Glenda Larke

I have to be off to the airport at 5am, so I really ought to be getting some sleep. Instead, Gillian over at gillpolack over at livejournal started me thinking about worldbuilding. She has thought more deeply about the way I do things than I have myself!

For those who don’t know much about writing sff: think about this. If I tell you I am writing a mainstream novel set in London in 2006, you already know a helluva lot about my novel before you’ve read a word. You have a sense of place, time, culture. You could probably make a stab at what my characters have for breakfast without me telling you. If I tell you my main character teaches at a government secondary school, then you already have an idea of his socio-economic position.

But what if I told you my book was set in Sebundancia in the forty-sixth century after the cataclysm and my main character makes corrabuds for a living? You would be none the wiser. A fantasy writer has to build a whole world and make it believable. If they don’t do it well, the whole book flops, even though the plot may be a scorcher and the characters marvellously drawn.

Gillian says: “I am reading Glenda Larke’s work and it strikes me that her worlds are a lot more convincing that those of a lot of other writers. When you get down to it, though, she doesn’t have a great deal more information than many fantasy novels, and she definitely has less than some. Why do her worlds work?”

“…It isn’t the amount of background you add to your novel, though the amount of effort you spend worldbuilding most definitely helps. The important thing is what detail you select. And Glenda chooses her detail with extraordinary care. Her worlds work because she mimics the sense we sometimes get in our own lives: that things are interlinked and complex.”
And : “The detail is *so* telling, that we can infer much more from her hints than is said on the page.”

I was delighted when I read that, because that was the result I was striving for. I have a horror of boring the reader with a myriad of details, for example about what you can order for breakfast in the local inn and how the food actually got there… Yet I don’t want the reader to ever be jerked into a sense of disbelief. (Hey, wait a moment, this inn is in the middle of the desert, how come they have fresh bread and what do they use for fuel to heat the ovens if there’s no trees?) 

I don’t think I do nearly as much written work to build my world as some authors do. You won’t find my study strewn with plans of the economic life of the Gorthan Spit or notes on the details of how the Hub Race affected the social status of the Middling Isles…and yet I do know those things. I could tell you if you asked. So how do I do it?

I spend a year (at least) thinking about a novel before I write it – and most of what I think about is the place. How it is governed and stratified. What the conflicts are and how the economy works. I don’t write this down. I don’t do it in painstaking detail. And I don’t do it as an academic exercise either – I do it through my PoV characters, in the amount of detail that they would understand.

Let’s say Ferria is a chambermaid in Sebundancia and she is one of my main protagonists. She works for the corrabud-maker. I think about her a lot. How she spends her day. What she thinks about, the work she does, where she lives, what her family does. She probably doesn’t know much about how trade is done with the people who live in the neighbouring valley over the other side of the hills, but she will know some things – where those silk sheets on the beds come from, for example, and how much they cost. And that small snippet of info will also mean that there are silk merchants and silk traders and silk caravans, which I will probably mention somewhere or other. And if there are silk sheets on the bed, then making corrabuds is very lucrative…

Gillian says – and she is absolutely right:

“And that is the strongest argument I can think of for thinking about how that world needs to appear in the book at least as much as you think about building your world in the first place. When a writer gets the appropriate detail -the telling detail – and links it closely into plot and people then fantasy and SF reading becomes a whole new ballgame. We feel as if we are entering those strange lands ourselves.”

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Sunday, 23 April 2006 (5 Comments).

Lucy Sussex has written a very short review of Heart of the Mirage for The Age, a Melbourne newspaper, appearing yesterday (Sunday). I am tickled pink to be in The Age and to have a writer as talented as Lucy say nice things! The review ended with: For those jaded with genre fantasy, Larke provides fare that is fresh, strange and intriguing.

There have been some interesting comments added to my last blog entry on the difficulties of language of a period, and Gillian had some words of wisdom over on her blog. I liked the comment Karen (author of Kingmaker, Kingbreaker duology) made about some things being invisible, no matter what world you are writing about – cows and horses are fine, but the moment you mention something like kangaroos, you’re doomed. You’ve made the place Australia, and nothing is going budge the reader out of that slot.

I think this is one reason why fantasy seems sometimes to be so much the same in setting: oak trees are fine (“invisible”) and so are wolves and generic bears and wild boars and the north being colder than the south. None of those things grates on the reader. Include kangaroos or armadillos or giraffes and all of a sudden you are no longer in a land called “Cavalaria” or “M’grith”. Have your hero fight a battle with a savage tiger during a hunt, and you’ve got to be in India. Have your heroine watch the toucans in the tree outside her castle and you’ll have your reader shaking their heads in despair. You have placed them somewhere real and not at all fantastical in the way they expected.

The challenge is to provide a setting that is different, yet doesn’t carry a load of baggage with it. The aim must always be not to jerk the reader out of your world and into his/her own.

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Monday, 1 May 2006 (3 Comments).

The plane was full from New York to Kuala Lumpur. The man sitting next to me was American.

‘Your first trip to Malaysia?’ I asked at some point, one of those casual questions you tend to ask of a fellow sufferer on a long flight.

No, he said. He had been an American Peace Corps volunteer in Malaysia, back in the early 70s, he explained, and named the institution where he had been a lecturer.

I was startled. My husband had been one of the Malaysian initiators of that programme at a time when the country was short of tertiary science teachers prepared to teach in the Malay language and when many local educatonists and some politicians were scornful of the idea that science could ever be taught in the national language at university level. (From a modern perspective, this attitude seems incredibly strange. The past truly is another country.) A few dedicated Malaysians, a handful of Indonesians and members of the American Peace Corps proved the doom-sayers wrong.

Several among the Corps had become good friends to my husband and me. During the initial Malay language learning period, one American family was hosted by my in-laws in their village home. Much later, another – I’ll call him K – asked my husband to be his wakil (negotiating rep) for his engagement and marriage to a Malaysian. He’s looked us up on a more recent visit to Malaysia.

‘But you must know my husband!’ I exclaimed to my fellow passenger, and gave the name. ‘In fact, you and I have probably met before.’

He did indeed remember my husband, and yes, we probably had met a few times thirty-five years ago. ‘You’re an author, aren’t you,’ he said, ‘and you have a daughter in the US, and another who’s a musician in the UK.’

I was staggered. ‘How on earth did you know all that?’

‘Oh,’ he replied, ‘K drove me to the airport this evening, and he was telling me about you.’

K, of course, had no idea I had been in N.Y., let alone that on the plane I was going to be sitting next to the friend he had so kindly driven to Newark Airport. (Years before, he’d done the same good deed in reverse – he’d picked up our newly-arrived daughter at the airport and taken her to the Cornell post-grad campus in Manhattan.) Out of all the 300 plus people on that plane, none of whom I recognised, I was seated next to someone I had once met – who had been talking about me on the way to the airport!

Now that’s a coincidence.
They do happen. And many real-life coincidences are even odder than this one.

And yet coincidences are dangerous things to include in a story because, written down, they seem so trite and contrived. They jerk the reader out of his belief. The person who comes across them in literature tends to curl his lip up in a sneer, and mutter something about writers who think their readers must be pigeon-brained poodles to believe that sort of rubbish…Life Is Not Like That, they state.

Well, life is like that. But the good writer also has to be beware of writing too realistically. Sometime you can be too real for your own good.

There are ways of getting around the unbelievability of the coincidence, of course. Not confusing the unlikely with the impossible is a beginning. Having your characters comment on the unbelievability is (illogically) another way. Or you can, like Dan Brown, keep the action going at such a frenetic pace that the unlikely bits don’t have time to register on the reader…

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Tuesday, 23 May 2006 (3 Comments).

Today’s tip is all about the word: “that“.

Take a look at this rather silly sentence:
That that that, that one that we see here, can be removed is not in doubt.

This sentence is actually grammatically correct. It’s also hideous, of course. (If you can’t make any sense of it, think of it as being spoken by someone pointing to the word “that” in a written passage.)

Unfortunately the word ‘that’ is far too easy to over-use – partly because it can be so many things:
An adjective. He has that belief in his talent…
Or an adverb. Only six or seven, if that many…
Or a conjunction. He decided that she should know the whole story.
Or a relative pronoun. …a list of books that influenced me…
(I hope I am remembering my grammar terms correctly here – years since I taught this stuff!!)

It might pay to ask your word processor to do a search of your final MS and see if you have too many of the pesky little things. If they turn up like a bad case of acne spots in every sentence, then try to re-word some of them.

That as a Conjunction
Conjunctions are “joining” words like and or but or if or although – or, sometimes,that. Copy editors are often biased one way or another on using ‘that’ as a conjunction. My Australian copy editor tends to re-insert all the ones I have left out. I then alter at least half of them back again! Another Australian copy editor I know religiously tries to get rid of them all in her clients’ work.
Who is correct?
Grammatically, I believe he is right is just as correct as I believe that he is right.

So what’s a bewildered writer to do?
Well, remember this: I believe he is right is more colloquial, the other more formal. That might help you make a decision. Just be careful of dropping the ‘that’ if the result ends up lacking clarity. For example: They announced all teachers, regardless of gender, must wear trousers seems odd when you start reading it. Much better to insert the ‘that’ after ‘announced’ so the reader doesn’t do a doubletake as he tries to figure out how teachers get announced or misreads it as “renounced”.

‘That’ as a Relative Pronoun (relative pronouns are words like “which”, “what” and “who”)
Here’s one way to get rid of a ‘that’ relative pronoun. Use a partial form of the verb.

It’s up to you to decide what sounds best in context – sometimes it is the first way, sometimes the other.

And that’s that about thats.

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Sunday, 28 May 2006 (8 Comments).

Is it: He’s coming too or He’s coming, too
I don’t want one either or I don’t want one, either

The answer on this one is actually quite simple. You can please yourself.
There are no set rules, at least none that are applied regularly today. [Some people will try to make rules, but they don’t seem to work very well.] Just do what you think suits the situation.

Jim has a ball, so Mary wanted one too!

I think that works without the comma. But there’s nothing wrong if you put one in.

Jim worked in accounting at the time, but he had another job, too. He was a barman at night.

I like that better with a comma.

There is one case where the comma is used more often than not, and that is when the “too” is in the middle of the sentence.

Michael used to go sailing every Sunday, and his son went with him. His daughter, too, when she was old enough.

Inevitably, when I get a copyedit back from the publisher, I find she has inserted more commas than I originally put in. I usually leave them there. I figure that a copyeditor – while perhaps not the actual god of punctuation and grammar – does come close, and tends to know more than I do about what is best!

So don’t fuss too much about this one. No editor is going to toss your work across the room because you did or did not insert a comma before “too”.

That’s all I have time for this week – I have a copyedit that has to be completed and sent back to Australia …

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Sunday, 9 July 2006 (4 Comments).