world building, inventing language, setting the scene. cha cha cha
Sci-Fi authors talk a lot about world building. You can take workshops in how to everything together, including such complex things as topography and climate and creating a language. This idea always makes me smile. I'm sure the people who take creating a language seriously have put a lot of time and effort into setting up a way to do this, but crickey. What a task.
How far can the native English speaker get from the structure of English? (or Turkish from Turkish, or Japanese from Japanese?) Without extensive study of languages with very different phonologies and syntax, most of these invented languages have to be very English (or whatever language the author speaks) like. Even with my training, I don't think I could easily create a fictional language that uses tone (for example) as a primary phonological feature. Or infixes in the morphology (you know how we stick things on the front and back of words? Some languages stick things in the middle. Lots of complex little morphemes tucked in there, little things with big important meanings that you can't do without). Or has a complex honorific system, such as Thai. An adolescent girl in Thailand ends every sentence with an honorific that means (very loosely) me-little-rat. Adults end sentences with honorifics that shift with the setting, the relationship between the people in the conversation, the topic, the mood, and gender (and in Thai there are more than two genders to worry about). If you're setting up a language for a world in another galaxy, do you try to work some of these kinds of features in, or do you stick with English sentence structure and just change the vocabulary? One seems too hard, the other too lazy. Do these creatures see color? Do they have fewer or more senses than we do? How do you create a vocabulary for a sense that is next to impossible to even imagine?
Where was I? I didn't mean to run off on the topic of language invention, really. I wanted to say something about world building.
It seems to me that world building is one of the more engaging and fun things for a sci-fi author to do. Figure out basic biology (three sexes? four? none? mutable? reproduction is handled how? love, yes or no? birth how? death when?) and social structures, economies, all that stuff. It sounds like so much fun I wonder how they get anything written.
Here's the thing, though. Every author has a world to build, on one level or another. Even an author who sets all her novels in the same city -- the place where she was born and still lives -- has some inventing to do. A community of fictional people, where they live and work, how they relate to each other. The places they hang out may be real or made up. It all has to work together, the fictional with the factual.
I love this part of writing. It's like a complicated puzzle, setting up a fictional town, not just its geography and infrastructure, but its history, social and economic and everything else. The names of the streets, the number of schools, the business district. Most of this stuff won't make it into the novel, but these are the details that go through my head while I'm driving or in the garden or sewing.
Pajama Jones is set in a fictional town in South Carolina. A fictional town on a fictional river, plunked down exactly where I want them for reasons of plotting. I haven't changed the topography of that part of the state or the climate patterns, but everything else is mine. Last night I found myself wondering where the power plant and water treatment facility were. Is there a water tower? Almost certainly. On the web I found a water tower in a town in South Carolina constructed to look like a giant peach, with a single green leaf. From some angles it looks like a big rosy colored posterior, which apparently is still a contentious topic at town meetings, the big pink butt in everybody's line of sight. This is a wonderful detail but not one I could use, as Jenny Crusie did something similar with a water tower in Welcome to Temptation, except it was an accident that its paint job made it look like a giant ... lipstick. Can't play with the water tower, but I still want to know where it is. So I dragged out my maps (I draw lots of maps of my fictional places. Sometimes I draw individual buildings and floorplans. So I'm obsessive. This is a surprise?)
One of the basic plot points in this novel is that this small town has been economically depressed ever since the two largest businesses went bust, but is now on the upswing because of good urban renewal policies and the fact that a large Swedish car manufacturer has chosen it as the site for its North American headquarters and a state of the art assembly plant. Swedes in the deep south, that idea just appealed to me. Now, I can't use a real auto manufacturer (I doubt Volvo would appreciate it) but I can make up a fictional one, which is another kind of world building. When was this company founded? By whom? What are they best known for? Which models? What are they called? Who is the president of North American operations, and how important is s/he to the story? Is the invasion of the Swedes backstory/background or should it be up front and center? (the answer: not upfront, not center; just a n opportunity for some kinds of conflict and comparison).
At some time when I was first researching this book I did a search to see if Volvo had a North American plant and where it was. And it turned out that they thought about building one some years ago, and had even settled on a site, in Virginia. In a town called Greenbriar. But the whole thing fell apart when the economy went south and has never been revisited. I liked the name Greenbriar and so I started using it for my fictional town in South Carolina. I may still have to change it, as South Carolina is more a palmetto kind of place that a greenbriar kind of place, but I could spend days trying to settle on a name and I need to focus on moving the story along.
The real world building in this novel has to do with Lambert Square, which was once the site of the Lambert Printing Company, and which has been renovated into a complex of shops, community space and city offices. I spend a lot of time thinking about Lambert Square, what the shops are, who owns them, how those business people are related to each other (or not). How my main characters, both of whom own a shop there and are the only non-natives, fit in. Or don't.
So world building is a big part of writing, and for me one of the most interesting and challenging parts. Some authors do it all automatically and give it little thought; they probably write faster than I do. It's a risk, but I couldn't write without taking it.
Back to Greenbriar. Or whatever I end up calling it.