[In this document, Ornoth discusses the sense of wonder that is important to fantasy fiction, and how to go about creating it.] Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2002 09:52:41 -0500 Sender: Dargon Project Writers Forum From: "Ornoth D.A. Liscomb" Subject: Wonder (was Re: CRITQUE: Measure of a Man 1) At 10/31/02 12:03 AM, you wrote: > >With regard to the whole vivid imagery/sense of wonder thing, I understood >what you meant but I'm not sure how to go about it. Does anyone have any >suggestions or any specific examples of stories with particularly strong >imagery or a great sense of wonder? I'm not sure how much of it I can put into words, but here's a very wordy attempt. First, you need to realize that wonder is different for different people. Everyone has different things that call to them and evoke that sense of otherworldliness that you're after. So there's a lot of ways that you *could* infuse your fiction with wonder, but you've got to find what works best for you and/or your readers, depending on how important each of those constituancies are for you. Here are some ideas off the top of my head. Yes, some people equate wonder with magic and nonhumans. But depending on how you treat them, those can also be viewed as the typical, mundane stock elements of fantasy. I think "mundane" is the absolute bane of "wonder". I think the difference with magic and nonhumans is in how original you are with them, and how uniquely you treat them. I'll get back to this in a second. Another way is through a unique plotline. If you have an insight into some aspect of medieval life that most people might not think about, then that can instill wonder in your readers. Or if your story is action-packed in a way that is unpredictable and truly involves your readers, they have a wondrous feeling of having been absorbed by a work. Drama is a very powerful thing, and well-written drama can really charge your story up. One that is absolutely the heart of my own writing is wonder about nature. We've all seen landscapes that move us in a very visceral way, whether the image be a moutain cliff, a foggy lake at dawn, a crashing surf on a rocky ocean headland, the pastoral beauty of a small village, or the urban canyons of a modern city. With fantasy, we have to power to make such places, and give our readers the sense of wonder they evoke. But what am I really saying? It sounds like just about anything -- characters, setting, plot, imagery, theme, conflict -- has the potential to evoke wonder in the reader. So am I approaching it the wrong way? Perhaps so. If you listen to me talk about wonder, though, you'll hear the same words over and over again: compelling, uniqueness, insight, beauty, evocativeness, otherworldliness, originality, involving, absorbing, awe, moving. In opposition, I use words like mundane and stock and bland. So how do we infuse our writing with all those good things? Again, here's some stuff off the top of my head. One way is obviously to write stuff that's original and doesn't use the traditional stock fantasy elements, or uses them in a way that's new, fresh, engaging, and not necessarily predictable. If you read enough DZ, you'll be able to identify when people succeed at this. Dafydd's a master at creating wonder in the diverse human cultures he creates. I try to do justice to the beauty of nature in my stories. And I always fall back on Jon's Fenib as a place where he could have simply plunked down a typical stock fantasy element (intelligent wolves, mmm), but instead he made them wonderfully unique and portrayed them in an insightful and meaningful way. That brings me to insight. Even the most mundane of things can be portrayed in a way that's fresh, and makes the reader pause and think "That's really cool. I never looked at a wolf that way before". Even completely fictitious things like the Kinkwand of Saberlard can be portrayed in a way that makes them magical and mystical and deep, and not just another insipid magic item. If you have these insights, then the more you capture them in your writing, and the more unique and insightful your stories will be, and the more excited people will be when they read them. Note that I said "if you have these insights". Insight and originality are hard to come by. It's my firm belief that if you want to write well, you need to be a very keen observer of the world around you. And I don't mean just look at stuff, I mean *think* about the stuff you're looking at. Have you ever written down your experiences travelling to a place that took your breath away? And discovered that what you wrote had absolutely none of the power of your original experience? "It was really cool" just doesn't do it justice. In order to communicate that experience of awe successfully, there's two things you need to do. First, while you're in the experience, you need to study it. Like an artist, you need to look at what's so unique about what's happening around you. You need to look at the details of whatever it is you're looking at, whether it's a visual image or a human situation or whatever. Take the time to "get present to the moment" and explore it to its absoluteness. Saturate yourself with whatever it is. Last year's Summit went through the Scottish highlands. If we allowed ourselves to just be passively impacted by the mountains and castles we saw, without taking any insight away from the experience, it would have been not just worthless, but a tragedy. But you need to bring the same intensity of observational skills to everything you do, every day, all the time. Going to the beach? Take the time to really deeply immerse yourself in the experience, and I guarantee it'll give you insights you can use in your writing. Going to a carnival? The same. Riding the subway? Dude, each subway car is a treasure room of observations! Going to next year's Dargon Summit? Well, I can't even express how powerful the Summits can be in this regard. Writing a story that takes place on a sailing ship? Go take a schooner ride, or just any old sailboat. There is absolutely no substitute for first-hand experience and observation. And for completely made-up things like magic and nonhumans, you need to create the same insightfulness about them that you get from real-world things. But to stop rambling and sum up the importance of my point here, this is exactly what I mean when I say that writers need to be astute observers of the world around them. You can't give the reader wonder if you haven't got any insights inside you. The other thing you need to do in order to transmit that awe to your reader is to find ways to fit it into your stories, and then use effective language to get those feelings across. It's important to note that I said "get those *feelings* across", because there's a natural tendency for you to *tell* your readers what you concluded ("Thedos loved the experience of sailing"), rather than *showing* it to them through images that illustrate your point ("Thedos leaned against the rail and thrilled as the ship heeled back and forth, and nodded as he heard the canvas pulling their spars so taught that they creaked under the strain"). You have to always remember that your goal is *NOT* to communicate an idea, but to communicate a *FEELING*. Take your trip to the mountains and experience it deeply, then, when you have to write a mountain scene in Dargon, use language that will make the reader see, hear, smell, and taste exactly the way you did on your trip, or moreso! If you can do that, you will also make them *feel* the way you did, and that's the key to manipulating your readers' emotions, whether it be to instill wonder, anger, fright, love, or whatever it is that you want them to feel. I want to underscore the importance of imagery and language. The way you get under a reader's skin is to give them carefully selected, insightful, vivid sensory images that they'll respond to. In order to do that, you first need to have those insightful, vivid images inside you, so that you have something to say that the reader will find compelling. And then you need to describe them in a way that does justice to them. You need a broad, bold vocabulary, and you need to be able to describe even common objects in an uncommon way. You need to be an artist in adjectives. Having the image isn't enough; you have to have the wordcraft to express it in a way that is lyrical, majestic, and emotionally powerful, yet without falling into dreary melodrama and self-indulgence. Artistry is usually better when it toes the line between boldness and subtlety. For me, that's the formula for wonder. I can't say whether it's a good formula for you, but that's how I approach it. As pertains to this particular story, I think the thing I'd be looking for is some way of making it less "mundane" feeling. It's a good story, and there's nothing wrong with it. I just think the next step in evolution is to take it from "good" to "great", and for me greatness is associated with evoking a sense of wonder, and I didn't get that from this story. At least so far -- I haven't seen part two, and perhaps that's already built into your plan. I don't know how well I did at achieving it, but in my "Visitation Rites" I did pay particular attention to the sense of wonder, particularly in the oceanside scenes. You might study them to see what you can get from it, although as I say, I'm not sure entierly how effective I was. -o http://users.rcn.com/ornoth/