Category Archives: Your Writing Career

I am vengeance! I am the night! I am a fluid and moldable setting that changes to match my protagonist!

Dave Heyman Setting and Milieu World-building Your Writing Career No Comments

For my second post this month I’d like to take a look at one of my favorite settings in all of media, Batman’s hometown of Gotham City. The angle I’d like to focus on is how writers and directors have used Gotham over the years, changing it like clay and sculpting so that the city is a reflection of the hero who protects it.

As Gotham changes, so does Batman. It’s more that just a fun exercise- -I think there is a lot here that we as writers can learn about using our settings to better frame our characters.

CONSISTENCIES OF THE SETTING

Let’s first take a look at four elements that stay consistent about Gotham in most interpretations:

The first two are somewhat trivial – Gotham is almost always shown as a coastal city in someway, and it is always located northern enough to get snow. The first one I suppose is to allow good waterfront scenes (and sell Batboat toys), while the latter allows you to have fun winter holiday issues.

The other two are more significant, and I think both tie to unchangeable elements of the Batman character.

  1. Gotham City is always represented as a very large city, both in population and geography.
  2. Gotham City is ridden with crime

I find these two very interesting, as I think they are interconnected to create a setting where Batman is a necessary element. Gotham is consistently depicted as a New York level city, in terms of population. This is as opposed to say Portland, Maine. We’re not talking about a hundred thousand people, Batman protects a city of millions of people. In a smaller city or a less crime filled one, Batman might have a chance at actually winning his battle. But Gotham City is too big and too filled with crime and corruption. One man could never win his war against crime here, which makes Batman’s quest to do so all the more compelling and tragic.

He fights a war he knows he can never win, and will someday lose.

So with those consistent elements in check, let’s look at how various media has played with the other components of Gotham City, and how those changes in the setting are there to reflect the version of Batman that protects it.

BATMAN – TELEVISION (1966)

The narration for this television show lets you know from the very beginning. Gotham is a “fair city”. Wayne Manor is “stately”. Of all the takes on Gotham, this is by far the nicest. It’s even daylight outside for most of the shots! With its blue skies and clean streets, this Gotham reflects its Batman perfectly. There is no brooding Dark Knight here. This Bruce Wayne is a fairly happy person; being Batman is a mission to him, but not a curse or burden as it is in most other takes.

It is also worth noting that this is the most generic looking of the Gotham versions I will cover. Other than Wayne Manor and Police Headquarters there are no iconic exterior locations, which gives the city a ‘everytown’ feeling. 

BATMAN – FILM (1989)

One of the primary challenges that faced the Batman movie in the 80s was washing away the image the public had of Batman a light and silly character, an image largely built by the television show I just mentioned. Director Tim Burton and his team gave us an extremely dark and fantastical city, which again reflected the much grimmer hero that protected it. While the television show depicted a Gotham that could be any city, Burton’s Gotham City could exist nowhere but in this film. It is seemingly always night there, everything is poorly lit and the architecture is gothic and grim. The setting of the movie is working hard to sell the change in the character before you even see him.

I find this to be the most hopeless and lost feeling of the Gotham Cities I’m reviewing, and its pairing with Keaton’s Batman is ideal.

BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES (1992)

Batman: TAS shares a lot of production aesthetic with Burton’s film. It is a very grim place where it is again nearly always nighttime. One thing about this setting that is different though is the strong art deco design elements that are married to modern technology. Airships fly overhead while people get out of vintage cars only to type on modern computers. It renders the setting with a feeling of being lost in time, which again is a spot on representation of this series’ version of Batman. Bruce Timm and the production team of this series cherry-picked components of the Dark Knight’s history to show a Batman that was not from one era, but from all of them. The setting here helps to sell that message.

BATMAN BEGINS (2005)

One of the initial conceits of Batman Begins was that this was a ‘real’ movie, in that this was supposed to represent a take on Batman as he might exist in a real world, as opposed to a comic book one. To help sell this, director Christopher Nolan and his team bring us a Gotham City that looks like a real city, really for the first time. There are a few fantastical elements, such as the Narrows and a city-wide monorail system, but those are the aberrations. You see real cars driving by real buildings- -cars that look nothing like the ones in the Animated Series and buildings that would never be mistaken for the dark gothic churches of Burton’s film.

The message here is that this Batman is real and not a comic book character, the movie altering the setting to help sell that to the viewer.

SUMMARY

Obviously there’s a lot more I could mine here and I made more than a few generalization, but my basic point stands. Your setting can just be a place your characters walk around in, or it can tell the reader something about your characters. A good setting will subtly reinforce the message you are already trying to send your reader, teaching them something about your protagonists even as they move around inside it.

See you next time… or should I say: same Fictorians-time, same Fictorians-channel?

Perhaps not.

Setting is a journey

Craft & Skills Dave Heyman Fantasy Setting and Milieu World-building Your Writing Career No Comments

As was mentioned in Greg’s introduction post for this month, the setting is one of the major elements every writer must work out during their story building process. I feel this task is even more critical for a fantasy writer like myself, and I’ll be using my first of two posts this month to illustrate that point further. Normally I also like to use the first paragraph of my posts to work in a silly pun about the month’s theme, but I’ll be setting aside that goal this time.

While even the most basic story will usually require a setting, I find that fantasy stories push those requirements much higher than average. There is the secondary world component to consider, if your heroes and villains exist in the Kingdom of a Thousand Mists, that setting will require more work than if they existed in Detroit. More importantly, fantasy often has a strong movement element in the story. The setting choices you make to portray that movement can do a lot more for you as a writer than just world build.

My current project is a fantasy trilogy that is set both in the Himalayas as well as multiple versions of that same setting, the same region represented in alternate worlds. I made decisions about how to represent each of those areas not just based on what I needed for the plot elements of the story, but also for what I wanted to reflect in the characters.

The first ‘Everest’ is the real one, albeit in 1950. At this point the main characters are untried, both of them unconfident and damaged by events in the real world. In climbing Everest, they encounter snow, ice and altitude as you would expect. I chose to emphasize how isolating the cold was though, with huge snow drifts that blocked their vision and towering ice pillars that threatened their path.

For the second version, I was taking one of my characters on a coming-of-age journey where she discovers that life isn’t always the fairy tale of adventure she wants it to be. Again I used the setting to help subtly communicate this progression to the reader. Initially the world she finds is green and lush, with sweeping vistas and sun dappled seas. As the story starts to darken, the world does as well. The seas turn choppy and storm filled, she ends up in a hot dry desert and so forth. When she returns to the picturesque land, she had changed from her journey and the land has too. The beautiful landscapes are still there, but they are tinged with gray now, the grass still green but not as lush.

With all the movement that is common in fantasy, you will find yourself creating a lot of different settings to help build your world and convey all that motion. Don’t forget that those settings are also a great opportunity to set tone and say something about the emotional journey your characters are on rather than just the physical one.

See you next time!

Home As Setting and Theme

Authorial Trust Believability Character Craft & Skills Ideas & Plotting Kevin Ikenberry Narrative Voice POV Publishing Reader Investment & Empathy Research Science Fiction Setting and Milieu The Writing Life World-building Your Writing Career No Comments

When my debut novel, Sleeper Protocol, was released in 2016, many of my childhood friends, family, and even my teachers commented about my use of “home.” Where I call home is a long way from where I live now, but every time I’m there the feeling of peace is as palpable as wrapping a blanket around my shoulders. I was born and raised in upper east Tennessee in an area called the Tri-Cities. My family actually lived very near a small community known as Midway – it was Midway between Johnson City and Tennessee’s Oldest City, Jonesborough. The Appalachian mountains filled the eastern horizon, running in a roughly southwest to northeast line. It’s a beautiful place.

And I never intended for my story to go there.

As the story of a cloned soldier trying to find his identity unwound from my brain to the keyboard, I initially struggled with “What’s the point?” or even Eric Flint’s famous guidance of “Who gives a $^#@?” I needed something to make the character’s emotional struggle hit home and that’s where the inspiration hit. So, I took my character home. In the third act, he descends Cherokee Mountain, crosses the Nolichucky River, and ends up on a small knoll where a farmhouse once stood. All of those are real places and the knoll is where my family’s homestead still stands. My cousins own “The Farm” as we call it, and it’s wonderful to know that it’s still there and open for my family to visit any time we want. That openness and warmth led me to bringing my character to an very different emotional level. I gave him a sense of place, a sense of a home that he’d once had and was very different than the future one, but a place he could identify with fully and embrace his identity. Once I’d opened that door, I proceeded to move him further along the path by having him stand over his own gravesite in the Mountain Home National Cemetery.

The journey to find his “home” was really the key to unlocking his identity. My first ideas to bring him through familiar territory to help with my description and emotional resonance gave way to something else entirely: a theme I’d never intended. Our sense of home is a large part pf our identity. Even our home nation, or state, or municipality is much more than a common bond to our neighbors. We identify ourselves to that place forever. No matter where I go, when I am asked where I’m from I always say that I’m from Tennessee and just happen to live elsewhere.

My point is this – write about your home or wherever you consider your home to be. Pull that emotion and identity into your own writing. Your voice will improve, your characters will seem more grounded and real, and your readers – especially those who claim the same sense of home – will keep asking for more. When you’re not writing about your home? Put that same warmth and emotion into the characters who are there. It makes a difference to the story and to your characters.

Starting Your Own Publishing Company

Business Forming a Business Kim May Publishing Your Writing Career No Comments

One of the wonderful things about indie publishing is that you don’t have to publish under a vanity press name or any other publishing service name. You can publish under your own company’s name. For some indie writers it’s not that big a deal and that’s okay. However, for people like me who have been entrenched in the sales side of the industry (almost two decades for me) it’s a sign of professionalism. The second booksellers see a vanity press or publishing service name we automatically regard the book as amateurish. (A small press that we’ve never heard of will always be in higher esteem than a vanity press.) Having your own house name is one of those little details that can make stores take you more seriously.

I usually don’t include disclaimer in my posts but in this particular instance I feel it’s necessary because I am not a lawyer or a business consultant. Besides, this isn’t a how to start your own company post. There are great posts from independent business organizations that explain it better than I can. I’m just sharing my own experience from starting my own publishing company. There are a lot of things that took me by surprise that I wish I’d been better prepared for.

Here’s a list of things that I learned along the way that might help ease the way for you:

  1. Take the time to check local and national databases of registered business names. There’s nothing more embarrassing then picking a name that’s already taken. Yes, it’s extremely tedious and the print on the website is tiny. You still need to do it. Once you’re sure your name is unique register it in your state right away to stake your claim. Registering it nationally is a good idea too. Yes, there’s a registration fee (one for state and another for national) so be prepared for that.
  2. When deciding whether to register your company as a DBA (doing business as)/ sole proprietorship or to go ahead and file as a LLC don’t think you’re selling yourself short by wanting to do the former. If you feel a DBA is right for your business at this point in time, that’s fine. If circumstances change later and you need the extra legal protection a LLC provides you can upgrade your business.
  3. Decide now if you want to take on authors other than yourself (along with the expense and bookkeeping that goes with it). It doesn’t matter if you have a website or not. The second an aspiring author, or the mother of an aspiring author, finds out you’re a publisher you will get asked that question. It’s not a matter of if you’ll be asked, it really is a matter of when. Knowing the answer ahead of time will help you maintain a certain level of professionalism.
  4. Know how copyright works as well as how and when to file for it. You’re the publisher so there won’t be anyone to do it for you. It’s a good idea for authors to know how that works regardless but it’s doubly important when you have your own publishing company.
  5. Speaking of you having to do everything, you’re also financing everything so it’s a good idea to sit down and figure out a budget or even write a full financial plan for your start up — not just for the company but for the first title you’ll publish too. How much will it cost to: register your business, get a website, buy ISBNs and barcodes, get cover art, hire an editor to go over the manuscript, purchase publishing software, etc. If you need a few more months to save up day job income to buy ISBN numbers then maybe you should push out that publication date to give you the time you need. It’s also a good idea to figure in a buffer for unexpected last minute expenses.
  6. Terms of service and other user agreements are the bane of modern existence. That being said you really do need to read every item and subheading so you understand what the sites you’re selling your book(s) on expect of you. If they say that they’ll close your account and take down your titles if you break the agreement, they mean it. With that in mind I recommend giving yourself twice as much time to read them then you think you’ll need because trust me, you’re going to want to take a break on some of them. I also recommend that you don’t do more than one a day. They kinda blend together if you try to do all of them in quick succession.
  7. Keep receipts for everything! All of the expenses for the start up as well as the publishing costs are tax deductible.
  8. Don’t forget that you’re still a writer. The business side can easily take over your life. Make sure you’re still spending time writing the next release. With that in mind, my last bit of advice is…
  9. Be realistic. Don’t be afraid to farm out some less desirable tasks to someone else. I’m not saying that you have to take on an employee but you can take advantage of certain services that online retailers provide. I don’t have the storage space let alone the time and energy to fulfill book orders or process returns myself. But for a small percentage of the profits one of retailers I sell through will do that for me. I also have an accountant to handle my taxes. Being free of the headache and hassle so I have more time to write makes it a worthwhile expense.