Category Archives: On Writing

AI and the Digital Frame

Posted by natechen on

The use of Artificial Intelligence in creative endeavors is a topic of growing debate, with people who are strongly for it and strongly against it. Personally, I don’t think AI is as big a “threat” to creativity as some pretend. I also don’t think it’s a huge boon to creativity that many of its biggest boosters imagine it will be, although I certainly think it will have uses very soon. Let me explain what things look like from my very casual understanding of AI and my much deeper understanding of the art of storytelling.

First of all, let’s address the term Artificial Intelligence. This is a marketing term. There are a number of assumptions baked into the term which I don’t entirely agree with, although I will be using the term AI for the bulk of this post. What the programs we call AI do is they use mathematical algorithms to predict categories and outcomes. Pattern recognition and prediction is a function of intelligence. However, AI does not organize the information that it uses to make predictions by itself, it relies extensively on user input to create connections between data points then uses very advanced math to predict further connections or to anticipate what connections people would make between new data points.

A more honest term would be algorithmic prediction. However predictions are much riskier things than intelligence so the decision has been made to brand these programs as AI. There’s a lot of tricky things baked into this idea, not the least of which is that prediction is intelligence. That could be a whole essay in itself but I’ll leave it be for now. Let’s move on to the second important part of the discussion for the purposes of my area of expertise, the large language model.

AI that takes gives output via text or voice synthesizer choose their own words based on a large language model (LLM). These models analyze truly titanic quantities of text to build an idea of how the human language is used. Typically they are trained on some portion of the available text on the Internet. Risky? Undoubtedly. Most of the Internet is used by people who use its anonymity as an excuse to prolong their adolescence and write accordingly. As a result many of the “chat” AI out there, like ChatGPT, come off as shallow and immature. Personally I don’t think that’s a shortcoming of the technology but rather a shortcoming of how it’s been trained to make predictions. But I digress.

Once a LLM is trained you prompt it with a few words and concepts and the AI sees how those words are connected in its data sets, clubs them into the most common format out in the wild and regurgitates it all for you to read. Of course, it adjusts the format according to certain rules in its coding. AI tends to write with excellent spelling, grammar and punctuation, for example, even though much of the Internet has none of those things. So, with this information about LLMs in mind let’s talk about using AI in storytelling.

The art of telling a story involves very deliberately taking events and arranging them into a narrative to create character development and provoke an emotional response from the audience. The nature of a LLM makes it a very poor tool for this undertaking. Remember, the way AI works is by using it’s LLM to predict the most likely way words and concepts are connected. So if you use AI to build a story concept you will get what is statistically most common for that kind of story. I cannot think of any less creative way to tell a story. It may be mathematically deliberate but math doesn’t define character development or emotional response. Emotion, in particular, is blunted when the same emotional stimulus comes in over and over, which is exactly what you will get when statistics drive your outcomes. You might argue it’s the entire point.

If you’ve ever read any fiction on the Internet you’re probably aware that a huge amount of it is very derivative. Repetitive, predictable characters, plots and settings. There’s nothing wrong with writing something a lot like something you’ve read, in fact it’s one of the most important exercises for developing writers in my book. But when you’re building a LLM all that repetition weights the model towards those overemphasized story components. The AI is going to give you more of that than anything else. In short, your story will be confined by the whims of whatever is popular on the Internet, making it even more predictable and derivative.

In time, it may be possible to dig into the structure of your LLM and tweak what elements are weighted and how but even then, it will still be in service to an AI. It’s still a predictive – and predictable – algorithm.

The second problem with AI as a creative tool is the ability of the programmer to build frames into how it delivers output. I mentioned this already. AI chatbots can be programmed to regurgitate text with proper grammar, punctuation and spelling and that’s not something that’s well reflected on the Internet, after all. Those are guidelines programmed into the AI by their creators.

There is no guarantee that these will be the only preprogrammed tools put in place to bound the output of the AI. In point of fact there’s plenty of evidence other such tools already exist. People who have tinkered with ChatGPT have found it has very strict ideological blinders placed on it and many of the variants of AI image generators will reject prompts with certain key words like “fiery” in them. Yes, the word fiery is banned. No, it’s not clear why. Right now these constraints are very obvious.

However, like all computer software, AI is getting more seamless in how you interface with it and more opaque in how its internal logic works. I doubt the creators of these tools will have them simply reject prompts they dislike for much longer. Soon they’ll just replace these undesirable prompts with more palatable ones. The end user probably won’t even be able to detect the change.

This second problem is the part of AI that really disturbs me about the technology, that audiences and creators will have their creativity bounded by the constraints of programmers without even realizing the straight jacket being put on them. It’s why I currently view the technology with great suspicion. And its why I have no plans to use it in any of my endeavors at the moment, no matter how great the time savings from doing so potentially are.

Now I’m not a total pessimist. I think there are a ton of very useful applications for AI in creativity coming down the pipe. So far none of the basic structural issues of algorithmic prediction or LLMs have been overcome so AI still pushes towards homogeneity but that’s not insurmountable. If deployed carefully and judiciously, to handle small tasks, that can be balanced out. The digital framing problem is more complex. I doubt the danger it poses can be entirely removed ever, since it’s an effect of the human nature of AI creators rather than a result of some shortcoming of the technology. In that matter you’ll just have to find programmers who you think you can trust and pay as much attention as possible to what happens when you prompt it. That’s still years away, though.

In the mean time, continue to watch the technology develop with a wary eye. When the conditions are right for widespread use of AI the creative landscape will begin to change incredibly fast. If you’re ready for it that will be a once in a lifetime opportunity to get your stories out. I am waiting for it with great interest.

Consistency is Key

Posted by natechen on

Consistency is the foundation of good work. This is true in creative pursuits as much as any other kind of undertaking. A painter that creates a Rembrandt one day and cubism the next doesn’t look like much of an artist as they don’t look like they have a grasp on their style and technique. They cannot consistently show the audience something. An author who never finishes a story but has great prose isn’t much fun to read. One reason I’ve never jelled with American comics is the constantly changing creative teams. The wild swings in tone, art and writing really grates on me and reduces my investment in the characters and stories.

At the same time, as a creator myself, I understand how draining it can be to focus on a single set of characters and developing new story lines for them while maintaining consistency. Audiences also have a maximum tolerance for kinds of stories. They don’t want to consume the same thing over and over again, they do want to see some variation on themes and new characters to add intrigue and new perspectives. On the other hand, they don’t want things to depart too far from what they know and love. It’s a delicate balancing act. However in my experience proving consistency and baseline competence is the foundation on which variation and personal flair is built. This is true in building your narratives and your rapport with the audience.

There’s lots of talk about how to build consistency in narrative. For good reason. That’s the foundation of storytelling after all. However if you cannot find a sizable enough rapport with your audience then the consistency of your story isn’t that important as no one is listening to it. So today I wanted to examine the question of how to build that rapport with your audience. We’re going to do that through the lens of some comic companies I’ve been following for a few months or years but before diving into what these up and comers are doing we need a little context.

While I’m not an expert on the American comic book industry – as noted above there are aspects to the major company’s approaches to storytelling I don’t like – I have noticed it seems to run on a cycle. Every twenty to thirty years, call it once a generation, it collapses and a handful of companies carry on the legacy. Both Marvel and DC Comics are amalgams of characters and stories acquired from other, failed companies over the years. These companies have come and gone since comics first came around but the two major powerhouses have done the hard work of preserving and sustaining the best pieces of those competitors for future generations.

Unfortunately, these Frankenstein patchworks aren’t very consistent. DC manages things through a series of reboots that are intended to reset characters and make it easier to get into the swing of things but rarely succeed in that goal. Marvel just retcons details. Tony Stark, for example, became Iron Man when he was kidnapped by opposing forces in an overseas war. Over time that war has been Korea, Vietnam and a handful of places in the Middle East, although the organization known as the Ten Rings was always involved in some way. Regardless, keeping the mess straight can be difficult.

The consistency the two big companies does have is a consistency of release. They put out new books every week and ongoing titles (the comic term for a long running series focused on a particular character or group) come out once a month, barring special promotional runs. This means fans do get a consistent story they can look forward to. Or they can about 60% of the time, when the industry is in the middle of one of its periodic contractions most of these titles get canceled without warning and then your favorite title is… less consistent.

Right now the big two are on the verge of one of those periodic contractions, if they aren’t in it already. Many titles get canceled after only a few issues. The stores that make their entire business selling these comics to the public are closing wholesale and predictions are there will be half as many comic stores in 2025 as there were in 2015. That’s not good.

While the future of mainstream comics and the stores that cater to them is bleak there’s plenty of opportunity for outsiders to step in and try to stake out a place for their own work.

One such person is Eric July, who’s Rippaverse publishing imprint has so far released three titles and reports a total intake of about $7 million. Financially that’s an impressive achievement. It’s hard to pin down exactly why July’s comic initiative did so well when most independent comics haven’t. The obvious possibility is that July had a huge following interested in comics already. He cut his teeth doing a daily podcast on comics and pop culture. As of this writing his YouTube channel, YoungRippa59, has 511 thousand subscribers, a considerable audience already interested in the kind of product he would eventually market to them. I have no doubt that was an initial portion of what attracted his audience. However, on his first outing he drew three and a half million of the seven million dollars his company boasts, much more than well established comic creators with equally sizable social media audiences. Clearly the existing audience doesn’t explain all of it. What I suspect has just as much to do with it is the Rippaverse Code, a series of promises from July to his audience. Among these promises is a pledge to avoid reboots and multiverses. In the eyes of the general comic audience, and Eric July in particular, these are two of the major sources of the inconsistencies and breakdowns in narrative that plague mainstream comics. On top of that, it promises not to pass superhero mantels from one character to the next. At first glance that looks like a silly pledge to make but this constant transferring of a superhero identity to different people is a bit like the painter who switches from ultra realism to cubism. It makes the characters very inconsistent.

I think it’s this pledge, targeted at the things many fans feel ruin the consistency of their stories, that drove a lot of the interest in July’s story. Since then the Rippaverse has had some growing pains. The interest in the company’s first outing far outstripped their infrastructure and an oversight in checking trademarks has embroiled the company in some potentially costly litigation. Still, the company is largely back on track with roughly quarterly releases. July continues to serve as the face of the company, which gives the audience a reliable touchstone although does create some PR liabilities.

For example, I didn’t know much about July before checking out his comic. I find his personality as presented to the public fairly abrasive and I wouldn’t go out of my way to spend a lot of time around him. Also, his marketing relies heavily on flash and doesn’t say much about the stories themselves. On the other hand, this would be fine if the stories were good and the marketing just needed to perk enough interest in them to draw you in. Unfortunately, while July is a musician he isn’t a well trained storyteller. His stories so far haven’t been very clear, well paced or engaging.

There’s telling signs that the inconsistency between story quality and marketing is taking its toll. His audience is shrinking in terms of both how much money they invest in the product and in terms of absolute numbers. It’s not just a case of people buying fewer shirts and collectibles with their comic order. Fewer people overall are buying comics. Again, based on my understanding of the industry, this is pretty common in startup comic companies. If July follows the general pattern of a company like Image Comics, his imprint will probably shrink to about half its starting size over the next two years and then begin slowly growing year over year from there. Assuming it survives, which is not a guarantee in any industry.

Still, the surprising outpouring of interest and money that first greeted the Rippaverse bears some testimony to the effect of promising consistency. Again, there were other factors that also played a role in July’s outstanding initial success. But those factors existed in many other cases and only July managed to find the level of response he did so I believe the added factor of consistency, or a pledge thereof, is important.

Another sign of the importance of consistency is the Kamen America franchise, written by Mark Pellegrini and illustrated by Timothy Lim. This franchise is distributed by the company Iconic Comics, a company that focuses on warehousing and fulfilling orders for a select group of independent comic makers. While the Iconic creators are comfortable collaborating they are ultimately in charge of their own brands. There are yearly crossover events but they do no hijack the plot of ongoing titles. The entire scope of Iconic Comics is hard to compress into this summary, nor is it particularly important, so I’m going to leave the summary at that. Right now I want to emphasize the approach Lim and Pellegrini have taken.

This creative team puts out one book every quarter, much like Eric July. However, the Kamen team has been at it for a good four years and boasts a much more extensive backlog. While the artistic direction is a little more cartoony than that in July’s titles and the genre is closer to Power Rangers than Superman, Lim and Pellegrini have pushed out a huge number of titles that their audience enjoys. The continuity is consistent and the character work is charming.

What’s most impressive is that the Kamen audience has grown, rather than shrunk. It’s hard to get comprehensive numbers as the title is available through three different platforms, two crowdfunding sites and the Iconic Comics web store. Unfortunately there are no sales figures for the Iconic store but we do have the crowdfunding stats. There may be some customer overlap between the two platforms but they’re fairly consistent over time.

Kamen America Volume One netted approximately 2,600 sales on initial offering and the most recent release, Volume Eight, netted about 3,300 sales. (For those wondering, the seven other titles Lim and Pellegrini released in the past four years were crossovers or part of another franchise. The numbers are generally lower than the Kamen franchise. The growth in sales of Black Hops, the other franchise, and crossovers is roughly proportionate to Kamen America, just lower in absolute value.)

There was a bit of a drop in the beginning, as Lim and Pellegrini tried various things, but they’ve shown slow but constant growth over time. Only steady, consistent work has made that growth possible. While we don’t know the full scope of that work, as the Iconic store is quite opaque, I have seen personal accounts of people who discovered the series through the Iconic store. Lim and Pellegrini haven’t made a big pledge like July did but they now have enough of a track record to assure us they’re going to do their best to turn out satisfying, dependable work that will entertain and delight readers. They tend to keep a fairly low profile now but they did have some high profile feuds early on. Consistent work eventually drowned that out, which may be some comfort to July.

Either way, consistent work clearly pays big dividends to creators who promise it and put in the work to bring it to fruition. Not huge returns in a short period of time. But enough to be worthwhile to those who can make that promise to their audience. That’s something I’ve tried my best to bring to the table on this blog and I’ve seen those small returns over the years. As July, Lim and Pellegrini prove, I’m not alone in that and hopefully you won’t be, either.

The House of Love and Death

Posted by natechen on

Andrew Klavan’s The House of Love and Death is the third book in the Cameron Winter series which follows its protagonist, a covert government agent turned college English professor, as he works to solve murders that catch his attention. I’ve mentioned this series in fiction reviews before. While I’ve enjoyed it so far this is really the moment where I felt the series made sense as something other than just a tale about a reformed assassin trying to make good on his previous misdeeds.

So far Cameron Winter stories have had interesting things to say about what it means to be a man and what the modern world taking shape around us might mean for those trying to live good lives. However there were a lot of pieces that didn’t quite add up yet. Many good things in storytelling come in threes so when a third book in the series was announced I was optimistic that we’d get a more complete picture of where his tale was leading. The opening scene convinced me that was the case.

The House of Love and Death opens on firefighters rushing into a burning house where they find four dead bodies, all shot to death with a rifle. The only survivor of the massacre is a boy hiding in the woods out back. The rest of his family and his nanny are dead, claimed by the specter of death that looms over the house, and he has little of use to say as, when asked how many people were in the house, all he can tell the firefighters, “Everyone.”

Cameron catches wind of this strange event and his so-called strange habit of mind kicks in. He inserts himself into the case and contends with disgruntled security guards, hostile police, the wealthy and the working class. Outside of the case his life isn’t easy either. The Dean of Students has received complaints about him and is now looking into his past, which draws the wrong kind of attention. His own guilt at his life as an assassin hasn’t entirely passed. At a glance the story looks like it will be very complicated. However from the moment it was clear that the murdered family employed a nanny I knew the payoffs I was waiting for were coming.

Let me explain.

In When Christmas Comes we learned a lot about Cameron’s terrible childhood and how his primary source of moral teaching and emotional warmth was his own nanny. Unfortunately that relationship ended in disappointment. It couldn’t be a coincidence that, three installments in, we see another young boy who’s life is literally saved by a nanny in a case he is investigating. Klavan is a very deliberate author and he wouldn’t include that kind of detail without reason.

I wasn’t expecting quite the outcome he had in mind, however. In his first outing Cameron is dealing with foundational issues, a simple crime with a reasonably straight forward solution. In the second installment, A Strange Habit of Mind, things get more complicated. Social media and its trends intrude on the narrative and the battle for justice unfolds alongside the question of how much we can shape our world through intelligence and willpower. The scope of the story was expanding. In The House of Love and Death the largest possible forces have taken a hand. Love and death themselves are playing out their roles in the medium of human wants and desires and we have to be prepared to accept that these are more than abstractions if we hope to solve the mystery the house presents us.

Cameron is familiar with Death, having been a messenger of it for years. Love, on the other hand, has always kept its distance from him and its absence has left his understanding of the world skewed. It will take the work of a handful of warm, diligent and yes, loving women to help him work that part of it out. The question of what is true and what is a fancy we’re caught up in is also a theme in this work. The mystery itself feels almost like these abstract questions have donned human flesh and manifested their work in any number of ways across the small Midwestern town where the murders happened.

By the end of The House of Love and Death it truly feels like Cameron has come to grips with Love. He just has to manifest it in his life. It’s really a landmark in the series and it feels deeply impactful. In many of the previous stories Klavan has written it really felt like he was struggling to find a way to handle these themes in a way that felt organic. Many of these efforts, such as his Another Kingdom trilogy, were done in good faith but were lacking something. Now, once again working in his favorite genre, it seems like he’s really hit his stride.

In short, The House of Love and Death is a gripping thriller, a murder mystery not afraid to look at the darkest parts of human nature and a sweeping battle between good and evil as its hero seeks to find his place as a man in the modern world. It’s a remarkable achievement by Andrew Klavan. If you are not afraid of a story that deals with the dark side of human nature I cannot recommend the Cameron Winter series enough.

Process – Editing and Feedback

Posted by natechen on

Like many crafts, writing is actually a number of different skills all wrapped up in the process of creating something. Like all craftsmen, writers are better or worse at various aspects of the process. In the case of editing things are particularly polarizing. Authors seem to either enjoy the process of editing, and indeed claim to do their best work in this stage of the craft, or they hate editing and just have to slog through it. I must confess that I fall firmly into the second category.

Let me be clear. Editing is a very necessary part of the process and there’s nothing I’ve ever written that didn’t benefit from having a good editing pass to make it clearer and more consistent. However it’s not something I enjoy doing and as a result this is the part of the process where my advice will probably be the weakest. So, what’s the purpose of editing?

Well, as I already mentioned, making it clearer and more consistent is a good starting point. Watching for consistency is pretty simple. Check your set ups for important pay offs and make sure the set up actually leads into the payoff you are aiming for. When I discussed outlines I mentioned I didn’t tweak my outline to reflect revisions I made as I planned scenes but I probably should. Why did I say I should? Because scanning the most current outline I have is the fastest way to remind myself what payoffs my setups should be pointing to. (Again, I keep coming back to the outline as the fastest way to keep your story straight. This is why I stress its usefulness as a writing tool.)

Clarity is harder to gauge. It’s best to set a piece of writing aside for a while before editing it, although it’s best to acknowledge that the time available to the writer is a factor into how practical that is. When you come back you’ll hopefully be able to read what you wrote without your intentions clouding your mind. That will make it easier to gauge whether you actually said what you intended to say. Developing the proper perspective when doing this is also important. You’re not reading and asking whether you said something other than what you intended, that’s not the way unclear prose works its way into what you write. What happens is you write gibberish instead of something understandable.

I should also note that, in my case, how long I must leave something sitting before I can effective edit it is dependent on how many times I’ve edited it. Often a week or two of down time is enough for the first editing pass. This is part of why I try to give myself a couple of weeks of material in padding for the stories I am writing. I can edit them the day before they are posted and have a pretty clear eye for what I’m reading. However it can take a month or two before I can make a second editing pass with any clarity and even longer before a third is effective.

Ultimately editing on your own will only take you so far. It is also wise to seek out the input of people who are willing to give fair and even handed critique of your work. Ideally that would be a professional editor. The problem with going that route is that such people will rightly charge you a fair amount of money for their services and if you are not yet a major publishing phenomenon you may not be able to afford it. I understand this problem as I also suffer from it.

That said, there’s really something to be said for having one person who handles all your basic feedback. An editor who knows you, your style and your priorities is going to give very personalized input. You also won’t have to constantly go back and fill in important context and thematic through lines as you discuss your story. If I could afford that kind of consistent input from someone I would definitely pay for it. Sadly, I can’t afford it and I suspect, if you’re reading this, you can’t either.

So what’s the alternative?

There are plenty of forums, websites, Discord servers and the like where you can find like-minded, struggling authors and exchange feedback with them. While you won’t get the same level of personalized input from them as you would an editor, any feedback is good. It’s not impossible, of course. Sometimes a collaborator will be able to work with you for months or longer on multiple projects but it’s not a guarantee and you shouldn’t count on it.

Managing feedback is a whole ‘nother thing. Hopefully you’ll be able to engage in a lot of dialog with them and not just get an email outlining a few thoughts on the story. Ask as many questions as you can. Again, clarity and consistency is a major thing you want to ask questions about. Did they understand characters and decisions? If not, how can you make them clearer?

Beyond those two basic issues dealing with feedback is a lot harder. Readers will offer thoughts on your characters, the tone of your story, your prose, your genre of choice and many other things you won’t think of until people bring them up. All of that feedback is good and useful but you should be careful. Don’t chase any one particular kind of response from your audience. People have many and diverse opinions on these many facets of your story and you cannot control them. The ultimate question is did they see what you were trying to do with your story or not? Don’t concern yourself as much with whether they liked what you were trying to do.

Ultimately, whether you are editing yourself or asking someone else to do it you are not trying to make people like your story. That’s not something you can do. What other people think of your story is their business. You are the creator of your story and you need to focus on whether the vision you had for that narrative is getting through to your audience. If you didn’t have enough confidence in that vision to stick with in the face of criticism you shouldn’t have written it. This part of the process is about making your vision as clear to others as possible. If you can do that, you’ve fulfilled your role as storyteller. With that, your role in the process is done and thus, so is this series.

Process – Dialog and Subtext

Posted by natechen on

Writing a scene is more than just working out the people and how they would carry out their goals. It’s also how they interact with each other while trying to convince others of their positions or dismiss their objections. It’s how they interact with their environment. Ultimately it’s what these words and actions say and don’t say about what they want and what they value.

So, once I have the basics of a scene blocked out I ask myself how direct they would be in talking about what they want. A Candle in the Wind is our case study for this series and it has a couple of examples of this. The best is probably the meeting between Sheriff Avery Warwick and the Fairchild siblings. The sheriff suspects the Fairchilds are working with Harper, who he’s just sent out of town so he won’t cause any problems. Which they are. Brandon and Cassie are trying to figure out what’s happening in Riker’s Cove while also not getting kicked out by the sheriff and, in Brandon’s case, upholding the first tenant of Avaloni chivalry – to seek the truth. In other words, Brandon doesn’t want to lie directly to Avery. Both characters are pursuing goals they cannot state explicitly to the other – but they still need the other to do something for them.

Much of the dialog in these scenes is constructed so that the two men serve these goals without ever explicitly bringing them up. Most people will describe this as showing the characters are intelligent. There is certainly an element of that to writing characters with subtext, as intelligence is an important factor in recognizing subtext and both characters do pick up on some of what the other is trying to do. Likewise, less intelligent actors tend to have less subtext. But adding subtext is more than just a reflection of intelligence; it is a way to give insight.

In his final duel with Heinrich von Nighburg, Roy baffles his opponent with his resistance to the other’s mental push towards anger. In his dialog he points out that his anger comes from showing up late and short on silver. This reveals that Roy’s real emotional vulnerability isn’t anger, it’s guilt. He becomes angry with himself when he feels he had a responsibility to help others that he couldn’t fulfill and that anger leaks out. Nighburg would have done better to push him towards guilt rather than bait him into anger but his understanding of Roy was too superficial to understand that.

I could have written this in plain language. However, Roy Harper isn’t a character who is comfortable with strangers, especially those who are out to kill him, so it’s not something it would be in character for him to state plainly. Furthermore, it’s more interesting for the audience to work it out from the subtext than see it so stated.

It’s important to have moments of subtext woven into your scenes. It doesn’t have to come from dialog, although these are the most obvious examples, but can come from interacting with objects as well. Say you have a protagonist who was given a keepsake by a parent who hated violence. Having the character holding that keepsake or even fiddling with it while debating the ethics of using lethal force creates a subtext to all the character’s arguments, for or against, without need any explicit dialog or exposition.

In a visual medium subtext can also be established by character expressions. Smiling while saying you’re sorry is a fairly blunt way to create subtext, a character looking at the door while promising to stay is another. This kind of visual subtext can be used in prose but it’s often very on point. I prefer to use it when a character is realizing another character’s subtext rather than as a way to signal subtext to the audience.

How you integrate subtext into your narrative is up to you. There’s a lot of different ways to do it but I’d recommend picking one or two and really honing them before trying another one. You don’t need a huge amount of subtext in a scene. Keep adding it and eventually it’s just the text of the scene so it’s better to be good at delivering it than having a bunch of different ways to work it in.

I put dialog and subtext together because I like to try and write dialog that introduces subtext. (Whether I succeed or not is not my place to say.) However there are also other techniques I try to keep in mind while writing dialog and, while not a process per se, these rules of thumb are things I find helpful when trying to put one word after another.

Characters should have preferred kinds of metaphors. Roy speaks in terms of fighting and army life most of the time but sometimes lapses into the language of his religion, the Mated Pair. This reflects his general outlook on life and his background. I’ve written a character who grew up as a grove tender and for whom I deliberately wrote down a series of tree based similes that I looked for every chance to use.

Analogies and metaphors grounded in real-world history and culture can be used in some cases. Obviously if your story is set in the present day feel free. Otherwise, depending on how deep you want immersion in your setting to be, you might sprinkle a few in or chose to invent “parallel” idioms based on the history and cultures of your world. If you do chose to avoid “real” colloquialisms in your dialog be careful. There’s a lot of things that don’t immediately look like they’re directly rooted in Earth history or culture that turn out to be if you look closer. For example, “zounds” is an abbreviation of “Christ’s wounds,” a potentially sacrilegious exclamation common in medieval England.

Characters should also have a rhythm of speaking. Some might prefer short words or sentences, others are prone to stringing thoughts together. Any kind of verbal tic can be present in character dialog, although I recommend not writing any dialog in a way that is difficult to understand. Spelling out heavy regional accents, for example. I try to describe these in narration rather than write them out as someone not familiar with the accent might find it incomprehensible.

It is possible to give characters difficult or even impossible to understand dialog. Giving the incomprehensible speaker a translator can create comedy, subtext and intrigue in equal measure. The dialog might not be important, either. But in general, if you’re going to write it out on the page I recommend making it understandable. Having strings of gibberish written out on the page typically just frustrates me and I skim past it. Your mileage may vary.

How your characters communicate with each other, persuade one another or conceal their goals is a difficult thing to manage and probably one of the most important things for you, as an author, to work out. As such I don’t have as fixed a process for it as some other things. I do have a lot of rules of thumb, however, and I’ve gathered them together in large part by reading blogs like this one or books on the art of writing and, of course, reading lots of good stories myself. Hopefully something you find here will help you create compelling scenes as well.

Process – Scenes and Bridges

Posted by natechen on

This is part two of a series discussing my process when I write a story. If you’re interested in the first part, on constructing an outline, you can find it here. It’s recommended reading for this post because, like all good processes, this step builds on the previous one so some of what I suggest here will not work that well unless you’ve written an outline. As with everything I write about my process, this is an outline of what I do. I have constructed this process through trial and error, basing much of what I do on what I learned in elementary writing exercises filtered through constant experimentation with the methods of other, more skilled writers. The result is not gospel by any means. Many things people have suggested as good writing methods I have tried and rejected. I expect others will try my methods and reject them in turn, which is good and right.

With all the disclaimers out of the way, how do I go about turning an outline into a series of narrative scenes that tie together?

Well, the first thing is that I think about the story a lot. I know that seems like a given, many people mull of their stories from time to time over the course of the day. However the thing that I try to do is be very deliberate about it. When I am at work and I have a very repetitive, hands on task like cleaning equipment scheduled for the day I look over my outline, pick two to four points and ruminate on them while performing that activity.

During this process I generally ask myself three basic questions:

  1. Who are the characters in this scene?
  2. How would they cause the events of the scene?
  3. How do those actions lead to the next scene?

Each of these questions is actually quite complex, less because the question itself is tricky but because there may be no good answer to the question as the situation stands. For example, if the outline calls for Roy to be the only character in a scene but he needs someone who can read records of the Forever Wars written in ancient Iberian then the scene cannot progress. Roy doesn’t speak or read Iberian in any form. Thus I have to add a character to the scene to help him with this by either adding a character who can read Iberian or by adding another scene where Roy hunts down someone to translate for him.

Ideally, the events of a scene should naturally grow from who is present and what the events of a previous scene were. The first scene or two of a story are thus the most important. They’re going to set up all the pieces that drive the story so any inconsistencies there are going to spread through the rest of the story. Early errors only get worse as time goes on. That’s why I find the outlining process so valuable as it lets me see those cracks forming without spending a whole lot of time writing and rewriting the story.

In general I begin with the situation characters are in at the beginning of a scene and think about how that character would respond to it. I prefer a good, steady escalation to a scene so I begin with dialog and ramp up to actions taken. That doesn’t mean characters will always begin a scene by talking but dialog, even if it’s never used, helps you get an idea of what your characters are thinking about and what their perspectives are. Those thoughts may be best expressed directly through action. However I find that sitting down and talking over the situation with the characters the best way for me to get into their heads.

Yes, this means I am often at work, performing maintenance and having imaginary conversations with people that don’t exist. Don’t judge me. It works very well for me about 99% of the time and that is what is most important. Can’t guarantee it will work for you unless you give it a try.

Now as I mentioned above, in this stage I will often end up expanding on the outline or tweaking aspects of it in order to better reflect my answering the questions I ask myself in building a scene. I mentioned adding a scene where Roy goes to find a translator in my example above. Generally I don’t go back and modify my “final” outline as I do this although it would probably help me if I did. The outline is my road map as I plan these scenes. It’s how I plan the direction of scenes and having these things on hand is helpful, especially if I wind up taking a break part way through writing something. But as you can see in the outline I posted last week, many elements are missing from it.

The perfect example of how turning an outline into scenes can create new elements of your story is the “character” of Jonathan Riker’s Statue. I created the Statue to “watch” certain events that the point of view characters of the story couldn’t be allowed to see. They were still important events to the story and the audience needed to know them. However letting the characters see them would cause them to intervene. I couldn’t let Roy or Brandon see the captured children moving around town, watching the townspeople, for example. However letting the audience know about them was important to building the atmosphere. So I chose to create a point of view that could watch but not intervene to give the audience that perspective and that turned out to be the Statue, which grew into a much bigger POV character that I ever intended it to be.

Finally, transitions between scenes merits a lot of thought because it frames the next scene. You don’t just want to think about how you are going to get from one scene to the next you have to think about how you are going to put the events of the next scene into motion. Again, an outline is a great tool for keeping that kind of perspective in mind. However there’s another element to scene transitions to keep in mind.

Chapter transitions are a very important factor in writing your story. Each chapter needs to be a fairly contained narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end but also push the reader into the next chapter so that they’ll keep reading, be it immediately or after they get back from work that evening. It’s tempting to think of chapter transitions as scene transitions.

They are not.

A scene transition is like lobbing a ball from one platform to the next. There may be two or three of them in a chapter and that’s fine, you don’t have to create all of them as if they were chapter transitions. A chapter transition is a hard break in the action. I generally start creating a chapter break by creating a scene transition but when the ball reaches the apex of its arc between platforms that becomes the chapter break point. Then I clean up the two sides of the break point to preserve point of view and continuity.

So there you have it. General things I do while writing a scene, more things I think about than things I actually do when I am sitting at the keyboard pressing buttons or scribbling on a notepad. Generally I try and have these things half way worked out in my mind before I get to the physical writing. Again, this is something to try and I hope it will help you. Let me know how it works for you if you do!

A Series on Process – Outlining

Posted by natechen on

At the beginning of the year I set myself a number of writing goals, one of which was to document and share my own process of writing. During the writing of A Candle in the Wind I took a few notes beyond the normal. Now I share the outcome with you, in the hopes that there is something here that can help the writer looking to refine their own process. This is just what I’ve found works best for my own writing. I encourage anyone trying to streamline their own writing process to experiment. There’s no guarantee any of this will prove helpful but creative writing is one of those things where you don’t really know if a technique will fit you until you try.

Note that the point of this isn’t to tell you how to come up with an idea, premise, characters or setting. This is about how you turn those things into a story. So in writing this I’m going to presume you have all that stuff worked out already and talk about how you arrange those things into a narrative.

The first thing I do is outline my story.

A lot of people say that outlining takes spontaneity or life from your story. My understanding from what they describe is that they feel shackled by their outline and cannot depart from it once they’ve written it down or the story feels listless if written from an outline. These are both the result of mindset, I believe. Some people want to explore their narrative as they write it and then just tweak and refine the narrative once they have it all down. Others lose interest in the story once they have all the beats worked out.

While neither of these are an innate shortcoming of outlining your story if you find either of these things to be the case outlining is not likely to be a helpful technique for you. Fighting that bent in your personality probably isn’t worthwhile. Everyone creates differently and it’s better to lean into your own proclivities than to try and contort your own thought processes to a particular technique. But if neither of these are the case I strongly suggest outlining as a huge time saver before you get into the meat of your story.

The point of an outline is to establish a structure and check for major contradictions before you spend hours typing out early chapters. In general I try to lay out between 15 and 25 basic plot beats I want to take place. Some outlining guides suggest including “up” or “down” in your beats but that is not something I do any longer, although I did try it at one time.

Once I have the beats laid out I work backwards, checking if I need to set up anything early on that will pay off later in the story. I also look for beats that contradict each other. Once the outline is written I leave it for two or three days then reread it with fresh eyes, looking for contradictions and asking if I like the story. In general the beats get rewritten 4-5 times. For an idea of what the finished product looks like, here’s the final outline from A Candle in the Wind.

  • Roy is in the jail of Riker’s Cove, watched by Sheriff Avery Warwick
  • We learn what brings him to the Cove, get the first hints of Heinrich von Nighburg’s identity and why Warwick wants him to leave
  • Roy agrees to leave and take the other members of Tyson’s Nine with him but the Fairchilds sneak by into town
  • Roy rallies the available members of the Nine and they make a new plan to sneak by the Sheriff
  • The Fairchilds and Warwick meet when Cassandra frees a child from Nighburg’s influence
  • Brandon and Cassie leverage their saving the Strathmore boy to convince Warwick to let Roy and company back into the town
  • Roy and the Fairchilds reunite but before anything is discussed Nighburg retaliates, sacrificing a captured child to the Voices
  • Roy and Avery get a glimpse of the mindscape before breaking Nighburg’s enchantment and ending Nighburg’s attack
  • Roy and Co regroup and meet with Jonathan Riker’s son to plan their attack on Nighburg’s lighthouse
  • We learn that Jonathan was the one who called in the favor Tyson’s Nine owed his father and the group makes a plan
  • Strathmore joins the group and they break into the lighthouse, discovering the mirror into Nighburg’s extradimensional manse
  • The manse is explored as Nighburg makes several stealthy mental attacks on them
  • Nighburg slips past the town’s defenders as the Voices play havoc with their emotions and awareness
  • He attempts to fulfill his ritual during the eclipse by executing Jenny Riker on the lighthouse beacon but Strathmore intervenes, dying in the process
  • Strathmore’s life is enough to push the ritual halfway to completion and Roy is forced to fight Nighburg in the beacon chamber to prevent it’s completion
  • When Roy throws Nighburg off the lighthouse he accidentally completes the ritual and the Voices of Taun begin to reach into the world fully
  • We see the defenders of Riker’s Cove rally and hold them off for a time but their stamina wanes
  • The Strongest Man in the World arrives at the last moment, the last of Tyson’s Nine, and wards off the Voices, returning the world to normal
  • Characters go their own ways, with the Strongest Man warning Roy that now that he’s touched creatures from Beyond he will never be as firmly a part of his world as he was before

Since I just lay out beats in a text file and edit them as I go I don’t have a change log of the entire thing. It didn’t occur to me to save it. That said, I don’t recall very many major changes at the outlining stage. If you’ve read A Candle in the Wind, however, you can see that some elements did change between this point and the final product.

For example, many things were added, like the mayor of Riker’s Cove or Chester Tanner entering the narrative and the Statue of Jonathan Riker serving as a framing device, but the essential structure only changed in a couple of points. Tanner turned out to be related to the child Nighburg killed. That meant it made more sense for him to go into the tower rather than Strathmore – after all, Stu still needed his dad and Chester’s nephew… well, he didn’t. That change was at once important and not really that big of a deal. It required the change of one character for another but very little in the outline rested on that side character so the replacement was fairly easy to make.

By working out most of the major structural changes at the point where the entire story is less than a page of text it’s possible to check for contradictions quickly and consider the implications of changes on the broad scale without having to streamline details over and over again. This is the biggest strength of the outline.

The second thing is that there is a lot of room for improvisation and creativity between those major story beats. As I said already, the use of the statue as a framing device didn’t come around until after this step. I had all the characters and magic powers in mind before I started on this but some of the interactions, like Brandon serving as the arms of an enlarged lightbox for Johan, were things that came up on the fly. Again, some say writing an outline robs the story of spontaneity but I think that has more to do with a writer’s perception than reality.

As I said before, some authors will undoubtedly find outlining their story robs them of a drive to write it because now they know how it ends. If that’s the case for you then by all means, don’t use an outline. But if you’ve been discouraged from using one because you’ve been told you’re putting shackles on yourself I’d highly encourage you to try it once or twice. It may be just what you need to get yourself across the finish line. Tune in next week and we’ll talk about how to get from an outline to scenes.

Under the Hood

Posted by natechen on

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about miracles and magic and, in the process, I mentioned hard and soft magic systems. This is an aspect of storytelling that many writers have very strong opinions about. Having strong opinions about storytelling is fine! In fact, that is a big part of what we do here, on this particular corner of the Internet! As I stated before, the question of hard magic versus soft magic is a question of systems. Hard magic is very systematized, with rules, costs, predictable outcomes, and so forth where as soft magic works because it works, with no clear rational.

Each of these approaches to showing magic in your story has its pros and cons. There’s also no clear and obvious lines where one class of magic starts and the other ends, which we’re going to look at in more detail in a bit but before that we have to talk about why the divide exists in the first place.

Every story has a goal. Whether it’s to create a mood, recount events or help you get to know a cast of characters one of the most important things for a storyteller is to keep that goal in mind and choose the techniques that bring you closest to fulfilling that goal. Many people who write about minutia like hard or soft magic systems don’t consider goals when they do. They analyze magic as if it were a law of nature in and of itself rather than a technique used to leverage the audience further down the path towards your goal, a toolkit to achieve narrative ends.

So for starters, what is in the hard magic toolkit?

The first and biggest aspect is a sense of cause and effect for things that normally cannot happen in real life. All narrative is built on cause and effect. A thing happens, which causes another thing to happen, which causes a final thing to happen which forces a character to make a choice and do something which causes another thing to – well, you get the idea. When something that is impossible happens in your story you may wish to assign it a cause. When impossibilities and their causes start to link together in a system you have hard magic in a nutshell.

The second thing in the toolkit is a sense of stakes. Like a dwindling fuel supply or the bullets in a gun, knowing exactly how much longer a person can do magic before he’s out of gas makes each use of it more tense and more important to how likely that person is to succeed at what they’re trying. This works in many ways. If iron cancels out all magic and the audience knows the villain is hiding an iron knife in their pocket as the confront the hero then we know that the hero is in danger he cannot anticipate. In essence, the more concrete and predictable your magic system the bigger the part it can play in tension or suspense based narrative techniques.

Finally, a hard magic system allows for more creativity in how goals are accomplished. In many stories with a soft magic system a conflict with magic or the harnessing of magic to accomplish a task boils down to concentrating harder or reaching some kind of personal epiphany. Hard magic systems create opportunities for surprising uses of existing magical mechanisms or lateral thinking with simple abilities. These ‘a-ha!’ moments are a lot of fun for the reader. Predicting them ahead of time is very satisfying for the audience as well.

So at what cost do we bring these tools to bear?

Well, first there’s the issue of memory. When the reader has to learn a bunch of things about the way your world works it can be hard to keep track of it all. Especially because there’s never going to be a chance for the reader to apply what they learn. Knowledge that goes unused is the soonest forgotten. Second is the question of complexity. The more moving parts a story has going the more likely your audience is to misunderstand some part of it and loose track of what your story is about.

But the greatest issue might be the time taken in explaining a hard magic system. It’s not fun to stop in the middle of a thrilling car chase for a lecture on how the internal combustion engine works. By the same token, lectures on how magic functions aren’t the most thrilling fiction out there. Finding the best way to explain the details is one of the biggest hurdles to a hard magic system out there.

What is the soft magic tool kit?

It offers you the chance to do things way outside the normal human experience, just like hard magic does, but it also offers a sense of mystery or menace rooted in how little people can actually understand what is happening around them. Soft magic puts the focus on how characters react to the unexpected or supernatural. The demands put on people by circumstances outside of their control are totally different from the demands of controlling a situation by knowledge and skill.

In short, while hard magic is about ingenuity and circumstance soft magic is all about resilience and determination. Finding your way in a world of soft magic is more about you than about the magic. Instead, the magic highlights aspects of a character’s personality, usually in a poetic or ironic fashion. Alternatively it gives voice to an aspect of the world that normally wouldn’t be accessible to the human experience. Consider Dr. Seuss’s Lorax, for example. He’s certainly a magical creature and, as he himself says, he speaks for the trees. Without the soft magic of the Lorax, his eponymous story could not take place.

Now that I’ve laid out these two types of magic, let me ask you a question – what kind of magic do you think JRR Tolkien created for the world of Middle Earth?

If you’ve read deeply about the world and the man, you know this is a trick question. Tolkien doesn’t dive into the supernatural mechanics of his world in The Lord of the Rings and that would seem to indicate a soft magic system. Gandalf, Saruman and Sauron all have potent magical powers. However we rarely see them used and we have no idea how they work when we do see them. Very squishy stuff.

The problem is, Tolkien did have pretty clear mechanics for how all the magic in his world worked. There were rules he put on the system. And, in point of fact, he spent a lot of time making sure the magic and its functions were consistent from beginning to end. He just didn’t sit down and explain it all to the audience and by doing so he turned a hard magic into a soft magic.

All of this is context for understanding the question that I’m really interested in as I write this post. That question being, why make this change? Tolkien could have gone under the hood and explained the One Ring and how the principles under-girding it allowed Sauron to so easily subvert others. He could have explained Gandalf’s command of flames. After all, he understood these things in exhaustive detail, why not take us under the hood, so to speak, and show us the full breadth and potential of his world?

The short answer is he was not writing a story that needed to. Tolkien was a linguist – a philologist, to be exact – and his stories founded in a world that existed to explain languages. However not just any language, poetic language. The great poetic narratives like Beowulf were the focus of Tolkien’s study and were undoubtedly part of his inspiration as he started to craft Middle Earth. By that token, his story was about the great emotional and poetic elements of life. Getting into the nitty gritty of magic really doesn’t play well into the ideas at the heart of his narratives so he chose to ignore them to keep the focus on the sweeping strokes of the human experience.

So ultimately the thing that interests me about hard vs soft magic is less the mechanics of it, though I do think its a worthwhile distinction. What interests me is the why. Every step a writer takes should be made deliberately to help you tell your story or, if it’s not aimed directly at advancing your narrative, shoring up the world and themes of your story. It’s okay to have a hard magic system and know all the ins and outs of the paranormal. However if these details pull the focus away from what you set out to do you may find it’s better to do as Tolkien did and never show the mechanics under the hood.

Ultimately your magic system isn’t supposed to be the heart of your story. Like world building it exists to help your audience get into the story and hold their attention on the plot, characters and themes. Delve as deep into it as you need to in order to maximize those elements. Allowing the magic system to surpass them is going to decrease the impact of those central things substantially unless that system is purposefully designed to go along with those elements.

Just like the hard magic/soft magic scale, the under the hood scale has a lot of gradations. You may need to rewrite things substantially to find the write point in order to find that balance point. But spending the time to be as deliberate as possible in building your story will make it better and that’s worthwhile!

Miracles and Magic

Posted by natechen on

Alchemists have been promising us they are on the verge of creating life from nothing, then granting mankind immortality since long before the word alchemy existed. Even today scientists, as we call modern alchemists, insist the Singularity is about to merge us all with the machine for the rest of eternity. Or perhaps we’ll clone ourselves into immortality. Perhaps no salvation will come to our generation but our children can be genehacked into perfection and all suffering on Earth after they take over will be averted.

Regardless of whether it’s the promise of immortality, the power to see the future or control over the forces of nature magic has always been the promise of control over things mankind previously thought we could not control. Miracles, in contrast, represent an intervention into the natural order by something transcendent. They are the opposite of magic in that they represent things moving even further out of control. The transcendent does not just move beyond the material it also surpasses human understanding and control, after all.

Thus these two forces, magic and miracles, often stand in stark contrast.

A brief aside. In fantasy fiction there is a spectrum known as the hard magic-soft magic spectrum, which is used to assess how well the audience understands the functioning of the supernatural power system in the fiction. Hard magic has clear rules. The characters and readers should understand what it can do, what it can’t and what it costs. Soft magic is mysterious. Its function is hard to understand and dealing with it is extremely dangerous in no small part because it is so poorly understood. It’s generally understood that hard magic exists to build stakes while soft magic exists to build wonder or fear.

For the purposes of our discussion this distinction is irrelevant. It is tempting to map miracles onto soft magic and magic as a source of control onto hard magic. However that ignores what I actually want to get at today.

As you may have already gathered from the opening paragraph, for the purposes of this discussion science counts as a kind of magic. Most scientific principles started as bits of occult knowledge. Chemistry? First it was alchemy. Medicine? Partly the herblore of witches and shaman, partly learned by heretics who cut up dead bodies.

Now it’s true that as the Church gathered the writings of the Greek philosophers many members of the clergy gained an interest in science and started discovering its principles themselves. Eventually the Church would conclude that nothing human reason discovered contradicted God’s ability to intervene in the world as He chose. However, be it the ordered realms of science or the wild fetishes of the witch doctor the tension is the same. Magic seeks to seize control of the world. Miracles take the control of the world away from mortals and places it in the hands of the transcendent.

Reconciling these two things is one of the roles of religious belief. Not every religion will reach the same balance point as Christians did and some will reject any compromise in favor of one extreme or the other. But sooner or later they will find some point of balance – that’s the point of systematic theology.

Thus, when writing a system of belief what is less important is the hard or soft nature of your magic system and more how a person of belief feels about the control magic seeks. Continuing with our starting metaphor, the religions of Star Trek, this is one area where they all seem to agree. Both the Vulcans and Klingons have a strong emphasis on wielding science as a way to gain the control needed to pursue their transcendent goals. The Bajorans largely accept science as a part of understanding the world. They often insist that the Prophets can work outside the bounds of science but very few Bajorans disregard science entirely. In fact, in doing research for this post, I could not find any reference to their rejecting science on religious grounds at all.

Granted, I did not have time to go back and rewatch Deep Space Nine while writing this post. Don’t consider this definitive.

The point is, by and large, there is little tension between the forces of magic and miracles in Bajoran thought. While the miracles the Prophets create, namely creating a wormhole and predicting the future, are interesting to the Federation rarely do people question their scientific interest in them. The Bajorans see the Prophets themselves as divine whether their gifts are understood or not.

I don’t have a personal problem with that perspective but I know there are many people who would and have very clear reasons for why they do. The notion that scientific understanding is a method for controlling our world that is granted to us by the divine order isn’t new. But it is very specific. A quick study of Greek myth, for example, shows us a strong belief in mankind’s actions being controlled by fate rather than by men. Those who challenge the Fates or the Gods suffer for it. Their efforts never see success. There are beings that use “magic” in their mythology but they descendants of gods, at the very least, and their powers are extensions of the divine and transcendent rather than magic for the purpose of this discussion.

In short, magic in Greek myth is transgressing on the divine and inviting punishment.

There’s a lot of middle ground between the Greek view of magic and the Star Trek view of magic. Some religions might see magic as valid in some areas and invalid in others. Many smaller religious sects in modern America reject medical intervention because they view it as an attempt to usurp the power to choose when people live and when they die. In more paganistic belief systems farming techniques might be seen in usurping the harvest.

So, for the storyteller the first real question of miracles and magic is, what can people do to take control of their circumstances without transgressing their beliefs?

One aspect of miracles and magic that the modern storyteller does do quiet well is grapple with people confronting the miraculous. Most horror stories have that element to them. A film like It Follows presents us with a force beyond human understanding that can’t be reasoned with, only appeased for a time. These chilling tales tackle the second question of miracles and magic. Namely, what will people do when confronting the transcendent tells them that they will never have control of some part of their lives?

Many tales that involve magic and religion often put these two forces at odds but few of these tales get down to the reasons that cause the division. Of course you can call many things “magic” or “religion” and create a coherent tale. But the separation we’ve put between the old ideas we called magic and the modern conception of science conceals many of the old threads that put religion and magic in tension. In fairness not every story needs to engage with the themes of control and transcendence. The thematic power is there, though, and I find the restriction of this idea to the horror genre a little sad. Hopefully we’ll see the rich vein of ideas come back into the limelight in the future.

Why Systemic Theology?

Posted by natechen on

We’re not going to be addressing systemic theology on a large scale today. It’s a huge topic that people can, and often do, study for their entire lives on a scope ranging from personal reflection to rigorous academic investigation. It’s also important to note that very few people embark on those studies. They’re not topics that interest most people nor is the study of them very accessible to most people, as writings and talks on systemic theology are generally addressed towards those who are already very aware of the questions and contradictions that they attempt to address. That doesn’t change the fact that big, world changing beliefs have days and years of constant, diligent, intelligent thought behind them. The problem this poses to a storyteller is twofold.

First, when dealing with anything as all encompassing as religion, if your story is going to address the topic then if you fail to adequately understand it you will come off as insulting and uninformed. Second, systematic theology is so complex, obscure and full of jargon most people aren’t familiar with it. The observant will notice that these two things are somewhat in tension.

There is no direct contradiction, mind you, but the first thing the average writer must work with is the fact that most people who profess a religion do not know the full intricacies and nuances of hundreds or thousands of years of religious study and meditation. That’s not a judgment, just a fact of life. I drive a car with only a basic understanding of what it is and I go to church with only a marginally greater understanding of God. What writers must understand is that systematic theology does exist. This is something modern Western culture seems to entirely reject, as if acknowledging the fact that people work hard to create coherent, consistent ways of understanding their beliefs is bad.

Modern writing’s approach to belief is the Bajoran approach. To the extent people believe anything, they engage with it as a way to promote a nebulously understood ‘good’ for their community that comes from the solidarity and continuity of religious expression. This approach identifies strengths of religion – solidarity and continuity – and mistakes them for the purpose. However, as stated in my introduction to this topic, we are defining religion as something that connects its adherents to a concept or being that transcends the material. Solidarity and continuity are certainly immaterial concepts. The problem with them is that they do not transcend the material, nor do those religions focused on them ever insist that they do.

Consider the Vulcan belief in logic. Nothing about logic is bound up in the Vulcan people, it is entirely abstract. If there were no Vulcans, logic would still exist. Its basic principles would still be discoverable by anyone with an ordered mind and a desire to systematize the world. In fact, it is the discovery of those principles that drives Vulcan belief. While the methods Vulcans use to discover logic are unique to their people and build a sense of shared community and understanding among them, logic is not dependent on Vulcans. In fact, Vulcans find particular insight from the methods used to uncover logic by other species.

In short, logic is transcendent. Logic is logic regardless of the who, what or where and will continue to be so no matter how much time passes.

The Klingon belief in honor is rooted in courage and conquest, virtues of a warrior who bends the universe to his will. In the far past, the Klingons were attacked by a spacefaring people. Their homeworld was stripped of many vital resources then the invaders departed, leaving the castoffs of their technology on Qo’nos. Impoverished and enraged by this travesty, the Klingons fell into petty infighting. Eventually they would be united by Kahless the Unforgettable, who conquered the planet, taught them the importance of honor then pointed his people towards the stars.

The Klingon understanding of honor is rooted in the example Kahless set. It stands in stark contrast to the Federation’s understanding of honor. Starfleet honor is rooted in loyalty, excellence and the promotion of the common good. And yet from the moment we first see Kirk meet Kor we see that these different senses of honor result in similar actions and attitudes. These similarities and contrasts are part of what make the Klingons such a powerful foil.

Honor is transcendent, it will exist whether or not anyone holds to it. And yet the ways people hold to it create a very rich and nuanced understanding of what exactly honor is and how we can try to reach it. By showing the many different shapes honor can take when it interacts with specific circumstances, personalities and cultures we get a better understanding of those conditions, peoples and cultures.

Neither the Vulcans nor the Klingons have anything approaching a systematic theology. At least not one that we see on camera. Even if creating such a thing was one of the goals the writers had when inventing these cultures they couldn’t have the depth of thought and nuance we see in the real world theologies of long lasting world religions.

Yet we can still see how the core, transcendent pillars of their beliefs function. They inform vast swaths of their cultures and thoughts and no one looks at them quite the same way. If there were a religion like the Klingons’ or the Vulcans’ I can easily believe it would have a systematic theology. By the same token, I don’t think members of those species would be upset with how their religions are presented in Star Trek. It is handled with nuance, depth and empathy, even if the writers are not adherents themselves.

The Bajoran religion isn’t quite so lucky.

The Prophets are so named because they often predict the future to benefit the Bajoran people. These predictions, along with the religious rituals and traditions of the Bajoran people who are waiting for new prophecies, exist mostly to keep the Bajorans alive and give them a sense of community, rather than to give them an understanding of the Prophets. They are mechanisms for survival rather than transcendence. Unlike the Vulcan understanding of logic, the rituals and Prophecies the Bajorans study cannot serve as a bridge to other civilizations. They’re too particular to share.

Even Benjamin Sisko, the Emissary, a human being who is seen as a go-between anointed by the Prophets to prepare the Bajorans for a major crisis, doesn’t deepen this facet of Bajoran spiritual life at all. He occasionally gets cryptic prophecies but the key to unlocking them is the circumstances he’s in, not his understanding of the Prophets or some transcendent virtue they teach.

These survival driven tenants also negate nuance. Because prophecy and ritual are entirely circumstantial none of the different perspectives or cultural approaches to reach the same end can exist. There cannot be a broad examination of what it means to interact with the Prophets in different situations. The Prophets give revelations to relate to single circumstances for a single group of people or a single person.

We never really get a clear idea of why the Prophets behave this way. In the best case, their interest in Bajor seems to be some kind of inter dimensional charity project. Because these transcendent figures are so nebulous I never get the feel that the Bajorans have any kind of systematic understanding of them. (They do have a highly politicized clerical hierarchy, but that’s outside the scope of this post.)

It’s fine for transcendent figures to have specific points of interaction with those who seek them, by the way, and to be incomprehensible to those they interact with. The problem arises when those seeking the transcendent make no attempt to draw lines connecting those points of contact. They don’t have to all agree on how to connect those points or the order to draw the lines. No one ever has, no matter what clerics and priests sometimes tell you.

The point is they have to try. That’s the key to writing a belief system that implies a systematic theology without actually trying to create one. As a bonus, you’ll unlock all the nuance and depth of character we see in the Klingons and the Vulcans free of charge! Try it some time. The effort won’t be wasted.