Author Archives: Evan Braun

Yesterday, I wrote about my first foray into the realm of mythology research. I laid out the broad strokes of what I was after and how I approached it. Today, I want to take the time to more specifically discuss the methodology I employed.

I mentioned a couple of the primary texts my novel focused on, and the Big Three religious mythologies I was interested in: Christianity, Judaism, and Paganism. Through reading my various source texts, I discovered elements that all of my target mythologies had in common-points of intersection. First, they all subscribe to the existence of certain very specific supernatural beings that have interacted and continue to interact with humanity to this day. Second, they more or less universally accept a single common historical event: the global flood. From these intersections, the plot of my novel arose.

But these are broad strokes. Starting points. I’m not writing this to promote my own work so much as to tackle the subject of solid research methodology.

When conducting research, I can’t emphasize enough the importance of reading books, both original texts and commentary texts, including commentaries from as many different perspectives as possible. The tension between scholars who disagree is rife with creative possibilities! The temptation, however, is to surf through a handful of Wikipedia pages, watch a Discovery Channel special, and call it done. This usually won’t be enough to generate convincing real-world depth in your writing, though, not if you don’t have a wealth of personal, firsthand experience in the subject you’re dabbling in.

The internet is your friend. We all know that. It’s like saying that the sky is blue or pizza tastes good. More specifically, the internet is that friend you can never fully trust because, although you like them and spend as much time with them as you can, he or she is a compulsive liar-albeit a well-meaning one much of the time. So it’s a good idea to vet and twice confirm information gathered online. Now, I’m not going to say I haven’t embraced a half-baked conspiracy theory or two and thrown them into the plot stew; I have, and such additions often provide that je ne said quoi spice that keeps life interesting. But it’s got to be the seasoning, not the base.

Finally, get out of your head every once in a blue moon and remember that it’s not all about screen research. You have to spend time with people. Talk to them. Befriend them. Learn from them. In my case, I scheduled face time with a number of people I know who run in pagan circles. Frankly, some of my electrifying material came from them. It’s important to stretch ourselves, to dive into areas we know are dark and murky. Real, live, breathing people make for fantastic sources, and often other people’s beliefs and perspectives bring a lot of colour to the party.

In the end, it’s important to remember that the best mythologies, on a narrative level, function best in the background. Compelling human drama is where the real story is. Even when the myth jumpstarts the plot, the characters should hopefully still do the heavy lifting. And yet without myths and legends, where would we be as modern-day storytellers? Nowhere, I say. Absolutely nowhere.

Mythology Research: A Case Study, Part One

June 23, 2013

Evan Braun

As a writer, my genre of choice is hard sci-fi, and this involves a lot of research. Since I don’t have a science background (or, let’s be honest, any kind of aptitude for it at all), I sometimes feel like a fish out of water. I love that feeling. So when a fellow writer and close friend approached me a few years ago with an idea for a series of books that would delve deep into dozens of cultural and religious mythologies, I seized the opportunity.

But I had my work cut out for me, because this was an area I didn’t know much about. In other words, business as usual. Because it’s so important to write what you know, I therefore needed to acquire a lot of new knowledge. Fortunately, I absolutely adore doing research. There’s nothing quite so satisfying and exciting for me as Wiki-surfing late into the early morning hours, clicking from one link to another and amassing all manner of random trivia. Targeting that effort is a bit more work, but worthwhile in the end.

First of all, I hope I won’t offend anyone when I refer to “religious mythologies.” It would be quite impossible to write about the subject of mythology research as it pertains to my writing without broaching the subject. As a religious person myself, I don’t mean to imply that these various “mythologies” don’t also bear resemblance to truth. I use the term only to refer to systems of belief-and in the case of this particular novel I was authoring, all systems of believe. Or at least as many as possible.

My scope was necessarily broad, but I was especially concerned with the intersection of three sets of religious mythologies-Christianity, Judaism (including Kabbalah), and Paganism. I dig into a lot of others also, but for me these are the big three. And admittedly, Paganism is probably too broad to justifiably squeeze into a single term, but for the purposes of brevity, I’ll leave it at that. My goal was to dive into these mythological and look for ways to unify them.

My starting point was an ancient Hebrew text called the Sefer Yetzirah. Could it possibly have a more spine-tingling name? Sefer Yetzirah. To my ear, it sounds deliciously mysterious. Its direct English translation is “Book of Formation (Creation),” from which I derived the title for the first novel in the series. As legend has it, this short text (it’s only about four thousand words, total) was penned by Abraham, the Patriarch. The story goes something like this: Abraham sat down one day for a tÃªte-a-tÃªte with the Almighty, and on that day God explained to him how the world was created. This wasn’t a retread of the creation account in Genesis which so many of us learned in Sunday School; this was the nuts and bolts version, what some people refer to as “creation science.” We’re talking specific methodology, a step-by-step “Creation for Dummies” how-to guide. Except, of course, there’s a catch. There always is. Even translated into English, the whole thing is basically incomprehensible. It’s a fun read, with lots of symbology and numerology on display, but no one can claim to grasp it. Here’s a sample:

In two and thirty most occult and wonderful paths of wisdom
did JAH the Lord of Hosts engrave his name…
He created this universe by the three Sepharim, Number, Writing, and Speech.
Ten are the numbers, as are the Sephiroth, and twenty-two the letters,
these are the Foundation of all things. Of these letters,
three are mothers, seven are double, and twelve are simple.

It goes on in that vein. This is research at its most fun, surely.

So basically, I had to do a lot of reading, some of it difficult, and a lot of digging. Another text I spent much time investigating was the Book of Enoch, considered apocryphal by most modern-day Christians but a really gripping read nonetheless. In it, a number of interested mythological concepts collide-angels, demons, giants, monster, and yes, even aliens, if you turn the page and squint at it a little bit. I looked into the rest of the Apocrypha, and looked for connections between my Big Three and some of our world’s most famous myths, most notably from the Greeks and Romans, who gave us so much to work with. Not to mention Egypt! The Native populations in North and South America are also especially myth-rich, though they are often neglected for some peculiar reason; in particular, I’ve become very interested in the early Inca civilization.

There’s more. Much more than I have room here to go into… and even if I did, it would likely stretch your patience to the breaking point.

In tomorrow’s follow-up post, I’m going to spend some time to talk more about my research methodology. Be sure to stop on by!

My Last, Best Hope for Mastering Structure

May 27, 2013

Evan Braun

Evan Braun The Writing Life 5 Comments

Earlier this month, I wrote about how Star Trek ignited my passion for writing and gave me the push I needed to start committing words to paper at a young age. Not all my early work, however, was Star Trek fan fiction; I also produced a couple of short original pieces, as well as a 100,000-word novel in ninth grade called The Investigators. What all these works have in common is that they were very terrible, though each one improved on the one that came before.

There are a number of failings in these first works, but the main problem is that I didn’t have a handle on structure. My understanding of plotting could be reduced to this: the plot is the sequence of events that occur over the course of the novel. I mean, you can’t get any vaguer than that. If you read my first novels (I don’t recommend it), this is evidenced by the overall sense that I was making the story up as I went along. There were so thematic underpinnings, the twists and turns came out of nowhere and served no purpose beyond surprise, and the characters did not progress through meaningful arcs. Lots of stuff happened, but none of it told a story. The plot points were random; I may as well have written some plot ideas on playing cards, shuffled them together, then wrote the novel based on the order of the cards with no thought towards what would make sense or provoke an emotional response in the reader. The plot was just what happened-and it could be anything.

In 1998, however, at the age of fifteen, I was washing dishes at the restaurant where I worked when a coworker, Carole, asked me if I’d ever seen Babylon 5. The two of us shared a passion for Star Trek, which is what we talked about most often, but I had barely heard of Babylon 5, even though the show had just about completed its five-year run by that time. Carole had the first couple of seasons recorded on VHS, so one day she came to work with a bag full of tapes for me.

I took those tapes home and began to devour them.

Much has been written about the unevenness of Babylon 5. Especially in the first season, the acting was rough, the effects were cheaply produced, and the writing was… bumpy. Awkward, even. And yet I immediately fell in love with the show, because it was the first time I encountered a television series that was unabashedly serialized. It was a show that was intended to be viewed in order. Though individual episodes had beginnings, middles, and ends, Babylon 5 told a larger story that could only be fully appreciated and understood in the context of many seasons.

Since that time, Babylon 5 has been followed by dozens of serialized shows, so many in fact that heavy serialization has become the norm. However, in terms of structure and planning, no show, in my opinion, has ever surpassed the high standard established by Babylon 5. The show’s creator and main writer, J. Michael Straczynski, personally scripted 91 of the 110 episodes, and wrote the last three seasons entirely by himself, with the exception of one installment. This resulted in unbridled consistency. From the beginning, he knew where the story was going. He had a full series outline. Many shows’ writers have claimed to have known the end from the beginning (I’m looking at you, Lost and Battlestar Galactica), but Babylon 5 is the only show I’m aware of that proves its structural integrity by directly foreshadowing its later twists and turns right from the very start. Rewatching the show, with full knowledge of how the show progresses and ultimately concludes, allows its genius to be fully appreciated.

Structurally, Babylon 5 taught me to think ahead. It taught me to think about consequences. It taught me to think about the significance of the events of my story, even the very small events. In fact, the very small events in my stories often end up triggering very large events down the road, something which Babylon 5 excelled at.

It could be said that Straczynski planned his show almost too well, with the effect of producing uneven episodes which aren’t always much fun when viewed in isolation. The plot momentum of that show, however, is pretty overwhelming-in a good way. When it comes to understanding the importance of structure, Babylon 5 provides a master’s course.

Make It So: A Twelve-Year-Old’s Head Start

May 13, 2013

Evan Braun

Evan Braun The Writing Life 1 Comment

On a schoolyard in 1993, I made a new friend. His name was Joey, and he introduced me to Star Trek. Without seeing a single episode, I began to learn about the Starship Enterprise. It was like hearing the Gospel for the first time. I started by watching some of the Star Trek movies. I remember going with Joey to the local video store. While browsing the shelves, he explained to me those basic tenets of the Star Trek feature series that now seem as constant and self-evident as the lunar cycle, the length of day, and the colour of the sky-the odd movies are good, the even ones are bad. So we started with Star Trek II, which proved successful, if not completely a deal-sealer.

I was reluctant to share this interest with my family, because I had a sense that they would not endorse it. Little did I know that my mother had grown up watching Kirk and Spock on her family’s television-a piece of technology still mostly shunned in the 1960s by most people in the religious community where she grew up. Yes, my mother’s family was quite worldly, a fact which I am somewhat proud of.

My parents were tolerant of my interest in Star Trek, and so it was that I began catching episodes here and there on television. This was the early 1990s, of course, so the episodes I saw were reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation-and I quickly grew to love it. There is one episode that sticks in my mind. I’m not a hundred percent certain it’s the first episode I saw, but it’s definitely the one that sealed the deal. It was called “Remember Me,” a fourth season episode featuring Dr. Crusher’s escape from a warp bubble. (I’m sure that sounds like Chinese to some, but it makes perfect sense to me.)

The result is that in 1995, at the age of twelve, I wrote a full-length novel. It was set in the Star Trek universe and it was called “Warring Factions.” Oh my goodness, it is a travesty of epic proportions. I say it’s set in the Star Trek universe, but I had the unmitigated gall to invent my own new ship, and a whole new crew. Eighteen years later, I have only the vaguest recollections of the plot, but I’ve been too embarrassed to actually read it (it even has an alien character named “Hamlit,” ugh). I may never read it. A year later, I wrote a follow-up called “Nightstalker.” This one mingled my invented crew with the cast of Star Trek: Voyager, a bizarre mashup which makes precisely zero sense.

As terrible as those books are, within them are over 100,000 words, interspersed with correctly placed commas, period, and apostrophes (also a fair share of incorrectly placed semicolons). These books gave me a powerful head start, and I doubt any of it would have happened without Star Trek.

Ever since, my progression into the world of genre publishing has been characterized by an attempt to eradicate Star Trek tropes from my writing-not that they’re bad, but because they’re so very distinctive. Remember what I said about the warp bubble? Well, in my early fiction I had a tendency to write about the positronic reconfiguration of the neutrino assembly, or the baryon- particle causation effect in the warp field capacitor. Trekkers affectionately refer to this as technobabble.

But there are a lot of things that Star Trek did right, lessons it taught me and which have served me well over the years. For one thing, Star Trek, at its best, did a good job of balancing sci-fi premises with compelling character drama. After all, just about every form of fiction, whatever genre it falls into, must have a strong character component. Star Trek also taught me about immersing the story and the characters in the setting, and finding ways to actively integrate and bring to life the environment in which a story takes place.

Star Trek was powerfully inspirational to me, in more ways than I can count. It’s something I return to constantly, and it always gives me a creative boost.

Ultimately, Star Trek imbued me with an appreciation of style and setting, but when it comes to story and structure… well, that’s a post for another day. May 27, to be exact. I’ll see you then!