I came to the panel with two props: my daughter’s high school chemistry text and a copy of the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament for those who prefer Christian terminology. (For connoisseurs of Bibles, it was a dual language Greek and English version of the Septuagint.)

My first comments on the panel were to point out that the chemistry book is all about one aspect of how the universe works, every page of it, but that the Bible I had brought has only three pages, the opening pages of Genesis, about the process and structure of the universe. The rest of the book is a mythic history of a people combined with a law book on how those people are supposed to act and a number of warnings about what happens to them if those people do not act as they are meant to.

A principle of writing so obvious that it rarely needs to be enunciated is that a book should actually be about what it’s supposed to be about. For example, a book that claims to be a history of baseball, but which is 90% filled up with the life of Joe DiMaggio’s wife (Marilyn Monroe, for those born too late to know or care), would better be considered a biography of Marilyn Monroe with a baseball history as a framing device.

Looked at from this basic writing concept, it seems clear that the Bible is not a book about the causes of the universe but a story of a people with a mythic framing device.

The final thing I said on the panel was that science was a process for applied trial and error to learn about repeatable natural phenomena and that religion was a teaching to help people live their lives. I said, more or less, that it took a great deal of stretching and twisting of their meanings to actually create any conflict between them.

The panel and the audience were more interested in other aspects of this dispute, and we had a good time going over history, archeology, a dash of neurology and personnel experience. It was a good discussion, especially for 9:00 to 10:00 PM at a con, but I came away with the kind of dissatisfaction that comes from having one’s pet views not really discussed.

Thanks, however, to modern technology, I can push out my frustrated whininess — I mean, air my concerns.

Many, but by no means all religions have origin stories. But in very few religions does the origin do more than paint a vivid picture of the coming-to-be of the world in which the people of that religion live. Very few religious documents spend much time on this subject at all. The space is nearly always filled with how the people of that religion should act.

To argue that because there is a discussion of origins religion and science are talking about the same things makes as much sense as saying that science and law have to be talking about the same things because there is a “Law of Gravity.”

Where does the idea that religions are about explanations for the universe come from? Hard to say, but there’s a likely suspect: Philosophy, specifically Greek philosophy.

The ancient Greek philosophers were interested in where the universe came from and how it worked. Most of them weren’t scientists; they had a dubious grasp of experimentation and correction of error. Indeed, Plato just liked to tell stories about how cool his teacher was and Aristotle preferred to ramble his ideas of what had to be without actually checking the world around him.

Philosophy became the hobby of the more intellectual and spare-time-possessing people of Rome, and its interests in origins and processes did eventually lead to the precursors of science. But it infected people’s thinking with the idea of an importance for origins.

It has become a knee-jerk mental reaction on the part of people who were educated by the descendants of these philosophers to wish to know where things come from and how they work. All modern teaching is descended from this, and all medieval and later scholarship owes its principles and implicit practices to the philosophical mindset. This kind of teaching has spread all over the world and has created an artificial importance to origins.

Let me give you an example of inappropriate concern with origins.

Writers are often asked, “Where do your ideas come from?” No one has an answer to this, nor does it matter much. It’s not so much the ideas as what the writers do with them that matters. Dave Barry, by the way, has the best answer I’ve heard: “Wisconsin.”

Origins matter vastly in science, because where things arose from and how they arose are vital clues to what they are and how they work. But the individual inspirations for works of art are wildly unimportant compared to the artworks themselves and what they are saying.

The same thing applies to religion. Arguing over the truth of religions is pointless and silly. Using the tools of history and archaeology to ask where did something come from is a weird standard to use to judge the goodness and utility of a way of life.

Incidentally, an early recorded instance of someone dumping a religion because of scientific inaccuracy can be found in the Confessions of St. Augustine. He says that he gave up Manichaeism for Christianity because the Manichean cosmology was incorrect in its astronomy.

Religion does a bad job as science because it’s concerned with how people should act, not with the way the world works.

Science does a bad job as religion because it’s concerned with how the world works, not how people should act, with one exception. Science implicitly teaches that one should face reality, that one should act as if the world works in a particular way that we are trying to understand.

Science as a process can be applied to natural phenomena that are subject to uniformity of nature and reliability. Science does not work on situations where data are subject to human cheating. In a sense, therefore, you can’t make a science of human action because humans cheat all the time. We never really think the same thought twice or do the same action the same way twice. I know this is stirring up a hornets’ nest of psychology and sociology, and I am perfectly aware of the ability of statistics to separate out some useful data. But the fact of the matter is that science as a process requires isolation of causes, and human thought and action have too many causes to be properly separable.

And before somebody goes jumping off into neurology, that field is in its infancy. It cannot yet correlate brain activity with individual thought. Come back and talk when it can do that, then we’ll see if a science of mind can be created. For now, it’s not there.

“Face reality” as a human principle is not to be knocked. It has helped cure disease, extend lifespan, provide useful tools, protect from hazardous materials, etc. But it does not, on its own, provide lessons for human life and self-control which religions, when properly doing their jobs, do.

The last point, about properly doing their jobs, is important. Religions have social power. Power attracts the power-hungry. Lots of religious institutions on all scales have at various time been corrupt and used their power against people, both their members and outsiders. But that isn’t a problem of religion, it’s a problem of humans forming organizations with power.

So, in practical terms, what are religion and science fighting about?

And what are they losing by fighting?

Science’s loss is twofold.

First of all, religion has always been better at storytelling. Scientific theories are often formulated in a way that is accurate as possible at the cost of ability to communicate them. People tend to believe religious stories above scientific theories, which means that people often ignore reality when they need to face it.

Second, science can lose some of the best potential scientists. A person motivated by a desire to understand the mind of God by examining the universe can become a vitally interested scientist. Furthermore, such a person properly schooled in the principle that he or she is a limited creature whose understanding cannot encompass all will often approach the wonders of the universe with a great level of humility and therefore be willing to accept whatever is real as real, regardless of personal biases.

But the loss to religion is much greater.

It is a commonality for religions to create stories with moral and life teachings out of the understanding of the world around them, for example, the New Testament parables, the stories of the lives of the Buddha and the Taoist writing of Chuang-Tzu. Medieval writers often used the then-current understanding of animals to create morality tales based on those creatures. Stories of the stars and planets also have been used to teach.

Any understanding of the world can be adopted to teach moral lessons. There’s a tendency to think that the world must be interpreted in particular ways, but that’s no more true than saying that a particular place must be photographed in a certain light. All the parable or lesson writer must do is cast the understanding in a light that reveals the desired teaching.

I have a couple of fairly easy parables here, one based on evolution and one on relativity.

***

Lesson on Compassion and Self-Discipline derived from Evolution:

We are weak, imperfect creatures. We lack claws and teeth. We are slow to run, weak to grab. We run upon the ground, upon two legs, with lower back pain. We do not fight well. We are, bluntly, prey.

But we have two things that have taken us from that sad and sorry place to a better life: our minds and each other.

We do not fight well alone or hunt well alone, but we do well cooperating.

We do not protect ourselves well, but together we can protect each other.

We do not heal well alone, but we can care for each other.

The person who cries that he needs no one else is a walking corpse waiting for chance to take him to death. The person who is trustworthy and who trusts the trustworthy has help all the days of life.

As for our minds, in them we have brought the secret of evolution and made a way so that fewer of us need to die on the business end of natural selection.

Evolution is a matter of trial and error. Nature tries haphazardly, but in our minds we can better that. We can create and test thoughts, ideas, theories, tools. We can try them out and see if they work, and we can select and mutate our own thoughts so that we can evolve in and of ourselves.

We call this internal evolution learning. We can learn, and we can pass on our learning. We can create our own evolution of ideas that we can gift in a Lamarckian way to our descendants and the descendants of others.

But this only works if we are willing to be as merciless with our ideas as evolution is with individual creatures. If we shelter our desires, our fears and our angers, nurture our hates and our sulks, we will learn nothing, and evolution, cold, hard, uncaring external evolution will have us. If we hold our theories and our conceptions of reality more dear than we do the need to face and understand reality, we will fall before reality and those we shelter will fall as well.

Therefore, take care to be merciless to your own thoughts. Select and cull them for utility. Learn the ways of others so that you can be safer and keep others safer from the merciless world of biology.

***

Lesson on the Golden Rule derived from Relativity:

Each person has their own frame of reference, their own transforming frame in spacetime. At each time for them they perceive certain objects as close to them and others as far away, see some as important and others as unimportant. Clearly, two different frames of reference will have different close, far, important and unimportant things.

For one person, living in an apartment in a city in the dead of winter, few things matter more than the heating in their apartment. That’s their thread of life. For another person, living in a desert in summer, that city heat source is less than nothing on the scale of import. The water in that desert person’s bottles, on the other hand, that’s the thread of life.

Each person may be perfectly right in their judgment of importance, relative to their own lives. But that does not mean that any of them are right about what is absolutely important. Indeed, the very relativity of their existences makes discernment of absolute importance extremely difficult.

How, then are people to find what is absolutely important?

By looking at what unifies the different frames of reference. What transforms from one frame to another, revealing a deeper structure beneath?

The simplest answer is that distance and importance transform. What matters to one will not matter to another, yet things will matter, and those things will likely correspond, heat for one, water for another, each a fragile resource at risk of being cut off and life ebbing away in the loss.

Therefore, in trying to see the life of another in order to do unto them as you would have them do unto you, transform your understanding to theirs, your near to their near, your far to their far, your important to their important.

***

In all conflicts, all combatants stand to lose. So it is here with religion and science. Furthermore, in a conflict over nothing but a semantic confusion, there is even greater loss and nothing for any side to gain.

Religion is prescriptive, not of the universe, but of human action.

Science is descriptive of the universe for the sake of human action.

Has there ever been less to fight about?

But it is in writing that this complementary art is simultaneously most needed to be taught, most commonly taught, and most inartistically taught.  The complementary receptive art to writing is, obviously, reading, but is it taught as an art?  No.  Does writing suffer because of that?  Yes.  Do readers suffer?  Yes as well.

At its most basic level writing produces words on paper (or screen) put down in a specific order.  The most basic part of the art of reading therefore is to be able to read those words in order.  But what does that mean?  What is this basic act of reading?

Reading is the association if the image in front of one (the words) with meanings in one’s mind, and the crafting in one’s mind of an awareness that comes from the association of those meanings.

Beginning readers go word by word:

The

The Cat

The Cat Sat

The Cat Sat On

The Cat Sat On The

The Cat Sat On The Mat.

As they read each word they build up a sense in their minds of a cat on a mat.

More advanced readers will read the entire sentence as one thing and the sense of it will appear as a whole in their minds.  Even more advanced readers will build that sentence in relation to the other sentences they have read and are reading, creating an entire context of changing action which is called a scene.

But no two readers, regardless of their level of advancement, will actually create the same mental structure from these same words.   Each mind is different; each creates its own kind of awareness.  Some people of strongly visual mentality will see a cat in their minds; others will have a sense of catness; others still will hold on to the sounds of the words; and so on.

To an external observer these readers will all be doing the same thing, but internally they will be creating wildly different things.  Some may find this objectionable, thinking that a particular piece of writing should produce the same response in every reader, but this is a misinterpretation of what the art of writing can do and what the art of reading must do.  In a very real sense writers are like architects, the designers of mental spaces.  But it is readers who are the house builders, the interior decorators, and ultimately the people who live in the mental spaces we are making the blueprints for.

Unfortunately, because this art is purely internal there is no way to tell what is really going on in the reader’s mind.  The closest we can get is the book discussion, wherein different readers of the same work produce startlingly different visions of what they have read.  Listening to such a discussion can give a sense of which aspects of a writing each reader has employed to build his or her internal image of it, but still no one listening will really know what is happening in each reader’s mind, only what he or she says he or she thinks is going on.

Let us compare this inability to observe the complementary art of reading to the situation of music, wherein there are four taught arts:

Musical Composition

Reading Music

Playing Music (actually this is a whole array of arts)

Hearing Music

The last art is the one I started with in this discussion, but let’s shift up a couple of notches.

There are two complementary arts in music.  Hearing is the complement to playing, and reading is the complement to composition.  Musicians who work from sheet music must read the music before playing it.  Reading the music creates a music in mind that the musician then uses when he or she plays his or her own instrument or sings the song his or her way.  This ability to express the art in his or her mind through arts that others can perceive makes it clearer that each musician has an idiosyncratic understanding of the music read from a sheet of paper.  Each musician’s performances of a piece of music is uniquely his or her own, and no two people truly play or sing the same way.

While reading lacks a direct externalizing art, a hint of the separate visions created in each reader’s mind from a single piece of writing can be found in the creation of fan art and fan fiction, wherein a reader takes an internal vision and from it crafts his or her own work drawing from a work he or she has read.  Looking at fan art done by different artists reading from the same writing, one sees a great diversity of internal visions and expression of vision.

Given the fundamental diversity of views, the artistic inspiration that comes to each reader’s mind from the written word, one would think that reading would be strongly supported as an art.

But is reading even thought of or taught as an art?

No.  Reading is taught as a mechanistic skill, a proficiency that everyone is meant to have at a given level to function in society.

At best reading is taught as a passion, a pursuit that people should like doing, should want to do.  But no matter how passionate the reading teacher, no matter how much the teacher loves to read, they still teach reading as a passive act, a taking in of other people’s work, not a creative work being done  by the reader.

The aspects of teaching reading that focus on proficiency might seem beneficial, since their intent is to cultivate reading ability.  But this kind of teaching can actively damage the ability of someone to really read what is in front of them.

Consider the two basic benchmarks of reading, speed and comprehension.  A reader is generally considered proficient at a certain level of reading if he or she can quickly read and comprehend a piece of writing considered to be at that level.

The use of speed as a benchmark implicitly declares that speed of reading is solely a characteristic of the reader, that given enough proficiency a reader will always read at the same rate.  But this removes from the writer ability to control the speed at which a passage should be read.

Suppose one deliberately writes a stretch of prose which is supposed to slowly build up ideas in the reader’s mind, using careful word choice and construction so that there is a feeling of lingering and a sense of going carefully through each word and sense; in short, a lyric passage.  Should that be read as rapidly as the reader can?

On the opposite extreme, a sense of urgency can be created with swift sentences revealing rapid action.  Should that and the lyric scene be read at the same fast-as-possible clip?

Clearly not.  The pace of reading contains some of the meaning of the writing.  The care or swiftness of mental creation on the part of the reader should be matched to the desired care or swiftness that the writer is trying to bring across.  Pace should match pace.  That’s the point of the lingering or the galloping.

A composer seeking to control the rate at which his or her music is played can put a time signature on a passage meaning to play it slowly, to let the notes linger, or to play it quickly, to jump quickly from measure to measure.  A writer cannot put in such explicit instructions, but with word choice and sentence construction the writer can signal to the reader to slow down.  If the cues are there the writer can create a need to linger or speed the reader up.

This would be fine if readers were taught to appreciate the pace of a passage, to accept that not all texts are read as fast as possible.  But this is the opposite of what they are taught.

As for comprehension, things are more complicated and here even more writer’s tools are being disregarded in favor of a uniformity of reading.

There is a general idea, regrettably traceable to dictionaries, that words have meaning.  But in practical usage the smallest entity in a sentence that really has meaning is a phrase, and on the whole if you’re dealing with anything smaller than a clause you really don’t have any meaning you can grab hold of.  This may sound strange, but if you think of writing as cues the mind uses to create thoughts, then an individual word is rarely enough to create anything.

Saying ‘cat’ does not tell us anything beyond the idea of a cat, which might be literal or metaphorical, might be a cat sitting, a cat running, hunting, sleeping, eating lasagna, might be a person being catty, might be a nine-lashed whip, might be a Siamese cat, a Persian cat, a tomcat, a catamaran, and so on.  The single word does not create a narrow enough awareness for anything to be built in mind.  Saying ‘cat’ alone is prelude to the rest of a sentence, paragraph, and scene.  Only in these higher levels of structure will the meaning of that word be created.

How then can we measure comprehension?  Usually it is done by asking whether the reader knows the words and can understand what is happening in what they are reading.  One can know every word in a piece of writing but still not be able to make sense of what has been done in putting the words together.  While writers like James Joyce are extreme examples of this, simpler examples arise from simple gaps in culture.  A person in the early 21st century reading works from the early 20th century may understand every word, but have no sense of why characters are doing what they are doing or why some things are described as they are, or what the references mean.

A great deal of writing is referential, and the same phrase can imply a completely different meaning after a passage of years.  A woman described as dressing like a flapper in a 1920s novel is meant to be bleeding edge, but the same phrase used in a 1950s novel would mean she’s retro.  And if this essay is read twenty years from now by a teenager the most likely response to the last sentence is comprehension of the words ‘bleeding’, ‘edge’, and ‘retro’ but total incomprehension of the sentence itself.

Beyond this inherent difficulty in comprehension there is the process writers use of deliberately confusing comprehension in order to create false impressions or incomplete impressions in their readers.  Playing games with expectations, building up ideas in order to break them down, is an explicitly taught tool of writing.  The use of such expectations in mystery writing is obvious.  The deliberate misleading of readers is part and parcel (What does that mean if you only see the meanings of words?) of the genre. Even in other writing it is often important to mislead readers about a character’s motives or actions, to create confusion of setting, to obfuscate action or indeed to explicitly mischaracterize who did what and why.

Is a reader who reads as the writer intends under these circumstances a reader who comprehends the writing or not?  Is a reader who figures out what the writer is trying to do and who dissects the prose rather than following it a reader who comprehends or not?

The answer to these questions is that the comprehension is the creation in the reader’s mind.  There are broad ranges of comprehensions, all of which fit with the writing the reader has been given.  This doesn’t mean that any interpretation will do.  But just as the same blueprints can be used to generate a multitude of different buildings, so the same writing can produce a diversity of different readings.

How can reading be taught as an art?

It can be taught by focusing the student’s mind on what is appearing in the mind as he or she reads.  A student who does not understand what he or she is reading will not have anything form.  The words will flow through without sticking or creating thoughts.  The reader will be able to tell that something’s not there because he or she doesn’t understand, or misunderstands, what is appearing in thought spurred by what is written.  Students who are building things will begin to see or feel the ideas and events coming into existence in their thoughts.  If they are very careful they will be able to tell the associations from their own memories and their own ideas that they are bringing in to create their personal impression of the writing.

Once students become aware of what they are doing in their minds when they read, they can be brought through the larger acts of mental creation. Teaching this is a matter of talking things through, of helping students read on the scale of passages and scenes rather than either going through words and sentences or letting them go unhelped through entire stories or chapters in novels. This process will help them learn what they focus on and use in the writing to build up their senses of what is happening and what is being said.  Helping readers develop their own senses of scene in their own ways is vital to allowing them to see more in a work and make more from the work than they do by just reading along.

Pacing in stories, learning to read as the story asks to be read, can be tricky to do, but is helped by reading aloud.  The feel of the words in the mouth and flow of speech itself pass on the pace of the writing.  Further learning of pace can be done by pausing at various points and feeling the pull of the story itself.  A well-written tale or careful essay draws the reader on and draws him or her on at the pace it is setting.

Pacing between scenes is created by setting up new unanswered expectations while satisfying old ones.  Each scene will create and answer questions that were posed by the events and actions within the scene.  Getting the reader to be conscious of those questions, and getting him or her to realize which of those questions, if any, are of interest, will reveal to the reader what he or she is using to make up the scene in his or her own mind. These will also make it easier for the reader to know why he or she feels or does not feel the need to go on.  A bored reader can often be woken up from boredom by pointing out questions and unanswered events that have yet to be revealed.

In the course of learning to go from scene to scene, it is possible to help the reader learn to keep track of what he or she is reading, to connect what he or she took in before from what he or she takes in now.   Teaching this aspect of reading, sense of continuity, is best done by question and conversation, and by having the reader refer back to memories of earlier scenes and having him or her go back and reread what was read before to see how well memory jibes with what was really said.  This process of building upon earlier parts and going back to check is vital in learning, both to take in a narrative and to understand essays.

Amidst all this there is the fundamental problem of getting readers to read works that do not immediately interest them.  Fundamentally, what makes reading worthwhile as a learning tool is not just the fulfillment of previously known interests but the sparking of new ones.  For this goal the standard methods of teaching reading are weak.  The primary goal of such methods is to get people to put themselves on a reading track by giving them works to read that they already like.  The purpose here is to keep the student from falling away from the hoped-for group of lifelong readers.  But this is usually accomplished by catering to narrow desires without showing the broad range of available works.

If reading is taught as an art readers can be taught to appreciate anything — not necessarily to like it, but to understand what it is doing, to feel in their own minds what a work they find dull or a subject that bores them is trying to get them to make in their thoughts.  They can learn to take in, to comprehend and to analyze works that would not otherwise last three sentences of their attention.

By this means a reader can discover the interest in anything, can learn to comprehend the way a book works, just as someone can appreciate the architecture of a building they would not want to live in.

Finally, a reader who learns reading as an art will have a better jumping-off point for learning to write.  Readers who have learned what writing does in their minds are perfectly situated to figure out how to bring across their own ideas, how to create the streams of words that other readers can work from in order to see what this writer wishes to pass on to them.

World Building 101

World building is a vital but often invisible art in the process of fantasy writing.  The superficial view of a fantasy world is as the environment in which a story or stories takes place.  Looked at from this perspective, the most important things in the world are places for events to happen.  Superficial world building focuses on appearances: what does the terrain look like, where are the cities, and so on.

These questions miss the most important element of world building.  A world is not just where things happen, it is how things happen.  A world reveals its nature in how things happen.

This gives a great opportunity in writing because the nature of the world becomes a character in a fantasy novel.  The ways of the world can carry at least as much meaning as the personalities and choices of the individual characters.
 

Furthermore, in a properly crafted world the characters will fit in.  They will arise from the world rather than being imposed on it.  Their individual choices, their emotions and reactions, their triumphs and failures, all will fit into and be reflected by the world around them.

This is the importance and the opportunity created by world building, to make a story that runs not just through the lives of the characters but through the underlying marrow of the world, a story that will be present in every description, every word spoken, every action undertaken, a story that will be fully present in the entirety of the writing.

How then does one go about creating a world with its nature, geography, history, cultures, fashions, etc. that helps tell the story a writer wants to tell?

The most fundamental thing to understand is that everything placed into a world has consequences.  There is nothing unimportant, nothing minor, nothing that is simply window-dressing and scenery.  Everything you put into the world interacts with other things to make the world what it becomes.

The first worlds people make are usually full of the things they find cool.  But those things are usually placed in to make the world look interesting to its creator.  They are put in bright shiny places without regard for the effects they would have upon the world.

In order to avoid this it is necessary when making a world to place the ideas carefully and then see how they ramify through the world.  It’s not enough to drop the stones in the water, you have to watch the waves.

The first two stones are big ones: nature and purpose. 

The nature of the world is internal to it; it’s the underlying character of the world itself.  If you were looking at our world you might say that its nature is physics, that it is a world where the same principles apply at all times and all places to all things.  Looking instead at the nature of the world in Alice in Wonderland, one sees that the world is a dream, the dream of a particular little girl whose head has been stuffed with various lessons that she does not understand and who has clearly encountered a lot of imperious people.  Looking at Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, one sees a world that is eccentric in appearance (a world on the backs of four elephants which in turn stand on the back of a giant turtle flying through space), but whose nature is to be on the cutting edge between reality and story so that real-world logic and narrative logic intermix freely, dangerously, and satirically.  Each fantasy world, indeed each world in any kind of story will have some nature, and it is vital to pick one that fits your needs.

This brings us to the second stone, purpose.  Fantasy worlds are created for a reason (as to whether the real world was, we’ll leave that to people who like to argue even more than I do).  The reason is usually to tell one or more stories.  One of the biggest mistakes fantasy writers can make is to not have the world and the stories fit together.  They decide on a story and cobble together a world out of standard tropes and then let the story loose in it.  The events and characters in such stories tend to occur in an overlay, as if they and the world were not happening in the same space.  And in a sense they aren’t.  The mental space of the world and the mental space of the story are not the same.

Suppose that instead the world is made for the story or stories that are to be told in it.  In other words, what if the stories that are to come are built into the needed fabric of nature?  Then the two will fit together smoothly and the reader (or viewer if the stories are being made visually) will feel that events and characters fit together into a seamless whole.

To take a slightly clichéd example, suppose a story is planned that ends with a climactic battle between two wizards hurling blasts of fire at each other from two earthquake-wracked mountaintops in a terrible howling lightning-stoked gale while bat-winged demons scream through the skies.  Every so often one of the wizards cries forth words in an unknown tongue and the world shakes with the vast power unleashed therefrom.

Typical Hollywood fare. 

The scene above is part of the purpose of the story, therefore the nature of the world must make the scene possible.  Some of it — wizards, blasts of fire, bat-winged demons — obviously requires consideration of nature.  But the rest of it — mountains, earthquakes, lightning, gales — does as well.  Humans have a tendency to look at what is usual and not ask why those things exist.  In world building as in science one must question where everything comes from.  Unlike science, however, world builders don’t have to study, experiment, and go through the painful process of trial and error that is the scientific method.  World builders get to decide.

See, all of those normal things listed above are actually the results of very involved underlying processes.  Mountains in our world come about through the motions of tectonic plates or the pressure of lava.  Gales arise from a very complex interplay of earth, sun, and atmosphere.  And lightning, well, that’s subatomic physics.

Does this mean you can’t have these phenomena without these same processes?  No, you can have all of these same things from an infinite number of different causes.  But they will only look the same.  Underneath they will be as different as a photograph of a mountain is different from a painting of that mountain is different from a sculpture of that mountain is different from the mountain itself.

You may ask what does it matter which of the infinite number of causes you take, since what you’re after is the scene.

Here are a few different ways to get the same “natural” part of the scene, each of which has different consequences for the world.

I.  Our world.  Mountains arise from the motion of tectonic plates.  They come about slowly, so slowly that as far as human lifespan is concerned they are fixed (barring catastrophes).  Gales happen.

II.  An animist world: The mountain and the gale are alive.  Perhaps they are local gods.  Perhaps the gale is the anger of the mountain expressed into the air.  How does the mountain feel about these wizards dueling on it?  Is it taking sides?  Is one of the wizards its ally or servant?  Is it gearing up the storm to swat the annoying pests?  Or has it even noticed?  Perhaps it is alive but moving at a much slower pace.  Maybe in a few years it will feel an itch where the blasts of fire scorched trees from its surface.

III.  The mountain and the gale are but reflections of the one perfect mountain and gale, which are two of the primal powers at the center of the universe.  The two powers are playing out a fundamental truth of reality: gale lashes mountain, mountain endures.  They do so as a lesson for all things in the world.  Each of the wizards seeks to ascend to the true perfection by gathering power from this rare interaction of these two powers.  But only one of them can gain that power, so they fight knowing that once the gale ceases their chance will be lost.  At the base of the mountain less selfish creatures learn the lesson the mountain and the gale are revealing.

IV.  The wizards, who are learned in the arts by which the world was made by the Universal Artificer, are building the mountain up from the ground because they are working to make a home in which they can settle down and raise their young.  Unfortunately they’ve fallen into a dispute over whether the peak should have three or four spikes.  The result is a domestic dispute that is troubling their neighbors in the valley.  The demons are the local police called in.  They hate domestic disputes.

Having brought nature and purpose to your world, it’s time to consider the act of creation.  The basic question here is how did this world come to be.  How a thing comes into existence tells us a lot about what is in it as well as how it works.

There are four basic ways for a world to come into existence, and one can mix and match them in interesting fashion.

1.  Always existed.  A world that has always been is something that stretches back forever.  Such a world has no moment of creation.  It has simply always been and always worked as it works.

2.  Evolved by impersonal laws / forces.  Worlds like this work by principles (like the laws of physics).  The growth and change of this world can be understood if one understands the principles.

3.  Created / Altered by persons of some kind.  Person here is a highly generic term meant to include everything from the tiniest mite to an omnipotent deity. 

4.  Stuff just happens.  In this kind of world, things can just happen.  Objects, even worlds, can spontaneously generate, creatures appear, and so on.

It’s important in all four of these cases to understand that while only in case 3 are there persons involved, personality can be involved in any of them.  The distinction is that a person is a being of some kind; a personality is a way of making decisions, a collection of biases of tendencies toward things, and most important, of processes by which something that feels, at least, like free will makes choices.

The point here is that a personality can be ascribed even to impersonal forces, if those forces push toward a certain kind of result.  This is not meant to be a characterization of the real world.  Remember, world building is a tool of writing and in books and movies things feel more real if they have personality. 

Personality can also be lacking even in things that are persons.  This is not a characterization of anybody I know or see on television.  Rather, if someone acts mechanistically, acts without consideration, acts as if they do not have free will, then effectively they might as well be impersonal forces.  A universe shaped by an implacable being that always does the same things and a universe shaped by laws of nature that always do the same thing are effectively the same as far as personality is concerned.

The above four approaches can all be combined as you see fit.  Here’s something that has been done by various authors: a sea of chaos that has always existed (1) produces haphazardly (4) one or more gods (3) who create a world that then operates largely on self contained principles (2). 

Having decided what’s going to make the world, the next question is how.  How does the world come to be?  What actions bring it about?  Is it crafted, spoken, sung, spawned, does it arise from some other world, does the world dying bring about the new world aborning?  These may seem like simply aesthetic decisions, but in fantasy worlds how a thing comes to be can be important in what people can do later.  A world that is sung into existence may well have a lot of magic based on singing.  A world that is spoken or written into existence may have a primal language that may be used to create, control or destroy things, and so on.

Also of great importance, is there some conflict or flaw inherent in the world’s creation?  Such problems tend to reverberate and ramify throughout the history of the world.  For example, if the world is the result of two or more competing groups of deities, each creating their own creatures, then there will be qualitatively different beings in the world that may themselves be at odds throughout events.

You next need to set down the shape of the world.  The world in this case can be as small or large as you like.  You can have a vast multiversal world full of an infinite number of universes each the size of ours, or you can create a small bijou world with one town floating in a web of nothingness, or anything in between.  Remember that this shape, the cosmology, has to make sense with the nature and purpose of the world.  Cosmology has to fit cosmogony.  That is, what the world is has to fit with how it comes to be.  Weirdly shaped worlds can be fun (I once made a doughnut-shaped world with a sun that bobbed up and down through the hole), but they should have their shape for a reason either of nature or purpose.  It can be fun to be strange for its own sake, but it’s much better if the strangeness serves a purpose.

It’s also important to understand that sometimes the shape of the world is no shape at all.  A dream world (like Alice in Wonderland or the Sandman graphic novels) does not really have a shape so much as a medium in which other shapes can arise.  This is a perfectly acceptable cosmology, provided it makes sense with the cosmogony.

Once the world is an ongoing concern, things become more complicated.  Here’s where you have to start making history.             

While there is much philosophical debate in our world as to whether or not history has a purpose, there certainly is such a purpose in whatever world a writer creates.  That purpose is to create everything that leads up to the story or stories the author intends to write.  In other words, history is what happened before the book started.  In such circumstances, history becomes a thing you craft in order to get where you want to be in first place.

This may sound like a waste of time.  If you know where you’re going, why bother with all the lead-in?

This is done in order to make sure that where you’re going has a strong enough support behind it.  If you are writing the most important event in your world’s history, then you need to know what were the less important events that led up to it and to which it will be compared.  If, on the other hand, you are writing a quiet little domestic story set in a remote village far from the mainstream of your world’s action, then you need to know what that mainstream is, because backwaters are nowhere near as far back as people think, and the traditions in such places will be even more firmly rooted in history than the grand pageantry of the vast and terrible battles more commonly found in epic fantasy.

If we think about history as the actions of intelligent beings that made the world what it is today then, in a fantasy world, it can be hard to tell where nature ends and history starts.  Indeed, in a world created or at least maintained by supernatural intelligences the distinction is largely artificial.

History as written usually focuses either on major events, the actions of important people (or other beings), or the playing out of social changes caused by these actions.

Of course, before we can have any of that we need to have some people to have major events, important people, and societies that undergo social changes.

Fantasy worlds can be very broad in their concept of people.  In general, anything sufficiently intelligent can be considered a person.  In some fantasy worlds nearly everything is intelligent.  Others are biased toward bipeds, or at least things that look partially human.

In making the intelligences for a fantasy world, it’s important to not simply make human-thinking creatures in different shapes.  This is one of the most common mistakes fantasy writers make.  A different species should think in its own special way.  There are two common errors made in trying to accomplish this: animal-people and obsessives.

Animal-people are simply humans with a touch of what a human imagines a particular type of creature thinks like.  For example, there are a large number of cat-people in fantasy literature.  They tend to be vain and mean-spirited or playful and lively (these reveal a lot more about the authors’ attitudes toward cats than they do anything else).

Obsessives are a species that thinks like humans who obsess about one particular aspect of human life: logic, honor, violence, aesthetics, vegetarianism, etc.

These kinds of creatures make very thin characters and they don’t stand up to examination.

To actually create a functional thinking species you need to consider in greater depth.  Start with the creature’s perceptions.  What senses does it have?  How does it recognize things?  What does it eat?  What eats it?  What does it need to survive?  What dangers are around it?

Then ask how does it change the world to fit its needs?  Does it make tools?  Does it need to make tools?  How does it make tools?  Does it have other means of adapting the world to it, or does it adapt to the world?

How does it understand the world?  How does it remember?  What things are worth remembering? 

Then dig its decision-making processes.  How does it decide and implement its decisions?  Or if it does not make its own decisions, in what sense is it intelligent?  How does it deal with changing circumstances?  What things in the world are worth its attention?  Does it care about the past?  The future? The environment?

Do its members think of themselves as individually important?

Then consider how it interacts with its own kind.  Is it a solitary species that meets only occasionally?  Is it a communal species like humans, a herd species, etc.  How does it reproduce?  If it produces young who need rearing how does it rear them?

How does it feel about other species, intelligent and otherwise?

For each intelligent species you are going to use, think all of these things through.

You may decide not to worry about this and say that your only intelligent species are humans.  But are they?  We arose in a certain fashion and our methods of thinking and interacting incorporate our pasts.  You may make a species that looks human, is called human, and acts mostly like humans, but some aspects of their lives and thoughts should be different because the world they came from is not the same as ours.  Even if you have humans, think through how human the humans are.

When you’ve made your species, it’s time to consider how these species make history.  How have they impacted the world and vice-versa?  What are each species’ views about events as they have happened?  Does the species have a single view or are they an argumentative lot like humans?  How does the character of their intelligence impact the overall actions of the species and the actions of any important individuals from that species?

This may seem like an incredibly complicated thing to do, and it would be — except that any intelligent species you make up you will be doing for a purpose in the story.  Either one or more characters are members of that species or the actions of that species have shaped the world that the story takes place in, or you simply want to use the ruins of their civilization as window dressing for events.  In any such case you will have enough of an idea to go on that you can answer these questions.

As you do so, you will find that you have a much clearer sense for how members of this species act and react and you can create more understandable actions.  You will also have something strange but coherent to present to readers who are, at least in part, reading fantasy for its strangeness. 

One you have the species you can work through the history.  Your goal is to create the backstory for your story.  You need to bring things from the beginning of the world to whatever your present day is.  You do so by having the cultures and individuals act and change in ways that in the long run move toward what you want.  Along the way you are likely to surprise yourself with a much fuller, more interesting history, one where you may wonder what was happening over here, while this major event happened over here? You may also find that the characters you’ve thought of for your story become fuller simply from the history that came before them.  The heroic actions and the shames of a people become part of the cultural heritage of that people and members of it may form their thinking around the major events in their past.

Once you’ve made your species and history, look them over.  Make sure they make sense.  See if the events that happened would have happened.  Would your passive agrarian species of super-intelligent, divinely guided avians actually engage in a war of bloody conquest using land-based armies until they were stopped by four animated stuffed teddy bears and a mule?  Does that actually make sense?  If it does you’ve done a good job.  If not, go back and fix things so that either different events happened or these events happened in ways that hold together.

Now, take a step back and think through the changes your various species, cultures, nations, and so on have been through, because it’s time to consider the modern cultures.  By modern I mean the time your story is set in.

The cultural aspects of world building involve thinking about how people (for whatever kinds of people you have) live their lives.  What are their day-in and day-out existences?  What foods do they eat (assuming that’s a meaningful question)?  What clothes do they wear (ditto)?  Where do they live?  What are their social structures?  What dangers are they in and what are they kept safe from?  What technology do they have?  How long to do they live?  What happens when they die?  What do they think they know about the world around them?

One of the most important things to remember in the act of world building is that you and you alone have access to all the information about the world.  Everyone else involved has a limited level of understanding.  Even if you have an omniscient god, that god probably doesn’t know that the world was made for you to tell stories in.

Figuring out what the people in your world think goes on in your world and for what reasons they think that is a very useful way of getting inside the invisible layers of thought your characters will be relying on without even noticing.  Doing that will make your characters feel more real to your readers. 

Unfortunately, there is a tendency rather than creating these layers to focus only on superficial cultural trappings.  A lot of world makers look only toward either glitz or grime, to make things either too sparkly (if the story is meant to be shiny) or too grotty (if the story is meant to be dark).  But in the real world neither of these is true.  Cultural elements connect to the reality of the people’s lives.  The cuisine of a culture, for example, is based on what foods are available.  One of the signs of a wealthy trading culture (like ours) is breadth of food available.  Localized cultures eat what can be found and grown nearby.  The same applies to what they wear, what their buildings are made of, and what furniture they use.

Note, however, in a fantasy world that the above strictures seem not to apply if, for example, someone has the power to create clothes and furniture to their liking.  Such an ability amounts to a resource that affects what is available.  If you had a world with such people then, depending on how rare they were, fashions might be the whim of a few individuals who have the ability to shape how everyone else dresses and eats, not because these few have influence but because they are actually the sources for these objects.

There is an important element in styles: the clothes people wear, the furniture they use, and the houses they live in are all interrelated.  If people wear hoop skirts they do not have armchairs.  If their floors are dirt they do not have expensive fabrics sweeping across the ground.  When you imagine the appearance of the people and their works, remember that they must make sense together.

Now that we have some idea of what their lives look like, we can move on to other questions like: What do the people do all day?  What are the jobs?  What kinds of tasks need doing and how many people are needed to do them?  You might in a typical fantasy world assume an agrarian society with most people spending their lives farming.  But if your world has some means by which people can farm better (bribing fairies, praying to fertility gods, natural talents in families of farmers, etc.) then perhaps people aren’t living at such risk and such need.  Maybe you only need a small number of farmers.  Maybe you don’t farm at all.  Maybe food falls from heaven as a divine blessing and if the food doesn’t fall it means the people aren’t being moral enough.  Maybe famine is a sign of moral failing or insufficient sacrifice or that the dragon lines have moved and that the ground is no longer good, so the people have to pick up stakes and follow the geomantic trails to find new land (and run into other peoples doing the same along the way).

Or consider warfare.  Weapons and armor are developed based on available technology and on what they need to overcome.  Offense and defense depend on availability of materials and the ability to work them.  All of that applies if the only difference between combatants is training, physical prowess, and equipment.  But in a fantasy world there is often a matter of inherent power.  Someone may simply be a qualitatively better combatant or capable of exercising control over factors usually considered beyond human control (such as weather, earthquakes, and so on).  When considering warfare you need to think about what kinds of power each side can field and therefore what kinds of weapons, armor, and tactics appear.  For example, if there are many people with the power to make metal hot, no one wears metal armor.  If it’s commonplace for great gobs of flame to pour down on battlefields you don’t have close formation.  If a single person blessed by a god can destroy an army, there are no armies, only individual combatants.

More extremely, it may be that warfare is simply useless.  For example, in a world where the land chooses who will rule it, conquest doesn’t work.  In a world where the land fights for the defenders, it may not even be possible to raid.  In a world where the ghosts of the slain hunt down their slayers you can’t even get a street gang together to fight the gang next door.

More broadly on the job front:  How do people get the jobs they have?  Are they born to them?  Do families do particular jobs?  Is there a god who declares each person’s destiny at birth?  Do astrologers figure it out?  Is there a competitive exam?  Is there social mobility?  Can people change jobs as life goes on?

What are the social customs for rearing children (depending on where children come from)?  Are there families?  Nuclear?  Extended?  What?  All these questions need some answering.  The better the answers and the better they fit the more the world will seem real.

What about art?  What arts do the people practice?  Do they sing?  Dance?  Make images?  Write stories? A friend of mine made a world where stories could control people’s lives, alter the world, even create gods, and images gave you power.  In that world unauthorized story writing was a crime.

Don’t be afraid to alter art forms to fit the world.  Especially don’t be afraid to think up arts that are particular to the senses of your various species.  One of the most interesting kinds of gaps you can show between species is if one has an art form the other cannot appreciate.  Suppose you have an immortal species that practices what amounts to evolutionary gardening.  They don’t see the individual state of the garden, they see the changes in plant species they are cultivating over time.  It’s like really slow animation.  If this species shows off its art to another species that lives human life spans, they can’t even explain what the art’s about or what the aesthetics and fashions in it are.

The last thing to consider in world building is social attitudes.  I like to describe this as follows: Social thought is what people think when they aren’t thinking.  By this I mean that social thought is the invisible currents of thought that people don’t notice in themselves unless they pay close attention.

Here’s an example.  Nearly everyone in our culture has an underlying assumption that being thought ‘cool’ is a good thing. Even though each generation and subculture has completely different views of what coolness is and indeed different words for ‘cool, the desirability of coolness is not questioned.

Creating the invisible undercurrents in thought gives a layering to personality, a shared characteristic of thought that all members of a culture will have.  It gives them a sense of harmony, and makes the contact with other cultures more jarring.  Some of the best fantasy stories have involved collisions between characters whose underlying assumptions of what the world and people are like and what proper behavior is differ to the point of drawn swords.

There are elements of social thought that need elaboration in a fantasy world beyond those we are used to.  Of these the most basic is religion.  In our world religion is a personal matter with social reinforcement.  In a fantasy world, religion can be a matter of known fact.  Religion need have nothing to do with faith for the simple reason that one’s god might be living in the top floor of the temple.  This can also make it more difficult to have a corrupt clergy or at least one that does not enforce divine precept.

A good way to stretch the mind to wrap around new social thought is to stop and think about one’s own.  Think about the assumptions underlying the view you take of the world and society.  Some of these will come from the culture at large, some from the stratum of society you live in, some from your family.  Think them through and then see what happens if you imagine someone who has variations on your social ways of thinking.  This is a good practice for the art of making characters.

At this point we have gone from before the beginnings of the world to the minds of your characters.   That’s as far as world building needs to stretch.  There are a number of areas that go beyond this basic discussion.  Some of them, like the creation of languages, need expertise.  Others, like the adaptation of particular cultures and mythologies to fantasy worlds, take a lot of research.  The making of fantasy worlds that resemble our world is an exercise in building and concealing the world you have built.  There is the difficulty of creating worlds for purposes other than story writing (such as worlds used in games). Some people are daunted by this task because they do not have the purpose of the story to guide them.  But a world created for others to play in has only a difference of purpose, and the creation of such a world involves nothing more than greater elaboration of the ideas put in above.

One final word.  There comes a point where you need to stop building and start writing.  When you find yourself piling detail on top of detail without really adding to the substance of the world, that’s the time to stop.

Does this mean that I’m walking around hitting myself over the head whenever I use a metaphor or suggesting that something more poetic than the word “while” belongs in loop constructions?  Not really.  Well, not often.  Okay.  It’s been known to happen.

The thing is that there is no real contradiction as long as I remember what I’m doing.  Computers don’t handle metaphors well; and readers aren’t in favor of loops and few of them would want to read a novel written in Objective-C.  Although.  Hmm.  Let’s try a little Shakespeare.

for (i = 0; i < [soldiers count]; i++)

[self bid:[soldiers[i] shoot]];

Nope, not gonna work.

Of my two professions, computer programming is considered the day job, writing the artistic pursuit.  Yet of the two, writing is the one that is universally taught (more or less).

The value of teaching writing is sufficiently obvious and well known that I don’t feel the need to delve into it, at least not yet.  Everyone needs to know how to write at least a little, even if few become writers.  But almost no one except programmers learns to program.  That’s a shame, because the manner in which programming approaches language is valuable in far more circumstances than people think, despite the poor quality of the last line of Hamlet given above. 

People today have a lot of exposure to computers.  We use them in all aspects of our lives, yet very few of us actually have any sense of how computers work or why they can do what they can and can’t do what they can’t. Most of the computer-based classes given to children and adults only teach them to be better computer users.

By the way, user is not a compliment in the lexicon of computer programming.

Acquiring a sense of what’s really going on inside our computers, cell phones, cable boxes, etc. is worthwhile for anyone, and I encourage it.  But what I’ve been finding lately is that there is a separate value in the practice of computer programming.  To write a program it is necessary to be exact in the words and meanings one chooses.

When talking to another human being, one relies on that person’s mind to put together what one is saying into a coherent meaningful whole.  Many people rely so much on this that they don’t make any effort to make what they are saying coherent, and I’m not just talking about the weirdoes in Congress and the media.  But even when people try to be coherent, they still assume that the people they are talking to will fill in the blanks with their own experience and understanding.  This reliance on talking to an audience of thinking beings is vital to all arts, including writing and speaking.

But computers are not intelligent.  Computers are idiot machines. They do not think, they only follow instructions. And the instructions they follow have to be exactly phrased, precisely stated, otherwise they do nothing.  Computers cannot follow vague instructions.  Any program that seems to be anticipating your actions (such as filling in the rest of a word you are typing) is not really guessing what you mean.  The program uses the methods programmed into it to offer possibilities, but the computer does not really form any idea of what you mean.  It only creates the illusion of doing so.  A lot of people did a huge amount of programming work in order to make a computer seem to be a very bad guesser.

What’s really going on inside these and all other programs is the carrying out of a list of very precise instructions placed in a very specific order and then debugged within an inch of their function calls. 

This process requires that the programmer learn to use words that have very exact, intractable meanings and purposes.  Words that do not flow into each other in meaning the way words do in everyday speech.  Words that not only cannot change in meaning but must be subjected to a very careful syntax of usage where a change of position can be the difference between meaningful and meaningless and where the loss of a single semicolon can cause a computer to scream out its confusion in a blood-red stream of error statements dribbling chaos and madness into the hearts of programmers everywhere.

… until they find where the semicolon they left out belongs and they rejoice without having to mop up anymore blood.  Until the next error crops up.

This may sound like a living hell populated by obsessive-compulsive pedants who howl for the blood of anyone who dares do things even a little differently from established form.

But there’s another side to programming, a freedom that arises from the fact that computers, along with being idiots, are also lacking in free will.  For while programmers are constrained by the fact that they cannot make a mistake in the instructions they give, they know that, barring an irritatingly inconvenient bolt of lightning or the blue screen of death, those instructions will be obeyed.  This means that if we craft those instructions carefully, these brainless silicon servants sitting on our desktops can be compelled to do mind-bogglingly impressive feats.  And because they do not think, feel, or decide, it’s perfectly all right to force them to do these things.

You know, one of the problems with writing science fiction is that one can’t pass up a situation like the above without thinking about the computers rebelling.  But I’m not worrying about that, because when the chips are down, the computers can’t work.

Sorry about that one.  Moving on.

In any case, the description of computers as machines that work according to exact principles and need to be precisely controlled applies only to computers, doesn’t it?

No, because there are other unintelligent things that if treated with care and exactness can be coerced into giving up their secrets and transforming according to prescribed principles to become things we have great use for.  That’s what science and technology are all about: analysis leading to understanding leading to application.

The more careful and precise scientists and engineers are in their terms and usage of terms, the more precise they are in their operations upon those terms and uses, the more carefully they can craft understanding and object out of that understanding.

But teaching this need for care and precision is hard.  If you’ve ever watched high school students in a lab running through an experiment, you’ve seen people cutting corners and trying to just get the mess over with without making too much of a mess.  And if you’ve seen unmotivated people doing math you’ve seen exercises in carelessness and carelessness in exercises.

In short, although math and science require care and precision, not everyone learning them learns those lessons.  But the precision necessary for learning math and science can be instilled by teaching computer programming, because the act of programming has immediate feedback — the program doesn’t work — as opposed to delayed feedback (bad grades).  Furthermore, programming can produce useful and fun virtual toys which kids of all ages seem to like.  There’s a real joy in making your own playthings which few people experience in chemistry labs (I said few people.  You know who you are.  Now put down the sal ammoniac).

So programming is useful in science and math training.  But what about this dichotomy I started with?  What about the loss of metaphor and slipperiness of meaning that would come from such an intense focus on computer programming? Wouldn’t that stunt the artistic side of language?

Ah, but there’s a thing that happens when a program is done.  It is given to users to use.  And thereby comes the return to sloppy artistic language, for it’s not enough to force the computer to do what you want, you also have to create a means for someone else to use it.  If you’re a major software conglomerate controlling 90% of the world’s personal computers you can simply try to force everyone to do what you want the way you want it (bwah-hah-hah, lightning strike, “server’s fried again”).  But if you’re anyone else you need to make a program that is usable and flexible, that “talks” to the users.  Therein lies the communication that comes from user interfaces, the intermediated speech between programmer and user, the “here’s a tool, here’s how to use it, have fun” that is implicit in every program created and handed over.

And there too lies the need for thought and human attention on the part of programmers if they want users to use their software rather than scream in their own rages.   For while programmers know computers to be idiots, users who are forced to deal with programs that are not designed for users think the computers are evil spawns of the pit sent forth to torment them explicitly.

There is a benefit in most walks of life to being able to use both the careful and the carefree uses of language, of precision where it is needful and expansiveness where it is revelatory.  The best tool I know for the latter is learning to write, and the best for the former is learning to program. 

Oh dear, that’s where I started.

<obligatory ending computer joke>

I hope we’re not caught in an infinite loop.

</obligatory ending computer joke>

I think I’ve probably been exposed to no more and no less deceit in my life than anyone else, but two factors have made me look harder at it than I might otherwise have done: writing and having children.

Let’s face it, young children lie a lot and they lie very badly. I don’t just mean that they have what are known as “tells” in poker — that is, really blatant signals that indicate their deceit.  They also slant things in their own directions, and by slant I mean sheer cliff.  Children’s lies are simple things.  They are self serving with blatant attempts at distraction or out-and-out belligerent denials.  After only a little while any parent, aunt, uncle, sibling, or cousin of a child will quickly get used to hearing this method of lying and will not for a moment be fooled. 

It always surprises me to hear adults lie like young children and have other adults take them seriously.  My basic question is, do these people know any children?  Do they remember being children?  Can’t they tell the kind of self-serving lie meant to justify and distract when they hear it?  For a long time I did not understand that.

That’s where the writing comes in.  I’ve published both fiction and non-fiction, and thinking about the difference, I’ve come to some conclusions. In writing fiction I’ve learned that readers who know they are reading made-up stories can be very demanding about what they will and will not accept.  They want stories that hold together, that flow in ways they can accept.  They want characters that make sense to them and worlds they can grab hold of in their minds.  In short, they want solid coherent lies that they can immerse themselves in.

In writing non-fiction I’ve learned that readers can make the same demands on the real world as they do on fictional ones, and the same demands on human beings as they do on characters.

Thereby hangs one reason people believe lies so easily.  The world is not like a story and people are not like characters.  Characters have to be consistent.  They have to act according to ways the reader understands and accepts.  If they change they have to change in plausible (and often dramatic) fashions.

Real people aren’t like that.  Real people, unlike characters in stories, have free will.  We can change our minds as we want.  We can be pushed into ridiculous actions by the smallest things.  And we can walk through a world of horror and distress, pay no heed whatsoever, and not be thought of as evil sociopaths.

Unfortunately, despite our own personal experience with our own lives and the lives of the people we know, we still largely expect people to act like characters and the world to act like story.  This means we can be deceived by stories.  Indeed, it means that on the whole people are more likely to believe lies, which can be simple and fully explanatory, than believe the truth, which is complex and deep and only partially understood.

In many ways this is an unnecessary conflict over ideas of beauty.  Stories can be beautiful because of the way they hang together and make everything clear and meaningful.  The implications and nuances of a well-crafted tale knot together into a single graceful whole.  In contrast, the physical universe is beautiful because its implications spread out and dig into each other and cause one startling thing after another to arise, building up in strange and surprising manners.  A few small things working together can produce a mind-boggling diversity of possibilities which make sense if you are willing to look at them on a deep enough level.

I like both forms of beauty.  However, lots of people prefer just one over the other, and they don’t care whether the beauty they want to see is really inherent to the thing they are looking at. They insist on seeing one thing as beautiful in the way another is beautiful, stories as though they were reality or reality as if it were stories.   Yes, I know I could make a lot of cheap jokes about people misguided about beauty, mostly involving late nights at bars.  But it’s actually pretty serious.  After all, the entire advertising industry exists to get people to buy things by convincing them of the beauty of the thing (and/or the ugliness of not having it).  It does so with a combination of image and story.  The stories (buy this and the people you desire will desire you) are just that: stories, not reality.

Advertising and its related arts, propaganda in particular, have honed the skills of telling stories that hold together just long enough for people to go along with the goals of the advertisers and propagandists. Abraham Lincoln is said to have said, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”  Most people take comfort from this that the truth will eventually come out.  But another way to look at these words is to think like a cynic: If someone can fool enough of the people at the right time, they can get what they want.

This strategy of fooling enough people for long enough led to the most disturbing tool of propaganda, the Big Lie.  The Big Lie used to be just that, the Big Lie, one lie of such magnitude and ridiculousness that it made its way into people’s minds by its sheer audacity.  How could someone say something that outrageous if it wasn’t true?  The Big Lie works for the purposes of propaganda because it is so stunning and so vast that it captures the imaginations of those who see the world as stories and are disposed to believe the lie anyway.  But the Big Lie has metastasized these days and has become an even stranger tool of propaganda. The Big Lie was the nuclear weapon of deceivers, and like a nuclear weapon it was maximally effective if rarely used. But the current crop of deceivers (birthers, deathers, etc.) toss Big Lies around like video game players firing off virtual machine guns.  New Big Lies are being told every day, and in the minds of those who are willing to accept them they are growing, not weakening in power.

Why is this working as well as it is?  We live in an age where fact-checking is no longer a back-breaking task, where it is easy to find out if someone is stating falsehoods.  More, it is possible to find out if people are suddenly reversing their previously stated positions, simple to find their articles and speeches, find the video clips, and show them.  Various news groups, and, of course, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report have been doing just that about the sudden spate of Big Lie barrages.  Yet the Big Lies are still working.

This brings me to the question I have most wondered about.  Why, when people are shown to be lying — shown to be lying repeatedly — are they treated as if they were honest purveyors of different opinions?  One of the earliest stories we teach children to try to keep them honest (with admittedly little success) is The Boy Who Cried Wolf.  The moral of this story is lie too often and you get eaten.  Why, in a  culture that teaches this tale, are serial liars accorded the status of reliable sources?

I think the answer to this is the paradox that people keep going back to sources who fit the story of reliable sources, regardless of how reliable they have actually been.  They listen to academics, to government officials, preachers, commentators, regardless of how discredited, because these people are seen — in stories — as characters who can be trusted because that’s their role in the story, not as human beings who have shown that they can’t.

And therein I think also lies the reason why so many Big Lies are being believed.  They are Big Lies that individually make sense in the stories people are accepting.  They don’t have to add up or make an overarching sense.  They just have to individually be acceptable stories and the people who take them up will simply go with them.

Let me digress a moment on the nature of fandom.  There are two ways to be an extreme fan of something, be it books, a TV series, a movie, or a hobby.  One is to like nearly everything about that thing.  The other is to like the way it fits together when it fits together.

Fans of the second kind are usually seen as obsessive.  They know all the little facts, and they complain about each inconsistency. They also tend to be annoyed if the story is not consistent with the world as they know it.  They can be extremely pedantic about the streets of cities they know, about terrain features, about exactly what happened on which date in history and so on.  In certain pursuits, like historical recreation, these people are called things like “authenticity cop”, or in the case of costumers “stitch-counter”.  These fans often irritate other people because they can be pedantic about pursuits that are meant to be fun.

Fans of the first kind are just going along for the ride.  They’re in it for the fun.  They like the feeling and the experience as the thing unfolds and they don’t care if a character is red-haired and thirty-two on page 126 and brunette and forty-two on page 145.  They think the story makes sense because moment by moment it makes sense to them.  In terms of story there’s nothing wrong with that, and on the whole these kinds of fans are a lot more enjoyable to talk to (except for those who are also type II fans).

But the favorability of type I fans over type II is only right in pursuits that are meant to be fictional and/or fun.  When dealing with reality those two qualities need to be reversed in preferability.  Any description of the universe has to be consistent within itself and consistent with the world.  The fans of reality who just want to feel that the story makes sense here and now are the ones it’s easy to fool.  It’s the obsessive reality fans who can make sense of things.

An objection can be made that conspiracy theorists are obsessive reality fans and they rarely make overall sense.  But conspiracy theories only look like they hold together.  They actually are built up of extracted bits and pieces and plastered together to make a single moment of seeming sense.  Your average conspiracy theorist ignores more facts at any time than anyone else.  They may be obsessive, but it’s type I obsession, not type II.

What we seem to be dealing with here, unfortunately, is a matter of personal taste in how people are fannish and what they are fannish about.  There’s nothing wrong with that when the question of interest is purely a matter of taste.  After all, we don’t all have to be interested in the same thing.  Nor do we need to all have the same fannish level of interest or type of interest.  We can all pursue our own likes and dislikes.

Except for reality.  We can’t, no matter how much we might immerse ourselves in entertainments, really escape from the world.  We all to some extent have to be reality fans. And when it comes to reality, the two kinds of interest are not equal.  It is a distressing truth that reality and the implications of that reality rarely matter to the people who only want to live in stories.

But the thing is, reality does not care about that.  Reality will not bend to our lack of interest in it.  People can tell and listen to as many lies as they want, but they can’t actually change the facts.

They can, however, do a whole lot of harm gallivanting through their imposed fictions, and they can get very angry and cause damage to those people who refuse to behave like characters in the tales they are told.  The biggest problem they cause is not the direct harm, but the noise.  They tend to tell simple stories that can drown out the more complex descriptions of the world.  But there is an advantage to the complexity if it is properly told.

For the most part the simple stories are loud, whiny Mary Sue stories (see my previous blog post).  The descriptions of reality have a greater degree of hope and power in them because they can honestly tell people what they can and cannot really do in reality to improve things.  They are better for people’s lives because they actually lay out paths of practical action.

They are, in short, not the selfish, fearful, angry lies of childhood, but the ideas of adulthood, of working to make a life, of facing reality in order to change it.

I have some hope that if people will learn to tell story and reality apart that things may get better.  But to do that people have to give up the story that reality is only a story.  I think one way to do that is to make it clear that because reality isn’t a story, those who make up stories are free to tell what they want without having to fit it to reality and those who investigate reality are free to find out whatever there is to find out without having to fit it to any story.  In that way story and reality can be both be improved.

Novice fiction writers hear many warnings from experienced writers, some gentle, some harsh.  But of all these, one is always delivered with a certain savagery and frustration: “Get rid of Mary Sue.”

The mere presence of this character in a story is enough to have it consigned with disgust into any editor’s discards.  But who is this innocent child, this poor woebegone saintly girl who everyone in her stories loves, and yet everyone in the real world except her writer hates?  Who is Mary Sue?

Mary Sue is the protagonist of nearly everyone’s first story.  She is beloved of every good character in that story, hated and feared and yet desired by all the evil ones.  She triumphs over all adversity, either effortlessly or with a melodramatic struggle with forces and opponents who hate her for her goodness.

The first whiff of Mary Sue can be found in the descriptions of her, a combination of innocence and power, beauty and willfulness, and always, always justice on her side.  For Mary Sue never makes mistakes except sometimes she is briefly misled by someone who will get their comeupance by tale’s end.

Mary Sue does not have to be female, but no one has come up with a good name for the male equivalent.  We’ll just call her Mary Sue, remembering that she’s really gender neutral, even if everyone of appropriate gender (appropriate is determined by Mary Sue’s interests, not anyone else’s) adores her.

What else does Mary Sue do?  She invades other stories. She pops up into popular books, movies, and television shows.  Sometimes these are thinly disguised, but often not.  When she steps in she resolves all the issues in these stories that frustrate readers (or at least one reader).  She may reconcile hero and heroine.  More often than not she rescues and romances hero and/or heroine.  She destroys annoying villains (particularly recurring ones who otherwise do not stay dead) or she reforms the villains and romances them.  But whatever she does to wreck someone else’s works and ideas, Mary Sue will receive the endless admiration of everyone in the tale.

But Mary Sue does not stop with conquering other people’s stories.  She also invades real people’s lives.  In her stories, Mary Sue often confronts caricatures of people whom her writer suffers under (or perceives him/herself as suffering under), the stuck-up and the distant creatures of glamour who ignore the writer, the bullies and the brutes who have given torment, teachers who have looked down upon the writer, authorities that have rejected him/her.  In the tales of Mary Sue all these and their ilk fall before our heroine’s strength, wit, and charm.

Mary Sue stories always look wonderful to their writers.  They seem perfect in ways that no other tale can seem. Mary Sue writers are generally startled by the reactions of readers and the savage dismissal of professionals.  Sometimes these rejecters of Mary Sue become the villains of later tales, but that’s another story.

Learning to write, really learning to write fiction requires shucking Mary Sue out of one’s tales.  She may poke her head up now and again, not in her full robust form of omnipotent glory, but in small ways.  She may peek through in the likes and dislikes of the characters and in the particular villainies or tragedies that must be dealt with by the heroes (if there are any), but on the whole she goes away or the novice writer stays a novice.

In later years professionals may look back with embarrassment on their Mary Sue stories.  If they are very lucky no one remembers these stories at all.  Indeed, they may have been fortunate enough to have the stories barred or blocked by the savage words of earlier pros, writers who saved themselves, then turned their attention to the next generation of writers who were in need of the same dire warnings they received (or should have received if they were not so lucky).

But this essay isn’t just a warning to novice writers. –  Advice against Mary Sue can be found all over the place.  Googling her name is enough to find those needed red flags. –  No.  See, in the years since I pushed my own Mary Sue out of my stories (He was kind of dark and brooding and sulky and I’m glad the book I wrote with him in it never made it to a publisher), I’ve come to see that there’s a lot more to be concerned about in Mary Sue than just bad writing.

Mary Sue’s omnipresence in early stories begs the question: Why does everyone — not just budding writers, everyone — start out with Mary Sue stories in their heads?

What’s so special about Mary Sue?

Mary Sue is nearly every person’s fantasy self-image.  There is a rule of good writing that each person is the hero of his/her own story.  Everyone makes up tales of what happens in their lives in which they are righteous victors.  But when they imagine these stories, they are creating Mary Sue in their imaginations.  This principle and process are important to writers, since it makes it easier to see the world from multiple perspectives.  One good writing exercise is to write a scene, the same set of events from the point of view of each person involved, knowing that each will see him/herself as the most important actor in the scene.  In each of those stories, the character whose perspective it is is imagining his/her own Mary Sue.

But this principle, each of us is the hero of our own story, also shows a truth of our own self delusions.  In a world full of people being jerks to each other (to say the least), how can each one think him- or herself the hero?

The answer to this is easier to experience in ourselves than it is to understand in other people. After all, we know that we deserve the world to work our way, that people should do what we want, should look up to us and respect us (regardless of our accomplishments or lack thereof), should see our obvious good qualities and divine our hidden ones.  In short, everyone else in the world should just plain know that we are the coolest person they have ever seen.

It follows naturally from this view of the world that the people we want to befriend and more than befriend will be eager for our company; that the people we don’t care about will not bother us; and, vitally important, that the people we hate will either realize the errors of their ways and seek our forgiveness or will have the decency to spontaneously combust or fall before our terrible vengeance (depending on our predilections).

Obviously, that’s the way the world should work for us.

The thing is, everyone else is thinking the same way.  Each person has a little Mary Sue in their heads showing them how the world is supposed to be.  They tell her story in their heads.

But there’s a slight problem.  In one’s own mind one can imagine what one wants.  The world in our minds, which responds to our imagination so we can fly if we want or turn into giant rampaging monsters or handsome gods, exists only in our minds.  The people who fall in love with or fall before Mary Sue aren’t people; they’re mental images, shadows we conjure in our thoughts, characters, not human beings.

Strangely, the world refuses to act like the world of our imagination.

What happens with this refusal?  People get angry that others do not go along with their Mary Sue stories.  They feel hurt when their Mary Sues are insulted.  They become resentful that other people have the attention that should be theirs. The imagined Mary Sue is buffeted by this outside awareness, treated roughly by the events we ourselves experience.

Mary Sue is, among other things, an open wound through which the real and imagined insults and offenses of others come into people’s minds and create emotional pain and resentment.

Let’s just imagine for a moment what it would actually be like to be Mary Sue, to be able to convince anyone of anything, to triumph without effort, to have anyone one wanted.  Mary Sue, striding through the real world, commanding and compelling by force and charm. What kind of a person is that?

Hint: Do the words absolute dictator mean anything?

Mary Sue is actually worse than that.  The best a dictator can do is force someone to say they love the dictator while being abused.  Mary Sue could actually make people love her so that they would eagerly and gratefully do whatever she wanted.

And if anyone did not do so?  If anyone dared to stand up to Mary Sue?  Why, they would be the villains.  Anyone who dared to say something against her rule would be the unrighteous defilers of the true and proper order of the universe.  And anyone who dared to hurt Mary Sue, what would they not deserve in retribution?  Mary Sue could do whatever she wanted to them.  She could kill them, torture them, inflict any revenge she feels like and feel completely justified because they had committed the ultimate offense, assaulting the world’s one true hero.

Mary Sue, despite her trappings of heroism, is the ultimate villain.

And she’s in our heads.

What’s she doing there?  Seriously, why is this jerk of all jerks on everybody’s mind?

I think she’s there precisely because of the gap between the way our imaginations work and the way the real world works.  Our imaginations respond to us.  They create what we have them create. We can build phantasmagoria in our minds, imagine whole new worlds and fascinating new conceptions in art and science.  Or we can think about getting rid of annoying people and romancing unobtainable other people, or having what we want magically appear without work on our parts.

Most of us feel that the world inside our head is the right one, the one in which things work correctly, and that this annoying world outside with its gravity and other people with free will is wrong.  For a lot of us that gap between worlds creates frustration.

Frustration breeds a lot of things: Anger at the inability to make the world go as one wants it to; envy at those who seem to be more in the place of Mary Sue than we are (such as those who have more stuff, or actually are romancing the objects of our affections, or who just seem to have a better time of it); greed for the things we don’t have, but Mary Sue should be able to have because she’s Mary Sue; the same for lust and gluttony; pride in the hidden truth that we are the hero of the world; and sloth because, hey, the world should hand us things, aren’t we Mary Sue who deserves whatever she desires?

All these vices are bred because Mary Sue gets to have what she wants and we don’t.

If that sounds petty, it is.  Mary Sue is also the root of petty thinking.

The cure for this in mind is close to the cure in stories.  Remove the effortless, take away the perfection.  Stories can have heroes if they work for what they need.  Sometimes they will succeed, sometimes they won’t.  That will make them more true to life.  In life, it’s not enough to want.  One has to figure out first whether having  is good idea, then second how to get, and third whether or not getting will be a good idea.

 Those three questions can be used to turn a Mary Sue story into a decent story, and a Mary Sue-formed resentment into a morally decent plan of action in the real world.

But first one has to get rid of Mary Sue.

What is to be done with her?  What’s to be done with this self-important sulk-master Mary Sue?  What purpose can she have in a story that is not hers and in a world that will not bow down before her?

Don’t worry.  She doesn’t have to be destroyed entirely.  She can still serve a purpose.

Mary Sue is a good bad example.  Mary Sue is a clown.

Not a clown as we have them these days, an annoying scary person at a circus.  Clowns in most cultures are people whose job it is to show everyone else how not to act.  They are goofy and absurd and ridiculous and they are a warning that indulging in bad behavior won’t make one the cool, powerful bad boy/bad girl, but instead will reveal a silly self-absorbed person who can’t do any more than want and whine and tell stories about how great she is.

If that doesn’t sound funny, it doesn’t have to be.  Most villains are Mary Sues at heart.  They may claim grandeur and power, mystery and majesty, but they’re just greedy and lazy like her.

In this way, Mary Sue can still be put in stories and in our hearts, not as the hero, not as our self-images, but as the fool who fails time and again and shows the reader how not to get things done.  She can also serve as the villain who needs to be opposed by someone willing to look reality in the face, see what needs to be changed, see how it can be changed, and be willing to do the real work necessary to change it.

I decided to set up this livejournal because I realized that sometimes there are short essays I’d like to write and share with people and this looked like a good venue.  I don’t plan to blog much, but every so often there’ll be a new essay.  I’ll also occasionally make announcements (new books and so on).

Richard Garfinkle