Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

“Here there be dragons”

“Here there be dragons”. Words written on maps in ancient times, to indicate places where no humans had been, which were unknown, unexplored, dangerous, magical. The places where real magic might really dwell.

“Here there be dragons”. I’ve chosen the fantasy genre because of that very thing. It’s freeing to me to know that even if I don’t, personally, know the lay of the land in the places where the dragons lurk – well – neither does anyone else, and therefore I am free to create my own geography, my own history, my own world.

I’ve always loved the worldbuilding aspect of the fantasy genre, the part where I get to go wading out into the dark unknown with nothing but a tiny flashlight in my hand and it is by that light alone, MY light, the light that I choose to shine and the spot I choose to illumine, that determines what anybody else who might be following me is likely to see, understand, remember.

All the worlds are a blank page before a writer’s eyes fall upon them.

But I cannot seem to get that dictum to stick with stuff that is supposed to take place in the “real” world, our world, the mundane everyday days that we all inhabit routinely. For some reason I can write lush, rich, penetrating prose about characters who can never exist – who live only inside my own head, who cope with dragons or their equivalent on a daily basis – but present me with a cast of characters who are living realistic, mundane lives in the common shared reality with the potential reader, and I freeze.

Why are ‘real’ people so hard to write? Because the reader already has an inkling about what they’re supposed to be like, or what they’re supposed to do, or how they’re supposed to feel – if for no other reason than those characters are more like unto the reader than, say, a dragonslayer or a Jedi knight?

But why should that be the case?

After all, in the spec-fic genre we take pride in writing three-dimensional (read, “real”) characters – or as close to that as we can get. We seek verisimilitude and are excited when we achieve it. But when you write verisimilitude for characters who are firmly lodged in your own reality you do precisely the opposite, because you instinctively try to make them “larger than life” so that they’ll stand out from the mundania which is their home – and you run the risk of making them manic, or too damaged for words, or else you might feel like they’re too boring to be of any interest.

And even if you escape that, you may blunder into the territory of having “interesting” things which you are obliged to make your character endure (because otherwise where’s the conflict?) and you wind up writing soap opera of the worst sort where nothing normal ever happens, where everything is High Drama All The Time. If people aren’t crashing their cars on an hourly basis and winding up on life support in hospital with their loved ones weeping around their bedside while machines surrounding the (bruised but unbloodied) patient are going pocketa-pocketa-pocketa – if people aren’t having dramatic and confrontational conversations about who betrayed whom with which cheating so-and-so and revealing the true parentage of prodigal children who come home to roost and don’t look remotely like the person who’s supposedly their mother because she could not have possibly given birth to them because she must have been four when she was pregnant – if people aren’t smart, and beautiful, and powerful – I mean, who wants to read about ordinary? Aren’t readers surrounded by ordinary? Isn’t ordinary equivalent to boring?

Why are “real” conversations so hard to write?

Why are “real” things dismissed by writers constantly? Why does every single little problem that a character has instantly balloon out of all proportion and beyond all believable hope for help – because, well, who wants to read about niggling small problems in the pages of a book when they can just shut the book and look around and find a plethora of niggling small problems of their own?

Why should it be that I am so much more at ease as a writer in the presence of Empresses, and slave girls, and kings, and shamans, and aliens, and even just people who might have actually lived but did so in a past century and are no longer around, than I am with those more like myself? It isn’t that I am incapable of writing a contemporary character – it’s just that I’m so much more tentative about it, worried about how real is real, how the reader is going to interpret that reality, how much of the inside of my head is interpretable at all in the outside world if I ground it in a reality that might not instantly gel with the reality carried by a potential reader down the line.

I’m far more afraid of inviting a reader into my reality than I am of inviting that same reader into my fantasy.

In the fantasy world, I am the one who is in control, the only one who can guide the reader’s experience of that world. But I have no control over reality, none at all, and it can take the bit between its teeth and run away with me into oblivion if I get the smallest details wrong. Because, see, those details are not mine to decide. They’re already decided.

In contemporary fiction I am judged not by how well I can make a fictional world resemble reality, but by how well I manage to prevent a recognisable reality from sliding into either the desert of dry-as-dust mundania which will interest nobody at all or else into the morass of desperately applying patches of more and more detail in the hope of shoring up the verisimilitude of my scene and instead winding up with something too fantastical to be believed.

I find myself ease with the fire breathers who live beyond the borders on old maps.

My true dragons dwell in the ‘real’ world. They walk on two feet, they think and they reason, and they already inhabit a world of their own. Anyone can walk amongst dragons, and make them what they will… but walking amongst people – real people – is much harder to do.

Here there be dragons. And I am on my way.

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