Die by the Pen: Story Bibling on Long Walks
Due to injuries sustained during a month long blogfest, Matt. Murray is currently on the SAC Blog’s disabled list. He hopes to quickly ascend the ranks of the injured reserves with a fresh onslaught of insights and snarky comments about comics and cartoons. This week, Jared Gniewek will graciously be delivering a double dose of Die by the Pen…
As someone who is recently unemployed, it is doubly important for me to adhere to a work ethic regarding my writing. I find that my gentleman’s library can be a touch distracting if I am in the middle of a piece and need to get out of the house to work. I found a coffee shop a mere fifty blocks away. It’s good to get out of the house and the walk keeps the brain gears greased. I find, sometimes, that stories are a very easy thing to come up with on a two and a half mile walk, but what becomes difficult is communicating their setting. I mainly write Horror, and it is very important to maintain setting. A reader has a very hard time accepting that the monsters are real when the characters are floating around an undefined place. One must know the barriers in Horror, so that these may be destroyed by the invading agent.
My latest inspiration is experimenting with world building exercises. It’s important that the characters you work on live in a breathing, vital world. No one lives in a vacuum – not even the most powerful wizard in the universe. Everyone is a part of their community (even an outsider is a reflection of our response to a pre-existing social network). We inhabit physical spaces; so should our characters. The town, country, planet, dimension, etc. should be hatched out at some point. In a lot of cases it won’t matter all that much that the story takes place in Utah or Burbank. But in quite a few stories the environment is so defined that it becomes an entity as strong as the characters themselves, such as in the setting of Tokyo in the works of Yoshihiro Tatsumi or the planets of Apocalypse and New Genesis in the works of Jack Kirby. Or, perhaps most famously, Hill House in the novel by Shirley Jackson.
If you are working on a pre-existing world, such as writing an adventure for your friends homebrew Watership Down Roleplaying Game or writing some Superman fan fiction for kicks, much of the work is done for you and then you are simply cherry picking the elements that work towards the feel of your story. You know the owsla gets the best cowslip and that green kryptonite is gonna weaken a Kryptonian on Earth. Otherwise, you are on your own and it is up to you how much information you want to go into about the mechanics of this place that your characters inhabit in the physical sense. You can wait to build your world until the story is finished and then drop a couple cues as to where they are, but what cannot wait and shouldn’t be retrofitted is the character’s place in the world in relation to the other characters. Everyone should have a back story and everyone’s relationship (if one exists between the characters) should be hatched out before they interact.
One interesting book was James Sturm’s take on Marvel’s Fantastic Four, Unstable Molecules, in which the characters are re-imagined without their superhuman powers but the dynamics of their familial unit remain intact. It is a very successful adaptation. Through this example, one can see that so much of setting is just so much fluff (or “chrome,” as I call it). One doesn’t need to know the flavors of pipe weed to know that Sam and Frodo are best friends. If the dynamic is strong enough, setting can become secondary.
I recently spent a day writing out what is called a “story bible” for a group of super-powered bikers. It is a document that covers the histories and relationships of all the principal characters. Examples are the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe and Bulfinch’s Mythology.
The OHofMU has timelines and all of the noteworthy events of their pasts. It has who-hates-who-and-why. It is very detailed and it is designed in such a way that any writer could come into it and draw these people from it and how they would interact. It also sets up the basic conflicts that they will be addressing and has seeds and springboards for even more stories. I found, while writing it, that as their back stories became more and more defined and as their relation to the other characters became more and more crystallized, that more and more scenes came to me.
The setting is a rough approximation of the great American biker films of the seventies melded with Kirbyesque super-weapons. I was laughing out loud at the coffee shop at how ridiculous it felt at first. But then, as the Bastard is revealing his feelings of self loathing to Red Hot Momma’s real son, Mars Markus, in the aftermath of their brawl with the Scorps, it didn’t seem funny anymore. The characters seemed to leap off of the timeline I had written up and into the area of breathing life.
The first step is character, I feel. Through knowing the characters, the World will organically build upon itself. Often times, I find when looking over a friend’s writing project that they have fully rendered the setting in their mind but are so in love with the world they built that the characters become secondary. Do yourself a favor. At least draw out a diagram showing how each of the characters in your piece knows one another. You’ll find after you become aware of this that little things will sneak into the dialogue that will reflect where they are in the diagram. Little asides emerge. Color and texture become more vibrant. The characters become real.
On Wednesday, I’m gonna show you how to build a world around them.
Jared Gniewek works in the music industry as a back line technician, performer, and promoter. He is also a freelance writer whose work can be seen in the recent re-launch of Tales from the Crypt and heard on The Dark Sense, an audio anthology of the macabre for which he is also the story editor — http://www.earstage.com/darksense.htm.
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