The most important part of creating realistic societies in a fantasy world is, in my opinion, research.  You can either directly base your societies off of real world societies, or you can take bits and pieces from here and there, or you can create your own society mostly from scratch, as long as you know how a society works.  You won’t have to go into much detail on societies in many stories, but there are plenty of other stories where you will need to, and it can really show if you don’t know what you’re doing.

As far as research goes, you can learn about ancient cultures, look at modern day politics, or read books such as Machiavelli’s The Prince (which I found very helpful for understanding how people can gain and keep power).  You don’t have to do a ton of research, unless you’re writing a novel full of political intrigue or something like that, but just knowing how your society works can go a long way.

There are lots of elements to creating a realistic society, and a lot of things that you need to figure out.  Even for something as simple as a little fishing town, there will still be different classes, different roles that must be filled, and people who are in charge.

What is the class structure like in your society?  Is there a middle class, or is there a small group of elite and lots of poor?  How big is the divide between classes?  These are things that you have to figure out.  Generally, a society with a middle class and less of a divide between classes is a nicer place to live for the average person than one with lots of very poor people and a few very rich, and is considered a more ideal society.  You also need to figure out what roles the people play in a society.  In less wealthy, less advanced, and less ideal societies, a lot of people will have to be farmers.  There usually need to be some craftsmen as well, and of course there are those who are in charge and some sort of law enforcement.  In a more advanced society, there will be less farmers and general labor workers and more people like scientists, artists, and engineers.  If the society has a standing army, there will also be soldiers.

Another thing that you need to think about is how warlike your society is.  Maybe it’s a peaceful little village that’s never had to deal with more than little skirmishes.  Maybe it’s an average nation that neither actively seeks out war and conquest, nor completely avoids it.  Maybe it’s a great warlike nation that crushes its enemies beneath its heels and is feared by all its neighbors.  All of those societies would have a different military and attitude towards war.  Peaceful and pacifist societies would probably have very few, if any, trained soldiers, and may only have a few weapons aside from hunting weapons.  Some societies may ask their lower class to train in combat a bit in their very limited free time and then draft them into an army when war comes.   Very warlike societies may make it mandatory that every able citizen train as much as possible to be a fighter (Sparta would be a good example of this).  A society may or may not have a standing army, depending both on how warlike they are and how wealthy and advanced they are (the less people who have to be farmers, the more people who can be full time soldiers).

Another important thing that you need to figure out if how the government works.  Who’s in charge, and how did they come to power?  How do those who are in charge keep power?  Is it a democracy or a monarchy?  Is the society largely controlled by the people, the nobility, the rich, or the church?  Are the leaders oppressive or fair?

It can be useful to think about how the government was formed and how it was changed over time.  If the government you’re creating is a democracy, why is it that?  Is that the norm of the world?  Is it a unique and new idea?  Was it put into place after a cruel monarchy was overthrown?  If your government is a monarchy, how is the monarch chosen?  Is it the standard hereditary monarchy, or something different?  Does the monarch have absolute power, or are they more of a figurehead?  Maybe it’s neither a monarchy or a democracy, and the nation is completely run by the church or the rich, or maybe it’s something completely different.  You just need to make sure that those in charge could realistically ascend to and keep power.

There are many ways that the government could keep power.  The two main ones, as Machiavelli put it, are fear and love.  There are various ways that either or both of these can be achieved.  Love is more straightforward than fear.  If a government treats its people well, protects them from outside dangers, lets its people have some power (or believe that they have some power), and/or recently replaced a much worse government, it can likely gain at least some love from its people, which will keep them from wanting to overthrow it.  Fear can be used in many different forms.  It can be the fear of external threats in the absence of the government, the fear of the government and military itself, the fear of the change that would be caused if the government were overthrown or the fear that something worse could take its place, or many other things.  A government almost always needs one or more of those elements of either fear or love to stay in power, and if the people grow to hate the government and don’t fear it, or if that fear was suddenly stripped away, chances are they will attempt to overthrow it.

Another very important part of many societies is religion, which I haven’t covered in this post.  The next post is about religion, gods, and mythology, and I’ll cover the role religion plays in society and government in that post.

Alpha is pleased to announce that Catherynne M. Valente will teach for two days at the 2012 workshop.

Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton Award, the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award She has been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, and Spectrum Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and 2009.  She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and enormous cat.

John Joseph Adams—called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble.com—is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a two-time finalist for the Hugo Award and a three-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. He is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed Magazine, and is the co-host of The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

Alpha, the experience, continues long past when we leave the University of Pittsburgh campus. The Alpha alumni have a critique group where they edit each other’s work, talk about ideas, support each other, encourage each other to keep writing. Those connections have kept me writing and have kept improving my work in the years since I was last an Alpha student. Even beyond that, some of my closest friends, the ones I talk to the most, the ones who support me when times get rough – they’re people I met at Alpha. I was lucky, going into Alpha – I had fun, nerdy, friends who liked reading and liked learning. I know a lot of people who didn’t. But what I didn’t have was people who fundamentally got me. Even before the workshop started, talking online to the other writers, I remember this giddy feeling of disbelief – these people understand me. They’re fun and smart and they think about stories the same way I do, and even though they’re the coolest people I’ve ever met, they still think I’m worth spending time with. Staff members and authors who wrote brilliant pieces and gave brilliant lectures thought I should take my writing seriously. That was an unbelievable gift as a teenager whose freshman year English teacher had told her parents she “wasn’t really a writer, was she?”

So yes, meeting Tamora Pierce, whom I worshiped, was a dream come true, and yes, playing Ultimate Frisbee was a ton of fun and yes, I learned to write and edit and critique better than I’d ever learned before. But I also learned to take myself, and my writing, seriously, and I made friendships that have lasted me a lifetime.

Alpha tries incredibly hard to keep costs low, with an all-volunteer staff and tremendous alumni support – but there are plenty of teens who deserve the sort of life-changing summer I had, that we had. Every year we need about $3,000 for scholarships for students, and so for the past several years the alumni have been putting together donations drives trying to keep operating costs low and scholarships feasible.

This year, we’re holding an auction as part of our fundraiser, and offering an e-book anthology of stories written, collected, and illustrated by Alpha alumni. We’re auctioning off donations from Tamora Pierce, John Joseph Adams, George R. R. Martin, Ellen Kushner, Patrick Rothfuss, Theodora Goss, Karen Healey, and many other brilliant authors and editors. Those with winning bids, and anyone who donates any amount, at any time during the fundraiser, will get a copy of the anthology and, of course, our undying gratitude.

So take a look at the fabulous prizes, and bid if you like them, and think about donating just because there are teens all over the world (and we’ve had them from as far away as New Zealand) who could use something like Alpha in their lives. And based on the work I’ve seen come out of it, I think the world could use their stories, too.

Both of these approaches work, as long as they both meet the basic requirements for worldbuilding:  Your story needs to feel like it’s happening somewhere, that there’s something beyond just the central conflict of the story, and not like the characters are just walking around in a plain, grey, featureless field of blandness.  The world needs to have flavor, and it needs to feel like it could be real.  However, you also don’t want to bog down your story with too much information on the world.  You don’t want to have tons of references to that city over there that you never see and that plays no role in the story, and you don’t want to go into detail about how the complex government system works if it isn’t important to the plot.  Generally, stories are about the characters, not the world they live in.

The most important things about worldbuilding, in my opinion, are these:  Know how much worldbuilding to use in your story, as I outlined above.  Try to be at least a bit original–usually, readers aren’t going to be super thrilled about a story set in a generic fantasyland that looks like it came right out of the Dungeons and Dragons core rulebooks.  The best way to make sure your world is original and hasn’t been done to death is to read a lot.  And lastly, you want the world to feel real, like it could actually function even if it has magic or advanced technology or whatever.  One of the most important ways to make a world feel real is to think about the logical consequences of the ways your world is different from our own.

Logical consequences are what should happen when you add something strange to a world.  If you decide that everyone in your world can fly, don’t just leave it at that.  Think about what would happen if everyone could fly.  How would transportation change?  What would combat be like?  etc.  A good example of logical consequences would be the effects of the many years long seasons in A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin:  Everyone fears the coming of winter.  They have to stock up tons and tons of food in the summer to survive the winter.  Many aspects of their society are built around how to survive the long winters.  When you introduce something magical or not of this world into your world, you need to think about how it would affect the world.  I find it very annoying if I’m reading a book, and the writer comes up with some neat concept that would have interesting effects on the world, and then doesn’t even bother to figure out the logical consequences.

Research can help a ton.  I did a lot of research on economics, for example, when I decided that I wanted time to be currency in one of the novels I’m writing.  You can also ask friends and fellow writers what they think the logical consequences of something would be, as they may come up with something that you had never thought of before.

That’s just the very basics of how to worldbuild, and what to think about while worldbuilding.  In the next few posts in this series, I’ll talk more about what to actually put in your world.  Next up is governments and social structure.

A list of other Alphan publications can be found on our Publications and Awards page.

My husband Mike and I sold our debut novel this year. It’s a middle grade fantasy called Claws, and it’s the second book we wrote together. We came up with the idea together, plotted, wrote, and rewrote together. One of the most common questions we get is: What’s it like to write together? The short answer is that it’s awesome.

Mike wrote his first novel on his own, but found he hated the process of submitting, and he got discouraged quickly. I wanted to help, so I took over the querying, record-keeping, and market research. Then, when we didn’t get any interest, I got more involved with the editing and we went over the book together, line-by-line, The Eye of Argon style (meaning we read it out loud and cracked up at how awkward some parts were).

I started working with him on the editing, and he let me stomp around and do whatever I wanted with his book. He offered me co-author credit at some point, which I turned down because I didn’t feel the book was really mine. I didn’t really like the book, and it just wasn’t my thing. But we decided to start a new novel and work together from the beginning.

We had to learn to write together effectively and learn how each of us worked. Alternating chapters or scenes was too strict. Mike got impatient when I was taking too long, and I got frustrated when he took over a section that was supposed to be “mine.” Now we plot together and pass the manuscript back and forth whenever one of us is stuck or needs a break. Sometimes we also write side-by-side, usually with Mike typing and me watching and discussing. We have meetings when we’re stuck on something, which usually involves leaving the house and going somewhere less distracting, which helps us focus.

One of the best parts of working together is that we can use each other’s strengths. For a long time, Mike was better at putting a lot of words down quickly, and I was better at cleaning it up after. That’s evened out as we both learn (though Mike is still the typo king). I’m still better at the business side of things, and when we queried, I did the query letter writing and submission tracking.

The other great thing? This business can be so stressful, and it’s so cool to have someone else be a part of every step. We can mope about rejections together and celebrate success together. Neither one of us ever feels like we’re being ignored for the writing, because when things get crazy busy we’re both a part of that.

If you’re thinking about working with a writing partner, I think there are a few things to keep in mind. First, you have to trust each other completely, with both the writing and business aspects. Second, you have to let go. The book isn’t just yours (or theirs). You both have to be happy with what goes into the book, and that means you can’t justify a decision just because “it’s my book”. Sometimes that means having to drop something. Sometimes it means working that much harder on an idea in order to prove it’s worth it. In either case, the result is usually a stronger book.

You also have to thicken your skin. No more hiding drafts of the book from all eyes until it’s ready — until you’ve let the literary concrete settle, in other words! You have to let someone in when it’s still completely rough, when it’s a lot easier to change direction and try new things. That can be hard, of course, but it can save you so much time. And for every time you feel frustrated that something you were trying got critiqued as you were writing it, there are so many other times when your partner comes up with something and you realize you never would have thought of that yourself.

I actually think that more writers should try this full-trust method of writing with someone else, even just once. You’d be amazed how much you can learn, about your own writing and writing in general, by working in complete openness with someone. (But of course, I’m completely biased!)

First and foremost, applications are now open for the 2012 Alpha workshop. The deadline is March 1, so start working on your application stories!

This post, however, is mostly about the Dell Awards. Or, more precisely, the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing. The deadline is always in early January (this year, it’s January 3, to be precise), so for the past few years of my life, December hasn’t just been about gift-giving and family togetherness. It’s also been a frenzy of writing, critiquing, and last-minute edits. I wouldn’t have it any other way, of course. The process is insane, but it’s also insanely fun.

Why do I do it? The winner of the Dell Awards gets $500, and the winning story is published on the Asimov’s website. In addition, every finalist receives a free membership at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA). Held every year in March in Orlando, FL, ICFA is a literature-focused conference, which means great discussions, sightings of awesome authors, and free books. (Seriously! You go to lunch or dinner and free books are sitting at your table, waiting for you. It’s great.) Also, during the conference, every finalist has a one-on-one critique session with the editor of Asimov’s, Sheila Williams.

Last year, I received an honorable mention in the Dell Awards. Seven other Alpha alumni were also finalists. (You can see the list of 2011 finalists here, and all Alphans who have placed in the Dell Awards are listed on the Publications and Awards page.)

Because I graduated from college in May, this is the last year in which I’ll be eligible to enter the Dell Awards. The deadline is less than three weeks away, so now that I’ve hopefully convinced the undergraduates reading this post to enter the Dell Awards, I’d better get back to work.

Any questions about the Dells or ICFA? Ask away in the comments!

The ending, like every other part of a story, does several things. One, it tells the reader when to stop reading. It signals that this story is done– it is a Thing, and you have set its boundaries. Snow White’s marriage to her prince (or bear) is not part of the story. It’s a different story, perhaps, or it and the dwarves (or bears) are part of another story that is not the same story as Snow White. Everything that comes after the ending is irrelevant to this story.

This can be accomplished by ending a sentence and deciding not to write any more. You will not have written a good ending, though.

A good ending connects to the beginning of the story in some way. It establishes the final tone– hope, despair, triumph– and brings the emotions together. More than that, a good ending connects to the entire story, emotions and all, and changes it.

Come on baby, let’s do the twist….

You can connect to the story and change it by writing a twist ending, but I usually advise against that.

No, wait, I usually wave my hands and yell and stomp my feet because you can do better than a twist ending.

Twist endings work because they surprise the reader– there’s a bonus climax– and suddenly the reader views the text in a new light. Whatever you favorite twist ending is, it’s just as good to go through the story a second or third time and see all the new meanings. You can have this experience with any story, of course, but it’s easier when it all ends with a bang.

The problem with a twist ending is that if a twist ending fails, it fails big.

The most common way a twist ending fails is that the reader sees it coming. This is especially dangerous for new and young writers who simply haven’t read widely enough to know what’s been done and what’s been done to death. If your alien is pinkish and has forelimbs rather than arms, if you play the pronoun game with your protagonist, you have signaled to readers that the alien is a human and the protag is a woman.

You can ameliorate the effects of an untwisted ending by making the story work whether the reader’s surprised or not. You should have enough plot happening that it doesn’t matter what’s in your protag’s pants. Make the twist a bonus– or better yet, avoid the falling-flat gotcha! by making it a revelation instead.

I like revelations. The difference between a twist and a revelation is that a twist has an end point– you read so far and then the story tells you what’s been going on. A revelation happens on its own, and every reader will figure it out at a different time. “Waiting on Alexandre Dumas” at Strange Horizons is one of my favorite stories because of the ooooh feeling I had the first time I realized that there was another layer. The gotcha-moment is also fraught with peril. If the reader’s figured it out already, you’re wasting words trying for drama you can’t get. A revelation lets the reader pick the most dramatic moment to figure everything out.

Another way to make a twist ending work is to twist it again. This doesn’t fix everything, but it does give you a potential second set of expectations to subvert. Again, if it fails, it fails big.

Closure!

Wrapping the story up is an exercise in balance. You can’t just stop, though some stories seem to. The end should tie everything together, as I said before… but not too neatly. Especially in a short story, a little mess is good.

The challenge here is knowing how much ending you need. Some people like to know how everything turns out. Others will fill that in on their own and want more ambiguity. In general, plotty stories need more solid endings– the villain’s defeated and the victors ride into the sunset– while more character-based stories can end with almost wholly internal changes, often without resolving any of the external problems. Compare some of your favorite short stories. What happens to tell you that this is the end?

How do I stop?

Of course, Nanowrimo has taught a few basic tenets: when in doubt, keep the words coming, and do so with explosions. How do you find your ending when you’ve spent a month moving forward?

The easiest way is to start there. What kind of ending do you want? Maybe you want a mage setting out on her own after rejecting her school’s strictures– that means you have a mage, a school, a conflict between the two, et cetera. Maybe you want a young man to take control of a space station he’s not sure he can run– now you have a character and some conflict. Who did he take the station from? Why isn’t he sure he can run it? How can you lead up to that final ambiguity and uncertainty? Maybe you have a weary traveler coming home to family, waiting just outside the door and not quite able to knock– do you have a child stumble out and ask who the stranger is? Do you end with the image of footprints on the doorstep, slowly filling with snow so that in the morning, no one will know they were there? Does your character knock and wait or walk in?

These are different endings, and you can write the different stories that lead up to them. You can even start with a few characters and an emotion. If you want a story to end with sacrifice and hope, it probably won’t begin the same way as a story that ends with triumph, resolve, or a message about society.

But we don’t always write with that kind of plan in mind. When you’ve been writing to figure out what happens next, you’ve been writing to avoid the end. How do you restrain yourself from writing another scene, and another, and another?

Look at what you have. Perhaps you’ve already written too far. Could you cut a section from your story and make it stand alone? Does anything feel like an ending?

Try reading your story aloud and pausing significantly after each scene break. No, really, this can show you how final some of those breaks feel. Is one of them an ending?

If you haven’t uncovered THE END, you can look at the existing arc. If there isn’t one, you’ll have to step back and make one happen– you can plan your ending more easily. If you find an arc, congratulations, you’re halfway to THE END.

If your mage keeps butting heads with her teachers, then that’s your arc, and the end has to deal with it.
If your ambitious engineer knows exactly how to run the station, give him what he wants.
Which weary traveler ending feels right?

This kind of examination is also useful for making sure you have the right ending. Your ending should follow from the rest of the story. If it feels a little off, you may have a mismatch to fix.

It’s frustrating referring to feelings, but a good ending is, in some ways, intuitive. You learn to harness your intuition so you know what will make it feel like an ending, and that starts with studying short fiction. What are your favorite endings– or stories in general? Bring them to the comments and we can discuss how the endings make everything work.

***
A writing exercise!
This one is stolen from L Timmel Duchamp, one of my Clarion West instructors. She asked us to write three endings to each of our stories that week. Try a few different endings for one of your stories. Don’t just tack on different resolutions– see what you have to change in the story to reach a completely different emotion at the end.

So you’ve spent thirty frantic days and thirty sleep-deprived nights typing away in a word document named NaNovel 2011 (or maybe you’ve got a title already. If so, congratulations, you’re way ahead of me on that one). But now it’s December, or near enough, and you’re thinking, Now what?

Well, friend, I can at least attempt to answer that one. I’ve been participating in NaNoWriMo the last few years, and in between Novembers, I’ve been steadily working my way through my very first NaNovel, morphing it from the nigh-unintelligible goop of late nights glued to the laptop into a veritable book, readable by sane people, and maybe, some day, agents and editors.

I’m here to tell you how I have done it, and how you can do it too. I’m not saying everyone has to subscribe to these methods, but I will tell you it’s worked for me and might work for you.

DISCLAIMER: This process has happened over the course of about three years, so some of the chronology may be iffy. But the chronology isn’t important. It’s the spirit of the thing that counts.

First of all: This whole fallacy of DecemboEditMo, or whatever it is kids are calling it these days, should be disregarded at the outset. When I finished NaNovel 2008, now known as A Pound of Flesh (or more commonly the pirate ballerina story), it was pretty much the last thing I wanted to look at. So I read some Emma Bull and let my brain take a holiday in somebody else’s fantasy world (it was Territory, so the world consisted of the Earp brothers and the wild west. With magics).

At some indeterminate point, I actually wanted to revisit billionaire heiress and ballerina Bela Saji and Captain Marina’s crew of piratical miscreants. At this point, I opened the novel up, reread it, and was like, this is not actually terrible! How did that happen? As I reread it, I poked at a few things here and there. It’s surprising how many amusing typos you can make when you haven’t slept.

I let a few people read it. Parents. A boyfriend. My British neighbor, who got very drunk one night, banged on my door, and stumbled into the house declaiming about how much he liked it. This incident tipped me off: someone thought this thing was good.

It took a while, but after a few readings and some comments from trusted sources, I started in on serious rewrites. The first chapter, I heard from numerous critiquers, was pretty stinking awful and needed to be totally scrapped and redone.

So I did that. Then I moved on  and did some piddling rewrites over the summer. Then I sent it off to a reliable Alphan with good taste who read it and sent back her thoughts. And one of those thoughts, I recall, was that the first chapter was still pretty bad.

I sighed, put A Pound of Flesh into its own file, and ignored it for a long time while I worked on short fiction.

So THIS summer (2011), while I probably should have been finishing a historical fantasy piece about the Boer war, I decided to procrastinate by revisiting A Pound of Flesh, which I had been putting off because I was discouraged by the terrible first chapter.

Let me tell you something: the first chapter is IMPORTANT. So it was reasonable to work hard on it and take a long time and be kind of intimidated. But the third time was a charm, and I wish I had gotten to it sooner. So while I do advise taking a break between NaNoWriMo and EditNoWhateverMo, I don’t advise sticking your novel in a folder for two or three years and not thinking about it. I could have had this thing knocked out a long time ago!

One advantage of a break, though, was a new piece of character development that fell into my brain randomly one day and made me more confident about the character it pertained to. So I suppose there are advantages and disadvantages to putting off your editing.

Anyway, with a spanking new first chapter, I spent my summer alternating between short stories and novel editing, so I had something to do when I got bored of the other thing. I’m now halfway through rewrites (with an outline for the rest of the book), and looking at finishing up in January, while I ignore my current NaNovel (or, perhaps let it age like fine wine in an oak cask—er, folder on my desktop).

Then, of course, the rigmarole of seeking representation and being rejected, over and over again.

To sum up, for the TL;DR crowd: In November, write your novel. In December, read somebody else’s. Then sometime in the next two to three years, get that novel out and DO SOMETHING WITH IT. It’s not going to edit itself. You may even find that outside the stress of NaNoWriMo, you actually enjoy the world and characters you’ve created.

What about you? If you’re doing NaNoWriMo, what are your plans for this year’s NaNovel? Let us know in the comments!