Balancing Fantasy and Reality
World creating is an all-encompassing and immersive task. A writer must
sit down at his or her desk and give birth to entire realities, histories,
ideologies, people and places. World creating isn’t an undertaking for the
faint of heart, and it presents its own unique challenges on top of all the
other myriad struggles involved in writing a novel. One of my favorite quotes
on the subject is:
“Writing is like sausage making; you'll all be happier in the end if
you just eat the final product without knowing what's gone into it.” –George
R.R. Martin
I think it’s especially telling
that those words come from an undisputed legend in the field. World creating
represents its own mountain to the mind of an author, but what happens when a
writer has conceived of a story that blends a fantastical world with the real
world? This story arc is more common than one might think, and it ranges across
genres from Harry Potter and His Dark Materials to X men and Superman. It has a
particular prevalence in science fiction, where a given story arc often imposes
a new technology or phenomenon that acts to jettison a “real” world into the
realm of genre.
These “hybrid” stories present their own unique dilemmas for a writer.
On top of the world creation itself, there is now another variable in the
equation: the collision of worlds within the story. That was the situation that
faced myself when I sat down with the initial storyboards and notebook
scratchings of my debut novel Anthem’s Fall.
To orient you to the task I faced, here is the pitch for Anthem’s Fall:
When the fallen emperor and a banished exile of the same herculean race
ignite into battle over New York City’s rooftops, a brilliant young scientist
discovers a technology that can defeat them both, yet might be more terrible
than either. (*Disclaimer: getting it down to a one-sentence pitch was one of
the hardest things I’ve ever had to do!)
As you can probably guess, my process involved world creation and the
presentation of a familiar world. I simultaneously introduced modern New York
City along with the brutal, futuristic world of Anthem. It took a long time and
a lot of rewrites to get it right.
Here’s what I learned along the way:
1) One world can strengthen the other
Introducing two distinct worlds and two separate narratives presented a
unique opportunity to deliberately juxtapose and relate one seemingly
dissimilar place to another. The fantasy of Anthem could strengthen and add
implicit tension to the scenes in New York City. The stripped down realism of
New York City’s streets could anchor the fantastical vision of Anthem.
Combined, the two worlds could coalesce the familiar and the unfamiliar to form
a more dramatic setting than either could have attained alone.
2) Creating a world is hard, but
it’s even harder when that fake world is held up against a real place. With
such a novel, a writer’s fantasy must compete with reality on the believability
scale.
As I developed the world of Anthem, I learned how many rules a made-up
world requires. Amid the editing process, I found myself catching more glitches
and flubs in my own constructed reality than the mistakes I made with the
streets of New York. I never would have imagined how strict a writer’s own
rules have to be in order to achieve believability in a made-up world. This is
especially true when the made up world is constantly being interspersed with
chapters that take place in modern New York City.
With Anthem I wanted to create a world that looked more like an ancient
society than a world one might normally associate with science fiction. Anthem
is futuristic, and home to advanced technology, but I wanted the world and its
people to be more reminiscent of an ancient barbarian culture than an advanced
dystopia. It’s a society controlled by a dynasty of brutal warriors, and
despite the long history of Anthem, it’s clear to the reader that Anthem is
more barbaric than New York City.
I wanted the connection there. I wanted the reader to flip from chapter
to chapter and think about the similarities and differences between these two
worlds. A reader knows that these worlds are eventually going to collide, so I
wanted them thinking critically about each along the way.
What I found by the time I finished my final edit run was that my rules
for Anthem had become more imperious and unflinching than the rules of writing
about a modern New York City. If one fell out of equilibrium, they both would
fail.
3) Balance must be found
When simultaneously introducing two worlds chapter by chapter, a writer
can play an extraordinary game of tug of war with the reader’s
imagination—grounding it with normalcy on one page and then lifting it up to
thundering heights when the time is right. However, when “world creating”,
there are so many factors to consider. What is this world’s history? How do its
people think, and what ideologies do they cling to? In order for the reader to
care about Anthem’s fall (as in, Anthem’s Fall) he or she first has to care
about Anthem.
Forming the back-story of a world and its people is an incredibly
enjoyable experience, but one in which I had to be very careful. Long
exposition spent describing Anthem’s history could kill the story flat. I
learned that divulging the back-story of an entire world is an exercise in
subtlety. Because you are writing a novel, not a history book, you have to
allow the reader to connect the lines and draw their own inferences from hints
and suggestions in the text.
Going in depth about the ancient history of Anthem would have been as
extraneous as discussing ancient Rome while introducing New York. Incorporating
the “real” world into a fantasy story forced me to strip down unnecessary
details in Anthem and focus on simply letting the story roll.
Above a horrified New York City, genetics and ethics collide as the
fallen emperor and a banished exile of the same herculean race ignite into
battle over the city’s rooftops. In the streets below, a brilliant young
scientist has discovered a technology that can defeat them both, yet might be
more terrible than either.
Set both in modern New York City and in the technologically
sophisticated yet politically savage world of Anthem, Anthem’s Fall unfurls
into a plot where larger than life characters born with the prowess of gods are
pitted against the shrewd brilliance of a familiar and unlikely heroine.
Available from:
Excerpt:
It had its certain comforts and learned familiarities, but New York had
never felt like home. The initial novelty of Manhattan and all of its cultural
and architectural grandeur had long waned, and what she once regarded with
wonder, she now felt only a moldering cynicism. These days Kristen Jordan
considered the soaring edifices and crowding streets to be the material shape,
the substance, behind the insatiable and thoughtless ambition of the modern.
Nudging her straw against the melting ice cubes at the bottom of an empty vodka
tonic, Kristen looked about the shabbily decorated and dimly lit college bar.
Glowing neon beer signs and television screens hung on walls that enclosed a
dozen booths and tables. A distinct smell of stale beer and hot wings hung in
the air, yet the nearby conversations of fellow academics, exultant and
self-assured, ignored this atrophy.
Kristen studied genetics at Columbia, and her brilliance was unrivaled.
Sitting quietly and gazing across the young faces of the bar, Kristen wondered
if she stood out among her outwardly preoccupied and self-satisfied peers, or
if they too were all carrying unspoken anchors of anxiety and doubt. On some
level, though, she knew her general restlessness was an unfortunate byproduct
of her intellect, and not an affliction shared by the masses.
From across the table her fellow graduate student Steve Armstrong had
started rambling over the loud rock music, his hand clutching a perspiring
glass of beer. “My point is that there’s a difference between intelligence, or
even consciousness for that matter, and awareness. They’re two entirely different
phenomena that are always lumped into the same category. Don’t you think?”
Kristen Jordan groaned and rolled her eyes, which elicited a laugh out
of another graduate student sitting beside her, Cara Williams.
“I don’t care, Steve,” Kristen said, her voice distracted and leaden.
“I hardly think it’s a topic worthy of lengthy discussion. There’s no way of
knowing for certain because that kind of technology doesn’t exist.”
“Are you kidding me?” Steve gulped his beer and glared at her, his
words faintly slurred. The alcohol added a note of indignation to his tone.
“You’re saying we shouldn’t consider how a new technology will operate?”
AUTHOR INFORMATION:
S.L. Dunn is the debut author of Anthem’s Fall, a novel he wrote amid
the wanderings of his mid twenties. He has written while living intermittently
in St. John USVI, Boston, Maine and Seattle. Raised on big screen superheroes
and pop science fiction, he sought to create a novel that bridged a near-sci-fi
thriller with a grand new fantasy. He currently resides in Seattle with his
girlfriend Liz and their dog Lucy, and is hard at work completing the next book
of the Anthem’s Fall series. Get in touch at
www.sldunn.com.
