Category Archives: Setting and Milieu

Guest Post by Pamela K. Kinney

Whether your tale is set in a real place or an imagined one, you need to establish your characters’ world so that the reader can suspend disbelief and fully engage with the story. Not only horror, this includes from science fiction and fantasy. There must be reasons why a character or a whole slew of them reacts as they do in their world. Their actions, their thoughts, the reason they fall in love or hate someone, why they kill, every bit of their reactions comes from how their universe revolves. World building determines the place your characters live in.

World building is the process of constructing an imaginary world. World building in horror and dark fantasy often involves the creation of a back-story, maybe history, geography, ecology, supernatural creatures, and people for the novel, novella, or even a short story. The short story will consist of a scene unlike the longer novella or novel. This can be lesson from a sentence to a paragraph’s worth of world building.

The more differences to the mundane world you write into your plot, the more the writer should focus on getting those details right. Set them so they almost fade into the background, and that way, the reader will focus on the characters and the story. There is no need to info dump those aspects of the world right away in the first chapter or two.

It is not just the big details the writer should worry about, but those small things that can escape attention. Small details sharpen the world. Think of a movie. You have the main actors. But you also have the extras, or background as they are called in the movie business. You’re thinking, “No, extras aren’t that important, not when your hero or heroine are the real focus of the story.” Take a look at a haunted house story, It’s not just the humans who are stuck in the building and trying to get out. The house itself and the ghosts are the extras or background. All this makes your story a more rounded one.

Be consistent in your world building rules. Keep them as you delve deeper into the story. Once the manuscript is done, editing will help in catching these kinds of mistakes. I have files on all my characters in my stories, adding their traits, what they do for a living, and much more. This keeps straight my characters and the world they exist in. After all, if what you’ve written goes against any of the rules you’ve created in your world, then there has to be a logical, rational reason, reasonable to you, but most of all, to your readers. Such as if iron is poisonous to the fey, but suddenly later in the story, the character can touch a fence of iron, there must be a reason why they can do this at the time (maybe they had found a spell that enables them to). Don’t just have them unable to do something because it isn’t convenient to your story. Being consistent is what makes the suspension of disbelief your readers are willing to have if you do it right.

Your world’s historical past should not overwhelm or dominate your current story. If it does, then you will bore your readers, most of all, you’re writing the wrong fiction. A paragraph of it is all you need.

When writing fantasy, building a world that is extraordinary and vivid is often the heart of the tale, even the dark world of a horror novel. The stranger that fantastical world is, the more important it becomes for the author to create a reality that readers can relate to and make them feel part of it. Throw horror into the equation and now the writer must add a visceral component into the mix. When it comes to horror, Hell might be the world the writer is building. Don’t just stick to the physical horrors. Develop the emotional and psychological plight of it. For horror is about the emotion; the fear you want the reader to feel as they read. This would flesh out the horror world; make it 3D and not a flat world.

Magic is not only in high fantasy, but it can used be in dark fantasy or horror. Look at George RR Martin’s Games of Thrones—magic is as much a part of the frightening elements and monsters as the noble families plotting to kill each other are. There’s a reason tropes like magic is evil and black magic exist. Take deals with the Devil, or human sacrifice. Look at the world that JK Rowling built. How dark this young adult fantasy grows as it progresses, to more horror than light fantasy.

Now, get out there and start planning the world of your scary story. One that will raise the hairs on the back of the reader’s neck.

About the Author:

Author of Haunted Richmond, Haunted Richmond II, Haunted Virginia: Legends, Myths, and True Tales, and Virginia’s Haunted Historic Triangle: Williamsburg, Yorktown, Jamestown, & Other Haunted Locations, Pamela K. Kinney has written fiction that enables her readers to journey to worlds of fantasy, go beyond the stars, and dive into the vortex of terror. One of her stories proved heart-stopping enough to be runner up for 2013 WSFA Small Press Award. As Sapphire Phelan, she also writes bestselling, award winning paranormal romance with dark heroes and heroines with bite!

Find out more about her at her websites: http://www.pamelakkinney.com/ and http://www.sapphirephelan.com/.

About the Book:

Travel to Petersburg, Virginia, and the surrounding areas of Colonial Heights, Hopewell, Prince George, Dinwiddie, and nearby Ettrick-Matoaca, Enon, and Chester to discover what spirits, monsters, UFOs, and legends await the unwary. Why are the Union and Confederate spirits still fighting the Civil War in the battlefields? Who is the lady in blue who haunts Weston Plantation House? Learn what the phantoms at Peter Jones Trading Post will do to keep from being photographed. Drink tea with runaway slaves still hiding on the top floor above the Blue Willow Tea Room. Are Edgar Allan Poe and his bride still on their honeymoon at Hiram Haines Coffee and Ale House? Why does the Goatman stalk young lovers? Meet the ghosts of Violet Bank Museum that greet guests at the house. Hauntingly active as they share space with the living, the dead refuse to give up their undead residency.

Schiffer Publishing Amazon Barnes and Noble

This Ain’t No Fortess of Solitude

August 13, 2015

Leigh Galbreath

We talk about writing being a solitary art. We go on and on about sitting alone in a room, writing stories that only we can hear in our heads with characters we create in worlds we manufacture, an internal creation that, in it’s inception, is as separate and isolated as the writer putting down the words.

Only, it’s not, strictly speaking, true, is it? I mean, yes, the story in our heads part is real, and often we are alone when we’re thinking about said story or writing said story, but when you think about, none of us really write in a vacuum.

Let me suggest that, rather than saying that a story is an internal creation, it is actually a creation of internalized experience. Experience, of course, based on the community in which we live, work, and play. And community is essential for good fiction.

Lets start at the beginning, the inception stage when everything is amorphous and at most we have bits and pieces of plot or setting or character. But these bits and pieces didn’t come out of the aether. It might feel like divine inspiration, but it’s not really. Its our lives, our friends, something we saw on TV or read in a book. Its all the people, places and things that our minds (whether consciously or not) squirrel away for whatever reason. It percolates in our heads until something cool comes out and we think, “Gee, that could make a groovy story.”

And the more experience, the wider our personal community we take in, the more inspired that grove can be, the more diverse and deep, in sum, the more realistic the story can become. Without taking part in the world, without that community, I dare say, story cannot exist. Inspiration would fall flat on it’s innocuous face.

Now, that’s just no fun.

I personally have trouble with this part. I spend too much time in my head and not enough taking in the world around me, but when I do pay attention, I’ve found some the best characters always have a basis in people I know. The same goes for places and even plots. Even though I’ve never been to another planet, I can still describe what it feels like to get sand in my shoes on that planet because I’ve been to a beach on this one. An analogue can alway be found in our personal experiences within our community for the details that place the reader there with a character.

But it’s not just the initial inspiration that comes from our community. One of the nicest things about having a large group of acquaintances, picked up from going to seminars and classes or starting up a conversation in the check-out lane at Wal-Mart, is that not only can you gain inspiration, but also gain sources for fact and reality-checking. Don’t know how to fly a plane? Ask a pilot. Network enough, and you’re sure to find one, or someone who knows one. Need to make sure you’re plots on the right track? Pick a friend who reads or join a writer’s group, if you’re so inclined.

My point is that you do not, in fact, live in a fortress of solitude. It’s not difficult to bring community into our writing lives. It’s already there. We just have to take the time to pay attention to it. Actually, it’s kinda hard to truly be alone in our writing (that is assuming you’ve not locked yourself in a bunker without the internet or television or anything, but let’s face it, if you had, you wouldn’t be reading this, so you wouldn’t notice to argue with me, now would you?).

Your community is right there, now go use it!

And while your at it, use our community to give you some seriously nifty books. Scoot that cursor right on over to the right and sign up for this week’s give away. And come back on Monday, and do it again for even more nifty books!

Inspiration from Songs

July 10, 2015

mary

Ideas & Plotting Mary Pletsch Setting and Milieu No Comments

If you’ve spent any length of time in a fan fiction community, you’ll probably know what a “songfic” is. If you haven’t, a songfic can most easily be described as a story interspersed with the lyrics of a song. It’s the fan writing equivalent of a movie soundtrack.

You’ve seen scenes in movies, TV shows and even commercials where a song plays in tandem with visual images. Sometimes the lyrics of the song narrate the events on screen. Sometimes the music helps to create a certain mood or underline a theme. Or, sometimes, images and music that don’t seem to match can provide a striking and powerful contrast. (Examples include the “Mad World” commercial for the original Gears of War video game, or when “I Can’t Stop Loving You” by Ray Charles plays during the destructive climax of 2001’s anime film “Metropolis.”)

Songfics aren’t allowed on certain fan fiction web sites for copyright reasons. But it’s natural for people, as creators, to use music for inspiration: to imagine certain songs as the theme songs, soundtracks, or end themes for our novels, stories, or characters. And this impulse isn’t limited to fan fiction.

Carrie Vaughn’s urban fantasy Kitty Norville series, about a werewolf who hosts a talk radio show, includes a playlist of songs at the beginning of each book that help set the “flavour” of the story to come. James Roberts, writer of IDW’s “Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye” comic series, tweets a selection of songs that inspire and inform the newest issue right before it comes out. Stephen King has used song lyrics as epigraphs in his novels or in the text of his fiction (with permission from the copyright holders).

If you’re not Stephen King, the legalities and potential fees involved in directly quoting songs might be prohibitive for you. Still, songs are excellent potential sources of inspiriation. Familiar music can help you get “in the zone” while you’re writing. Sometimes a song can help you imagine the kind of mood, emotion or situation you want to portray in your story. And sometimes a verse or even a line can spark the idea for a story.

The first story I published, “Blood Runs Thicker” in the ebook edition of “When the Hero Comes Home 2” by Dragon Moon Press, was inspired by a single line in a song.

Jim says some destinies should not be delivered…

The song is “In Thee” by Blue Oyster Cult.

Every time I heard this line – and I’ve been listening to this song for years – I wondered about this line. Why “shouldn’t” they? “Should” is a value judgment, compared to “are” or “are not” which are merely statements. The song goes on to suggest that these destines are delivered just the same as those that “should be.” What would be the difference? What would it mean to have this kind of destiny?

“Blood Runs Thicker” is the story of a reluctant war hero who became famous in the service of a cause she doesn’t believe in, in a failed attempt to save the person who mattered most to her. It’s also the story of her best friend, who finds himself forced into a choice of his own: helping his friend salvage what’s left of her life is going to come at a heavy cost. The hero has received one of those destinies that should not be delivered, and now the narrator finds himself pulled into the aftermath of that deliverance.

Songs can be excellent sources of inspiration. Songs can help form ideas for characters, moods, or as in the above example, even plot. But songs don’t have to be direct quotes to provide inspiriation. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about the role of music in culture and how playing a certain kind of music helped me build a world for a story.

Orbit Xplorer

May 22, 2015

fictorians

Doug Dandridge Software World-building No Comments

A guest post by Doug Dandridge.

I was going to write a post about Ginger, a software program that helps writers find errors in their manuscripts. However, Ginger changed their interface to the point where it does not do all the stuff this writer was going to rave about. So on to something else.

I write very detailed military science fiction, and I like to get things right as much as I can. I’m sure I miss, but not from a lack of trying. In the bad old days, I had to do everything by calculator and graph paper, but now the internet supplies the tools to really get down into the dirt of astrophysics. There are a lot of programs out there that do a good job of simulating different types of orbital systems. Programs like Universe Sandbox and others. I love Universe Sandbox for simulating where asteroids are going to be at any given time in the future. For detailed orbits of simpler systems, enter Orbit Xplorer by Ottisoft. At $25 for a single site license the program, for all it can do, is a bargain.

Orbit Xplorer comes with a number of preprogramed simulations, a star visits the sun (bad), double star (cool), Kepler’s laws (educational), two colliding stars (also really bad, but cool as well). While useful, I found the simulations I could program to be much more useful, and I will give three examples below.

I wanted to work out Hohmann Transfer Orbits for a book idea about Mars. Hohmann’s use a least fuel curving orbit to put a ship into Mars orbit from Earth, and can only be accomplished over certain timespans. But for the book I wanted to see how much of a boost I could use to take days off of the transfer. Using the program and trial and error I found the optimal boost to achieve a least time transfer, and discovered that any boost after that just sent the ship flying out into the outer solar system.

The second example was working out the orbits for a book that was to be the lead volume for the second Deep Dark Well trilogy (which has been written but not published). The idea was that ancient humans had moved stars and planets into place, then put terraformed moons into orbit around some of the closer gas giants. The program allows the user to put whatever objects he wants in orbit around each other, setting the mass of each body as well the distances of the orbits. Again, it’s a trial and error process, and at some close distances the moons fall into the gas giant. I set up a situation where all of the terraformed moons were as close as I could put them, so that their days (which are the same as one orbit around the gas giant) would be of reasonable lengths, none more than fifty some hours or so. When I ran the program, everything orbited well for about fifty evolutions, as which point one moon curved in, hit another moon, and both collided with the gas giant (very bad), while one of the remaining moons was pulled out of orbit to go careening through the outer solar system, there to freeze (bad as well). Oops. Eventually I got it to run a thousand cycles without a disaster, and went with those orbits, which gave me the day night cycle of the moon of interest to the story, as well as the cycle at which phases of the other moons would be seen.

The final example is from my Exodus series, which has been called by some readers as a new level of worldbuilding. I won’t even go into the central black hole with eight stars in orbit around it, all with their own system. One of the systems I wanted as accurate as possible was the two Earth mass planets in orbits around each other, the capital world and it’s twin. Both were habitable, and I also wanted the capital planet to have a terraformed moon in orbit. So I modeled the two planets in orbit around each other first off, with the one parameter being that the day night cycle on both worlds would not be longer than about forty hours. Anything longer might cause problems with the earth like vegetation on the worlds. That was easy enough. I had two beautiful planets that each had a bright world in the sky in one hemisphere at night, and experienced daily short lived eclipses on their day sides each light cycle. The worlds were about ninety thousand kilometers or so apart, which would make each world many times larger than our moon in the sky of the other. I then added the moon, and found that it would orbit the one world at about ten thousand kilometers in a slightly elliptical orbit. I ran the simulation about a thousand cycles, and everything seemed to hold together.

One of the coolest things about a science fiction setting is how different we can make them. Planets in orbit with each other around a center of gravity, moons in orbit around larger planets. Multiple star systems. One of the coolest things I found about Orbit Xplorer was how it sparked the imagination, suggesting setting I wouldn’t have otherwise thought of. Setting can be another major character in your work, the more imaginative, the better.

Guest Writer Bio:

Doug Dandridge lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where he has worked as a full time writer since March of 2013. A graduate of Florida State University and the University of Alabama, and a veteran of the United States Army, Doug has been in love with the fantastic since an early age. He has over twenty-five self published books on Amazon, and has a half dozen novels that have reached the top five in Space Opera in the US and UK.