Month: December 2018

Writing Fantasy: The Glorification of Aristocracy

Last time, I talked about two of the things in the fantasy genre that I wanted to change while working on my novel. Today, we’ll look at the first one: the Glorification of Aristocracy.

In The Lord of the Rings, we needed the rightful king to resume the throne after centuries of Gondor’s misrule by the Stewards, whose line famously flamed out (ha!). In Game of Thrones, even though the excesses and brutality of the ruling class are thoroughly on display (Joffrey, the Lannisters, most of the Targaryens), chances are pretty good your favorite characters in the series all came from the noble class. Good and evil are well represented in the upper classes; the working class, not so much. Off the top of my head, the only Point of View character who is working class is Davos Seaworth.

You can argue that the lives of peasant farmers aren’t terribly interesting, since most of them live and die on the same plot of land and don’t really get to go on crazy adventures most of the time. That’s fair, and for fantasy series that go low-magic (like Game of Thrones), that makes sense. But not all fantasy settings try to recreate the Middle Ages in all their dung-strewn glory. The High Fantasy genre certainly does not; you have magical broomsticks sweeping the streets and everyone is literate, except for D&D 3rd Edition barbarian characters and even they can suddenly read if they multiclass.

In these instances, you have enough science and technology in the form of magic, which is often understood in a scientific fashion rather than a supernatural or faith-based source. You likely have characters who have walked on different worlds due to teleportation. And you have timelines with civilization that dwarf our own, yet no where in any of these scenarios do you see someone point out that maybe hereditary monarchy or feudalism should be replaced. And I think the reason why that happens is because of how we view social classes.

I think it’s safe to say that most Americans don’t really get the idea of class. We think we do, in that we understand that if you’re upper class, you’re wealthy. But that’s not quite accurate:

Class is what you are born and raised in; getting a windfall of money during adulthood doesn’t make a person who grew up working class into an aristocrat, it makes them working class with a pile of money. Trust me, this one is a subject I actually know something about. –Rich Burlew, creator of the Order of the Stick

Although the modern fantasy genre’s common ancestor is English by way of Tolkien, our more recent influences like Gygax and Martin are decidedly American. Which is why I think we’ve arrived at this weird fascination the genre has with aristocracy. Aristocracy is great if you’re an aristocrat and we all have this American Dream-esque notion that if we were to wind back the clock, we’d be aristocrats, too. Seriously, raise your hand if you go to the Renaissance Faire and imagine your past life as a peasant. The most humble “if I lived back then, I’d be…” musing I’ve ever encountered are the people who think they would be priests, and even that is still winning the social lottery compared to most people. We all imagine we’d be lords and ladies, but just by running the numbers, that isn’t the case. Unless you’re upper class right now, odds are pretty good your ancestors were commoners, just like the rest of us.

And so we arrive at the class problem in the fantasy genre. Either your most interesting people are nobleborn, because the aristocrats have all the education, wealth, and power to actually do something other than farm, or your commoner is a chosen one or bearer of some secret legacy, like Luke Skywalker at the beginning of Star Wars. The Chosen One and the Secret Legacy are related to this issue, but separate enough that I’ll discuss them in a later post.

Since the modern fantasy genre is the pop culture version of older mythology, you could say it’s fair that everyone important is a noble, since most myths are about the same groups of people: kings, king-like people, or chosen by/descended from gods, which is also incidentally how kings presented themselves much of the time. People tend to tell stories that are interesting, and kings and kingly people tend to be the most interesting, therefore those are the stories.

But here’s the question that really got me thinking: why aren’t there more settings that twist this around? Our brethren in the science fiction genre seem to delight in twisting the conventions of the genre, so that the sparkling clean and technology advanced society is the protagonist in one story (Star Trek) and the villains in others (FarScape, Firefly). One setting’s tech utopia is the next’s hellish nightmare concealed behind a shiny facade. The good Federation (Star Trek, again) has the same aesthetic as the evil Institute (Fallout 4).

But over here in the fantasy world, we’re still working for kings, or aspiring to be kings, or killing kings . . . and then replacing them with other kings. We desperately hope that the Game of Thrones will resolve in a good king or queen taking the throne and replacing the bad ones that have existed so far. The show has flirted with the idea that Daenerys wants to destroy the system (“I’m going to break the wheel”) but thus far, she hasn’t indicated that she’s going to usher in a representative democracy

So when I started to work on the setting for Dinomancer, this was very much on my mind. And while my during my first draft, it seemed like an easy thing to address (just have my protagonist espouse some democratic leanings!), I realized I had more to say.

The world of Dinomancer is fundamentally about power. Humans like us find ourselves in a scenario with medieval levels of technology (swords, armor, longbows, etc) having to content with dinosaurs roaming the countryside at every turn. No guns, no cars, no planes. We’re completely outclassed.

Fortunately, humans do have a weapon they can use to fight back, which is called the Geas (prounced “gesh” instead of “gee-ahs” if you’re like me and learned this word from a fantasy book). The Geas lets a person take control of a dinosaur and direct it psychically. It’s a huge advantage.

And because it’s such an advantage, it’s something that’s hoarded by a small number of people. In fact, it’s so useful that if you have the power of the Geas, you are automatically part of the noble class. The noble families will fight to adopt you into their ranks and make you one of them. It’s a pretty sweet deal.

How does someone get the ability to wield the Geas? We’ll talk about that later. The main thing is, if you have it, you’re noble. Your social class is noble. But how does that square with the earlier quote, about how class is what you’re born into? The truth is, it doesn’t. Your class is always your class, regardless of whether you earn a pile of money or develop a super power.

If the nobles are honest (with themselves and with the general people of this world), they would be forced to admit that this entire social structure exists to benefit them. Rather than using the Geas to keep people safe, nobles use it to capture and train dinosaurs to use as weapons. Commoners huddle together beneath the umbrella of safety their nobles offer, but it’s all to further the grip of power. This should sound familiar, because it’s basically how most of human history has progressed.

But just like with actual history, few people ever want to come out and say this. Instead, you get these remarkable contortions that people go through to justify themselves, such as the divine right of kings or similar ideas that the ruling class is the best and the most worthy, instead of just being the most privileged and powerful. The nobles in this world do something similar; if you’re adopted as a noble, it applies retroactively to your entire life. You were always a noble if you become a noble, because they’re trying to preserve this idea that it’s something you were born into, that you can’t change, in a world where you can.

With this in mind, it’s important to note that the protagonist of the story doesn’t think about any of this. He’s noble himself and just thinks that this is the way that makes sense. Other characters don’t, and realizing his own privilege is part of his own development as a character, which, not coincidentally, is a story that I feel qualified to write about as a straight, white male in the current age.

The difference, then, is the direction of the text itself, the “truth of the setting.” In Return of the King, the reestablishment of the monarchy is unambiguously a good thing. In most fantasy settings, it’s the existence of the evil wizard or the demon lord that’s the bad thing to be overcome. But for me, as I’m writing, this is the world state I’m keeping in mind: this social system sucks for most of the people that live in it. We should not glorify this idea of noble houses and titled lords. This is the problem. We should do better.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not writing a philosophical book here. It’s still a fantasy novel with dinosaurs and people getting killed by dinosaurs. I’m not creating high literature here. But even the pulpiest of fantasy stories have something to say, even if it’s just “man, it would be so cool to be a knight” and that’s what I’m keeping in mind with my work. Will it pay off? Will those ideas be communicated? Hard to say. We’ll see what happens when I finish it.

Next, I’ll talk about the Bloodline Legacy issue, also known as the Midichlorian Problem that turned Jedi into the bad guys . . . from a certain point of view.

Thoughts on Writing Fantasy

I really like the fantasy genre. Out of all the interests in my life, I think it’s my love for fantasy that’s had the biggest influence. My mom reading me the Hobbit is one of my earliest and most influential memories. It was a fantasy video game that got me into writing stories of my own, which set me on the path where writing became a thing I wanted to do. It’s even how I ended up meeting my wife; I mentioned that I was running a Dungeons & Dragons game, she asked to join and that was how it all started for us.

I’ll note that every time I say fantasy here, I really mean the entire fantasy genre, not just the idea of thinking about pretend stuff, but “fantasy genre” is tiresome to type out.

Anyway, fantasy is important to me. It’s something I look forward to sharing with my son when he’s older, even though I’m emotionally preparing myself for the possibility that someday he’ll want a football and a pair of skis instead of a Crown Royal bag filled with dice.

My first major writing project was a novel I started when I was about fourteen(ish). It mostly stands as a testament to how much I was enthralled with R. A. Salvatore at the time; you’ve got fifteen page long swordfights, for example. There’s also a romance plotline that reflects how the largest influence on my understanding of romance was the Star Wars movies, and not in a good way.

After that book, I sketched out some ideas for a sequel and a prequel. The sequel actually ended up getting pretty far in a first draft (I think around 60,000 words) but eventually I lost steam and the years started to pile up without much progress. In 2008, I learned about NaNoWriMo and in 2009, I wrote my first successful NaNo project, 50,000 words which eventually became the novel Unrepentant, which you can read right here on this very website if you so desire. In fact, I had so much energy going through November 2008 that I kept writing every day even after the month was over and eventually ended up with a 120,000 word first draft.

Unfortunately, after that first shot of adrenaline, I think NaNoWriMo started to become more of a distraction than a help. I spent 2010 writing and rewriting Unrepentant and I was making pretty good progress, but then November rolled around and it was time to start another NaNo novel. The rules strongly encourage you to start a new novel instead of working on an existing project to give yourself the creative freedom to write quickly, so I started a prequel called the Fey Queen. I worked on that long enough to win the month, then it was back to Unrepentant. That was 2010. In 2011, I started a sequel to Unrepentant called Angel’s Descent. For some reason, perhaps a holdover from my first ventures into writing, I really had a thing for the writing pattern of novel > prequel > sequel.

You can see the pattern that started to emerge. I would spend most of the year working off and on, only to start a new project each November. After my three forays in an urban fantasy-esque romance, I tried cyberpunk, then a frankly bizarre attempt at a murder mystery, then back to cyberpunk for a sequel. Each of these hit 50,000 words for the NaNo goal, but then I would shelve them because each one would require extensive work to go from a NaNo draft to something resembling an actual draft. I think I planned to build up this pile of half-done jobs, pick the ones I liked best, then finish and polish those up.

By the time Unrepentant was in a draft I considered decent, I realized it had been almost eight years since I’d started working on it and frankly, I didn’t really know why I still was. The religious nature of a story about fallen angels, the devil, the Apocalypse; that’s interesting, but it’s also not really me. I don’t have much to say on religious themes much these days. I was just working on the story because that’s what I’d put so much time into working on.

And man, if I didn’t think I had much to say about a religious-themed urban fantasy, I don’t know what the hell I was doing trying cyberpunk or murder mystery, even if it was “murder mystery, but with snakes!”

I think that’s what made me realize it was time to come back home to writing fantasy. It’s what I spend the most time thinking about and frankly, it’s where I have the most to say in terms of story and world. And that’s how we got to Dinomancer, which is as you might have guessed, “fantasy, but with dinosaurs.” Because I love dinosaurs and I know a lot about them, and when I started this one, I didn’t know the late Victor Milan was going to do his own dinosaur fantasy series (I’ve avoided reading it to avoid cross pollination of ideas). But even after learning about it, I figured dinosaur fantasy is large enough to have more than one (or two, or five, or whatever) novels about it.

One thing that was great about working on a fantasy world for my novel was that I could talk to my wife about my ideas in a way that I couldn’t when it came to our D&D campaign, since she was a player in that campaign and I didn’t want to spoil the stories. A lot of those discussions got me thinking about some Big Concept ideas that ended up going into the framework of my dinosaur story, and some of which I think are pretty interesting.

One of the most influential blog posts I ever read was also the one I wanted more than anything to refute. In 2011, author David Brin wrote a post called Pining for Feudalism that basically set my mind on fire. Brin presents an argument against many of the classic fantasy tropes; really, more of a denunciation against all of Romanticism, which of course is where the modern fantasy genre is firmly situated. Chief among his complaints are the tropes of “hidden knowledge” as represented by wizards and elves, and the glorification of aristocracy.

And damn it, you know . . . Brin’s right. There’s a lot in the fantasy genre that’s, well . . . problematic. Try explaining to someone who’s even the tiniest bit woke why the drow mythos isn’t horribly racist; to wit, the evil elves are banished beneath the earth and cursed with dark skin, to reflect their dark hearts (even though living in a lightless world should have made them lily-white albinos). You can still tell great stories with these tropes and dark elves remain some of my favorite stories to this day . . . but there’s baggage there.

And while it’s tempting to just say, eh, fuck it, the whole genre’s busted, toss it out, science fiction is better anyway, I’m not willing to go that far. For me, this felt like an opportunity, even though it would take a while for the seeds to germinate. When I came back to the idea that I wanted to do a fantasy novel, I thought a lot about some of Brin’s objections and what I wanted to say about the issues.

Eventually, I settled on two “Big Concepts” that I wanted to explore, and while there are many others (such as the aforementioned racism), these were two that inspired me to realize I had something to say.

The “Glorification of Aristocracy” Problem: fantasy is filled with kings and lords and knights and other people who derive their power from their lineage. The restoration of the monarchy is typically seen as a good thing, or even the only way to bring about a golden age. Basically, the idea is that lineage is what makes heroes heroic and feudalism is awesome.

There are precious few democracies in fantasy fiction, but plenty of “rightful kings” who should rule, who deserve to rule, and often them not ruling leads to widespread disaster. But even if the story isn’t a “Return of the King” scenario, the nobles are frequently the best, brightest, and most interesting people.

Most of us like to pretend we’d be part of this group; we fantasize (hah) about which House we’d be in Game of Thrones. There are very few stories that glorify the struggle of the commoner, or even talk about it most of the time.

The “Magical Inheritance” Problem: The Jedi and their midichlorians, which are “the tiny microscopic organisms living in your blood that communicate the will of the Force.” Or how about “Yer a wizard, Harry.”

Most protagonists in fantasy are born with some special attribute derived from who their parents were. The Jedi and the wizards of Harry Potter are the most obvious examples, but there are many, and while this isn’t limited to the fantasy genre, I think fantasy is the most brazen about celebrating it.

Basically, even though your special powers might require study or effort to develop, you were fundamentally born with traits that others don’t have and if you didn’t inherit whatever “the gift” is, there’s nothing you can do about it. In Star Wars, you can’t just study the Force to become a Jedi, you have to be born “Force Sensitive.” It doesn’t matter how much of a heroic journey Han Solo had, he’s never going to pick up a lightsaber.

In Harry Potter, although children born to normal parents can learn magic, you can also be a squib, which is someone who was born to wizards but cannot use magic no matter how much they study.

In my next post, I’ll talk about how I approached the first problem, “Glorification of Aristocracy” in writing the world of Dinomancer.

Pardon The Dust

Every time I pick a WordPress theme, I tell myself that this time it’s going to be permanent. There’s no way this theme could ever look dated, I think. And then a few years go by and I realize time has moved on and the thing I thought was cool now looks outdated and lame.

So then I have to spend two hours tweaking settings and playing with previews until I find something that feels not lame. And all the while, a little voice whispers in my ear that it’s time to get out of the bush league and buy a professional theme for real money dollars because the lack of professional theme is the only thing that’s keeping me from realizing my dream of being an author. And then I start to think, you know, maybe that’s a good point; 80 or 100 bucks for a theme isn’t an extravagance, it’s an investment. In my FUTURE CAREER.

And then I see a perfectly good free theme that meets my needs and I go with that, because otherwise I have to justify to my wife (and to myself) why I spent 150 bucks on what basically amounts to a different usage of white space and a different font choice.

Yeah. Better stick to the free themes. When I find a good one, I play around with it until I’m happy and then I tell myself that this is the one, this look is timeless and will never, ever look lame.

So anyway, if you’ve been trying to read anything over the past few hours, that’s probably why things keep shifting. It’s not just you. Unless your graphics card is starting to fail, in which case it might be you.

Beginning Again

One of the the things that always came up during my monthly (or so) phone call with my dad was that he’d mention how I’d stopped updating my blog. He was right, of course; my last post was in May of 2017 and since then, I’ve been silent.

I don’t remember what I said each time he mentioned it.

Maybe something about how writing for my blog had felt weird lately, the fact that I was no longer comfortable writing my thoughts and sending them out into the open void. The internet got a lot more unfriendly after 2016 and given that it was never particularly friendly to begin with, that’s really saying something.

Or maybe it was something like how I just didn’t feel like I had that much to say anymore. That’s always been a common problem for me and in the past, I’d fill it up by looking around for something that made me angry and then I’d write about that. You don’t have to go back very far to find posts like that. I’ve disabled access to a couple of the ones that make me cringe the most, but otherwise I’ve left them alone.

I don’t know why I stopped, really. I could say I was too distracted (probably true, I’m frequently distracted) or I just didn’t feel like it anymore (also probably true, there are so many video games I’d rather be playing at any given moment). But that’s all just probably and maybe. I don’t really know, because I never really decided. I just stopped.

But I do know that my dad never stopped asking me about why I’d stopped and that meant he never stopped checking in.

The relationship between my dad and my writing has always been complicated. He’s never read any of my work, to the best of my knowledge. I wrote my first fantasy novel when I was sixteen and started six or seven other projects since then. I don’t remember if he read it at any point. Maybe I showed him a chapter or something?

Unrepentant was the second one I finished, but I was ready to move on from that world by the time I had a finished second draft, so I posted it up here for the hell of it. And there’s my current project, a fantasy novel with dinosaurs, which I’m pretty excited about even though at this point it’s been a couple of years since I started. No one has seen that yet, not even my wife, although I’m close to having a draft I can share.

The truth is, most of my writing is littered among half-finished projects that I never got around to finishing. So it’s not surprising that my dad never read any of those. It’s not like I was going to share them.

But he always kept coming back to this blog. He never stopped asking about what I was doing here.

I don’t think he realized it, but it kind of annoyed me at times. I don’t really consider this ‘real writing’ in any sense. It’s just something to do, something that leads to real writing the way running on a treadmill on a rainy day leads to going out on a hike when spring rolls around. It’s not writing, but it’s better than what I usually do when I sit down at my desk, which is play video games. That almost never leads to writing, not since I put my fanfiction days far behind me.

But even though I didn’t consider any of this to be my writing, it was interesting to my dad and he never stopped asking about it. I think he might have been my only dedicated reader.

The fact is, I’ve been sensitive about which of my things he showed an interest in ever since I was that teenager working on that first fantasy novel. At the time I was finishing up my first fantasy novel, I’d developed a bad problem with wanting to be good more than I wanted to learn how to be good at writing. I’d already decided I was a good writer at that point and I was hopelessly insecure about it. And the only thing that alleviated that insecurity was praise.

Have you ever had a moment in your life where you heard someone else tell a funny story or a joke or something, and later on, because it’s so funny you want to tell someone else the story you heard, but you realize it won’t be as funny if you say “my friend told me about this time . . .” so you just go ahead and make it a story about you instead? I don’t think I’m the only person who’s ever done this (I hope), but maybe I am.

The point is I wanted praise more than anything and at some point, I remember reading this short story that I thought was so good, so goddamned good that the ending gave me chills and I wanted to share it and talk about it. So I printed it out, but when I went to give it to my parents, I told them it was something I’d written, not something I’d found on the internet.

They loved the story. My mom said it was good enough to publish. My dad said it was the best thing I’d ever written.

I got the praise that I did not earn. They could tell at the time that I was upset by this and asked me what was wrong, but I didn’t want to admit that I’d stolen the story and lied to them about where it came from. I said something about how I was mad that something I’d put “no effort into” got all this attention, while the novel I’d been working on for a year wasn’t as good.

Which, if we’re willing to take the Obi-Wan Kenobi approach, might be true enough “from a certain point a view.” But let’s be honest: it isn’t true, not really.

I don’t think I ever told them the truth about that story. Maybe I told my mom at some point, I don’t know. Maybe they suspected the truth since I never brought up that particular story again after that day.

Regardless, since then I’ve always been a bit sensitive about which of my work gets attention and what doesn’t. And if you’re thinking, yeah, but you never invite people to see most of your work and you don’t really seem keen on finishing most of what you start, so are you really that surprised if the blog is the only thing your father asks about, given that it’s the only thing you ever ‘published’ in a way that was accessible for him?

And I’d say those are all really good points, annoying voice in my head. Well said. But he still could have asked about any of the manuscripts. He only ever asked about the blog, the thing I didn’t even really care about. The thing I stopped liking in 2017. For some reason, that’s what my dad liked.

And so he’d ask me, hey, when are you going to update your blog again?

He’d say, you haven’t updated your blog in a while.

And I’d say maybe someday I’d get back to it.

I’m getting back to it today. It took about a year and a half, but I got back to it. A year and a half is a long time when you’re a kid, less so when you’re an adult. But it’s enough time that a lot can change.

I’m a father myself now. My son is four and a half months old. His birthday is July 21. He’s taking a nap beside me as I write. He’s a good baby. I like him a lot. His mom and I are very happy.

I think my dad would like him, too. And I think he’d be pleased to see I’m finally back to updating my blog.

I say I think that’s how he’d feel, because I’ll never really know for sure. My dad won’t see that I updated my blog again and he won’t see any of my stories, because my dad died on July 24th, three days after my son was born.

I wish I’d started writing again sooner. I wish he’d lived long enough to see one more post. I wish I’d written something for him to read.

I wish he wasn’t gone.

I wish, I wish, I wish.

There’s a lot I wish was true. I wish I could say sorry it took so long for me to get back to this. Sorry for not thinking it mattered, even though it mattered enough to you to ask about it, to keep checking in.

But I’m here now. Picking it back up again. Writing down what I’m thinking, not knowing who it’s for or who (if anyone) will read it. Maybe my son will discover it some day. Maybe I’m just talking to myself at this point. I don’t know. But it feels good to do it again, regardless of the reason.