Russell started this workshop by asking what world building is. He said that it is verisimilitude. ("I am an academic - I will not use a small word when a big one will suffice.") He said that you as a writer are trying to get your readers to accept that your setting is real. Anything that breaks that jerks the reader out of the story. Whatever you are trying to achieve with the story will be harmed if you lose verisimilitude.
He advised us to set the level of detail to fit the story. You don't want story to be thin, don't equally you don't want want it to overwhelm the reader with unnecessary detail.
He invoked the metaphor of the tourist. Some cultures are sufficiently similar that it's easy to get about in them, while others are difficult to penetrate for cultural, linguistic, or other reasons. Consider your readers as tourists. Establish a set of assumptions that you're not going to break. Don't weird them out too early. Your story should have some kind of metaphorical guidebook to assist the reader/tourist in navigating your world. However, don't make the mistake of making your characters visit every country in your world, just so that you can show off all your world building. You need to know the rules of your world, but it is not necessary to dump them on your readers.
When you write a sentence in a genre you have the whole weight of the genre peering over your shoulder, expecting you to write in a certain way. Recognize this, and let your own voice come through. If you are writing bog-standard stuff, you don't even have to be there half of the time.
What kind of physical world is your story set in? Does it have an axial tilt (and therefore seasons)? Does it have one large moon (and therefore tides)? If you change the world, make sure the rules change too - otherwise you are missing out on a big opportunity. You should have something in your narrative so that the nature of the world really matters to the story. The reader will assume that the world of your story is like ours; they will not assume that it's not like ours.
But things can change: early on in the Discworld series, the fact that the world was flat was central to many of the stories. But now Pratchett's characters are so well established that the nature of the world hardly matters.
You need to establish consistent and limiting systems of magic or science: the superhero must have a weakness, magic must come at great personal cost, faster-than-light travel must be dangerous or expensive.
He used an architectural metaphor for this: if you buy a flat unremarkable section on which to build a house, chances are the architect will come up with a perfectly adequate but unremarkable house for it. However present the architect with an awkward site: maybe very small or steeply sloping, and chances are they'll come up with a cool and original house. You should impose limits on yourself in your world building to see what you can achieve by meeting the restrictions.
Russell suggested that we try world building as a cure for writers' block, which he asserts often comes about because you realize that the next bit doesn't really make sense. The more thinking you do about your world ahead of time, the better the story will be.
When world-building, you need to think about scale - you can set a story in a universe, a galaxy, a planet, a country, a house, a room, or a pocket. Your world has to have depth - of history, culture, and topography. However, only show to the reader a portion of what you know. Do not prove that you have done your research. What you are trying to achieve is a 'patina' or 'smell' over your writing that suggests a vast background.
As for maps, there is no rule as to whether a book should have one or not - but the author should always have one. Russell bemoaned the unimaginative nature of many maps. He asked why our maps are so often very sterile when the genre is so interesting? You should be able to get a sense of the people who live in your world just from the names on the map alone.
He said that the question he is most often asked in fan mail is what software he uses to draw his maps. He always answers that the best software for this is in fact hardware: a pencil and paper.
As well as talking about all this interesting stuff, Russell had us divide into groups for some collective world-building, asking us to come up with the three most important rules of the world, plus scribble down some maps.
It was a fun and thought-provoking workshop.
Elizabeth started out by reading an essay she had written in response to a journalist who had written a piece objecting to the prevalence of Fantasy stories. She called this essay her manifesto. She said that she doesn't distinguish between what is fantastic and what is realistic, but rather between what feels true and what doesn't. She said she loves being suddenly presented with a new set of rules in a Fantasy book, and claims that every time you put characters in a new world you learn something new about people. Humans live in a world of facts, but also in a world of stories. She said that she reads Fantasy because of the sense of wonder.
She asserted that "literary fiction" is a genre like any other, and that literary fiction has stereotypical books just like any other genre. She said that SF&F would receive much greater acceptance if only people like Margaret Atwood would come out and admit that they wrote Science Fiction, instead of repeatedly denying it.
The moderator asserted that this was a marketing decision, that the feeling is that people won't buy SF&F because they don't want to be associated with the likes of us.
Elizabeth said that she didn't feel that she had a problem with being pigeon-holed, as she has always been marketed as something a bit strange.
She complained that literary criticism in NZ comes down to simple categorization, and she called for a return to good old-style literary criticism.
She recounted the funny story of how her work came to be plugged by Stephanie Meyer on her blog. A fan contacted her through Facebook, asking her perceptive and complex answers about her Dream Hunter/Dream Quest world. Elizabeth replied with detailed essays, as much for her own interest as the fan's. Next she heard that Meyer had blogged about her, and the Dream Hunter/Dream Quest print run then ran out in the States within 12 hours. It subsequently turned out that the 'fan' had in fact been Meyer's PA. Meyer is setting up a production company, and is negotiating with Elizabeth to turn Dream Hunter/Dream Quest into a movie or TV series.
She said that she had had unbelief pounded into her as a kid. And yet she writes about Angels. She says that this interest came from a creation myth that her and her sisters had constructed as kids, which was based around Angels in caves creating the world by drawing sand-pictures.
The idea for Vintners' Luck came to her in a fevered dream while she was convalescing from an illness.
She said that she had dysgraphia - the inability to write - as a child. She could read and did so voraciously, but she couldn't get the hang of writing. Her parents and teachers thought she was being rebellious or lazy. Because of this early inability, she didn't properly learn the rules of grammar, and the publisher of her first book praised her for her experimental writing technique!
When talking about the Horror genre, she said that there is not a monster that is not a metaphor for something, as well as being a monster.
She enjoyed writing Daylight, which features a different view of vampires. She has another really good idea for a vampire story, but she can't use it as the market is currently swamped with vampire stories. She said that she's always disliked publishers' lack of imagination - a terrible irony, given that they are supposed to be in the imagination business. By this she meant the tendency of publishers to swamp the marked with the same stuff over and over again, rather than taking a risk on new ideas.
She predicted that paranormal is on the rise - it's not just a blip. Instead she sees the realism/genre divide as being the passing fad.
Elizabeth read us a section from her Dream Hunter/Dream Quest books, which have just been released in the US. Then she read a non-fiction piece she had written about how she had come up with the plot for Dream Hunter/Dream Quest. I found this fascinating, especially the extended footnote she read out, describing her reaction to the famously awful "Bobby was in the shower and the last year had all been a dream" scene from the TV show Dallas. She said that when she heard that the writers were going to bring back Bobby, she wondered how they would do it, and came up with a solution herself (involving Bobby being injected with a zombification drug and then being dumped on a rubbish tip when the dastardly JR refused to pay the ransom for the not-quite corpse). When she encountered the actual solution she was appalled, and went back to consider how the "it was only a dream" idea affected all the plotlines from earlier in the season. She said that this incident was the first time she had ever thought hard about voice in fiction.
Rather than reading from one of his six published novels, Russell treated us to a chapter from a draft for his upcoming book, the first of a series set in a new world. The story started in a most peculiar way: it opened on a ballet performance being put on in a magnificent opera house by a travelling troupe of performers. This being in theory a fantasy story, it was very hard to see (initially) what he was trying to achieve and where he was going with the idea. But the story soon took an unexpected and very dark turn indeed. It was a very cleverly-constructed piece, and I'm looking forward to the book coming out.
Sean - an Australian SF writer who has published around 30 novels and dozens of short stories - gave a ten minute prepared speech and then opened the floor to questions.
His talk was based around the idea of "living on the edge". He says that the idea of being away from the center has haunted him all his life. As a young man he went to university to study economics, in a conscious attempt at a normal life: he was planning on riding the train-trip to retirement right through the metaphoric center of town. There is much to be said for the comforts of living a life in the center. It's not easy standing on the outside looking in. But eventually he realized that life in the center was not for him, and so he quit university in favour of becoming a full-time writer. ("My two years of economics was used in one short-story.")
He said that many writers will take any opportunity to appear edgy, even if they're not.
He quoted Hunter S. Thompson: "The only people who know where the edge is are the people who have gone over it", but added that he wasn't planning on going over the edge himself.
He even extended this metaphor to living as he does in the suburbs of Adelaide, and then to living in Australia, itself far from the world center of things. He described books as postcards from the edge.
When he first started writing he felt obliged to write stories like Tolkien would write, since that's what he thought Fantasy had to be. He failed several times to finish books, until a dream showed him a different way, and this dream led to his first successful book.
He was asked about common themes in his books, and mentioned that father/son ideas often come up, both because of his complex relationship with his own father (he's an atheist while his father is a priest), and his interest in the nature/nurture debate (he claims that his biological son is nothing like him, while the non-biological son he raised is very like him).
He has written a number of Star Wars tie-in books, and talked at length of those. He was asked how different the experience is between writing original works and writing in someone else's universe. He said that on the publication of his first Star Wars book someone said, "Congratulations, you've sold out." He rejects this utterly, saying that he is fully invested in the Star Wars universe, and he loves it even when it's crap, and would not write in a universe he was only luke-warm about. He said that Star Wars writers are supported by encyclopedias of lore and continuity editors, but that they don't get to choose which stories to write.
He was first offered a Star Wars contract when he had already contracted to write six books over two years. The contract would add another three books to that list. It was a crazy work load to even contemplate, but his agent talked him into it. It meant he committed himself to turning out 1500 finished, polished words every single day for three years. He managed it.
Then he was contracted to write the first of three Star Was game tie-in novels, The Force Unleashed. He had a firm deadline, but couldn't start until the script for the game story arrived. This was repeatedly delayed, to the extent that when he finally received it he was faced with writing a 100,000 word book in only four weeks. This he managed, but at great cost - he now has RSI. And then, once he was finished, the deadline was pushed back a year! He was surprisingly philosophical about this shoddy treatment, saying that that's the risk you run working for a huge company: the poor old writer comes right at the end of the chain.
Ripley Patton and a team of volunteers has been working for 18 months to get an organization for NZ writers of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror up and running. We held the launch for this organization - SpecFicNZ - at Au Contraire! The launch was well-attended, Ripley did a good job of introducing the organization to folks, and we got about twenty new sign-ups. We had planned to process the new members live, but unfortunately the hotel's wireless wasn't working, and we wound up resorting to pen-and-paper forms.
In an interesting development, Feist's New Zealand publishers elected to organize a video conference between the author in late-night California, and the con. Of course it wasn't as good as having an author in person, but given how far away New Zealand is from things, this might well become a common occurrence at cons. We could see Feist on the screen, and he could see a video feed of the audience, plus a microphone was passed around to enable people to ask him questions.
I remember reading his first book decades ago, but I hadn't realized that in the thirty years since then he has written another 30 books all set in the same world. He mentioned often how much fun he had writing, how privileged he felt to have the job he did, and how he considered himself an entertainer first and foremost, and likened his vocation to a busker on the streets, with the readers tossing him money to thank him for the entertainment he provides.
Unfortunately the session ended in mild farce, as the publishers tried to give away books to the audience members, by getting Feist to ask questions about his books, with the person knowing the answers getting the prize. While the first question got answered straight away, no-one knew the answers to any of the subsequent questions, even though they were apparently easy. In the end Feist gave up, suggesting that everyone should go to the bar, and the last person standing would get both the give-away books, and the bar tab.
Sean read to us his story Jade Woman of the Luminous Star, which was a very interesting tale with steampunk and ghost elements. It was a great story, and it is a testament to the man's abilities that he was able to keep us spell-bound for an hour, despite it being late at night after a long day.
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