Filler bits and duct tape…
Look, guys, I’ll readily admit I’m the sort of craftswoman who never quite has the parts she needs to do something. Either the particular thread for an embroidery project is not available in my area of the country; or I start off on a complex recipe knowing full well I have saffron in the cabinet, but in the two minute window to find the dang thing, I can’t, and then #2 son admits sheepishly that he in fact broke the bottle and threw away the little envelope inside a month ago. Then there’s the carpentry projects where everything is going fine but a cat walks across the just-varnished table top.
And writing? Well! From not being able to find any bits about the police force in Paris in the reign of Louis XIII, to going nuts looking for how laundry was done in Paris at the same time – to find it years later, in a book called “A panorama of Paris” by Andrew Trout, from finding as I come up to the point that no one can answer my particular question on micro-biology, to discovering that my knowledge of orbital mechanics is insufficient, and none of my resources can answer – there are holes in my universe creation.
But you know what, there are holes in every universe creation. Look guys, let’s be real for a moment: if we knew how to build a time machine, we’d be out doing that, not trying to write a fun and exciting novel about someone who builds a time machine. I daresay the same goes for “if we could actually build an alien life form” “a time space portal” or a hundred other things. (If you can say how laundry was done in the Paris of the musketeers though – yeah, I do know now – you’d best hope and pray you can write an entertaining novel, as well.)
So, how do patch gaping holes in your universe building? And more importantly, how do you do it within genre expectation?
Well, this is going to take several posts. It is, as it were, the meat of writing with found objects.
The first thing you do is – don’t panic. No, seriously, don’t panic. You have your towel, right?
See what I did there?
That sentence above is not funny at all, but you probably smiled, because it invoked The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And it distracted you from the fact that that sentence doesn’t actually say much of anything.
In fact, it met expectations.
So, let’s get into “how to stop up the gaps in your universe with expected bits.”
First of all the common techniques. And then, how to make them uncommon…
1- Give them the old razzle dazzle.
Look, humans – yeah, and us too – are creatures of habit. This means that if you give us what we sort of expect, and handwave us in the right direction, we will fill in the rest of it ourselves.
Say you have a really cool world with flying cars, no one is going to ask how the flying cars work, or what about the future makes the flying cars plausible when they’re not now.
When you’re writing fantasy, no one is going to ask exactly how your female mercenary can heft a sword only men can lift. It’s fantasy. They expect that.
Same with your locked room mystery. Readers know there’s a catch. They’re not going to feel cheat. They’ll feel cheated if you don’t do it.
2- Tell them a truth, before you tell them a lie.
See, I learned this when I was about four and trying to hide some villainy from my mom (the villainy usually involved having given my bread to the dog, but never mind.) If you just told them the straight unvarnished lie, they’d spot it, but if you prefaced it with things they knew were true, they were more likely to believe you. So I’d go “I went down to the garden and… and… the neighbor kids were playing and they went like ‘booom’ and I was startled and dropped the bread, and then the dog ate it.” It went over much better than “I dropped the bread and the dog ate it.” Mom knew the neighbor’s kids were noisy, and she’d got startled by them, herself.
So, if you’re going to tell a lie, wrap it in truth. If your big bad female mercenary is going into battle, have her palms sweat and her stomach feel cold. Your readers have felt this in the past. They’ll be so busy with that they won’t wonder how she can heft that sword.
3- Dance around it. There are specific ways to do this, and we’ll devote way more to this part (actually we’ll devote way more time to each of these) but the accepted way, in science fiction and fantasy is to say something like “Good Lord, man, what do you mean you don’t know how to time travel. I thought they were teaching the Higgins equations in elementary school now. I mean, the whole idea of linear time was pretty well exploded in the twenty second century, wasn’t it?” Then have something really cool and sfnally happen. They’ll never know what hit them.
4- Be aware of how likely people are to catch you out, and if they’re very likely to, then research minutely (it used to be said, if you’re writing about NYC get EVERY address right. If you’re writing anywhere else in the country, consider the percentage of people likely to know you’re wrong). Look, for those of you who have watched Stargate – I don’t know how to put this… but… there are no projects in Colorado Springs. Or rather, let me rephrase that, there MIGHT be subsidized housing somewhere, but it’s likely to be small and in the middle of middle-class housing. There are no huge, half-empty, half-ruined skyscrapers that are used as the worst projects. Look – Colorado Springs is so white bread that diabetics get cautioned before moving here. Yeah, we have a ton of homeless, mostly because we have the best services for them in the region. BUT we don’t have the sort hopeless towers-of-dependency they showed in Stargate.
However people believed it. They believed it because Colorado Springs is a city. And all cities have that. So, there. People filled in the rest of the “big city” feel. They expected that, they accepted it, and only we, poor saps, who live in the place complained. No, Col Springs isn’t that big, but it is what people expect.
5- Beware the strange. Yes, of course you’re going to have original stuff in your world, but beware. The stranger it is, the more you have to explain it/justify it. And to know how strange it is, you have to know the field. Heck, guys, even I who don’t watch TV try to keep up with the major series, like Star Trek and SG1. You have to. Not just because otherwise you reinvent the stone, but because if you’re doing something truly original, you must know so you can introduce it properly.
I’ve mentioned above before that you don’t need to justify flying cars. But say instead of flying cars you have, oh, I don’t know… tunneling vehicles. They dig into the Earth, and just keep on going.
You’d better justify those. Because flying cars are allowed under the “well, Heinlein did it too” but these mole cars of yours have no credibility. You just made them up, didn’t you? You’d better have a good explanation for us!
These are basic techniques for holding your fractured world building together with spit balls and duct tape.
Next up, and for more detail: Silence is golden. How to allow the reader to tell lies for you.
Mad Genius Club 
66 responses to “Writing With Found Objects 3”
Cool, and on target, save for one thing. I have never lived in Co. Springs, I stopped for lunch there one time is all. I wouldn’t have bought the whole ruined towers thing. I never saw the show so I didn’t know about that aspect. But no one who has ever been near there would have bought it. You don’t need to have been a resident
I disagree. For thee, and for me, that would break us out of the narrative in unacceptable ways, but you’ve been around more normal people. Pratchett was right: most people want today to be like yesterday, and for tomorrow to be like today. If a story happens in NYC, and there are crowded streets, oddballs wandering about, and tall buildings, that fits for 95% of humanity’s concept of “New York.” For those who haven’t been to Small Town, KS, USA, it’s easy – as a writer – to sketch in broad strokes. There’re two gas stations in town, the tallest building has three stories (started off as a department store in the ’50s, now it’s an office building with a game store in the back, and a hackerspace in the basement, oddly enough: upscale-ish Small Town, apparently) and the town council finally managed to get the McDonald’s franchise to move farther from the interstate. They want people to stop in town and spend more money, not just zip through for a burger and gas. Bigger places require more strokes, until you start to hitting economies of scale. Just don’t play too much with planets of one biome/climate. Dangerous, that.
The reason I said you had to be careful with NYC in the past — sorry, I should have made that clear — is that EDITORS lived there and they got snerky. So if you wanted to sell a story set there, you had to KNOW it. (Unless your name is Robert A. Hoyt, and that’s something else.)
I’ve got a couple of friends from the City I have read anything I set there. If it doesn’t feel right to them, I tend to rework things. They’re also discerning enough to say, “good enough. You got X, Y and Z, even if it’s obvious you’ve never lived there. Most of your readers won’t know the difference.”
On that note, I’m told one thing that tends to be obvious to a city-dweller is when a writer isn’t. Same friends have complained of that related to a certain wizard in Chicago. The author tends to leave the streets fairly sparsely populated. From my single visit to that city, it seemed to be fairly crowded, pretty much all the time. At least downtown. I understand NYC is the same way. I’ve never lived in a city, so I can’t comment, but that’s one thing I try to keep in mind for my own writing.
Some of that IMO falls under “artistic license”. When Harry’s rushing to stop a rogue genie, do we want to see him stuck in a traffic jam? Oh, I’ve driven in Chicago. [Wink]
Actually, that’s exactly the sort of problem Harry would run into.
And may well have, if I recall correctly. Didn’t he get stuck in traffic trying to flee from a skinwalker at one point?
Actually, you do have to be accurate or you will get emails or comments from folks who know the city or town you’re writing about. Now, it doesn’t mean you have to know what color house sits on the northeast corner of the intersection of Baker and Taylor, but you need to know the main landmarks, restaurants, streets, etc. Even if you are making up a town, you will have folks emailing or commenting that they know the town is really Y-town. Ask Sarah about the folks who have talked to her about their theories on Goldport — and not all of them are right or even close to it.
I just assume those letters (like the ones that loooooove or haaaaaate or scream raaaaccisssssssss) are going to show up anyway. I really only want to fool most of the people most of the time. So yes, major landmarks. Know about the walking mall in downtown Denver (16th? Why is that in my head?) Know that Pike Street is closer to Puget Sound than to Lake Washington. If you go to the Field Museum, mention Sue. I’ve got a story where I’ve cloned a rural logging town in Washington and given it a different name. I’ve started populating it with people that never existed who work at places you can’t find on a map, and I expect I’ll still eventually get word from somebody asking me where they can find O’Leary’s Pub, because they’re pretty sure I based the town on Thusandsuch and they just can’t seem to find the place, but doesn’t that Irish coffee sound delicious?
This is one of those, “do your homework” smacks in the back of the head combined with “it’s about verisimilitude, not reality.” With a twist of “know the rules before you break the rules.” Your setting needs to feel right to the vast majority of your readership. It doesn’t need to be right, just feel right. And you’re not going to satisfy everybody, but if you craft the rest of it well enough, most of your readers aren’t going to care. That said, Google Earth is a great way to get streets and buildings right. Best thing is to write what you know. Second best is to have a close friend who knows the area who can vet your writing. Third best is writing from the time and place. Most often, I find I tend to mix those and stick ’em together with the bailing wire and duct tape of my own imagination. As usual, YMMV.
I have two great examples of how to do this right, Louis L’amour was very good at using real places, and I have actually navigated areas a hundred years later (than when the story happened) by memory of his descriptions in a novel, unfortunately the one time I know of him get geography badly wrong happens to be next to where I live. In all fairness it is only a couple lines, but he either had the mountain range the character lived in growing up wrong, or the river he could look down on from the front porch. I believe it is a simple typo, but it threw me out of the story. Second is the Twilight books, I only read one of them, but I lived in Forks for several years and have to say the author did an excellent job, I couldn’t pick out a single landmark that she got wrong/wasn’t there.
Perhaps the river moved?
I’m given to understand she, too, lived in Forks for several years. You poor, poor people. Western WA does things like that to people. Glad I escaped when I did.
I had to drive all the way out to Forks from Everett to assemble a desk back in my Furniture Assembly days. My stupid dispatcher (In Ohio) didn’t count on the ferry ride involved. He also thought he’d be clever and schedule me for the same day the furniture was to arrive. It didn’t. Not only was the trip and the whole day wasted, but because I didn’t do the work order, the computer didn’t want to reimburse me for the Ferry, or the mileage.
Ont the other hand, Lake Crescent was GORGEOUS.
This is why I like writing fantasy. When it’s an underground city full of dwarves on a planet named
Wealtia I can honestly say that no, they haven’t been there and yes my map is accurate because I drew the damn thing myself and I’M THE AUTHOR DAMMIT!
Just be glad you never worked for traditional publishing, where they’ve been known to correct your made up language. 😛 Just saying.
Movies don’t seem to care much. Big, well known landmarks are always right next to each other if they are needed, like when the hero or the villain needs to get one to the other within the same scene, or if they need to be glimpsed during something like a car chase. And you can always see the Eiffel tower if you are in Paris (been there twice, and I still haven’t seen it). Not to mention the city substitutions, Toronto for New York or what have you. Helsinki used to play Moscow during the 70’s and 80’s, when western film crews could not easily go there for filming, and the two places look nothing alike.
See? There’s the problem right there. Baker ends three blocks before Taylor, because of the park they just planted there. There is no intersection of Baker and Taylor. 🙂
I have heard #3 described as invoking the “Bledovitch Limitation Effect” from a Dr. Who episode. Someone asked the Dr, why, since he had a time machine, he couldn’t just go back in time to prevent something from happening. The Dr. started to explain the Bledovitch Limitation Effect, and just then someone started shooting at them.
Or, in other words, “wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey”.:-D
Now it’s “Fixed Points in Time.” Apparently you can change the little things, but not the big ones.
Which actually works if you consider a model where every decision branches a new universe, and they eventually re-merge when they are similar enough. Which explains lost keys, missing socks, and Deja Vu.
And books I inexplicably finished and forgot all about. Like the medieval romance I don’t even remember STARTING.
I tend to imagine that, when I imagine time travel. Well, it’s fantasy, but most time travel stories are. So, not time lines as much as maybe something like time foam, where the bubbles also merge regularly, there are lots of somewhat to very different parallel ‘presents’ and not only are there several different possible futures, several different pasts can also ultimately result in the same present. You could fit in Atlantis or some other myths I’m fond of in that a bit easier – there is no solid proof to be found, and no actual ruins now because it was real in only one of the pasts, and when the lines merged to produce present most of those got wiped out. 😀
Lately I tend to consider time travel impossible, because there’s no “There” to go back to. All matter in the universe is moving forward in time, and if you hop off the Now Bus, it goes on without you. Whether you find Langoliers or some other universe is up in the air.
Which also leads me to the idea that Gravity is the resistance of mass to moving forward in time, and the big bang was an explosion not so much in space, but in time, sweeping all matter forward in time, but Black Holes are too heavy to jerk forward in time, thus the dilation.
Good advice. I’ll have to use these suggestions to avoid having to be too specific about political issues.
I remember years ago telling a new writer “Stop agonizing over how to make your space station work! SF readers know space stations work. Just get on with the story.”
And then I keep trying to explain magic . . .
One thing that needs to be done for tech in SF, though – it needs to be thought out enough that you can get a reasonable idea of how it will appear to an every day user. Unless, of course, your character is trying to fix it, and then it needs a bit more description of the inner workings.
Several levels of human interaction with tech.
Basic unsophisticated user. Hit button, get cookie.
Advanced user. Read the manual.
Repair tech. This one is junk, this one needs parts, thump this one here, and this one is being used incorrectly.
Manufacturer. This one might be a lower level of detail than repair, depending on the problem, or it might not.
Engineer. The assembly has three widgets of this spec, because tradeoffs.
Scientist nailing down the fundamental principles behind the operation of the device. Again, this may or may not be in increasing order of complexity.
Science and engineering can overlap. Current day engineers are mostly also trained as scientists.
Note that I have neglected sales, ROI, and economic impact of a given bit of tech, so I am probably being very cursory.
If anyone here reads Japanese, Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei might be a good example of detailed world building in the magic system as applied to several of these levels of tech interaction.
I’m going to have that ‘fix it’ problem. I’m afraid I just described my main character as being something like mr. Scott in Star Trek, and I know bloody nothing about tech, or machinery, or how things work, and much less how one might fix things. Or maintain engines. Or anything.
And I’m planning sequels. I’m screwed. And he’d need to turn an ancient sublight vehicle FTL capable in the next story I’m planning.
Yep. Totally screwed.
I’m sure there are plenty of people around here who will offer assistance with suggestions of how to do tech stuff for various needs.
One of my main difficulties with that is letting go of the “inherently plausible, because I can see the direct path of innovation that will get us there” requirement that my brain has for such things. It makes it difficult to just wing it and throw out something that sounds interesting, because I keep wanting to know how it got there.
Space tape, always remember your space tape. If you can figure out why to plausibly have an equivalent to baling wire on space ship you can fix anything with space tape and baling wire.
And reverse the polarities?
No you’re not. A) It’s a dance of distraction. Dance faster. B) would you please sign up for Facebook, already? You can ask any tech questions in my diner (the conference of my fans) and you’ll get answers.
I’m a bit scared of facebook, I’ve been trying to figure out the rules with it.
But I’ll do that. Maybe this weekend, I’m not working. 🙂
I don’t know how active the Sarah’s Diner board on Baen’s Bar is. The Bar should be much safer to sign up on than Facebook. If there is any liveliness to it at all, there should be people able and willing to help you get things hashed out.
If the civilization of your engineer is much like ours, than service manuals should be an option. Both as a tool for him to use, and a way for you to get some idea of what might be going on in diagnosis and solution.
Relevant English terms include troubleshooting and component swapping.
I don’t know what your neighborhood is like. Perhaps there is a friendly machine shop or university engineering program. There are videos of manufacturing processes on youtube.
Rudyard Kipling’s poem, The Secrets of the Machines. (Kipling’s Sons of Martha describes well the human side of the equation, but if I’m limited to one, it would be secrets of the machines.)
One nice example of a repair in Science Fiction is in John Ringo’s To Sail A Darkling Sea. It is in the preview on the Baenebooks website. Another, perhaps harder to track down, would be in E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s Spacehounds of IPC. (IIRC. Much of his stuff is pretty good on the tech end, even if some of the physics are impossible.)
Thanks.
I used to visit Baen’s Bar, but it was quite a long time ago. Dropped out when the look changed at one point and it became more difficult for me to read on the small screen I had then. I do have a bit bigger one now, so maybe I wouldn’t have that problem anymore.
Yeah — I’m not much there, because there’s only so much I can do.
How will I find you on facebook, by the way?
Sarah A. Hoyt. I know, I know. Cryptic. If you tell me your name, I’ll friend you and pull you into the diner too.
Heh. Very cryptic. Okay, I guess I will manage that, provided you don’t have scores of full name namesakes there. And thanks again. I finished the novel I was working on, what is left is editing, so maybe I can manage to do some other things now too.
I can’t speak for Tom, and it has been a few years since I have been on. However, if I was you, and was going to take it to a place on the Bar other than Sarah’s Diner, I would consider the Kratskeller.
Depends on the point of the magic. Sanderson’s First Law (a hero’s ability to solve problems with magic is directly proportional to the reader’s understanding of that magic) places magic firmly into the realm of plot device. As evidenced by most of his work, actually. It also requires magic to be fairly well systematized, and – in my opinion – often removes the sense of wonder from fantasy. That just means (if you want to explain the magic, or the story requires it) that the writer gets to wander farther afield to maintain the wonder of the setting.
Incidentally, just finished Outcasts and Gods last night. Greatly enjoyed it, and writing up a review to go on my blog in the near future. Looking forward to more.
It occurs to me only now that you may have been using “magic” in a more metaphorical sense…
I set myself a challenge. One world with “magic” scientifically hand waved, and another world with “real” magic and actual gods and stuff. The first is Outcasts and Gods, and the sequels, where “magic” is just shorthand for a bunch of genetically engineered hand wavium. The other is my YA fantasy _Demi God_.
When it comes to magic, I think setting rules and limits, and sticking to them, works. Changing the rules every time you need a new way for the hero to get out of a problem tends to get the book TAW.
IMO the problem with “Magic” (and High Tech to a degree) is that the author has to somehow show the reader that there are limits to the magic/High Tech.
For example, if you are using “Nano-tech” in the story, you don’t want the reader to think that you’ll use it as a “magic wand” to get your characters out of trouble.
The Lord Darcy stories were very good at this. While magic was real in the Lord Darcy world, Randall Garrett was able to show what magic could and could not do so the reader didn’t expect (for example) a locked room mystery to have been done by a “magic spell”.
I’m not sure this is a problem, as much as it may be a challenge. The nature of which depends a great deal on the kind of story you’re writing. If it’s a fairy tale, a la Grimm, et al, magic has a great deal more in the way of latitude. Even then, there are rules. Things happen in threes, always help the nice old lady, don’t eat anything offered by the fae, etc. But those aren’t SF/F in the same way most of the genre is. For most fantasy, magic is another means of solving problems and doing work. A method that has its own costs and its own rules, and most especially its own limitations. The story isn’t about the magic, per se (though it often seems to be) but about the characters and how they’re dealing with whatever problem they’re dealing with. In the example of the closed room mystery, the victim is shot at close range, a pistol is found near the body, and yet there are no fingerprints on the gun. Magic! Perhaps, but the problem is still one of how to bring the killer to justice.
Not this Sanderson, just to be clear. No relation.
secondly, that whole series is terrific. Be prepared to lose time and sleep 😉 Pam’s writing just gets better as you go on, and it was pretty good in the first one!
Agreed. I’m still writing the review, and then I need to review Chuck Gannon’s Fire With Fire while it, too, is still fresh.
I’ll be reviewing Pam’s series – I was going to do just Black Goats, but I wound up reading all of them. I really need to read Chuck’s book – it’s been on the shelf for ages.
Hmm, I don’t keep up with the trends–with the exception of Pacific Rim, all television and movie sf/f left me behind long ago. Now I dream my own dreams without glum, stick-thin models in leather clogging them up.
Maybe I should check tv tropes to see if I’m reinventing the wheel.
I don’t watch TV, but I have husband and friends who do, and they tell me about it…
Well, I do sometimes pick up on really well hidden stuff, and ask questions. But generally, when I do that I’m aware it isn’t important, and I don’t really care.
Of course, sometimes while doing that I come up with an explanation that works for me, fits inside the lines, and maybe even works for other people.
I guess I’m going to need to watch SG1 again, and see how much of it relied on those bits of CS you mention.
Best piece of advice I ever got from a writing seminar: use the term “modified” to head off the determined experts. He was referring to guns, but I figure it works with history, guns, habitats, South African fish ….
It’s all modified. By the Shift. So don’t tell me I got the trigger wrong.
Just look at the original Mission: Impossible. The logistics of what the IMF is doing are often not possible. But the matter-of-fact way they depict it, with all the crawling in air ducts and fiddling with wires, makes it *look* plausible.
I’m rolling these around in my head and pondering. Mapping out my ‘blue collar space’ universe I’ve been struggling with getting the world building into stories without writing a manual. Pondering.
Another thing you can do is always write the manual, and then not put any of it in the story. Same thing with magic in a fantastic world. So long as you know how it all works, you’re good. Only give the reader as much as he needs to understand at any given point in the book.
That’s what I’ve done with the Azdhagi and later, when I tweaked European history to make Rada Ni Drako’s Earth. I have a full set of Encyclopedia Galactica articles about various things, plus the list of places I tweaked and how that changed history. It keeps things plausible for me, but my readers don’t need to know, aside from the occasional aside, like the monarch of England in 2010 being Queen Sonia, or Czechoslovakia still existing.
I’ve done/am doing a fair bit of that, in all three of my current concepts. It does help a great deal with continuity and internal consistency. Not to mention believability for me (I’ve got to ‘believe’ the world works to keep working in it).
I guess I’m just struggling with the shorthand for the readers. Spending some time reviewing authors and seeing how it’s been handled before. And waiting patiently (Really, this is patient. What?) for Sarah’s next installment.
Writing that sf I just finished getting started was the big problem. I still need to cut several pieces of probably unnecessary infodumps from the beginning. But when I started writing I couldn’t get going without putting them there.
I’m struggling with an aspect of this myself. The magic in my fantasy world is based(ish) on real physical sciency type looking stuff. None of it is quite right but if you squint hard enough after banging your head against a wall you can see the Laws of Conservation and certain types of chemical laws as well. Assuming anyone ever actually reads the book(s) someone is going to want an explanation and someone else is gonna chew my hindquarters out for fudging the details. *SIGH* I suppose I’ll just have to take my medicine.
Colorado Springs barely qualifies as a city.
If it has a stoplight it qualifies as a city. If it has a roundabout it is a city run by progressives.
<cries as to what happened to the village she grew up in.
Sniffles. Would you believe TWO roundabouts?
As well as stack-a-prole buildings in every former wheat field. That's also a prog thing. individual homes give people IDEAS. you must stack them.
It takes more than ten minutes to get from the airport to the hospital in non-rush hour. The Springs is a city. Lamar and La Junta?
Grrr. That should read “Lamar and La Junta? Not so much.
Too much effort to answer the troll on the way to banning, no?
Arachnothera has come in determined to insult us and prove we’re hicks, or something. Which again shows she’s really weak on thinking for herself and research.
Honey child Arachnothera, I grew up in Porto, Portugal and I’ve been to/lived in large cities in Europe and elsewhere. The Springs is a nice place to raise kids. It also is a city with probably a quarter million inhabitants, including the suburbs. And you, dear Arachnothera, are still a provincial buffoon with an inability to think for yourself.
Gee, what happened? Did you get tired of trying to pick a fight with me the other day? Too bad you didn’t pay any attention to what I, as well as others, said. If you want to take part in the discussion here, discuss. One line throwaways like this, especially when they are so easily disproved, isn’t acceptable. So either grow up and learn how to think and express yourself or go back to your rock and stay there. This is your last warning. Ban hammer is about to fall.