posted
when you are about to write a fantasy story, which do you find yourself doing first? creating a setting in which the story will take place or developing a story first?
Posts: 18 | Registered: Dec 2004
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posted
No matter what I'm writing I go for character first. SOme person starts living in my head, and they don't go away, so I have to make a home and friends and a life for them.
I have a Centaur and a telepath still looking for a good home.
posted
I always start with a character. Unless I start with a situation. I never start with a setting. I like to build the setting around the character and or situation. It seems much more personal to me using that manner. Besides, I think that readers want to get to know the character first, then they can better understand the surroundings. This is typically what is found in most spec. fiction (as far as I can tell).
I have to visit a place more than once (usually) to become attached to it. But, I can become attached to a character in just a short amount of time. Attachments are key to fiction, and character attachments are stronger and seem to work much better.
In fantasy, the setting is very important, and usually becsomes a big part of the story. But, start with a good solid character foundation, and you can't go wrong.
posted
I tend to agree with the consensus here of developing a character first, although that isn't how I usually go about it.
But you really can't just do a convincing character sketch without some idea of where the person/entity is, what is happening around them, what they feel, and who/what else is there. Just won't happen. Try it and see.
So, my point is that even if you are first developing a character, you aren't doing it in a vacuum anyway, even if you think you are. If you intend to let the story write itself, fine and good, for practice. But if you intend to set out a write a fantasy story, better have some backstory, setting, milieu descripion, etc. in place, or you're just wandering.
Since I'm very much in the learning stage, I developed a setting/milieu to work in, to give my characters and storytelling skills a place to play. It works for me. *shrug* It might work for you as well.
posted
I like to create a brief character sketch and what is his primary goal. Such as a trusted lifelong friend to the emperor must assassinate the emperor. Then I play the what if game with the character. Maybe it's not just a friend but a family member like the mother. Etc.
The what if game also helps me build a believable history for the political, cultural, and religious structures. It seems once I start asking the what and why questions the how seems to just form. My biggest problem is resisting writing a dry twenty page historical treatise on my created world rather than letting it develope in the story.
posted
I think that with a workable fantasy (or SF) story, at least one important element of the milieu has to be the starting point, before you get to the character and the story and all of that.
SF stories are often defined by the classic "what if X?", and X has to be a milieu level element (something that significantly affects the entire world or the fundamental nature of reality) for the story to be considered SF.
Fantasy stories are not usually defined by a single "what if", they usually have a number of them. Those elements don't really constitute a milieu, but they are the first step in developing a fantasy setting, and you need to have at least some of them in mind when you start creating a fantasy character, otherwise it wouldn't be a fantasy character at all. It would be a conventional modern fiction character, eh?
That said, you should have some experience with understanding character motivations and so forth before you start developing a fantasy milieu, otherwise you won't really know what kind of XYZ elements will bring out interesting conflict to generate a story. But you should develop that expertise with characters by studying all characters and primarily non-fantasy characters.
So the first step to creating a story is character, but the first step to creating a fantasy story is milieu.
posted
Well, it may just be that we have different definitions of what a "first step" is or what constitutes "creating a milieu," but I don't think that creating a milieu is necessarily the first step for fantasy. If I decide to write a story about a bumbling wizard who must protect a young warrior as he seeks to prevent an evil wizard from destroying the world, at that point I'm just choosing "generic sword & sorcery fantasy setting." I can do quite a bit of creative work in developing both plot and character before I work on turning the milieu from a stock setting into a new world.
Posts: 1517 | Registered: Jul 2003
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posted
I come from an extensive background with RPG's. As a result I generally cosntruct a world or setting for events and then script and generate characters to populate it.
I find this effective since the environment can have a dramatic effect on the people and plots that take place. I also typically run games set in the world I create and often the actions of the players will influence or inspire scenes or dialogue that later shows up in my work.
posted
I still say that if you create in-depth convincing characters, you can't go wrong. Readers connect with a good character more so than the surrounding. The Milieu is important, but everything around the character is just "set dressing" to make the story more believeable. It helps the reader suspend his/her disbelief.
posted
I have noticed a few Manuals of Style remark that Fantasy tends to place too much emphasis on milieu and that many stories bear very dry historical introductions (I have done this) rather than opening with action.
I wonder if this is because the story was written around the milieu rather than the character.
quote:My biggest problem is resisting writing a dry twenty page historical treatise on my created world rather than letting it develope in the story.
Why resist? Go ahead and write it up.
But don't stick the whole thing into the text of the story. Put it in your notes and refer to it when you don't remember something as you are writing the story.
Get the dry historical stuff out of your system. Writing it down solidifies it and then you have it clear in your mind so that you know what your characters know.
And knowing what your characters know will help you make them more real for your readers.
quote:If I decide to write a story about a bumbling wizard who must protect a young warrior as he seeks to prevent an evil wizard from destroying the world, at that point I'm just choosing "generic sword & sorcery fantasy setting."
Ooh! This looks like another chance for a writing challenge:
How many different milieus (from the "generic sword & sorcery fantasy setting") can we come up with for this basic idea and thereby how many different stories?
(Making Donald Trump the evil wizard and the young warrior a contestant on THE APPRENTICE comes to mind immediately for me.)
posted
I have an idea already. Put them in a non-fantasy milieu. The wizard is bumbling because he can't actually use magic and never has been able to do so. The young warrior needs help because he's going after the head of a perfectly normal company associated with dark magic mainly by his internet friends. The evil wizard is evil and a wizard, but his wizardry is more along fiscal lines.
quote:I don't know, a whole lot of people seem to connect with Middle Earth.
I don't know. Call me unique, but it wasn't the milieu that kept me reading LOTR. It was the characters. And I often found myself rushing through the ponderous pages of milieu to get back to what the characters were enduring.
posted
Middle Earth is interesting on its own merits, just because it was/is so unique. But I think the characters sell the story completely. So right on Dakota!
I will say that characters without setting are nothing. And a setting without characters is just a picture. So each are equally important in molding a story. I just think that the characterization is key to people connecting to a story, and caring enough to finish reading it.
That is why I start off with a character or character situation first. The character will usually tell me where he/she wants to live. That way I'm happy and my characters are happy too.
posted
Characters can exist independently of their milieu. But they are just characters, not a story of any type. The fantasy genre is defined by having a fantasy milieu, if you don't have any milieu, then you don't have a fantasy story.
Take a character sketch that doesn't include any elements of milieu, and there is no way that anyone can tell it is a character from a fantasy milieu. Which means there is no way to tell that the character is in a fantasy story. That character could equally well be in a different genre of story entirely (in fact, the main characters of all my different novels are actually the same character once you strip away all the milieu specific elements, I've just put the character in different settings to make different kinds of stories--My short stories have more diverse characters, but most of them are still identical to the guy in the novels once you eliminate all the milieu elements).
One further point, when your characters tell you where they want to live, the very first thing you do is put them somewhere else. Stories about contented characters are not very interested, and they don't get you where you want to live (presuming that you want to live in the world where you're a published writer, or at least a very interesting unpublished writer).
posted
> Characters can exist independently of > their milieu. But they are just > characters, not a story of any type. The > fantasy genre is defined by having a > fantasy milieu, if you don't have any > milieu, then you don't have a fantasy > story.
Well, if you define a fantasy milieu as any milieu in which fantasy-type things can happen, then this is true, but the definition is too broad to be useful.
For example, I just finished Expiration Date by Tim Powers. The milieu of the story is 1990's Los Angeles. I've even eaten at one of the restaurants in which an important scene takes place.
So, what makes it fantasy? Now, you can say that the milieu is a fantasy milieu because in this version of L.A. (and the rest of the world), ghosts are real -- some of the crazy bums on the street are actually ghosts that have accumulated enough physical debris to give themselves form.
I think, however, it's more useful to classify this as being fantasy because of an idea (ghosts are real, and eating the ghost of a great person will give you power) rather than because of the milieu.
Similarly, if you start working on a story about a fallen angel trying to redeem himself while working for an accounting firm in a Dallas high-rise, it's fantasy because your character is an angel, not because the milieu is a version of Dallas in which angels can work as accountants.
posted
Maybe my contented characters enjoy pain and suffering. It takes all types you know. The fish-out-of-water type is not the only storyline available. If you use that too much you may become over-used and boring as well.
I think Fantasy has room for just about every angle. You just have to find a way to make your angle interesting. Eric has a very good point, not all fantasy is sword and sorcery, or a quest. Those are just the main storylines people think of when fantasy is mentioned. It is fantasy after all, you get to do pretty much what you want.
It's an blank canvas if you let it be, paint it how you wish. I just think people connect with people, whether it's fantasy or sci-fi or whatever. That is why I choose to put the emphasis on building characters and situations first.
posted
I'm of the opinion that if your characters and plot can be cleanly divorced from the milieu, it's not fantasy. Fantasy stories that take place in the here and now, such as Little, Big, or Neverwhere, or all the Potter books still have milieu elements that are not only fantastical, but the story collapses without them.
I know there are folks who will disagree with this notion, but I'm not saying everyone should do as I do. I'm just describing what I do and why, responding to the question at hand which started the topic.
I nearly always have developed the important aspects about the milieu first. Then I create characters that must respond to or are entangled with these unique milieu aspects in a way that prevents them from being separable. From that the plot develops. Now, that's not to say I have no idea about a plot or a story until I have the mileu. For example, in my WIP, I already knew I wanted it to involve a young wizard apprentice, his mentor, faeries & monsters, a talking raven, and that the young wizard's nemesis would be his own cousin. But there are many places where the mileu and characters and plot are so intertwined with each other they can't be separated at all.
posted
I start with an idea, be it for fantasy or SF. What if you had a SF hero who knew he was fictional? What if you had to live in a 8x8 room with 4 other people for 3 years? Or such.
Posts: 2830 | Registered: Dec 2004
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posted
Sounds like a holodeck episode. The Fourth about the holodeck character that gets to fill in when one of the officers has duties more important than play cards. One day there's some minor emergency and they leave him running while they run off to the bridge, and he's stuck there by himself at the table, with nothing to do but reminisce over all the card games he's played over the years, to the exclusion of doing anything else.
Being a fallen angel is only an element of characterization if you mean it in the metaphorical sense. If you mean it in the literal sense, then it is an element of milieu, like having a Klingon working at a fast food joint. Same thing for ghosts.
That's what I was getting at with my not-very unambiguous disambiguation of KDW's very ambiguous Donald Trump as evil wizard idea. It is not that any milieu in which the fantastic can occur is a fantasy milieu, the key thing is that the fantastic is both commonplace and important in distinguishing that milieu from another similar milieu. Which is why "urban" (or contemporary/modern/whathaveyou) fantasy is universally acknowledged as fantasy.
There are lots of stories in which fantastic events occur (in fact, one wonders if there's any point in a story in which nothing fantastic happens). But if those occurances are as fantastic within the world of the story as they would be in any other world (namely ours), then the setting is not fantasy.
Which makes for some interesting dilemmas which hinge on POV. An L.A. in which there are homeless people claiming to be ghosts and so forth is not fantasy. An L.A. from the POV of one of those ghosts is.
Anyway, as for characters that are contented doing something that is painful or dangerous, there are plenty of great stories about those people. But they don't make the best POV characters for their own stories. A contented character has a hard time being the protagonist of any story, because the contented character has no interest. We don't worry about the contented characters, even if they do painful and dangerous things that they happen to like doing.
posted
For me I start with a character, then I have the character look around. I build a world for them to inhabit. Then alot of times I trash the char and make other people who live there.
Posts: 1895 | Registered: Mar 2004
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