The first and most important part of any mythology or religion you create is that it must do what all mythologies and religions attempt to do:  It must answer at least some of the big questions of life.  Why am I here?  Where did I come from?  Where did the world come from?  What comes after death?  These are questions that everyone asks, at some point or another, and in the absence of an answer, people will come up with answers of their own.  Even if, for example, in your world, even the gods don’t know what happens after death, people will still come up with answers to believe in.  It’s human nature to want to answer questions.  A religion that doesn’t at least try to answer any of those questions doesn’t make sense, and a society where people are content to sit back and make no attempt to answer those questions isn’t going to be realistic.

When creating a mythology or religion, you need to come up with answers to the big questions (a creation myth, an afterlife), you need to create the gods, and you need to figure out what roles the gods play and how they are worshiped.  It can also help to come up with a few myths and stories about the gods, if they’re going to play a major role in your story.

First off, creation myths.  You have a fair bit of freedom when it comes to creation myths, as they tend to differ quite a lot from mythology to mythology, though there are some similarities.  Generally, it involves some sort of void, and then life suddenly springing from the void.  After being born, these beings then somehow created the world and either found or created the other gods, and then life was created.

The afterlife is another major thing that you have to figure out in religion.  There will almost always be alternate afterlives depending on what you did in life.  Usually this takes the form of a judgment in the afterlife, like the traditional heaven and hell.  There are also mythologies and religions that believe that the soul is reincarnated, and I’m sure there are plenty of other, less well known ideas.

As far as the gods themselves go, one major thing that you need to keep in mind is that people worship gods that represent things that are important to them.  Death, for example, is important to all cultures, so many cultures have a god of death.  Other common themes are wisdom and knowledge, war and battle, things like the sky, earth, and sea, fertility and motherhood, love, weather, fire, and trade.  Most cultures will have gods representing one or more of these things.  Depending on the culture, different gods will be more prominent.  For example, Odin is the god of war (among other things) in Norse mythology, and he’s also the king of the gods, which indicates that war was important to the Norse culture.  Another example would be that a god of water would likely be extremely important and high ranking in a sea based or desert nation, but less so in other cultures.  If, for example, you wanted to write a sci-fi story involving gods, the gods would probably be completely different from the gods in a fantasy story.  You might have gods of spaceships and FTL, or gods of big organizations, or gods of stars, or gods of things like fusion and entropy.  It all depends on what’s important to the culture.

Another key factor in creating a pantheon of gods is figuring out what roles the gods play, relative to each other.  Some pantheons might be very structured, with a clear leader and stable, unchanging hierarchy.  Other pantheons might change constantly, as old gods die and new gods are born, and as one god usurps the rule of another.   Others might have a sort of council where everyone has equal say, and still others may have no order to them at all.  Just make sure that you understand how the gods relate to one another, and that their society makes logical sense.

You also need to figure out what relationship the gods have with mortals.  Do they regularly walk the earth, or do they stay in their own divine realm?  Do they ever speak to their high ranking priests or the leaders of the nations that worship them?  Do they care about their worshipers and help them when they can, or are they ambivalent?  Do they ever have children with mortals?  Do they choose who will rule their worshipers?  Are the gods themselves truly immortal, or are they merely ageless?  What happens when a god dies?

One last, important thing you need to figure out if gods are going to play a large role in your story is why they need worshipers.  A lot of people seem to forget this.  Why do the gods need worshipers?  Why can’t they just do everything themselves?  You need to somehow put limits on the powers of the gods.  There’s the common explanation that gods need prayer, and they get stronger the more worshipers they have, but that still doesn’t explain why the gods need worshipers to do things for them, and it’s been done a lot.  This doesn’t mean you can’t use it, but there are other ways.  Maybe the world was nearly destroyed in a divine war thousands of years ago, so the gods made a pact not to interfere with the world anymore, so they need mortals to do their bidding.  Maybe the gods are simply unable to manifest in the mortal world very well.  Maybe they’re vulnerable in the mortal world, so they don’t like to manifest there unless they really have to.  Or maybe there are no such limits, and the world is torn by divine war, and it’s all the mortals can do to try to hide and pray for their gods to protect them from the other gods.

And that’s it for the worldbuilding posts. If you have any tips of your own for creating mythologies, let us know in the comments!

A full list of Alpha graduates’ publications and awards is here.

Some of you, no doubt, are very diligent human beings who don’t know the meaning of the word “procrastinate.” You plan your weekend activities by Monday night, you eat your dinner for breakfast, and you finished your Alpha application story six weeks ago.

If that’s you, then this blog post may hold little value for you. But let’s say that you’re like, well, me. You’re a procrastinator. Perhaps you have written only a few paragraphs of your application story. Perhaps you haven’t started writing at all.

If so, then let’s face it: you’re behind the curve. But all is not lost! You still have a week until the application deadline (March 1), and many great stories — heck, even some pretty decent novels — have been written in less time than that. Still, you’ll need to pay close attention to the clock. Now is not the moment to attempt a wildly experimental rhyming epic written entirely in ancient Greek. Now is the time to play to your strengths: to write the story you know how to write, and to write it well.

Some advice from a serial procrastinator:

Aim short, but not too short. Alpha application stories can be anywhere from 2,000 to 6,000 words long — a very wide range. The short end of that spectrum is just barely longer than a short-short; the long end is just barely shorter than a novelette. Clearly, it would be far easier to write 2,000 words than 6,000 words over the next week.

That said, please don’t cheat yourself by writing so few words that you fail to tell a story at all. Having read Alpha applications for the last 10 years, I can tell you that, very often, 2,000-word application stories aren’t really stories. They’re vignettes, or they’re fragments, or they’re jokes. If you can tell a complete story in 2,000 words, then by all means, do it, but I’d rather see a 3,000 word story than a 2,000 word build-up to a bad punchline.

Lean on plot skeletons. “Plot skeletons” are very, very general outlines that are shared by literally thousands of stories. If you have a great idea but don’t yet know how to turn it into a full-fledged story, a plot skeleton can provide a useful starting point.

The most famous plot skeleton is probably the seven-point plot. This version is attributed to Algis Budrys:

(1) A character…
(2) in a context…
(3) has a problem.
(4) The character tries to solve the problem…
(5) but experiences an unexpected failure.
(6) The character tries again to solve the problem, using new knowledge or tools, and either fails or succeeds.
(7) Denouement — that is, a resolution or validation of the character’s actions.

Using the seven-point plot does not guarantee that your story will be brilliant or even readable, but it at least guarantees that you’ll tell a complete story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Here’s another of my favorite plot skeletons: the three-scene story. In the first scene, establish your character’s life. In the second scene, show an incident that totally rocks your character’s world. In the third scene, show your character’s new equilibrium.

Outline. Yes, seriously! You might feel that, with only a week until the application deadline, you don’t have time to outline. But if you just start scribbling with no sense of your destination, you’re at risk of discovering, a day before your application is due, that your story just won’t work — that you’ve overlooked a plot hole or don’t know how to resolve a climactic fight.

So I’d urge you to outline your story before you begin writing. An outline doesn’t have to be long, and it doesn’t have to be formal. It doesn’t even have to be written down. Just make sure that you know, in your bones, how your story will unspool.

My favorite outlining method: use one index card for each scene in your story. Write three bullet points on each card, describing where the scene begins, what happens, and where the scene ends. I generally assume that my average scene will contain about a thousand words, so for an Alpha application piece, you’ll want to fill up between two and six cards. (I often outline a story half a dozen times or more, essentially “rewriting” the story again and again — and hopefully improving it each time — before I ever write a first draft.)

The perfect is the enemy of the good. It simply is not possible to write a perfect story in a week. It is very possible, however, to write a good story.

So don’t try to be perfect. Sure, hold yourself to high standards. If you write a scene and it’s flat-out bad, discard it. But if you write a perfectly serviceable scene that isn’t quite as good as you’d like, just keep going. Write another scene. Then another. When you’re done, use whatever time you have left to polish. You’ll do far better to submit a finished story, even if it’s only pretty good, than to submit a half-finished “masterpiece.”

Do what works for you. If one of the “rules” above struck you as misguided, foolish, or just not in keeping with your personal style, ignore it. If plot skeletons feel to you like plot straightjackets, don’t use them. If you simply can’t outline your story, don’t. Please consider this post, like every other bit of writing advice you’ll ever receive, to be a helpful hint, not a strict commandment. Just do what works for you, and keep doing it until you reach “the end.”

5. You don’t think you’re a good writer.

Maybe it’s because, when you read your favorite books, you wonder how you could ever possibly create something so magical and amazing. Maybe a teacher remarked to your parents, “Well, she isn’t really a writer, is she?” (That actually happened to one of my fellow Alpha graduates! She went on to attend Alpha and then place multiple times in the prestigious Dell Magazines Award.) Maybe someone else said something unkind. Whatever the reason, you doubt your ability as a writer.

Here’s the thing about writing ability: it changes. Right now, you are not the writer you will be next year, or in five years, or in ten. And even now, you may well be a better writer than you think you are. So, “am I a good writer?” is the wrong question to ask. Ask yourself, “Do I love to write?” If the answer is yes, then Alpha might be for you.

4. You don’t think you’re good at writing short stories.

Before my first Alpha in 2006, I concentrated on writing novels… well, one novel. Truth be told, I still prefer working in a longer format. But applying to Alpha, writing stories as part of going through the workshop, and later writing even more short stories in order to enter the Dells (which I would never have heard about if not for Alpha) turned out to be invaluable in helping me grow as a writer. Writing short means honing your ideas until they’re razor-sharp. It means making every word count. (At my first Alpha, guest author Theodora Goss told us that every sentence in a story should be doing at least two things.) And especially when you’re just starting out, it means trying new genres, new kinds of characters, and new ideas. You don’t have to write a perfect short story to be accepted into the workshop, so give it your best shot, and use it as a learning experience.

3. You live too far away from Pittsburgh, PA.

Students have come to Alpha from all over the United States. Others have come from the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand. You don’t have to live nearby in order to come to the workshop and have a great time. Granted, flights can be expensive, which brings me to my next point…

2. You can’t afford the cost.

This is a big one. As you probably noticed, tuition is $995, and that doesn’t include the cost of transportation to and from Pittsburgh or a hotel at Confluence. (Confluence is the weekend-long science fiction convention that happens at the end of Alpha. It’s not required that you go, but I definitely recommend it!) The staff has kept tuition as low as possible over the years, but for many students, it’s still a bit much.

However, that doesn’t have to be the end of the story. A limited amount of scholarship funding is available for students who need financial assistance in order to attend the workshop. If you ask for a scholarship on your application form, it won’t have any effect on your chances of getting in… the judges reading the application stories won’t know who asked for a scholarship and who didn’t.

1. Your parents will never go for it.

I know this feeling very well. My parents weren’t enthusiastic about putting me on a plane to spend ten days with people they had never met. But in the end, they did agree to let me come to Alpha, and I am so happy that they did. So, if your parents are dubious, invite them to read through the Alpha website (including the For Parents page), and let them know that they can always contact the staff with any questions or concerns they may have. (That being said, if your parents give you the green light and you do end up coming to Alpha… don’t forget to call home. Trust me on this.)

Any other questions about Alpha? Ask away in the comments, and if I don’t know the answer, I’ll find someone who does. Good luck to everyone applying!

I’ve listed all the stories below; Alphans’ names are bolded.

Winner: “Superposition” by Rebekah Baldridge, Newman University

First Runner-up: “Halcyon Days” by Madeline Stevens, Bennington College

Second Runner-up: “The Taste of Salt” by Rachel Halpern, Grinnell College

Third Runner-up (tie): “The Writ of Years” by Brit Mandelo, University of Louisville
“Opus No. 4: Duet for Expressionism and Absinthe” by Anthony Powers, Wright State University
“The Case of the Smitten Magician” by Lara Donnelly, Wright State University

Honorable Mentions:
“Ilse, Who Saw Clearly” by E. Lily Yu, Princeton University
“The Sister Kite” by Rebecca McNulty, College of New Jersey

All of us at the workshop would like to give a huge congratulations to this year’s winners, and especially to the Alpha alumni who did so well.

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.