Writing Skill: Magic Power Backfires

Magic is a joyous aspect of fantasy, but without limits, magic will scupper your plot or leave giant plot loopholes. Some ways of restricting magic are that it’s…

• addictive
• drains the person using it
• creates an imbalance
• built-in limits of the aid (eg potions)
• dangerous for the world or the user
• comes at a cost
• the resources to make it are limited

Having the magical power backfire, though, creates a lovely new dimension to it, following law of unintended consequences. This Writing Skill gives you a lighthearted way to play with it, to explore the story possibilities it opens up. I suggest you spend 10–20 minutes on it, whichever suits. Grab your notebook, pen, and a cuppa, and curl up somewhere comfy.

If you’re using this Skill as your starting point

What superpower or magical power have you always really wanted? (For me, that's breathing underwater or flying.) You're going to give someone that magic power – and then explore all the ways it backfires and all the problems it creates.

If you’re using your own story with magic in it

Pick any magic that appears in your story.

Once you've got your magic

That power might seem like such a wonderful thing to have, but it's going to backfire, in all sorts of unexpected ways. For the user, for those around them, in other ways... 

I suggest you do this as a freewriting exercise, to explore all the ways it goes wrong. Freewriting means writing continuously and completely non-judgementally, without caring about good / bad ideas, grammar, non-sequiturs. Write anything that comes into your head; just keep writing. Follow it and see where it goes. You’re creating raw material, like weaving cloth which you can later cut up and sew together.

That freewriting might include talking out loud to yourself on paper, writing snippets of dialogue or description, summarising events, dipping into storytelling whatever comes out of your pen.

Allow yourself to discover, and have fun!

The skills you're developing

Freewriting: Freewriting is a wonderful way to create raw material, to develop and explore ideas you might otherwise cut back earlier, and to discover voices and subject matter you would never have consciously planned. It could turn into any of the different kinds of writing. Equally valid and valuable, it could simply be the beautiful art of forming sentences on paper, or an exercise in writing more freely – a freedom you can carry into your other writing.

Constraining magic: As I said at the start, we always need to constrain magic, in fantasy, so it doesn't ruin the plot. Using the magic's own inherent properties is an especially satisfying and uncontrived way to do that.

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Writing Skill: Soundscape Sliders

My two favourite soundscape sites for writing, MyNoise and Ambient Mixer, both create soundscapes of different places and situations by mixing a bundle of different sounds. Each sound has its own slider, and the listener can play with the sliders to adjust it. For instance, MyNoise's "Medieval Village" has ten sliders: Watermill, Pastoral (birdsong and brook), Rejoicing bells, Fire bell, Trotting horse, Carriages, Market, Animals, Blacksmith, and Fanfare. Ambient Mixer's "Victorian London" has eight: Colombia Road Flower Market, Horse Whinny, Church Bells, Pre Thunderstorm, Steam Train, Rain on Umbrella, Rain on Cement, and Carriages at Night.

This Writing Skill uses that idea for a lovely exploration of sounds in your writing. I suggest you spend 10–20 minutes on it, whichever suits. Grab your notebook, pen, and a cuppa, curl up somewhere comfy, and have fun!

If you’re using this Skill as your starting point

Pick a genre you like, any genre: cosy detective fiction, romantasy, Gothic, historical, space opera, near-future science fiction, epic fantasy, mythology, paranormal fantasy, dystopia, alternate history, folklore, steampunk, urban paranormal, or anything else you fancy.

Each of the genres in that list will create its own sense of place and the sounds you might expect. For example, if you choose mythology and go for Viking mythology, then your sense of place might be on a longboat or a coastal village in Scandinavia. If you choose folklore, you're likely looking at an old-fashioned rural village or farm. If you choose cosy detective fiction, that's likely to be an English village (but it could also be a Caribbean island). If you choose steampunk, that's definitely Victorian era, but it doesn't have to be London; it could be anywhere you choose. If you choose urban paranormal, then what urban spot are you picking: Oxford? Cheltenham? Croyden? So pick your genre and let that dictate what kind of place you're imagining.

If you’re using your own story

Use the main setting in that. If your characters move around a lot, pick the area you'll be using the most, or one that you want to imagine in more detail.

Once you have your place

You're going to plan a soundscape for it, featuring ten sliders. What key ten sounds would you pick out to create the complete atmosphere of being there? Brainstorm all the possible sounds you could include. If you want more ideas, spend 5 mins or so browsing MyNoise or Ambient-Mixer. (If you've come on any of the courses recently, I'll have sent you soundscapes each week, to look back at.) Save the rest of your time for inventing your own soundscape, though.

Already, that will have given you a much more heightened awareness of sounds, to include in your writing. If you want to play with it more, I have two suggestions:

• Actually make your soundscape in Ambient Mixer! Here's the details on how. It's limited to eight channels, so you'll need to pick your top eight out of your ten. If you make one, do share it in the comments. Massive bonus here if you have an ongoing project: you can enter the sound of your world, using your own soundscape, any time you're writing. It's a time-consuming adventure, mind, so only choose this option if you're looking to fritter away several hours!
  
• Write a sound description of your place: a good ten minutes' or so writing, so you really stretch your writing legs with it, giving us everything in terms of the sounds it makes and exploring your sound vocabulary.

Have fun!

The skills you're developing

Part of the joy of stories, for both readers and writers, is imagining ourselves into different places and times. That's especially true of the genres I listed: the sense of place is central to the story. That full-body immersion works best when you give readers all the details their bodies need: not just the sights, but the sounds, smells, tastes, and sensations. It's easy to forget the non-visual senses when we're writing, though. With sounds, we're often pleased if we can muster up one or two to mention. Soundscapes are a wonderful way to remind ourselves just how rich and varied the landscape of sound actually is and how many different things we're hearing at any one time.

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Want more Writing Skills? As a member of The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get a new Writing Skill every week: quick fun activities to develop your writing across plot, character, description, style, genres, and poems.

Plus you'll get expert advice on tap, a friendly supportive writing community, and help sending your writing out.

Find out more and join here.  

Writing Skill: The Market

Markets and their ilk are a lovely moment in writing: a rich opportunity for description and world-building, filled with sensory potential. The only hitch is that as you cheerfully launch your character into this wealth of stuff, you suddenly have to invent all the stuff! Your writing flow suddenly grinds to a halt as you start googling "types of fish" or "ornamental stuff" or "tropical fruit"... Enter Reverse Dictionary.

Reverse Dictionary gives you words that use a word or phrase in their definition. For example, if you look up "ornamental", you won't get synonyms (decorative, showy, etc) but a list of ornamental things: lampshades, figurines, beading, doilies, etc. It also works well with phrases, eg "tropical fruit" brings up heaps of names of tropical fruit. If you struggle to get the exact slew of results you're after, think of one example of what you want (eg "figurine") and put that into an actual dictionary, eg dictionary.com. Look at the definition for a key word, then plug that into the Reverse Dictionary.

This Writing Skill gives you a lovely way to play with this, and hugely enrich your writing. I suggest you spend 10–20 minutes on it, whichever suits. Grab your notebook, pen, and a cuppa, curl up somewhere comfy, and have fun!

• If you’re using this Skill as your starting point, pick any time or place setting you like – historical, contemporary, your country, another country, somewhere completely imaginary, whatever appeals.
• If you’re using your own story, use your own time and place setting, or your own imaginary world.

Spend a few minutes brainstorming the categories of things they'll sell there. For my imaginary world, that's fish, fruit and veg, fowl, spices, and assorted snacks. For a realist story in my home town, I'd also have clothes stalls, knickknacks, second-hand books, and so forth.

Next, spend the rest of the time using Reverse Dictionary to look up types of that thing, and jotting down the examples which catch your eye.

That's it! A brief but thorough trial-run of the Reverse Dictionary, and a much expanded sense of a story's world. To take it further, launch into some writing: have a character enter the market and encounter all these stalls and things, including as many senses as you can.

The skills you're developing

Specificity: Moving from generalities and categories (eg ornaments) to specific detail creates a much richer sense of your story: the details are what bring it alive for the reader.

Sensory description: Markets are inherently multisensory: visually busy, noisy, and an opportunity to include tastes and smells, which are often harder to weave in. This makes the story far more immersive to read.

World-building: Markets are a fantastic chance to showcase your story's world in all its richness and idiosyncrasy, especially if it's a world your readers are unfamiliar with: a foreign country; a historical setting; an imaginary fantasy or science-fiction world. Spending time delving into everything it contains will also enrich your world beyond the market square: next time someone's munching on street-food, buying another character a present, or preparing dinner, you have a much wider repertoire to draw on.

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Want more Writing Skills? As a member of The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get a new Writing Skill every week: quick fun activities to develop your writing across plot, character, description, style, genres, and poems.

Plus you'll get expert advice on tap, a friendly supportive writing community, and help sending your writing out.

Find out more and join here.  

Virtual FantasyCon 2014: SFF and Politics

There is nothing more glorious than to defeat your enemy by transparent democratic process, and hear the lamentation of the other sides’ whips. Can SFF make political process dramatic and heroic, or will it always come down scheming viziers and noble warriors?
Lizzie Barrett (m), Jaine Fenn, Foz Meadows, Catherine Hill, Adrian Tchaikovsky [with interjections and digressions from Megan]

Virtual FantasyCon 2014: Your fantasy world's economy ~ a rich seam to tap

But Does It Make Sense?
Economics of fantasy systems. If Smaug holds all the gold and it gets liberated, what does that do to the economy?
Leila Abu el Hawa (m), Kari Sperring, Kate Elliott, Tom Pollock, Anne Lyle

Building your world: Virtual WFC 2013

Where does your world-building start? Which bits are your geek-fest and which do you gloss over with smoke and mirrors? And what kinds of cultural assumptions do you trail unwittingly behind you? Patrick Rothfuss, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Robin Hobb, Hal Duncan, and Ellen Kushner (moderator) discuss.