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

[scarlettina.livejournal.com]

I do think your notes are germaine, absolutely.

One of my favorite TV series for using light and palette cues that way is the 1980s series, "Beauty and the Beast." The world above where Catherine lived was always gray and blue and cool colors. She herself pretty much stuck to that palette in her clothing, too. The world below, Vincent's world, was always red and brown--all warm colors and candlelight. It was, in some sense, a character in the series.

My feeling has been that I want the city in the book to give the impression of having its own secret life as a result of the incursion of magic into a formerly unmagical place. This is still a relatively fresh idea to me, the articulation of something that, until now, has been a pretty unformed idea. I've begun to have ideas about how I want to do it, and I think I'm getting there, little by little. We'll see.

[neutronjockey.livejournal.com]

Use things that are incursion-like in nature? Ivy --- but special ivy on the side of a building. Spots of life where there were none?Glimpses and trapses of light (like a refraction off of a crystal) where there was once shadow...