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DOING THE RESEARCH

9/15/2019

When you confess to new acquaintances that you write books, they often don’t know what to say, other than “Oh, how nice. What kind?” When you admit that you write speculative fiction, you get a range of reactions, from pitying condescension to confused, blank looks.

Occasionally people laugh and tell me how easy it must be since I can make any old thing up and it will fly
.
Nothing could be further from the truth.

Readers ALWAYS know when you have gone off the track and into the shrubs. World building must combine enough realism with the created world to make the fantasy plausible.

It involves research.

I spend hundreds of hours researching the most trivial details for every book I write. If I get it wrong, it’s because I failed to look in the right place.

In the process of writing numerous short stories, four medieval alternate-world fantasy novels, and six RPG game-based fantasy novels, I’ve done as much investigation into medieval times as many scholars. I know how people dressed, what they ate, how they earned a living, how they preserved food and every intimate detail of their lives that is researchable.

I know all of this because I read scientific papers written by experts on the subject, all of which are available to us via the internet. My files are full of the fruits of other people’s efforts, with the sources documented and the authors credited. By documenting my sources, I know where to go to find out more if I need to.

Keeping a list of links to websites that pertain to a particular novel is critical. Murphy’s Law is in full force here: if you didn’t write down the links and the authors, you will surely need the information again and won’t be able to find it.

Readers are smart. If something is impossible, and you don’t somehow make it probable, you will lose your readers.

The best way to make the impossible into something probable is to mix your fantasy with a good dose of real history. Be historically accurate as often as you can, so that when your blacksmith makes a weapon, readers who know about smithing will not be jarred out of the story by inaccuracy.

Most of the time, these things you spend untold hours researching will only get one line in your narrative, but if that line is inaccurate or impossible, your readers will know you were too lazy to do it right.

The following is a short list of go-to websites for in-depth, accurate information for when I am writing, including grammar questions. They are self-explanatory and are easy to make use of. Submit your questions via the handy query box. Figuring out how to phrase your question to get the answer you need to know may take several tries. Be persistent and as specific as possible, and you will soon have answers.

Medieval Histories http://www.medievalhistories.com

Academia http://www.academia.edu/

NASA https://www.nasa.gov/

Physics http://www.physics.org/

Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/

Grammarist http://grammarist.com/

These websites are just the beginning. Look at the many different sites that come up when you google a query and make a note in a log of each site that works for you.

I suggest you don’t simply bookmark these things. When your computer dies, you lose your bookmarks, even if you have saved all your work to the cloud (Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc.).

Don’t lose all those hours of research. Create a logbook (using word, excel, google docs, etc.) and save in a file to the cloud. Label it with a clear and simple name, such as Links_for_Research.

I’ve learned a lot from reading the great literature of ages past. If you really want to know how people thought during Medieval times, read a modern translation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. People were bawdy, irreverent, and loved nothing more than a good joke.

Much like we are today.

If you are writing a story set in an alternate world environment, you may need to know what sort of clothing common people wore in medieval times.

Or you might want to know what their home looked like, or a village.

For that, I suggest you seek out the art of the Flemish Painters.

When you go to the great art, you will see what men and women looked like and how they dressed, both for celebrations, and for working.

You will see what their towns looked like, and the public places they gathered in. The interiors of their homes are also found in the works of the great Flemish painters.

Any time you want an idea of average village life in the Late Middle Ages through the 17th century, you need to look no further than Wikimedia Commons. There, under the heading Category: Painters from the Northern Netherlands (before 1830) you will find the brilliant works of the Dutch Masters. These were artists living in what is now The Netherlands, and who were creating accurate records of the everyday life of the common people, along with stylized religious images.

They painted their subjects with a heavy dose of religious allegory, but that was a part of village life—both the Inquisition and the Reformation were under way, and the politics of religion was in the very air they breathed. If you are going to write medieval fantasy, you must understand how strong the influence of the Church was and how entangled it was in politics. You must show how even a fantasy religion and its politics affect the common person's life.

I adore Rembrandt and the painters who lived and worked during his era. I love the work of one family of early Dutch painters from Flanders, the Brueghel Family. Five generations of their family were well-known painters and printmakers.

The internet is your friend. Researching your novel can be incredibly entertaining. Research is what slows me down more than anything.

I spend far too many happy hours on Wikimedia Commons, looking at 16th-century Netherlandish paintings, so much so that I now also regularly write an art history blog. I love to share the beautiful art I have discovered on my writing journey. Since I already had the public stage in the form of my author’s website, it seemed a natural thing to share my secret passion for art and the people who make it.

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Credits and Attributions:

Connie J. Jasperson is a published poet and the author of ten novels. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies. A founding member of Myrddin Publishing Group, she can be found blogging regularly on both the craft of writing and art history at Life in the Realm of Fantasy.

This article was first published on August 23, 2017 on Life in the Realm of Fantasy as Do the Research © 2017 Connie J. Jasperson https://conniejjasperson.com/2019/03/25/gaining-strength-through-rejection-amwriting/ and has been reprinted by permission.

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TRICKS AND TIPS FOR WRITING SHORT STORIES

9/1/2019

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Authors soon learn that there is an art to keeping a story short. Contests and anthologies usually have strict wordcount requirements, and if we want our piece to be considered, we must ensure it follows the stated rules.

What are the requirements of the contest or publication you are considering submitting a piece to? If you have no specific contest in mind, 2000 to 4000 is a good length that will fit into most submission guidelines.

For this exercise, we will plot and write a story of only 2000 words in length.

Writing a story that short can be a problem for those of us used to writing novels. You know what the story is, but after a short while of writing, you find you have gone way beyond 2,000 words. Mapping your story in advance gives you a framework to go by and helps limit unneeded growth.

We have to look at this as if it were the action scene for a longer story. The example I am using is from a fantasy short story I wrote for a contest in 2015, titled, A Song Gone Wrong.

In every story, you must choose your words with care, but the shorter the story, the more important word choice becomes. We choose words that convey power. In English, words that begin with hard consonants sound tougher and therefore carry more power.

Verbs are power words. Fluff-words and obscure words used too freely are kryptonite, sapping the strength from our prose. Placement of verbs in the sentence is critical.

Moving the verbs to the beginning of the sentence makes it stronger.
Nouns followed by verbs make active prose.
1. I ran toward danger, never away.

Short stories are just like novels, in that they have an arc, and you can make it work for you. By looking at it from the perspective of the story arc, you can see what you have to accomplish, and how many words you have to accomplish it in.

Every word in this exercise is critical and has a specific task—that of advancing the plot. To that end:

No subplots are introduced.
Minimal background is introduced.
The number of characters must be limited to 2 or 3 at most.
Every sentence must propel the story to the conclusion.

The story: Our protagonist was a bit too specific when putting a local warlord's fling with another man's wife into a song. He is now a wanted man. Divide the story into four acts:

Act 1: the beginning: We have 500 words to show the setting, the protagonist, and the opening situation. This is only a few paragraphs!

Setting: a village near a crossroads.
The weather is unseasonably cold.
In an alley, a bard, Sebastian, is hiding.
Soldiers of the lord he has inadvertently humiliated comb the area, looking for him.

Act 2: First plot point: We have 500 words to show the inciting incident.

The soldiers surround and capture Sebastian.
He is hauled before the angry lord.
He is thrown into prison, sentenced to hang at dawn.

Act 3.: Mid-point: We have 500 Words to show the dire condition.

Sebastian meets a dwarf, Noli, also sentenced to die.
Noli is on the verge of managing an escape but needs help with one last thing.
Noli and Sebastian manage to complete the escape route.
The guard seems suspicious, hanging around their cell door, hampering their escape.

Act 4: Resolution: We have 500 words to show how things work out.

The smart guard finally is relieved by a less vigilant guard.
This allows Sebastian and Noli to squeeze through the escape route.
They are spotted at the last minute, but Noli's friends are waiting.
They are whisked to a dwarf safe-house, leading to Sebastian's next short story adventure

Take a moment to analyze and plan what needs to be said by what point in the story arc, and in how many words. Once you have the map, you can get to the nitty-gritty of turning that far-fetched tale of woe into a good short story.

In order to have your work comply with wordcount rules and limitations, you must phrase your prose carefully. Use descriptive, dramatic, powerful words to convey what you want to say concisely in one or two sentences.

Pacing is critical. You must choreograph the rise and fall of the action, drama, and transition; the ebb and flow of conversations.

All scenes have a mini arc to them: rising action, climax, reaction.
These arcs of action and reaction begin at transition point A and end at transition point B.
Each scene will end at a higher point of the overall story arc.
Each scene must blend so smoothly to the one that follows that the reader doesn’t notice the transition.

On-screen conversations are what conveys the personalities and the minimal backstory of the piece. Word space is extremely limited, so only new information can be discussed. The main character can't give anyone a recap of his troubles in the reader’s hearing—all that will have to be done off-stage. Distribute your exposition in small portions, delivered only when the reader and main character must know it.

After a few times of creating short stories this way, you won't need to think about it. When you know the length a given tale has to be, you can mentally divide it into acts and just write for fun.

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Connie J. Jasperson is a published poet and the author of nine novels. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies. A founding member of Myrddin Publishing Group, she can be found blogging regularly on both the craft of writing and art history at Life in the Realm of Fantasy.

Credits and Attributions:
Portions of this post were taken from Crafting the Very Short Story, by Connie J. Jasperson, © 2018, published 3 January 2018 for Life in the Realm of Fantasy.

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DOING THE RESEARCH

TRICKS AND TIPS FOR WRITING SHORT STORIES

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