Returning to Faery: Creation Through Narration

I dare you to try to build an imaginary world for a character to walk through, fight for, destroy, love, die, etc. and not become instantly overwhelmed by the immensity of the task. Go on, try it.

Tolkien said that he created the mythology of Middle-earth because he wanted to imagine people who spoke the languages he had invented. For him, the languages came first, and then the stories. I'm working in the reverse, which has a host of problems, not the least of which being that I’m taking a path many have trodden before, and few have actually succeeded. I want to write a story in a fantastical world and in order to do that I must imagine the languages, the customs, and cultures they speak there. It must be rich in detail, or else it won’t bear the stamp of my own unique perspective. I won’t enjoy it because I’ll be telling someone else’s story. The thing is, I've realized that for me the Story comes first and foremost. Don't get me wrong, I've got a taste for languages myself. I’ve come to relish the rhythm and cadence of language, and the beauty and strangeness of words. But I am not a linguist by trade, and I've come to realize that if I'm ever going to get this bloody book finished, I have to accept that I’m not going to become a linguist any time soon. For all intents and purposes, I am a storyteller. And a storyteller’s trade is the Story.

So, after Story, everything else is secondary. The world does not exist outside of the story. But that seems like a problem to me, in fantasy. Story reigns like a tyrant here, but it is not the only important thing. I want to create a four-dimensional place, a sense that people in it keep moving through time and space, keep going about their business elsewhere during the main events of the story, long after the last page has been turned, and the book has been placed back on the shelf. So how does one go about doing that? Correction: how does one go about doing that without losing his mind? I know it must be done, but after countless false starts over the years it seemed like I would never find a way in.

Last summer, in a moment of recklessness I decided “to hell with it I’ll write the damn thing anyway” and proceeded with a ‘Write first, ask questions later’ mentality. What I found was this: if I just wrote a passage of the story I knew I wanted to happen, without editing or judging what came out, I could actually find some really cool stuff. It was liberation: I could carry out this story without knowing all the details of the world. In fact--and this was the best surprise of all--I would find just the details I needed through the telling of the story. Example: my protagonist is put in a prison. She falls asleep there in that dank hole and when she wakes up, she sees a vine has grown up the wall from where she lay her head, one that was not there when she got tossed in. This is a detail that I didn’t plan for, but it came up while I was writing the scene out. It may not lead anywhere, but then again, it just might.

Of course, there are some things that are harder to get around. In the next scene, my protagonist is escaping a city through an underground tunnel; she is escorted by a guard. What is the guard’s name? What are the men and women who live in this city named? I’ve always been hung up on names. It’s hard enough when finding the right name for a character set in our world. "Should I call this woman Lisa? Or is she a Deb? Or a Françoise?" The snag is tenfold in a world you made up. Eventually the responsibility of creating these people proves too much, and if you let it, it becomes death to creative flow. But every now and then, I’ll brainstorm some words and some names, and if they’re suitable for this culture, I’ll use them. Which leads me to the best part, which I only recently gave myself license to do: if I realize later on a name doesn’t work? No biggie! I can always go back and change it! What a thought! It sounds pretty obvious, but for a long time I had felt I couldn’t find the character until I had the name, and once it was down on paper the process was almost irreversible, because the name is a powerful thing and can take root quickly. But it doesn’t have to. So the guard’s name? Let’s call him “Kalfira.” Why? What does that name mean? “Don’t ask me! I don’t f#$%ing know! Because I like the way it sounds! Leave me alone! I’ll figure it out later!” is my response. In the meantime, I stop myself from getting hung up, and just keep writing. The result? I’ve actually started writing certain scenes I’ve had in my head for years. It’s finally happening!

That’s the other thing: I don’t have to write out this story in chronological order. The very start of it is still a bit fuzzy, but I can see very clearly where my characters are three or five steps ahead. So why wait for the first step? Figure out just where you are, take note of your surroundings, look for clues, and then you’ll have an easier time of retracing your steps back. C.S. Lewis described the genesis of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe as a series of different images he had in his head, which for one reason or another kept floating toward each other, so he wrote them out and went backwards and forwards connecting them. The original seed didn’t start with the children fleeing London to escape the Blitz. It started with the image of a satyr standing beneath a lamp in a wintry wood. He didn’t intend for it to be a Christian allegory, but that’s the direction the story took him, and he followed it. But before that it was a story, plain and simple. And before that, it was images. And it was through the telling of the story that the images came together to become Narnia.

I find this approach seems to work for me as well. World building is a pleasure in and of itself, but I don’t have as much success with it if I just do it systematically, listing out names of places and people, mapping it out and conjuring up static information like I’m preparing a Encyclopedia entry for it. To an extent these can be useful things to help organize your thoughts, but I find they don’t generate the ideas themselves. They don’t galvanize the imagination, they don’t lead to action. And being an actor, I like me some action. A new world is an awfully big place. I’d much rather go there as a travel writer, documenting what I find. That way, the world comes in flashes, in sounds, images, in songs, poems, war stories, love stories. Stories. Approach it with child-like wonder and the active voice of narration, rather than the authority of a God-like architect listing trivia, and the world will more willingly unfold itself.

Another major obstacle has been my lack of experience. I’ve questioned whether I should be writing this story at this time in my life, simply because I haven’t lived enough. It’s stewed for so long (half of my brief life, so far), and it’s come to mean so much to me, that I feel like it has to be my magnum opus, or it doesn’t see the light of day. For a while I put it off, deciding I should wait until I’m older, wiser, have more life experience and am in theory a better writer, so it will be a better story when I’m at the top of my game. I realise now just how silly this way of thinking is. This isn’t prudence, or good writing habits. It's vanity! I’m coddling the piece to death. The ego gets in the way and the story gets punished for it. This must stop! The story burns in me now! Not 10, 20, 30 years from now. I should be writing from that place that yearns to make itself heard in the present moment. If I try to write from somewhere else, it will not be genuine, and it will shrivel up. Of course I’ve got other story ideas, and I work on them as well (if this was all I had to work on I would go mad!). But if this fairy tale habitually crops up unbidden, I should take that as a sign. Opus shmopus. It may not be the best story I’ve ever written, it may even be a very bad one. It may simply be something I have to get down before I can move on to a new adventure. Then again, it may be wonderful. But for now that’s not my place to decide, is it?

For now, my job is to keep writing.