My overnight learning about fantasy storytelling

[scarlettina]

Last night, amidst Merlin's bed-tumbling and Spanky's crankiness, I had a realization that will address one of my issues with the novel, which has sat dormant since I got back from Africa. The realization was that I'd been working on the characters as characters, but hadn't been working on the setting as a character, and somewhere in the back of my mind I'd wanted the setting to be a character and had been failing at creating that. It's not the thing that has kept me off the book, not the main one, but it's a contributing element. I've had this vague idea about how the incursion of magic into my world has affected society, but I've never really developed it to its logical conclusion: how the incursion of magic has affected the environment in which that society exists. It's world-building 101, right? We learn by doing, I guess, or at least I do. Heaven forfend that I actually, you know, read a book to learn about process, or listen to friends who have tramped this road ahead of me.

::sigh::

I despair of myself sometimes. So I'm note-taking and thought-processing and we'll see where this goes and if it helps to fire the process again.

Comments

[steve98052.livejournal.com]

In a fantasy novel, I'd say that setting-as-character is a critical issue, not just a contributing element. If readers weren't looking for a fantasy setting, they'd be reading a different genre. And if the fantasy setting doesn't add up, some will notice. Obviously, the survival of D&D-derivative fantasy shows that many readers will ignore it when a setting that doesn't add up, but the fact that setting problems are in your mind at all – even at the back of your mind – says that you don't want a setting that doesn't add up.

If you care to describe how the setting diverges from reality, I'd be happy to ponder what effects those divergences would have on the setting-world.

Smaller changes are easier to manage. A not-so-complicated change would be the modern world, plus the presence of vampires, who keep their existence secret, except to cultivate myths that vampires are far more powerful than they really are, so that people who discover them are inclined to take unnecessary risks when fighting them, such as heart-staking them when a stout gunshot would do the job.

A more difficult change would be the modern world with vampires that are powerful and contagious; such a world would very quickly run out of living people to prey upon. In such a setting, vampires would have to come to an agreement on how many victims are allowed to rise as vampires, how often vampires are allowed to hunt, and what penalties to impose on vampires who exceed their hunt limit.

(I just use modern world plus vampires because vampires are a pretty well-understood fantasy element, even if they're more horror-fantasy than general fantasy.)