, serves a similar purpose. I’ve also used small historical events—things that really have no bearing on the main narrative but that add to the richness of the world—to do much the same thing.

  And really, that’s the point. Take a look at the books of Guy Gavriel Kay, or Frank Herbert, of J.R.R. Tolkien or J.K. Rowling. Part of what makes their worldbuilding so strong is the extensive background work they do before they begin writing their tales. But part of it is also the stray detail that gets thrown in, seemingly as an afterthought. Those details hint at a larger, richer, more complex world. They can make the difference between
a world being merely the setting for a story and it being a place that readers feel they visit each time they open your book.

  So when you’re doing your worldbuilding, don’t limit yourself to just the big events and trends. Take a little time, either beforehand or as you write, to include smaller, more subtle stuff. These details may not change the trajectory of your story; they don’t have to. If they make your readers feel that your world is a living, breathing place, they will have served their purpose.

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  Faith Hunter

  Worldbuilding has to be done in every genre, but I had no idea what it meant to do real worldbuilding when I was writing in the mystery field. I totally subconsciously thought (in the back of my oh-so-superior mystery/thriller writing mind) that it would be easy. I’d just be making stuff up, right? (Slaps own foolish head.) So not right. I’d read fantasy for years (read your first series straight through long before we ever met) and had not stopped to consider what would be involved.

  And then I tried to write my first fantasy . . .

  I learned fast that it was anything except easy, with the threads of life and society not just involved in the process (as in mystery), but changed, bent, intertwined, rewoven into a whole new cloth. Every new thing introduced in the imaginary world affected every other thing. And I was writing about Earth. (Okay, an alternate Earth, but still.) My mystery writing brain took a beating. I wish I’d had your post before I started. Or . . . maybe not. I may have never tried to write fantasy. And I am so glad I did!

  David B. Coe

  Thanks for the comment, Faith. Having read your work it certainly seems that you mastered worldbuilding pretty quickly. Your initial point, though, is well taken. Worldbuilding is more involved in our genre, but it happens in all writing to some degree. Sometimes we’re bringing to life a place and time from our own world’s past. Sometimes we’re creating a "present". But whatever we’re doing, we are always trying to evoke a sense of place. Your book, Blackwater Secrets, does that brilliantly. It’s our world, not an alternate one. But it’s a part of the country few of us know as intimately as you do (the Bayou, for those unfamiliar with the book), and you make it come alive in so many ways. Creating a setting is really just another way of saying "worldbuilding."

  Daniel R. Davis

  I’ll mention the other side of the coin; knowing when to stop. I’ve read books before that I put down and never went back to because the writer didn’t know when enough was enough on the detail. Sometimes a story can be lost in world info and minutiae. There are times when I don’t really care about what kind of tobacco a character is smoking or where it comes from or what special time it’s harvested or how it’s harvested or who has to harvest it with special contraptions and why. Sometimes I just want to get back to the story.

  David B. Coe

  An excellent point, Daniel. There’s nothing wrong with developing lots and lots of detail about our worlds or our characters. Authors need to know far more about the background of their books than they ever show their readers. But that last part is key. Just because you know everything imaginable about Herjean shipbuilding, doesn’t mean your readers should be forced to read everything imaginable about it . . .

  Fantasy Language

  Faith Hunter

  I was asked recently, by an unpublished writer, the seemingly innocent and easy question, "How do I go about creating a fantasy language?" That got me to thinking, which my hubby would say is a very dangerous thing.

  When a writer starts from scratch for a language, they have to know a bit about the world they are creating. Okay, they have to have to have the world down pat. Language has to come near or at the end of the world creation. Here’s why: In English, we have only a few words for frozen precipitation, and a lot of them contain the same words: sleet, freezing rain, snow, ice, hail, snowflakes, and uh . . . frozen precipitation, which is where I got started on this. The Inuit’s have many more. Why? Because their survival depends on an exact wording for the different kinds of frozen precipitation. So in creating a language, I have to know about the survival requirements of my world.

  If I am creating a desert world, there will different names for the different winds, the rare seasonal rains, the names of clothing for sun protection, wind protection, traveling. The names for predators and the weapons that kill them. There will be names for things that grow there, on this alien world, that may not grow here. Plants that can last in the desert heat, grow on little water.

  I remember the first time I heard of breadfruit, a fruit that tastes like bread, I suppose, and I wondered why call it breadfruit? The people there have no grains . . . but the Europeans who "discovered" the land had grain, so they named the fruit what they chose, not what the native peoples called it. Bread was a survival food.

  For language, I have to know about the sexual interaction between the sexes. If this is an alien world, then there may be three or four sexes. There may be a totally different manner of procreation.

  I have to know the conflict of the plot line too, of course. So for me, the language would come last. And frankly, to keep readers from getting lost, I’d use English in different ways, with different syntax, rather than create a language. Remember the Jedi warrior, Yoda, the little green guy? "Lost to you, Luke Skywalker, is hope." English with different organization of phrases and words is ofttimes more effective than starting from scratch.

  But then, in my fantasy worlds, I always just used an alternate reality Earth, which makes it so much easier. Lazy? Probably.

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  Todd Massey

  Introducing new language into a novel is a tricky line to walk. It can easily make or break a story. Too much and it bogs a story down by making the reader work too hard. Just the right mix and it can help transport you deeper into the world. Some invented words can crossover into the real world and end up embedded in our culture.

  Of course, it isn’t just fantasy that can benefit or suffer from invented words, science fiction is another realm that often has to use invented words. When an author reaches into the future you can get a few subtle words that help to transport you like "Robotics" (courtesy of Isaac Asimov). This simple word did not exist in our world before he invented it for his Robot short stories, yet it clearly conveyed its own idea and did not halt the reader or break him out of the story.

  Love it or hate it A Clockwork Orange is one of those novels that both works and does not work because of language issues. It is so saturated with a "foreign" future language that many people are bogged down and turned off by it. But the following phrase is actually pretty clear, even though most of the important words are "foreign"—"to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood." If you happen to have been fluent in Russian you might have picked up on some of the words Anthony Burgess "invented" since many of them came from Slavic speak, although slightly altered. While the book can be hard to read, he wanted to convey what actually happens to our language as time passes. Plus, these were young street thugs that speak their own language.

  I think new languages/words are important for F&SF worlds to help set them apart and fully envelop the reader. It is up to the writer to masterfully and slowly drip the words into the reader’s brain so that learning the new language is a natural learning progression within the confines of the story.

  David B. Coe

  I tried creating a new language for my first series and just sucked at it. What I came up with was totally random—based pretty much on what sounded good, as opposed to what made sense. I don’t have a linguistics background and I really needed one to do what I was trying to do.

  I agree with you that the best way to make the language of a book feel different—to have it reinforce the worldbuilding—without becoming something overly complicated and forced, is to find creative uses of the English language. That’s how I tried to handle it in the Forelands books and now in the Southlands trilogy. The way people speak is informed by the way they live; the way they conceive of
their world, the imagery they draw upon when talking or thinking about their lives comes from the realities that surround them. Climate, the imperatives of finding food and water and shelter, whether they are at war or living in peace: all of these things shape the way they communicate.

  Harry Markov

  I’m curious how, even if you create a language (a task I want to do for one of my worlds) it can be used. I mean since the book is written in English, how can you apply a new language?

  Any ideas?

  Faith Hunter