Slowly returning things to "normalcy".

[alexandraerin]

I suspect I'm going to have to do something like I did the last time I got a mass of email all at once and make a "FAQ Post" addressing the bulk of them, so I can focus on the things that require attention: paying customers, sponsors, the artists of various media who contacted me and never got a reply, etc. And of course, the writing. It's been a busy week but I'm trying to make sure each story gets some attention, since I know they each have their supporters now.

Anyway, on writing...

yuki_onna recently linked to an older blog article of hers that included these quotes:

Most literary rules are better off bent, and combining the ritualistic self-flagellation of confessional poetry with genre tropes makes a much more delicious cocktail than either the bucket of emo-blood or elven mead alone.

and

If there is no emotional core, I don’t care how many tribes of elves you’ve invented. The fact is, none of y’all know what it’s like to be a young, blond farm boy dreaming up at the stars when a wizard shows up to dump the fate of the world on your shoulders and also hands you a crown and a girl. Life doesn’t work like that. The best books serve two masters: they show us what life could be like if everything was different, and they make us recognize ourselves with a start. They make us say: yes, that’s what it’s like.

To strike that balance, you must be like unto a World of Warcraft heroine: wear sparkly, leathery, fantastical armor that nevertheless shows all your secret parts.

Aside from being clever as fuck (and extremely clever fuck at that), that resonates with me. A lot of what goes into Tales of MU is "inventing tribes of elves", i.e., what's thought of as world-building. I like world-building as an intellectual exercise, whether it's coming up with fantasy civilizations on fantasy worlds or peopling the modern world with superheroes or envisioning fantastic vehicles and new technologies that could drive a story, but however much detail I invest these creations with, I never take them down off the shelf to show to company unless I feel like I have something to say with them... not just "this might make a good story" but "I myself have a good story to tell using these".

It's not enough to chart dynasties or map trade routes. Unless your imaginary world happens to hit on somebody's specific area of interest, there's no reason for anybody to care what you say happened in a made-up place that has nothing to do with them. If that place is Awesome!!! enough, you'll get some people who care by simple virtue of giving them a place for them to imagine themselves being Awesome!!!... and, y'know, I suppose there are worse levels on which a work can engage someone, but there are also better and stronger ones.

Most writers recognize this, which is why at the very least they provide you with a viewpoint character and put someone into some sort of peril (these may or may not be the same person) and do their best to give you some reason to care about them.

Of course, in this... as in all things... your mileage may vary. I've certainly received my share of "Enough of this emotional core crap, tell me more about your elven tribes." comments on Tales of MU, just as I've been told that The 3 Seas is less engaging than my other works because it lacks their heart. I've also been told (just today) that they read as though written by different people and both are enjoyable.

But, to bring this around to something resembling a point, while I've never been much of a confessional poet myself (I'm more of a limmerickist), Cat's blog post neatly describes my general approach to fantasy and why Tales of MU will probably remain my personal favorite of my works for a good long time, being such a heady mixture of emo-blood and elven mead, of personal reflection and world building, cultural examination and culture creation.

Comments

[stormcaller3801.livejournal.com]

Generally unrelated, but somehow I can foresee MUniverse middling elves having emo blood in their elven mead. It's the sort of batshit crazy that fits them.

The Emotional Core

[sage-blackthorn.livejournal.com]

I first started reading The Tales Of M.U. awhile back when our computer tech at work sent the link to my girlfriend, who passed it onto me since I like reading online stories and comics more than she does. (Thank you Misty.) At first I thought it was a cute story with a novel concept: College life through they eyes of Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes, and other fantasy and mythical creatures. D&D goes to college, novel concept. Had me going "Ok, this should be interesting, let's see where it goes."

The more I read, the more I related to the various characters in different ways, the more I saw of myself (15 years ago really) in them. I was never very outgoing (still aren't for the most part), I was a virgin 'til I was 21 and the aftermath of my first experience was the requisite "horrible, emotionally scarring, I never want to deal with this again" kind of thing. I won't go into details, but the whole initial Puddy thing made me both cry and feel rage. But I think that is the mark of truely great author.

To make an emotional connection with the reader. It draws them into the writers world and the characters and landscape become real for them. We care about Mack, and Amaranth, and Two, and Steff, and Dee and all the others. Even when you come up with something that people just flat out hate and dispise (such as some of the comments about Mack, for example) you've still evoked a strong emotion from your readers. So far, there have been very few authors who could do that to me.

J.R.R. Tolkien (The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy), Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (The DragonLance Chronicles, yes, I cried when Flint Fireforge died), Rand and Robin Miller (The Myst Books), and to a lesser degree John Steakley who wrote "Armor". There are other books that have tugged on my heart-strings, but they weren't sci-fi or fantasy/adventure novels. Most all of Derrick Jensen's work gets to me, but he's exploring culture and history( The Culture Of Make Believe and A Language Older Than Words). Daniel Quinn's work gets to me, but he's writting social commentary disguised as fiction (Ishmael, The Story Of B, My Ismael) and sometime he just comes right out and says it (Beyond Civilization).

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that is takes something special to get me to care about entirely fictional and made-up characters in a story. I have to see part of myself in the characters. Some people talk about tapping into "Archetypes", metaphores for the universal human experiences. Others will touch on a similar experience and base they characters on it (write what you know, is what my creative writing teacher always told me). I can't really pin it down, but Tales of M.U. just speaks to me, it hits all the right buttons at the right time and sends me on an emotional rollercoaster. Which honestly is something I really need right now, and more importantly is the need to talk about it with other people on the same ride. How the story makes me feel, what it reminds me of in my own past, and I really don't know how you do it, but how incredibly turned on some of the chapters have made me feel. (To which Misty is very appreciative).

It's more than just imagining myself in the MUniverse. There are times when I'll read something and think you've somehow pulled a memory out of my brain and put it on the screen in disguise. It's just similar enough to get me thinking "Hey, I went through that when I was 20-something. I really understand what that character is going through and how they feel."

[the-leaking-pen.livejournal.com]

A. I agree with the thought that 3 seas and mu seem like they are written by a different person. This is a good thing to my mind.

Harlan Ellison refers to world building as furniture. you take your house, or story, and you put your furniture into it, and it helps define the house, but no matter how much and how cool of furniture you have, you'd better have a damn interesting house at teh core, furniture or no.

He also likes to say that hes not a science fiction writer, hes a story teller, he just uses a lot of their furniture.

[sage-blackthorn.livejournal.com]

Harlan Ellison occassionally shows up to a convention (Http://www.loscon.org/) I work just about every year in Los Angeles. He's usually kinda cranky.

[leslie-r.livejournal.com]

One thing I've been envious of with MU is how easily it lends itself to Expo-Speak. Mack is a student, she can read a textbook/study on the ether/listen to a lecturing professor and you get to throw tons and tons of world-building at the reader and it's totally justified. I usually start with an interesting (to me) idea, have hours and hours of fun creating metric buttloads of world-building to justify it, then just stare at a word-processor blankly wondering how I'm gonna shove this all into a short-story without boring the audience to tears or making them go, "What, why do I have to know all of this crap?"

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

I love that the structure lets me do that, too. :P Though the one truly epic flounce I got where somebody flounced from the comments, from the associated forum, and then went to TVTropes to baaaaw about me basically specifically cited how I'd interrupt the story to cram a bunch of filler about my "pet theories about the world and magic" in.