{"id":1923,"date":"2013-08-17T17:18:56","date_gmt":"2013-08-17T23:18:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=1923"},"modified":"2013-08-17T17:18:56","modified_gmt":"2013-08-17T23:18:56","slug":"playing-with-deep-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=1923","title":{"rendered":"Playing with Deep History"},"content":{"rendered":"

Story #2, of the new Paksworld stories, the “lightning strikes” post,\u00a0 is one of those “out of the blue\/accidental hits” stories.\u00a0\u00a0 Here’s the article I found that started it all: \u00a0 “The Ghost Cavalry of Gondole.<\/a>”\u00a0 Right off the bat, the title begs for a story.\u00a0\u00a0 Reading the article and bring up all the pictures…skin-tingling stuff.\u00a0 It belonged in Paksworld.\u00a0 It felt right<\/em> for Paksworld.\u00a0 But right as background does not make a story…a big fancy gravesite (a real one) is a fact, not a story.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Muttering and making notes followed.\u00a0\u00a0 Supposing it could fit into Paksworld, where and when would it be?\u00a0\u00a0 What people would be buried there, and why?\u00a0\u00a0 What non-ghost people would interact with them?\u00a0\u00a0 Would they be excited, happy, frightened…and why?\u00a0\u00a0 (Remember the much earlier post on motivations?)\u00a0\u00a0 Could this situation (grave, with people and horses buried in ritual positions)\u00a0 fit the requirements for the second anthology?\u00a0\u00a0 How?\u00a0\u00a0 How would magic be involved (since this is a fantasy anthology and some magical something is needed)?\u00a0\u00a0 Are ghosts themselves magical?\u00a0\u00a0 Are there really ghosts or do the people (still undetermined) who see the grave think there might be ghosts?\u00a0 Are they afraid of the dead?\u00a0 (And always, WHY?)<\/p>\n

It did not feel like “current times” in Paksworld–the time of the current books.\u00a0 It felt…older.\u00a0\u00a0 So I wrote it as a bardic legend sort of thing…a king was buried with his companions (only not quite the same as those at Gondole) and their horses (though not the same as those at Gondole) and I let that tale unfold over some length of time, not really specified.\u00a0 How did the bones get there, and why (again!) and then what happened to them?\u00a0\u00a0 I was feeling for the twitch of the web that means “A Story Starts Here” and nothing came until…it did, later than I expected.\u00a0\u00a0 So by the time the story starts, the bones have been there a long time, and a lot has happened in the lands around.<\/p>\n

WHAT lands around?\u00a0\u00a0 I poked around in the land, in an authorly way.\u00a0\u00a0 Hmm.\u00a0 Doesn’t feel like Dwarfmounts or Westmounts.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Something about the smell…the plants are different (WHY???)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 OK, which way is the sea?\u00a0\u00a0 Or is there a sea?\u00a0\u00a0 If you just walked off *that* way,\u00a0 toward the rising sun, what would you come to?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And how long would it take?\u00a0\u00a0 And who might you meet?\u00a0 (And WHY???)<\/p>\n

Because of another chance meeting with another chunk of archaeology,\u00a0 the Valley of the Kings (the real one) tangled with the Ghost Cavalry of Gondole and then evoked a memory of the barrows and burial mounds in the UK and Scandinavia.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And I’d been reading Tony Hillerman’s Navajo country mysteries.\u00a0 What if…there’s more than one grave?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 How many could there be?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 What would happen to them?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Over what span of time?\u00a0\u00a0 Say they were barrows…well built?\u00a0 Not?\u00a0 Animals burrow, rain falls, wind blows…what happens if people want to put a city on top of graves?\u00a0\u00a0 Archaeology knows.\u00a0 How long does it take to build a city over some graves (WHY???\u00a0 Is it supposed to be lucky?\u00a0 Do people believe the spirits of the dead will protect them?\u00a0 What kind of theological framework might go with that? )\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Why put a city there anyway?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A ceremonial site to which people come regularly from…somewhere else?\u00a0 (Where?)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And any ceremonial site may be a target for raiders, for attackers, because…it’s collected wealth.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And it can be raided, burned, ruined…hmmm.<\/p>\n

Finally, after some hours, a character…actually a bunch of them…showed up.\u00a0 They weren’t what I was looking for, but maybe they’d lead to something.\u00a0\u00a0 They were from a long way back in Paksworld history, but a time of civilization–they came from a land that had been thriving for a long time.\u00a0 (WHY???)\u00a0\u00a0 They’re a different culture from any of the others in the books–older, but not primitive.\u00a0\u00a0 So I started writing Story, not Myth or Legend, in the POV of the one I saw first.\u00a0\u00a0 And now there’s a story that needs a title, but is enough of a story (say the first-readers)\u00a0 to be sent to the anthology editor and see what he thinks.<\/p>\n

The process in all this started with investigation, a willingness to poke around and see what was there,\u00a0 a discovery of who, what, where, when, and why.\u00a0\u00a0 Then it moved into a kind of intense observation…feeling my way into the POV character, what he experienced in the past, what he thought in the present, what he thought about the future, and also his sensory input right this moment.\u00a0\u00a0 Feeling around inside him to find out his why, <\/em> and the why<\/em> of the others.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Short fiction doesn’t allow the leisurly exploration of character that novels\u00a0 and series do–you have to get right at it, crack the code, evert the psyche the way some sea creatures evert their stomachs to get rid of waste (some have no through-flow.)\u00a0\u00a0 And then tuck it neatly back inside, in the way that works best for that story at that length, so the reader sees enough but not too much–so the reader gets the thrill of discovery as well.<\/p>\n

It is a messy business, writing fiction, in part because people are messy inside (and so characters need to be messy inside, not too easily assembled or disassembled.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Story #2, of the new Paksworld stories, the “lightning strikes” post,\u00a0 is one of those “out of the blue\/accidental hits” stories.\u00a0\u00a0 Here’s the article I found that started it all: \u00a0 “The Ghost Cavalry of Gondole.”\u00a0 Right off the bat, the title begs for a story.\u00a0\u00a0 Reading the article and bring up all the pictures…skin-tingling […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,5],"tags":[108,22,62,107],"class_list":["post-1923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-craft","category-the-writing-life","tag-background","tag-characters","tag-craft-of-writing","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1923"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1924,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923\/revisions\/1924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}