setting – Words Deferred

Growing the Language of a Story

My day job is in software development, and in pre-Covid times, when a solid majority of our teams used to still work in the office every day, I would host occasional “lunch and learn” meetings where we’d have our lunch in a conference room and watch a programming-related video.

Of these videos, one of my favorites is called Growing a Language, by Guy Steele. While it’s made for an audience of programmers, I think it’s fairly palatable to the layman. It is fascinating to me because it has a bit of a literary bent, where the form of the talk is, itself, a comment on the subject.

(I don’t blame you if you don’t want to watch the whole thing, but it’s worth watching to the 9-minute mark—the “now you see” moment.)

Primitives

Steele starts his talk with a long string of definitions, ranging from nouns like “man” and “woman,” to the names of particular people, to grammatical constructs and mathematical concepts. His speech is oddly stilted to the ear, and some of his definitions cover complicated ideas with surprising conciseness. He perseveres for nine minutes in the face of the awkward, confused giggling from his audience.

At last, he gets to the point.

“A primitive is a word for which we can take it for granted that we all know what it means[…]. For this talk, I chose to take as my primitives all the words of one syllable and no more[…]. My firm rule for this talk is that if I need to use a word of two or more syllables, I must first define it.”

Steele starts with a somewhat arbitrary limitation: words of a single syllable. This is the reason for his stilted cadence. And despite his clever use of this artificially limited language, it’s apparent that he cannot get across everything he wants to say without expanding it. So he begins with simple definitions, then uses those to build more complex definitions.

The first several minutes of the talk are almost entirely devoted to building the language he needs. Then he begins to make his arguments. But he continues to sprinkle in more definitions as he goes, expanding the language so that it is ready to tackle each subsequent concept.

The Language of Stories

Steele is trying to make a point about the construction of computer programming languages, but his ideas are just as applicable to fiction. Each story has its own language, and as authors, we must construct that language as the story unfolds. We are just like Steele, defining concepts and grammar between making points. We are the train conductors laying track in front of our own speeding train.

In science-fiction and fantasy, this is especially obvious. We often need to build a secondary world that feels real, or a magic system, or the rules of some future technology. But even in more “mundane” genres, there are rules that must be defined. Who is the story about? What is the time period and setting, and how do the circumstances of the world affect the characters? What perspectives will be used?

Writing a story is a balancing act—the act of providing exactly enough information for the reader to understand what’s going on, at exactly the moment when it is needed. Too much, too early, and the whole story becomes bogged down in dull definitions. Too little, and the language becomes muddled and confusing; the story, difficult to follow.

Assumptions and Audience

Steele’s other key insight is that the starting point is extremely important. He chooses words of a single syllable. The starting point for a story is more complicated. It’s what you as the author assume about and expect from your audience.

For example, I might be writing about a dystopian future. I might focus on the technologies that enable the authoritarian regime to keep the people down. I might focus on the social constructs that make it difficult for the characters to fight back. I might focus more on the language and structure of the story, or the internal depths of the characters, or an intricate plot. The version of the story that highlights tech might appeal to a reader of hard sci-fi, while a focus on the society itself may appeal to a reader of “softer” sociological science-fiction. The version that uses challenging language and structure might appeal to a reader of literary fiction.

Whether we recognize it or not, every author must make assumptions about what their reader will bring to a story. A story that expects the reader to bring less will necessarily have to start with a simpler “language” and do more defining up-front. A story that expects more from the reader might start with a more complex “language,” but this runs the risk of confusing or driving off part of the potential audience. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Better to write a great book for a particular audience than a mediocre book that tries to cater to every reader.

Breaking Expectations

Most of the time, it’s good to cater to your chosen audience, starting with a language they can understand and building it as the story progresses. But it can also be a powerful tool to break those well-defined rules.

It can be a story-defining twist to reveal something new about a setting or character that the reader wasn’t prepared for. It can be shocking and exciting to suddenly change up the structure or the way the story is told. The best authors can even carefully lure an audience into a story that they would have thrown away, were it revealed at the outset, and make them enjoy it. Maybe the main POV character dies at the end of act II, and the book shifts to the villain’s perspective?

Of course, it’s a hard trick to pull off. When done poorly, betraying the reader’s expectations can ruin the story for them. It can feel dull, like deus ex machina that impacts the story without earning it, or even like a mean prank played by the author at the reader’s expense. This is where beta readers and editors prove invaluable, helping to ensure that the trick actually works.

So Easy, You’re Already Doing It

Building a language for each story may seem daunting at first, but the good news is that every author does it, either deliberately or intuitively. By actively thinking about growing the language of the story, we have the opportunity to build it well—providing exactly what’s needed, when it’s needed, and not a sentence too early or too late.

Giving Characters Direction

Sometimes, a main character seems to come into being, fully fleshed out, and a story just coalesces around them. More often it’s a lot of work to figure out what exactly a character is all about, and what they’re doing in the story. And occasionally, that character fights you every step of the way, and you find yourself uncertain where the story should go.

Today, I want to talk about finding a character’s direction: where do they want to go, and how are they going to get there?

What Do They Want?

The first thing you need to know about your character is what they want. A character with a goal has something to fight for, something to work toward. The story comes out of their adventures along the way to that goal. If a character excites you, there must be something interesting about them, and this interesting thing can often lead to their goal. A character trapped in poverty may want to start a business and become successful. A character whose fondest childhood memories are stargazing with their father may want to become an astronaut. Any strong emotional or physical need can embody the goal that drives the story.

The goal doesn’t have to be straightforward. It could be subtle. In the real world, most of us don’t always understand all of the things that motivate us. For as much as we cherish our reason and intellect, we are creatures of instinct and emotion. Often, feelings run deeper than any “reasonable” ideas about what we need.

Some characters might know what they want and actively seek it. Others may fight themselves at every turn, never entirely understanding what they are actually looking for, creating an internal conflict. Sometimes discovering the real goal can be a powerful revelation that the entire story hinges on.

Where Do They Live?

No character lives in a vacuum. They are a product of their environment, and the setting they live in will influence what their goals are, and what tools and allies are available to them. Sometimes when it feels like a character doesn’t have direction, it’s really a problem with the setting. It’s perfectly reasonable to have the setting be mysterious to the characters and to the reader, but it should not be mysterious to the author.

The character needs to be able to navigate the setting to achieve their goals, and if the author doesn’t know what roadblocks they can face or help they can find, it will feel very difficult to craft a story around them.

To create conflict on their journey, there must be hindrances that make this goal harder to achieve. To relieve some of the tension, the character needs help. Every time they fail to reach their goal, they need to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and try again. This try-fail cycle keeps the story moving forward, and ideally, it keeps escalating the stakes.

Break the Steady State

Stories don’t happen because everything is staying the same. They happen because something changed, and that change has consequences that the main character can’t ignore. Throw a wrench in the gears. Screw up the character’s life so that there’s no going back.

The most common place to ruin a character’s life is a he beginning of the story (to get the action going) or near the end (to resolve the conflict). However, this technique is just as useful in the middle of a story that is starting to stall.

When the main character is succeeding left and right, a catastrophic failure can bring them back to earth and raise the stakes again. When a villain is running roughshod over the main character, they might let down their guard and suffer their own huge setback, getting the good guys back into the game.

A catastrophe can also serve as a reset button, forcing all the characters to reevaluate their goals and what’s really important to them.

Force Choices

A character needs goals, challenges to overcome, and help along the way. They also need options. Story comes from characters put into hard situations where they have to make choices. Those choices lead to new situations, new problems, and more choices to be made.

Choices are where characters reveal what’s important to them, and a great opportunity for unexpected revelations. When a character has to choose between something that ought to be important to them and something that really is important to them, they’re forced to reveal that secret (or keep it hidden and deal with the regret of not making the right choice).

When the character has clear goals, choices make the story interesting. If there’s only one path forward, then the character will just keep walking. But if there are many options, the character will have to decide among them. For the character and the reader, this amps up the tension as we wait to see if they made a good choice. Alternately, the author can reveal up-front whether it’s a good or bad choice, and the tension then comes from wondering what the consequences will be.

Direction

When a main character has direction, the rest of the story often accumulates around it. The goals of the character get them started, and roadblocks and challenges can divert them in unexpected directions and keep the story interesting. They have to make choices; find allies; try, fail, and try again.

If the character is stagnating, a catastrophe can force them to make new choices or reevaluate their goals, and is often a great twist in the middle of the story.

Finally, the most important thing is to remember what made you want to write that character in the first place. They have something awesome about them, and their direction should be tied tight to that. If it excites you, it’ll excite your audience.

Reference Desk #17 — Story Engine: Deck of Worlds

If you’ve been around here for a while, you might remember my review of The Story Engine. The Story Engine is part card game, part tool for generating semi-randomized writing prompts. I’ve used it as a fun way to brainstorm ideas for short stories, and I’ve found that it works well for me. As someone who enjoys card and board games, it’s just a much more fun and tactile way to generate ideas than sitting in front of the notebook with pen in hand.

Recently, the folks behind the original Story Engine kickstarted a new product in the same vein. It’s called the Story Engine: Deck of Worlds. Deck of Worlds is another card-based brainstorming game, but this time it’s focused on settings instead of plots. It’s billed as a tool for storytellers and TTRPG game masters to easily generate interesting and deep settings.

I received my order right before the holidays, and I was able to take Deck of Worlds for a test drive.

What’s In the Box?

The base set of cards for Deck of Worlds comes in a flat box with a plastic insert, magnetic latch, and a heavy tagboard sleeve that guarantees it will stay closed. This is nearly identical to the box that the original Story Engine came in, and the build quality is good. It’s the sort of box you’d expect from a premium board game.

However, the original Story Engine had many expansion packs that added more cards, and Deck of Worlds is the same. If you add extra cards to your set, you’ll quickly fill up the small amount of extra space in the box. Luckily, the creators of the Story Engine are well aware of this problem, and they’ve created a new card box with dividers that is capable of holding all the cards, even if you’ve got every single expansion. They’re inexpensive, so I got one for my original Story Engine set as well as my Deck of Worlds.

I also received three expansion packs for Deck of Worlds. “Worlds of Chrome and Starlight” is the science fiction expansion, “Worlds of Myth and Magic” is the fantasy expansion, and “Worlds of Sand & Story” is the deserts expansion. I chose these because sci-fi and fantasy are my two favorite genres to write in, and I have a TTRPG project percolating with a strong desert component.

Much like the original product, the Deck of Worlds main box includes a slim “guidebook,” which describes the intended ways to use the Deck of Worlds—although the creators are clear that there is no wrong way to play.

The Card Types

There are six card types in the Deck of Worlds: Regions, Landmarks, Namesakes, Origins, Attributes, and Advents. According to the guidebook:

Regions establish a setting’s main terrain type and act as a hub for other cards
Landmarks add geographical sites and points of interest
Namesakes combine with Regions or Landmarks to create in-world nicknames
Origins record significant events of the area’s past
Attributes highlight present-day features of the area and its people
Advents introduce events that may change the area’s future

Regions are the only cards with a single prompt on them, and have a nice background that illustrates the geography of the setting. Landmarks have two prompts to choose between, and each one has a background illustration. The other four card types have a symbol and color to identify the card type, and four different prompts to choose from.

Building Basic Settings

The simplest way to play with Deck of Worlds is to create small settings, or “microsettings” as the guidebook calls them. These will typically be built around a single region (terrain type) and a single landmark, like a building.

For my test run, I built a few of these microsettings. First, I chose the prompts I liked best and combined the cards. Then I expanded or focused the results, writing a little blurb about each setting. I only spent a couple minutes on each of these examples.

The Grassland of Crowds

The museum’s founding piece is a huge fulgurite dug out of a sandy hill. The museum was built around this dug-out hill, and the piece is displayed, unmoved, where it was found.

The “lightning festival” grew in this area, and is held during the season of rainless storms. People display all kinds of art. One of these presentations is voted the winner of each festival and incorporated into the museum.

The Scree of Rivers

(Cyberpunk) The scree was mined for the long, winding veins of precious metals near the surface, leaving a maze of narrow, shallow canyons and piles of leavings. Rivers form when it rains. A grey market meets here periodically, protected from government scanners by the trace metals in the rock, with lots of escape routes and hidey-holes for quick getaways.

Not sure about the prophecy bit.

City of Sand and Story

The City of Rains is nestled in rocky mountains in a desert. During the wet season, the mountains funnel moisture and clouds and it rains on the city, creating a temporary river. All inhabitents capture as much water as possible, to live on and trade for the rest of the year. They plant crops along the river while it lasts.

A recent sandstorm uncovered caverns in the rock beneath the city, leading to underground ruins and vast cisterns. The discovery of so much water could upend the economy of the entire region

Complex Settings

The guidebook also includes some rules for building more complex settings out of multiple microsettings. There is really no limit to the number of smaller settings you could combine. There are optional rules, including a “meta-row” for attributes of the larger area as a whole, a “sideboard” of extra cards to give you more choices when selecting any given card type.

To test this out, I built a setting from four different microsettings, using the meta-row (on the left) and sideboard (on the right).

The Golden Plains

Once known as a wealthy region, but its reputation is fading. The area has been covered with strange dark clouds for weeks, but there is little rain.

In the North: The Red City

Home of a religious order, this city was built on a river and filled with canals. It was once a hub of commerce, but the river grew over the years and eventually overflowed its banks south of the city, disrupting the flow and creating a vast swamp.

Now, the priests of the Red City ply a darker trade: they’ve made the city into a prison for the worst criminals. The prison is the center of the old city, and is called “The Prison Without Walls.” It is surrounded by deep and fast-running canals, and is only accessible by a single, heavily-guarded bridge.

The priests have traditionally been led by a patriarchal lineage of high priests, but now a lowly priestess is gathering a following among priests and prisoners alike. She has radical ideas of rehabilitating prisoners instead of working them to death as penance for their crimes.

In the South-East: The Swamp of Ink

These thickets were once hunting grounds of the nobility, until the river overflowed and the land became swampy.

The few people who still live here are led by an excommunicated priest from the Red City. They harvest “swamp mites,” tiny, stinging crawfish that can be ground into fine black dyes. Travelers from the North recently called out the priest as an exile, and he imprisoned them, but there is unrest and talk of rebellion among the people.

In the West: The Moraine

The coast of mists is the western edge of the Golden Plains region.

The Moraine is the home of the School of Poets. It was created by a celebrated poet who was known as a cantankerous jerk. The only woman who ever loved him, muse of his thousand poems, made him promise to teach other poets his craft.

The school is rumored to be haunted. While most of its inhabitants don’t take this seriously, many students have recently complained of strange and disturbing noises coming through the stone walls.

In the Southwest: The City of Smoke

A city on the slopes of an inactive volcano, built atop the ruins of the “old city,” which was destroyed by the last eruption.

Hot springs in the city are warmed by the heart of the volcano. They supposedly have healing properties, and draw tourists who hope to have their injuries or sickness cured.

Vineyards planted in the fertile volcanic soil use a unique variety of small, golden grapes, harvested after the first frost to make sweet wine.

The dark clouds that have shrouded the region threaten the growth of the grapes and the year’s wine harvest.

Takeaways

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the Deck of Worlds so far. It has a very similar feel to the original Story Engine. The cards strike a nice balance by giving you a few options to pick from, but also limitations that force your brain to make interesting and occasionally surprising connections between seemingly unrelated things.

Like any sort of brainstorming, not every single idea will be a good one. The randomization means that sometimes you get combinations that just fall flat or fail to inspire. Some of this depends on your own creativity and willingness to explore.

Like the original Story Engine, the quality of the product is great. The new boxes are an improvement, allowing me to keep all my original and expansion cards together in a form factor that takes up less space than the original box.

I don’t necessarily like all the rules suggested by the guidebook, but it’s easy to tweak the process until it works for you. They’re just cards, and they can be arranged however you see fit. The extra rules for bigger settings are a little complicated for my tastes, but the end result in my experiment had some interesting ideas that I wouldn’t mind exploring further.

The guidebook also has more rules that I didn’t get into, for collaborative multiplayer and for combining Deck of Worlds with the original Story Engine. All of that feels like more complexity than I want when I’m brainstorming—I would much rather create smaller ideas and then mix and match myself. However, I’m sure this style of prescribed creation could work for others.

Finally, I think this could be a great tool for GMs/DMs who run custom table-top RPG campaigns. I’ve long believed that the best way to approach TTRPG worlds is the “billiards” style described by Chris Perkins, where you set up a number of interesting locations full of interesting characters, and then let the player characters bounce around between them, setting events in motion.

The Deck of Worlds is a great way to invent these little islands of content, and I think it would be pretty easy to create quick and dirty sessions with very little prep, especially if you’re using a lightweight rule set.

Where to Get It

The Deck of Worlds and its expansions are available directly from the Story Engine website. In addition to the Sci-fi, Fantasy and Desert expansions I chose, there are Horror, Coastline, and Arctic expansions. If you’re planning to use the deck for tabletop RPGs, they also have expansions for lore fragments, cultures, and adventure prompts.

Three Things I Learned From City of Saints and Madmen

I bought City of Saints and Madmen on a whim, many years ago. I suspect I was too young to properly appreciate it back then. In fact, I don’t clearly remember if I even finished it. Regardless, it left a strong impression on me and it has influenced my own work.

The book was my introduction to the New Weird, a genre that is even more difficult to define than most genres. These stories of the city of Ambergris are like fantasy in that they create a secondary world, but there are no wizards, no magic, no elves. There are elements of steampunk in the presence of post-industrial technologies, but they are props, not the focus. There are certainly elements of horror, as these stories are often dark and bleak, unsettling and violent. There is more than a touch of the literary, the savoriness of phrasings and narrative in unusual, twisted forms.

Recently, an even larger Ambergris anthology was printed, and I had to buy it. It is a massive tome, combining three books—City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, and Finch.

Unfortunately, I discovered that this new version is missing almost everything from the appendix of the original book of City of Saints and Madmen. Even more unfortunately, this so-called appendix is almost half of the book, and it adds far more than just ancillary information. So despite having bought the new edition, I have to keep the old book for the huge chunk they cut out.

As usual, I don’t like to write ordinary reviews (and I’d be hard-pressed to review this strange book, anyway). Instead, I want to talk about what I’ve learned from it.

1 – Don’t be Bound by Traditional Narrative Forms

Vandermeer didn’t just write an anthology of ordinary stories. Instead, he presents the city of Ambergris through various narrative lenses. There are ordinary stories, but there are also pamphlets of civil history and family history, notes from psychiatrists, and a slightly deranged monograph on a fantastical type of giant squid. Hell, the squid monograph even has a ridiculously long bibliography of completely made-up sources.

Presenting fiction in some of these forms might seem like a bad idea, but Vandermeer makes it work. “Dradin in Love,” the first story, pulls you into the book with a strong narrative, providing an introduction to the city and piquing your interest. Then he expands the setting through a guidebook essay, “The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris.” He keeps it light with snarky footnotes from the author, an irritable historian who considers himself above writing a cheap guide, but still does it for the easy money.

“The Transformation of Martin Lake” follows Lake, an artist who will become famous in Ambergris for his oil paintings, through the most formative period of his life. Inserted between these scenes are the speculations and interpretations of his work by a famed art critic. As the story eventually reveals the dark secrets of his success, we see that the critic’s analysis is wildly inaccurate.

In “The Strange Case of X,” we witness an interview between a psychiatrist and his patient. The story flits from third person to first person, to the raw transcript of the interview and back again. The patient, X, turns out to be a stand-in for Vandermeer himself, institutionalized because he has become so obsessed with the fictional city that he can no longer differentiate between the real world and his own creations.

Then (at least in the original printing) we reach the purposely mis-capitalized AppendiX, itself presented as a collection of items found in X’s room at the asylum after he mysteriously disappears. Within this frame are more stories and tidbits, letters and codes. The sheer variety of forms keeps you wondering what you’ll encounter next, and in a subtle way they help to build the verisimilitude of Ambergris. This is a city with a history, with surrounding geography, with politics and art and beauty and danger, as well as hundreds of thousands of people going about their business.

Many of these forms involve multiple characters with differing opinions and interpretations. There is Lake and the critic. There is the dry history of Ambergris, and historian’s irritated footnotes. There is the interview with X, and the psychiatrist’s interpretations. Just as real people often come at reality from different angles, the characters in Vandermeer’s stories are constantly vying for narrative control.

2 – A Web of References is a Puzzle to Solve

“Dradin in Love” opens the book with a gripping story, but it also sets up much more of the book than the reader will realize at first. It introduces the Religious Quarter, Albumuth Boulevard, the river Moth, the distant city of Morrow, Borges Bookstore and the Hoegbotton and Sons mercantile empire. It introduces the delights and horrors of the Festival. Dradin and his former teacher, Cadimon, and the ubiquitous musical genius of Voss Bender.

In every single section of the book, every story and essay and letter, there are scattered little references to the people, places and things of Ambergris. Some are large and glaringly obvious. Others are extremely subtle, and sometimes even inserted into what seems to be purposely dull writing (a bibliography and glossary, for example) in order to obscure them. Characters and places that seem to be little more than decoration in one story reappear in unexpected places later on.

Once again, this makes the random selection of literary bits and bobs slowly congeal into a much more unified whole as you read deeper into it. It also encourages the reader to pay attention to all the details. The kind of reader who loves to solve mysteries and riddles will begin to see the book as a puzzle, and each subtle reference clicks into place like another piece, forming a larger picture.

Of course, the danger with this style of writing is that the reader may not want a difficult book that they have to “solve” to find satisfying. They may not want to wade through bibliographies and glossaries to find some small connection between Martin Lake and Dradin Kashmir. They may not be tantalized by the coded section at the end of the psychiatrist’s letter. They may simply be irritated. But the readers who like that sort of thing will feel rewarded by what they have found, and there is magic in the idea that you may not have caught all the secrets on the first read-through.

3 – Setting is an Engine of Story

Something I find myself often referencing is Lincoln Michael’s post “On the Many Different Engines That Power a Short Story.” Writers talk constantly about character- and plot-driven fiction, but there are really an astonishing number of ways to make a story work.

I think City of Saints and Madmen is definitive proof that setting can power a story. This ramshackle collection of elements should not feel unified. There are characters, yes, and there is plot, here and there. But it is the city of Ambergris that ties it all together. All of the other elements are in service of that. Even the author of Ambergris, X, finds himself in thrall to it, the city seemingly dictating its own creation.

I have to confess that I find this heartening. I’ve had a fictional city of my own that I’ve been slowly building for a few years, but I’ve struggled to find characters and plots that I find satisfying. I’ve considered short stories, a novel, and even a TTRPG setting. Maybe I should just follow the lesson of Ambergris. Maybe the city itself is the story.

Reblog: NaNoPrep: Signing Up and Getting Started — Connie J. Jasperson

Last week, I talked about the good and the bad of NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month, where the goal is to write the entire first draft of a novel in the month of November. Now, November is almost upon us. Are you going to participate?

If you’re on the fence, or you’re just not sure where to start the whole process, take a look at Connie J. Jasperson’s latest NaNoWriMo prep post for a guide to getting a project set up on the NaNoWriMo site.

If you don’t like to plan, you can just start writing after Halloween midnight. If you’re an inveterate planner like me, that strategy might feel overwhelming. Luckily, Jasperson has you covered, with an entire series of NaNoWriMo prep posts linked at the bottom. They’ll get you figuring out your setting, characters, story arc, and more.

Tag: setting