What is the History of your Society?

Every society has a past, and it dictates a lot of how we think of ourselves in the present.

For instance: The white man moved into the Americas, and after a few skirmishes and growing pains, we now all proudly call ourselves Americans, and give no thought to the original inhabitants of this country. Sometimes I wonder what this country would be like if we, the white man, had been repulsed. Assuming what we see out the window, the cities, the economy, and the communication system we have today, are the same, how would things be different? How would my stories be different if the original Americans were the dominate peoples of this country? How would this difference affect things around us?

The whole fun part about writing fiction is to play with ideas like this, but you have to remember your history, or create one. Past has an effect on present. Present just doesn't appear on your page by some miracle. Even if you absolutely never say a word about the history behind your story or your world, it should still be there; it should influence the decisions your characters make. For instance, Joe Blake, who lives on first street, in AnyCity USA just might act entirely different from John RedFeather who lived on that same street in that same city, simply because their entire history would be different.

In the same respect, your blue-skinned, vaguely humanoid character from Gidi Prime will also have some kind of a world history, or country history, or at the very least, history of society, and just like Joe Blake or John RedFeather, their decisions will be affected by it. Who knows, maybe their entire breed will have been dictated by the demands of their history.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Who Has It Right

I'm sure you've all heard the saying, 'The victor writes the history', and I'm sure it's 100% true. No victor wants to be seen as a bully, so such actions will be expunged from the records in favor of much more glorious stories.

However, even after the histories have been written, after those who might remember the truth have been long dead, who is to say which side was right?

While books dealing with the undead or zombies (whatever you want to call them) is not my general cup of tea, I happen to be about half way through this book which takes place many years after The Great Zombie wars. The victors did indeed write the histories totally in their favor. The unusual part about this book is that the victors are what you and I would call the zombies.

In this book, other than being dead, they are just like the living. They work. They eat. They make decisions based upon their teachings and beliefs. They even fall in love, marry, and reproduce. In this world, like in our world, after a fashion, the police force hunts down the criminals; the criminals in this world are of course the living, called zombies, those who have 'turned', or found life.

So in the backdrop of this world the 'existance-span' of the average citizen has gone from around seventy years to little more than fifty years, if they were careful. The much abused Earth has started producing crystals that entice the most vulnerable of their children, the ten-year-olds, those who are most impressionable. If these children find these crystals and manage to actually touch them, they turn living, and if discovered, they must be put to death right away.

So herein lies my question. Who decided which side is right? In this case, is there a right side? The living can argue they are right because they are living. The dead can argue they are right because they exist. To each side, the words might be different but the meaning is the same. What are other differences? Imagination is a big one. For the dead, they've all been taught that it was imagination that brought about the living's loss of the war, therefore it has been outlawed. Even something as simple as writing a poem is cause for the death sentence.

So this is the question that goes through my mind as I read this book. And that is, I suppose, a good thing. Not many of us can incite such an all-encompassing question. Do you have races opposed to each other in your book? Which one is right - really, bare bones, right? Not which one do you plan to win. Not which one will be best. Which one is right; which one has the right to exist over and above the other? I haven't found that answer yet.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Names You Choose

So what is your world like? Is it Earth-like? Extraterrestrial? Extradimentional? Or completely fantastical in one manner or another? Regardless, how do you generate the names you use in your world?

Tom, Dick, and Harry would work fine for an Earth-like world, but you still need to consider last names, unless you don't ever use them. There are also lots of options and resources when choosing names for your Earth characters and places, but what about those off-world stories. Now you can fall back on those same resources if your world happens to be an Earth colony, even if they have been long since cut off from Earth. But what about the completely fantastical, totally disconnected from Earth, world? Lets start by considering the history of names.

As I understand it, most names originated as a means of identifying a person by their job or status, but there can only be so many Carpenters, Smiths, and Carters, so they started attaching first names. Of course language and custom would have quite a bit to do with what names were chosen. Now how they decided on first, or given, names is unclear to me. Maybe some of them were just made up, maybe some of them were a bastardization of something they heard from another language as people started to travel, following the latest war or trying to run a trading route of one sort or another. Another thing to remember is that in many cultures, gender has an affect on the spelling of whatever name is chosen.

If your characters have never originated from Earth, there may be different customs involved in choosing names. For the names in my book, The Speed of Dreams, I went to a Dungeons & Dragons name list I have, and those with an apostrophe in the middle caught my eye, I morphed them some to fit the rhythm I wanted. I then decided on the custom that the clan name, or last name as we know it here, comes before the apostrophe. I got this idea from oriental names where the family name traditionally comes before the given name.

I've referred several times to my D&D list of names. It's extensive, including dwarven names as well as place names. It's great for sparking ideas when my mind draws a blank.

Now I've talked a lot about naming your characters, but character names isn't the only thing you need to consider. If your world is totally disconnected from Earth, it is highly unlikely they're going to give other things the same names we have. For the gist of your story, you can allow such things as buildings, mountains, and grass to exist, even trees can be called trees, but there's no reason to believe they'd be called Birch trees, or Spruce trees, and the flowers your hero is giving to his girl probably wouldn't be called Daisies or Roses, so you'll have to get creative all over again.

Naming these things, whatever you decide to name, isn't the only option. Who knows, there might even be cultures somewhere where a person has no name at all until he or she does something spectacular. In my soon to be released book, Half-Breed, in a culture where twins are common, identical twins were given the same name.

“When twins are born who are alike, it is common for them to share a name. It is thought that since the ancestors caused them to share a soul, it would be presumptuous of us to separate them by a name.”

Choosing names can have so many layers of meaning, so have fun creating the foundation for your names. Even if you never explain what you've done, the detail will show, and it will also add life to your story.



What customs underlie your names?

Does Your World have a History

I'm currently reading this brand new book, written and now published by an online friend of mine. The first time I read it, it was all over the place with lots and lots of characters and tons of world history. Pretty much the first thing I had him do with his manuscript is weed out the world history, then we had to decide who the story was about.

Knowing your world's history is vital though, and I told him to most assuredly keep it. It was rich and detailed, definitely worth keeping. I mean, take a look at the four books of The Lord of the Rings. First you have this hobbit who might dream of adventure, but well, no respectable hobbit would ever have anything to actually do with one. Then he gets swept away on the adventure of a lifetime where he finds a magic ring and returns home richer than anyone ever dreamed - end of story, and likely that was all that was planned at the time.

The Hobbit was published in 1936 but I can just see it - there was this magic ring. Where did it come from? What kind of magic ring was it? How did it get into the bowls of a mountain? How did Gollum become what he was? Why was he all alone? All these questions niggled and picked at the inside of Tolkien's skull but he was a very busy man, and it wasn't until the prompting of publishers that The Lord of the Rings began to emerge (published in 1954 and 55).

As with all epics, and most any book really, it was vital to understand why people were where they were located, why they believed what they believed, and why this group of people thought one way, while another group thought another way. All of these things, and many more, dictate why people do and say the things they do during the course of your book. It is very important that you, the writer, know these things so your characters can make sense. Tolkien knew this too and the history of his world came out in The Silmarillion, written at the same time as The Lord of the Rings series but not published until many years later, in 1977 by his son. If you are a fan of The Lord of the Rings and you haven't yet read The Silmarillion, I recommend it, but take time with the names. If you skim over them hoping sight recognition will be enough, you'll get lost very soon.

Back to the issue of your world's history: Even if you are writing about two men meeting in a town in small town USA in the year 2013, world history will have effect what they say and how they posture toward each other. Pick two men, each of any race you like; according to Google, we have 3 or 4 major races on this earth.

Caucasian
Negro
Aisian
Australian (yeah, I was surprised by that one too)

You might list a few others in there, but mostly, they're just a slight variation of the above, changed by location more than anything else. Whatever your list, it really doesn't matter in this example, but you know that each man will react to the other differently for one reason or another. Heck, have both men be of the same race, and depending on the race, they too will react differently to each other. So, knowing something of your world's history will keep your characters real.

Knowing your world's history is different from writing it down. Yes, you should keep notes of some sort. Heck, do like Tolkien, and write out entire stories. Why not? The exercise helps, but where you, the writer, needs to know this history, and maybe your characters know some of it, your reader doesn't always need to know it all. Such information included in your book will only weigh it down into the bog of boredom.

I was pleased to come across a spot in the book I'm reading where a long-lived person came to a clifftop overlooking a city. This person had been around when the city was laying it's first foundation stones and raising it's first gleaming walls. The only mention of world history here was 'and then came the orcs came'. So can you imagine what happened to the city then? That was enough. The character did not go into the city. There was no further thought on it. Just one of those heart-string tugs. I thought it was a very nice touch.

Things of that nature are all you need to include as far as history is concerned. Someone might know something about somewhere, and they might spare a thought about it at some point. More would be too much, unless there was a reason to explain it to someone else. Be careful with such explanations though. There needs to be a reason and most people don't go into long, drawn-out stories of history.

How well do you know your world's history?
How do you use that history?

The History of Halloween

by psychic Gina Rose (gleaned while searching for information about Celtic holidays for my current manuscript, Druid Derrick. I thought you might find it interesting.

Halloween dates back well over 6,000 years to the ancient fire festival of Samhain. Celts celebrated this day on November first -- this is their New Year marking the end of Summer and the third and final harvest of the season.

November Eve was believed to be the veil between realms -- the veil so thin that the ghosts and the dead came back into our world. During this time, Celtic Priests made predictions about the future, and people found these prophecies important sources of comfort and direction during a long, dark, harsh winter. Costumes were worn, fortune telling was told as well as story telling. The hearth was extinguished early on November Eve and re-lit from the sacred bonfire to protect them during the coming winter.

By 43 A.D. Romans conquered most of the Celtic territories, but not without a good fight. Within the course of 400 years, two Roman festivals were combined. Feralia -- a commemoration of the passing of the dead -- and a day to honor Pomona, the Goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple, which is how bobbing for apples became incorporated into Samhain.

By the 800s Christianity spread through the Celtic lands and Pope Boniface IV designated November first as All Saints Day, to honor all saints and martyrs. The Pope at this time was trying to replace the Celtic festivals with a related, but church-sanctioned holidays.

Then around 1000 A.D. the church made November second All Soul's Day which was celebrated with big bonfires, parades, dressing in costumes as saints, angels, and devils...together these celebrations were called Hallowmas.

Halloween Comes to America
As Europeans came over with their different costumes, beliefs and ethnic groups as well as American Indian beliefs, a distinct American version of Halloween was born. Play parties, apple bobbing, celebrating the harvests, neighbors sharing stories of the dead, fortune telling, dancing, singing, Bonfires...etc.

By 1846, America was flooded with Irish immigrants fleeing from the deadly potato plague... this blended an Irish-American tradition of dressing up in costumes and going house to house asking for food or money...you guessed it, this is where Trick or Treating comes from.

What started as festivals celebrating the harvests and the dearly departed has since become largely a holiday fostering community and neighborhood goodwill.

Have a Happy Halloween

Tell me all about your Halloween plans

Hmmm since fortune telling was such a big deal back then, I may have to break out my Tarot cards and tell my fortune. Anyone want to guess how it will turn out?