Author Archives: Evan Braun

On the Road… with Google Street View

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My recently completed Watchers Chronicle is by and large a travelogue. The stories hit every continent, more than a dozen countries, and even more cities and countrysides. At book signings, I am often asked if I have visited all the locales featured in the book, to which I must sadly answer, “No. I wish.” Frankly, I don’t have the budget or time for first-person research on that scale. Very few authors do, including those many times more successful than me.

So what’s an author to do? With a story like this one, the locations exist in the observable world. I can’t just make up geography to suit my needs. The cities and streets and lakes and fields and mountainsides are all real. They exist, and therefore they need to be as accurately depicted as it’s possible to do from the confines of my home in the middle of the Canadian prairie. It’s very flat here, and I can see an awfully long way, but I can’t see all the way to Switzerland.

Fortunately, Google can. Specifically, Google Earth. Google Earth is an encyclopedia of visual information sorted geographically. If you want to see locally sourced pictures and information from any location in the world, all you need to do is scroll to it on Google’s beautiful globe of accurate and increasingly detailed satellite imagery, and there you will find everything you could possibly hope for. It’s a geo-lover’s paradise.

The most powerful tool in the arsenal is Street View. A fleet of Google vans has been busy crisscrossing the globe’s million-or-so highways and streets for about a decade now, capturing a constant stream of 360-images as they zoom through urban centers, savannahs, high-altitude plateaus, and stunning sea sides. You can literally jump to just about any street you can think of and see for yourself exactly what it looks like. You can study the buildings, the passersby, the sidewalks, the shops, the road surfaces themselves, the soil and terrain, the trees and vegetation, even the wildlife, literally everything available to the eyes. Do you want to know exactly what the terrain is like at the opening to I-50’s Eisenhower Tunnel in western Colorado? No problem. Do you want to see which shops and restaurants adorn New York’s Times Square? Easy. Do you want to track the exact route between London’s Piccadilly Circus and Heathrow International, and capture all the sights along the way? Done.

What a resource to travelogue authors everywhere. Jack Kerouac never could have imagined this.

Of course, these research tools don’t fill in all the gaps. Your imagination still has to bring these still images to life. And of course the eyes only account for one of the five(ish) senses. You still have to fill your story with the endless sounds, smells, and tactile details needed to create a truly rich and diverse literary experience.

That said, Google Street View really is the perfect place to start. Unless your story is set on Mars. Except, actually, Google is working on that too…

Evan BraunEvan Braun is an author and editor who has been writing books for the last two decades. He is the author of The Watchers Chronicle, whose third volume, The Law of Radiance, has just been released. He specializes in both hard and soft science fiction and lives in the vicinity of Winnipeg, Manitoba.

No Evil Required

Author's Perspective Character Conflict Craft & Skills Evan Braun POV 1 Comment

Evil exists in the world. In fact, to some degree it exists in all of us—a dark side that usually only emerges in our most private thoughts but may occasionally peek into the light of day. For the most part, we don’t let this happen. Indeed, for the most part we are good people. In evolutionary terms, goodness propagates itself more successfully; evil is inherently maladaptive.

The worst kind of motivation for a villain is intrinsic, deep-seated evil. They’re evil because they were born that way. Or they crave power obsessively. To me, this almost never rings true. I suppose there are some people like that in the real world, but they must be a rare breed. Most people think of themselves as more or less good—not necessarily saintly, but closer to Mother Teresa than to Adolf Hitler.

Intriguingly, even the people who really are closer to Adolf Hitler probably view themselves as being closer to Mother Teresa, and this is fertile ground for growing conflict in our stories. First of all, a villain is not the same thing as an antagonist. You don’t need a villain to tell a good story, but you probably need an antagonist. What’s the difference? Well, think about it this way. Sometimes you just have two fairly normal people who just happen to want very different things… perhaps even diametrically opposed things… and thus the clash happens. (Exhibit A: Sad Puppies vs. Social Justice Warriors; no evil, moustache-twirling villains here, but a hell of a lot of conflict-enriching antagonism.)

When building a story, try setting up a conflict between two or more sides in which every side could be anchored by a strong, relatable protagonist. The only difference between a protagonist and an antagonist is often the fact that the protagonist gets the primary point of view; if you swap things around, those two characters can easily switch roles without changing the fundamentals of the story.

As a thought experiment, it could even be interesting to try actually writing the story from different points of view. Walk in your antagonist’s shoes; make them the protagonist and see what happens.

Indeed, conflict requires no evil. Just opposition. And effective, relatable, compelling opposition is rarely in short supply.

1Evan Braun is an author and editor who has been writing books for the last two decades. He is the author of The Watchers Chronicle, whose third volume, The Law of Radiance, is forthcoming this spring. He specializes in hard science fiction and lives in the vicinity of Winnipeg, Manitoba.

The Upside to Being Messy and Unfocussed

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RubiksCubeFor the most part, I’m a gardener. And proud of it! If you’ve spent any amount of time in the writing community, you probably know what this means: I explore my story as I go along, finding my way to the ending through a process of trial and error rather than moving through the book strictly according to a preordained outline. I don’t eschew outlining entirely; I do keep fairly detailed outlines of the two or three chapters ahead of wherever I happen to be in the story on a given day. Working this way gives me confidence in the story’s immediate future, but beyond that I admit it can get a little murky. I only have a general idea of how I want the story to resolve while I’m in the midst of it (usually it’s a solid, workable idea, but nonetheless I only work out the details very generally).

This doesn’t mean the endings aren’t well-earned or carefully orchestrated. In fact, I feel that working this way forces me to spend a lot of time considering how satisfying various plot and character developments will be when push comes to shove. If any particular idea isn’t panning out, I don’t have qualms about jettisoning it in favour of an alternate approach. In my experience, this allows my books to get better, stronger, tighter as I work through them, solving them in the same way one might tackle a Rubik’s Cube. (Full disclosure: I’ve never managed to solve a Rubik’s Cube, so I guess that’s a bad example.)

So what does this have to do with character? Everything.

When you don’t have an airtight outline guiding you through the storytelling weeds, you have to create potential in your characters. In the earlier stages of writing a novel, it’s profitable to spin dozens of little threads that may or may not pay off in the long run. You don’t have to tie them all together. Once your story is worked out, you can trim the book down to focus only on the threads that coalesce. At the beginning, though, the key to creating great, story-propelling characters is to pinball them off other characters and events to see what sticks. In my experience, this leads to a host of options which can be exploited down the road.

This can feel messy and unfocussed while in progress, but a lot of the detritus doesn’t make it into the final cut. I end up writing a number of early scenes that don’t see the light of day, because they don’t lead anywhere interesting. But I often won’t know if particular character combinations work until I attempt them. So Margaret clashes with Fred, and Fred makes a pass at Steve, and Steve can speak with the ghost of a long-dead alien consciousness from Europa, and the long-dead alien consciousness from Europa… The point is, none of these may be central to the premise of my story—at least to begin with—but the few threads that really click create enormous depth and interconnectivity to my characterizations in the long-term. And several of them likely will become central to the premise by the time I type “The End.”

Knowing what will come together and what won’t is a mysterious, unscientific alchemy I have yet to master—and maybe I never will. But in the meantime, I’m going to keep the gardening the hell out of my characters and sees what sprouts up. Sometimes it’s this. Other times? Not so much.

What I Set Out to Do: Closing the Door on 2014

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With one day left in the year, I think it’s safe to say I will not achieve the goals I set out for myself in 2014. I was hoping to complete three books, and instead I completed precisely zero. This suggests that I failed rather spectacularly, though the truth is not nearly so dire when I drill down to the amount of work I actually completed. The primary book I intended to write was supposed to be finished at approximately 100,000 words, and indeed I wrote 110,000 words—so I’m not done yet, but not for lack of trying. There’s just more story than I anticipated when I started it back in January. The other two books are already written more or less in full, and only require some polish to get ready. And therefore, with great confidence, I am able to predict that I will not only write, but also publish, three books minimum in 2015. A fourth book is not out of the question.

A year ago, I think I might have found a year in which I published no new titles discouraging. As important as it is to be releasing new material as often as possible, though, it’s also important to realize that one must devote the necessary time to producing quality writing. For me, 2014 was just such a year, and I expect to reap the rewards starting in the spring. So despite my seeming failure, the past twelve months have in reality been very productive. I’m enthusiastic about the coming months as I creep closer to the finish line on these multiple projects.

My primary novel-writing endeavour this year was getting through The Law of Radiance, the still somewhat tentative title of the third and final book in my Watchers Chronicle trilogy. In past years, I’ve adopted some pretty solid techniques for maintaining productivity and discipline, but this year the challenge was more about bringing a long-form story like this one to a close in as satisfying a manner as possible. Tying up the various plot and character threads of a single novel is challenging enough, so tying up three novels’ worth is a tall order. I’ve definitely learned a few things I’ll be taking into account next time I attempt a story on this scale.

Other lessons learned: don’t let yourself lose momentum when you reach a difficult yet critical juncture in your work in progress. My tendency is to work my way up to those big difficult moments, then back away for a few weeks, using the excuse, “I need to think this through before I move on.” The end result is that I typically go back and write it according to my first instinct anyway, so I don’t gain much by the delay and lose quite a lot of time in the process.

And as usual, the biggest professional obstacle standing in my way is my handling of the day job, which I routinely allow to take precedence over my writing. Which is, of course, a common scenario. This always seems to make sense at the time, but looking back over the past year, my biggest regrets revolve around not taking full advantage of the short periods of free time between my day job hours. It seems to me I could have squeezed out several more chapters if I’d made myself fill in all the cracks in my schedule that way.

Well, there’s always next year!