6.5 KiB
Writing Excuses: "Writing Practical Fantasy"
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Author: u/notmy2ndopinion Concent of Saunt Edhar*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3b2apa/writing_excuses_writing_practical_fantasy/
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Score: 24
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Created: 2015-06-25T11:52:55
Post:
Transcript here: http://mbarker.livejournal.com/157661.html
- think about economics
- what is the agricultural surplus?
- what is produced, how does it get to people who want it and how much would they be willing to pay for it?
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no dumb villains. "If someone is going to be a challenge for your hero, they aren't an idiot, they may have different values, but they won't be stupid"
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if you're going to have a "City in the Desert," at least rationalize why and how it is there (top-down story-crafting). Use the Myth-busters approach and if something doesn't work, keep adding onto it until it does.
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avoid "techno-porn" or the ubiquitous but irrational applications of specific toy-tech
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"write what you know" applies even in fantasy, if you are thinking practically and rationally about real-world subjects
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find a group of power gamers to understand the base-rule of your system and ask them to break it. Immunize it to munchkinry.
Comments:
u/alexanderwales [+5] Time flies like an arrow (3 hours later)
Writing Excuses in general is pretty great. Someone should grab all the episodes that specifically apply to /r/rational; there are ten full seasons now, all online. Every episode also has a writing prompt, which are usually pretty good, like the one for this episode:
You have a city in the desert. There’s nothing around it but sand. Figure out why that city is there, how they survive and how they support all the people.
Top-down worldbuilding is something that's quite important for this sub in particular. If you want cool laser swords and hoverboards, you need some way to justify them; some technology that explains them away, or some quirk of magic that makes this practical, economical, etc.
u/None [+3] (3 hours later)
Well, cities in the desert are actually fairly easy to justify. Rivers can erode through a layer of rock and change their course, or even fail to flood at all. Goats can eat through all the vegetation, and there are other forms of artificial desertification as well. Human beings could have fought so many wars over that city that they salted the land around it, killing off the vegetation and desertifying the area.
All of these rationalizations are taken from the actual history of the Middle East, unfortunately. "Fertile Crescent", and all that.
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (3 hours later)
Right, but then you still need the support structure to keep that city alive (assuming it's not a ruin, in which case you don't have problems). The city needs to get its food and water from somewhere.
Heck, you can even have a city deliberately built in the desert, like Las Vegas, so long as you have some thought put into how to explain it.
u/None [+1] (4 hours later)
Right, but then you still need the support structure to keep that city alive (assuming it's not a ruin, in which case you don't have problems). The city needs to get its food and water from somewhere.
Ooooh. I thought we were talking about ruins.
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (4 hours later)
No, they're talking about these enormous cosmopolitan cities that you sometimes find in fantasy settings. Like ... there's no river running through it, so where is the water coming from? There are no fields surrounding it, so where are they getting food? A shimmering city in the middle of desolate sands is a cool visual, but it's got to have some kind of underpinning to it (usually magic). At least, if you want to write something grounded.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (4 hours later)
It depends on the setting, though. Low-fantasy? Justify the crap out of that thing! High fantasy? One-sentence mention of "I passed a group of clerics casting their daily 'Create Water' spells into the cisterns and then something interesting happened."
u/alexanderwales [+13] Time flies like an arrow (5 hours later)
And even if you've got clerics casting "Create Water", you still have a lot of questions. Sure, the clerics are providing food and water for everyone ... but does that mean that every city in the world is only where it is out of inertia? If cities are totally disconnected from the supply of water and food, why do they really exist? Does creating food and water have no opportunity costs associated with it? And if it does, then what justifies the expense of a city in the desert? What kind of trade routes are there that go to this city? Does no one have the ability or desire to turn their desolate surroundings into not desolate surroundings?
The point isn't really to have answers to these questions in the text itself, it's that you can find cool stuff by not doing the handwave of "oh, magic". You think about why people have chosen to live in this desert city instead of somewhere else. And then you get answers like, "There's a mineral deposit far beneath the city, and the city exists primary to support that mine" or "It's the holy city where Optija began his pilgrimage" or "The city does exist mostly through inertia, from a time when it wasn't desert, and the cost of keeping it in food and water is a constant stress for the caliphate". And that takes you from "there's a desert city because I thought the story needed one and it would be a good change of pace" to "this is the desert city, which exists on its own, for the following reasons and in the following ways".
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (4 hours later)
Yeah, it definitely does. And obviously "city in the desert" isn't really what they're talking about, they're talking about the whole question of building a world that's ... well, they call it practical, but they could just as easily have said rational.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (3 hours later)
For a very rational fantasy magic system, Randall Garret's Lord Darcy stories are a good example.
u/Drazelic [+1] Dai-Gurren Brigade (8 hours later)
I'm just going to thank you for posting that link to a centralized repository of Writing Excuses transcripts. I've been looking for one for a while, because I can't analyze and brainstorm while I'm listening to other people talk.
u/mrmonkeybat [+1] (23 hours later)
Siwa Oasis.