Making the Foreign Familiar

One of the more interesting challenges I faced when I was writing Impaler is something that tends to happen to anyone writing historical fiction - although fantasy and science fiction suffer from it to a lesser extent. Basically, people have a tendency to assume that other times and places, real or imagined, are pretty much like they are now but with different clothes, magic, spaceships, or swords.

Heck, this is something that gets people into trouble now, with cultures as apparently similar as different regions in the USA, the USA and Australia, Canada and the USA, or New Zealand and Australia. It gets worse the more differences there are between where you're writing from (or reading from) and where/when the book is set.

Let's face it, fifteenth century Eastern Europe might as well be a different universe.

I know Sarah rants periodically about authors who'll have a servant buying baby-blue blankies in a medieval marketplace, and I really did not want to be on the receiving end of that rant. And that's really just the start.

Dave and Sarah know this, because I hammered them with all manner of weird questions early on, mostly about "stuff" - 15th century Wallachia wasn't a wealthy principality, and it had armies looting their way through the place on a pretty regular basis, so I needed to have a clear idea what kind of furniture there'd be, what the everyday plates and things would be made of compared to the best quality, what people of different ranks wore (fabrics and colors as well as styles), what would be considered the height of luxury at the time, and what kinds of food would be served at a regular meal compared to a feast. Not to mention what would be a treat for small children, and a whole host of other details.

Google got a heavy workout for a lot of this, and Dave and Sarah fielded more questions than any sane person should (thanks, by the way). There are no "Everyday life in 15th Century Wallachia" books out there, or I'd have bought them.

Mostly what I found were tidbits. Comments by bemused travelers of the period that even though Bucharest was ransacked and burned to the ground every few years the survivors rebuilt in wood (the place was in the middle of a huge forest at the time - wood was presumably the most accessible building material). The main streets 'paved' with wooden slabs where side roads were packed dirt. Somewhere else I found a mention that in winter everyone from the highest rank to the lowest wore sheepskin coats and boots for warmth. Information about what plants were native and what was introduced when. Domesticated animals (mostly sheep and pigs) and wild animals. When forks were introduced.

All the information went into a kind of mental map of what Vlad Dracula's world looked like, even though he's only in it for maybe a third of the book - and spends most of that time planning his southern campaign and carefully manipulating his boyars (the ones I mentioned in my blog spree - was it only 2 weeks ago? - as unscrupulous backstabbers with a well-known propensity for unseating princes and often murdering them as well) so that they're both afraid of finding themselves 'enjoying' the view from a stake and grateful for his generosity.

Then there's the culture. At that time, the culture was predominantly an honor-shame culture where appearances mattered. Vlad couldn't just be a fair, generous ruler - he had to show it as well. That meant calculated gestures of mercy, as well as placing himself at risk by not eliminating those he knows are traitors: instead, Vlad tries to arrange for those men to die in battle, which was considered an honorable death, and meant that he didn't need to make new enemies by executing the dead man's family as well - and gave him a chance of winning the loyalty of the dead man's heirs. Similarly, he had to show courage in battle despite the risk of getting himself killed (This doesn't seem to have been an issue: Vlad is reported to have led charges and taken the most dangerous role in more than a few of the battles he was in).

It was also a very male culture. Women fell mostly into the traditional roles - maiden, mother, whore and crone. In noble culture, women were effectively invisible: while they weren't sequestered the way they were in the Ottoman Empire, they had their part of the palace or manor where they and their servants did what was considered the female work.

To Vlad, the women's lives are an alien world - his last real encounter with female roles was when he left the nursery at the age of five and started training as a warrior and nobleman. Apart from his wife and his young sons' nurse, the women in the palace are irrelevant to him. It certainly never occurs to him to question this segregation - it's simply how things are. His decision to leave young Vlad in the nursery for longer than usual is one of his few unusual 'domestic' choices (He wants to protect his two young sons, and doesn't want to leave his sickly youngest boy with no company).

It's all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that women in that time would respond as a modern woman would to that environment when for them it was how things worked. As often as not the wife was independent in her domain, as well as managing the entire estate when her husband was away at war - a situation that was far from rare. Since most noble marriages were arranged and usually political as well, love wasn't common (and it was very common for the husband to keep one or more mistresses - and to some extent it was expected that a virile man would need a mistress or two). Try portraying that sympathetically in today's world!

I hope I got a good balance with the way I portrayed Vlad in Impaler, but I guess March will be when I find out.

When is a change really a change?

(note: my Internet access is going to be a bit intermittent for the next while - I'll do my best to get to comments in a reasonable time but it could be a day or so before I respond - Kate)

We're all familiar with the idea that characters need to change during the course of a story, short or long, but what actually is change? I don't know about you, but I get kind of tired of books where the main character goes through hell but at the end of the book MC hasn't changed a damn thing.

I'm talking - obviously, about the kind of change that's not physical. Scars, lost weight, gained muscle, and in extreme cases missing appendages... those aren't the kind of changes that matter. The character has to have learned something about who they are, and learned it the hard way.

This isn't something to take lightly. A couple of weeks back I commented that almost everyone fights learning about themselves like this, and resists changing. It's going to take a crisis that threatens something the MC cares for to push that kind of change - like in DarkShipThieves, where Athena fights to keep her view of the way things work every step of the way, but it takes her love for Kit to push her to actually change her beliefs.

Or Dragon's Ring, where Meb is left completely rootless, having lost everything. In that situation, traumatized as she is, she's more open to changing her core beliefs because there's nothing left of what she had - and even then she fights it.

The fact is, the open-minded person who examines their beliefs and assumptions and re-evaluates if there's something out of kilter is only a little easier to find than a living dodo. Most people fight thinking about anything, much less anything as personal and close as that.

So how do you push your characters into it? What makes them change?

When you look at what, historically, inspires change in people it tends to be either some kind of traumatic event - not necessarily the end of the world: divorce can do it, as can losing one's job - or a process of little bits of evidence gradually building to the point where something has to give (like a mid-life crisis). Not surprisingly, since the former is more dramatic that tends to be what gets used a lot in fiction.

The usual method is to determine the things that are most important to the MC, and take them away, preferably by either the machinations of the villain or - and this is particularly effective if you can make it work without a plot that requires every character to have the intelligence of a cauliflower (which may be unfair to cauliflowers) - as a knock on effect from something the MC did.

Some examples of well-managed character change: Vimes through the course of the Ankh-Morpork Watch books, and Carrot. (By comparison, Rincewind remains unchanged - he's the Eternal Coward, which makes him funny as all get-out, but best handled as the observer to the character who does change - which is mostly how PTerry writes him).

Athena and Kit, in DarkShip Thieves. Tom, in Sarah's Shifter books.

Meb and Finn in Dave's Dragon's Ring.

Who else can you think of?

Adding Color / Society for the Encouragement of Cruelty to Characters

Reading some fantasy recently, I came across in insane character. He was only slightly insane - and he also knew he was insane. Not that I have never read insane characters before, just not for a while.

It made me realise that there is so much scope to add color to characterization. Joe Abercrombie did some interesting things in his series, particularly with his crippled Inquisitor-type character. In this case the extra dimension was the pain and physical impairment that the character had to continually deal with (JA also altered the prose between character sections to give them a distinct feel. Nicely done.).

We take it for granted in modern society that 'pain free' is normal. You don't need to go back more than one or two generations to find people who just carried on with chronic pain, toothache . . .whatever. My mother was like that. She would just shrug her shoulders and say 'It will work itself out, eventually.'

Yet despite this - and that fact that almost all fantasy is set in medieval/historical settings - pain and discomfort are rarely mentioned.

You don't want to go too far and overwhelm the reader with an in-your-face setting that is just too grim to enjoy, but little touches can go a long way to make characters distinct for the reader.

Outcasts and aliens - people on the outside of society are always fun as well. This immediately adds conflict, both internal and external.

This all just goes to prove how damn sadistic authors are. So far I have made my potential characters insane, then given them chronic pain and introduced them to Albert Camus. At least I haven't broken their hearts - yet. MuahahahahaHAHA!!

So what other interesting elements of characterization have you explored? How have you tortured your poor characters lately?

Progress, of a sort

Thursday through Sunday: Well, the last few days someone turned off the valve and slowed the information to a trickle. I'm not sure why - possibly it's the day job ramping up again for the next phase of the Neverending Project (I seem to get a lot of these. I think someone 'likes' me). At any rate the most I've gotten in a few days is that Milord Alvar is quite willing to hold out as long as necessary until I get his name right. And Millie finds this very amusing.

The Evil Prince has yet to show himself, although I have the weird feeling that he's there, he's just still buried somewhere in my subconscious. Based on past experience, this probably means I'll wake up one morning with him kibitzing with some of my other villains - all of whom are certifiably evil psycho bastards (so are most of my heroes - the difference is the heroes tend to fight it rather than revel in it). This does not reassure me at all - and anyone who knows what my villains are like will be cringing at the prospect.

Monday: So after days of silence, I get a major dump courtesy Subconscious Data Delivery - a service about as reliable as a two-bob watch - when I start drifting to sleep. It proceeds to haunt my dreams, and I'm still processing what emerged.

To start with "Seraph" is the royal family name - only it's actually a corruption of a much older title that related to the ship that crashed on the planet in the first place. I have no idea what that title was, but it applied to the people who had been genetically engineered to have the Engineering gift - the rapport with machinery. There's a vague sense that the gift was essential to keeping people alive initially, so those who had it became a kind of nobility during the time the accidental colony struggled to survive. It's translated to a sense that it's very wrong to have any kind of "useful" ability and not use it in the service of one's people.

His Royal Horribleness is a little clearer: physically he could be Milord Alvar's twin. They're cousins through most of the branches of the family lines back to the common ancestors, although it never got closer than second or third cousin, I think. The royal family has full time geneologists keeping track of who is where in the accepted line of inheritance. It doesn't help that they all tend to use the same given names - generally honoring particularly notable ancestors. Who, of course, are shared all over the family trees of the extended royal family. The Emperor is His Imperial Majesty Arthur James William Seraph, Twenty-Fifth of the Name, Forty-Second of the Dynasty, Lord of Eldarsund, Defender of the Holy, etc etc (the full list of titles goes on for half a page or thereabouts).

The Evil Prince is only "Royal", not "Imperial" because he's not confirmed as the heir, only presumed to be as the closest male line relative.He rejoices in a similar list of titles, most of them courtesy titles attached to being the heir presumptive. The names that matter are William James Albert Seraph. Milord Alvar shares all but one of them - his family name is William Arthur James Seraph. Without all the extraneous titles, he's generally known as Will Seraph, Lord Alvar - or just Lord Alvar. I think he's a little older than HRHorrible - no more than a year older.

HRHorrible is straight out of Evil-Bastard-Central - which seems to be where my subconscious lands no matter what I do. Even in my lighter stuff there's elements of it. Hell, Milord Alvar is just as much a product of Evil-Bastard-Central, only he chooses to control that aspect of his personality where HRHorrible doesn't.

Millie is the catalyst. She's the wild card that kicks off the whole sequence, and to some extent part of Milord Alvar's redemption. Oh, and she's the cause of the ending of book 1. She's found one of HRHorrible's 'playhouses' and - naturally - goes in there to free the women (in a permanent and lethal fashion if necessary. Yes, HRHorrible is that perverted. I'm not sure how I'm going to make that work without overdoing the ick or backing off too much from it). Milord Alvar finds out, and goes charging in to "rescue" her - not only does she not need rescuing, she ends up back-to-back with him fighting off MRMorrible's henchmen. While the whole place is sinking into lava, since the only way Millie could get the slaves out was to disable the damping systems in the complex. Several of the henchmen find out what it's like to become a carboniferous anomaly in a volcanic deposit.

Of course - as those of you who know how my mind works have probably already figured out - HRHorrible isn't the main villain. I'm not sure who is, except that it's someone who's around in a minor role in book one, apparently something of a non-entity. I'm not sure Milord Alvar and Millie know who he is by the end of book one: only that he exists.

HRHorrible... think cold, arrogant, superior, convinced the rest of the world exists to serve him. Constantly looking for something to "entertain" him - and growing more depraved and decadent with each new amusement he contrives. Nucking futz, but in that kind of cold, rational, self-interested way that's a hell of a lot more frightening than ranting and raving crazy. The only thing I'm sure about is that the Ultimate Nasty is worse. The Ultimate Nasty is convinced he's doing the things he does for the Greater Good...

Religion. This is a religious society. I'm not sure they were terribly religious when they crashed on this world, but they sure as hell are now. Something about surviving by the grace of god and the quality of one's mechanical expertise will do that. The general ethos is along the lines of God helps those who help themselves mixed with if God gave you the gift it's a sin not to use it for society. Sorta-kinda-Christian based, although not really recognizable as such any more - although the hellfire and brimstone part is very familiar, since they live with it all the time. At some point the idea that they're there to "redeem" their world crept in, so there's a lot of social value attached to "improving" the land by siphoning energy off the everpresent volcanic substrata to power all manner of mechanisms, by speeding up the process of turning lava to productive soil (which in turn leads to a voracious demand for more improvable land and an outwards expansion of the Empire), and so forth. Think the words of "Jerusalem" - "And we will build a new Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land": that's their notion of Heaven. Greenery, pleasant climate, and real night and day. Most people believe God intends them to build it themselves.

Tuesday: Now I know why HRHorrible gets involved with all of this - it's Millie. She's seen too much, but while she was still a street brat it was too much trouble to track her down and eliminate her. Besides, who would ever listen to a street brat? If the information comes via Milord Alvar, it's much more credible. Also, Alvar has the resources to dig up evidence that can't be covered up: the pair of them are a risk to HRHorrible's existence.

Ah. Yes, the little lightbulbs go on while I'm writing this. The ultimate Big Bad is someone in the Academy. He recognizes the threat Millie poses to HRHorrible and passes on the warning. I'm still not entirely sure what he recognizes, since to him one street brat is much the same as any other, but whatever it is Millie has no idea about it. It's not appearance or her name... so it has to be something she says without realizing what the impact could be. Oh. (Cue little lightbulb again - I just love the way my subconscious works). Alvar wants to know why she's so skittish with him. She tells him he looks just like the man who killed her mother (trust me, it's not nearly that simple or clean). Big Bad hears the conversation - and since he knows what HRHorrible does for recreation, and is working his way towards greasy eminence, he naturally warns HRHorrible.

Wednesday: I need to find a new name for book 1. Twilight would be perfect if not for certain sparkly vampires, and this book does not have sparkly vampires. It doesn't have vampires, period. Shadowlands is also out, courtesy a rather better book that's also too well known. Since I suck at this kind of thing, any suggestions would be welcome.

Oh, and for those who might be wondering, no I'm not worried that anyone is going to steal my idea. I could hand this set of notes to a dozen people and ask only that the names change, and get a dozen totally different books - with everything from horror to hysterical comedy and all points between.

Diary of Character Growth

Last week I posted about the story seed I'd been infested with. This week's post is kind of a diary of the things that have emerged since then - mostly character, which is usually the first or second thing I 'get', although there are likely to be other bits of world building and assorted strangeness as well. What I end up with on plot at this stage is usually a starting scenario and what the basic plot and main subplot are likely to be about.

Thursday: Characters begin to emerge. Two of them, one male, one female. Definite sense of a romance subplot. He insists his name is Alvar Seraph, which is... somewhat ridiculous. Arguments over the name begin. She is Millie - possibly short for Amelia or Millicent, although she's being rather close about that.

He's noble and might be willing to accept "Alvar" as a noble title rather than his actual name. It's got to be there, though. Yes, it's weird, but characters will not cooperate for me if I don't have their names right. Long white-blond hair, dark blue eyes - the kind that look like they could be black until you get close - carries a sword-cane. Early twenties, but has had responsibility for a whole lot of things since 14 or 15. His manner isn't so much arrogance as assurance: yes, he really is that good.

She's a street brat. Mama was a whore, and died of her pimp getting pissy. She figures begging, picking pockets and running whatever errands she can get paid for - and pretending to be a boy - is safer.

Okay, so we've got a massive social differential here. Fine. Possibly a Pygmalion aspect.
There's some bioengineering way back - probably from Earth for the spaceship crew, although no-one in story-now knows anything about it. They see an inheritable gift which allows the person who has it to feel the workings and effectiveness of machinery. They 'know' when everything is going well, when something needs maintenance, and when something is going to break. They need training to be able to consciously focus on the gift, and to actually do something about what they feel. They're in two classes: Mechanics can diagnose and fix when told what to do. Engineers can do all that as well as design new machines. Both groups are highly regarded.

He is - of course - an Engineer as well as a nobleman. She has the gift but was never talent-scouted even though the Imperial Academy of Mechanics and Engineering is supposed to find everyone with the gift and train them up: well-maintained machinery is essential to their survival, especially the dampers that keep volcanos from developing in the middle of the cities and the steam turbines that provide power to the cities - powered by diverting water into the volcanic regions to generate said steam.

Opening involves her sensing before he does that a set of dampers under a busy square is about to go, realizing he's got the gift and is more likely to get people out of the way than she is. She'd run away after that, only he's not letting anyone that talented get away from the Academy. The dampers go, but his orders prevent any deaths when a rift opens up across the middle of the square.

He drags her to the Academy - thinking she's the boy she looks like - and goes to arrange a team of Engineers to upgrade the dampers.

Friday: Okay, I was wrong. Milord Alvar is definitely an arrogant sod. Millie is an imp. Sarcastic, self-assured the way street-brats can be (think Gavroche from Les Mis the musical). She's going to cause chaos in the Academy, especially since the Dean of Admissions is one of those unsackable incompetents who gets shuffled to where he can do least damage. Said Dean has problems with well-born girls having the gift, thinks that low class boys who've got it must have got it from a noble ancestor somewhere, and can't possibly learn to be Engineers, and as for low class girls, well they must only be after one thing.

The Academy Arch-Chancellor is one of your ineffectual avuncular types, and really hasn't got a clue how to run things. He's there because he was the most senior staff member when the previous Arch-Chancellor died. Negotiating Imperial political appointments and talented students from the full social range is beyond him. He'd much rather be buried in designs for new mecs.

Social structure/culture is probably most like the British Empire towards the late 1800s, although the colonies have rather more representation than they ever did in the Brit Empire. At this point I think the story is entirely within the capital city (I don't have a name for that yet), but there is a much larger world out there. The Nightside barbarians are a constant threat to the outlying colonies. I'm not sure what/who they are yet, except that it's rather more than just 'barbarians'. I know that at least some of them are exiles and descendants of exiles.

And the little light-bulb just went on to inform me that Milord Alvar and Millie are going to be exiled by the end of this - hence book 2, Nightside.

Weekend: Conflating all of the weekend's news into one piece...

Milord Alvar is still being unfriendly about his name. Millie is a brat. She managed to give all the stick-in-the-mud types collective conniptions in very short order and ends up being taught by Milord Alvar who is amused by her antics rather than horrified - I'm not sure why he finds her amusing, but I imagine I'll find out eventually.

The ending of book 1 involves the Crown Prince, who is the grandson of the Emperor and a nasty piece of work. I'm not sure yet what he's into/up to, but at minimum there's slavery (which is supposedly outlawed) and attempting to arrange granddaddy's murder so he can have the throne. I'm not sure why he ends up crossing swords with Milord Alvar and Millie, but he does, and he dies in a spectacularly ugly fashion - which is why they end up more or less exiled (as in, they're not sure they'd get a fair trial and decide that discretion is the better part of survival).

Monday: His Imperial Majesty is getting to the end of a long life, and outlived all his children. He's still mentally with it, enough that he's got his heir tied up in layers of bureaucracy and is quietly looking for a way junior can have an unfortunate accident. That's not a problem. The problem is that it's kind of difficult to classify "sword cut from navel to chin" as an accident - which means he has to try and convict the culprit.

Tuesday: Well, well. Milord Alvar is in the line of inheritance - distantly, but close enough that if His Imperial Majesty chooses to select an heir rather than appoint his closest male descendant his heir, Milord Alvar is in the running. I think His Majesty hopes that after a suitable absence he can blame junior's death on someone who's already going to die - or already dead - and appoint Alvar his heir. It's not an option that gets used a lot because it causes civil wars: imperial princes tend to get a little upset when they're passed over for the distant cousin they never thought was worth considering.

Wednesday: Weird synchronicity. In the MMORPG I play for decompression I just got to the final world. The 'feel' of it is exactly the feel for this piece - advanced civilization corrupted and dying/dead. Oh, and parts of the cities crumbling into lava. No dragons, though, more's the pity.