Filling the Creative Well with Writing Communities

Writing communities tend to proliferate like rabbits. You think you don’t have any, then you turn around and you have six. I’m not any different. I thought I was out here all on my own until I began counting things up and yes, I have writing communities. A lot of them. They fall into a few categories:

•  Organizations
•  Publisher
•  Educational
•  Committed

Organizations are professional groups like RWA, SFWA, local chapters, and any other regional writing groups we might be members of. Pre-pandemic, these communities functioned both in-person and online. Now, they’re mostly online with a few tentative in-person events starting. The power of professional organizations is in the numbers – a wide range of knowledge and experience is available. The disadvantage of professional organizations is in the numbers – that wide range of points of view can and does stir drama. Regional or focused-interest groups (thriller, mystery or PNR groups) are a good energizer because you’re in a community of writers who understand your genre and presumably your interests. It creates synergy. Local chapters are the smallest of the professional organizations but that often translates into more frequent in-person interactions and more detailed sharing around your specific writing needs because you know the smaller group and they know you.

I derive energy from professional orgs because I never feel quite so valid as a writer as when I’m soaking up business advice from people who’ve already been where I am.

Publisher/publishing house – Many publishers have started author communities as a means of leveraging cross-marketing. These communities work under the premise that a rising tide lifts all boats. Occasionally, a publisher takes community to the next level and does a conference in an exotic location and then the virtual turns into an in-person excursion to Ireland. It’s a chance to put faces to the names you routinely see asking for newsletter spots and retweets.

I derive energy from my publishing community because my publisher is run by a committed group of people who really do give a darn about everyone who writes for them and who are passionate about the business.

Educational communities/co-ops/etc – Writing classes tend to engender community, if only for the length of the class. Don’t underestimate those class-length connections, though. Critique partners are often found through classes. Author co-ops are longer term associations focused on promotional/educational synergy. These communities fill my ‘always learning’ well. They are currently all virtual and online.

I derive energy from education and learning. Almost always. There are exceptions and in those exceptional cases, I’ve learned to walk away and go find a different class.

Committed communities – These are the long-term relationships we build with other writers. Critique groups. Our personal author circles. For me these are the communities that cross over the line between ‘writer community’ to friends. Well, okay. Friends who also write and who can dispense writing advice from time to time. These are the people who can, and do, apply a much-needed swift kick when the situation calls for it.  They bolster confidence and make suggestions for fixing that scene the mean old editor hated. Almost all my communities are virtual, including this one. I had in-person, then I moved across a continent. Critique still happens once a week, it’s just on Zoom. At the end of the month, I’ll have a quick, in-person visit when I take a short road trip. And I’ll get all kinds of energy from that.

Release Day: Fantast Romance Anthology ONCE UPON A FORBIDDEN DESIRE

We're super excited to announce our Saturday FaRoFeb bloggers' new anthology of fairy tales retold with steam and sizzle. This limited edition release includes a foreword by our own award-winning Wednesday blogger Jeffe. Get it now while it's a mere $0.99!

Once Upon a Forbidden Desire

When it comes to true love, rules are meant to be broken …

Dark forests and locked doors, poisoned apples and forbidden lovers ... Bold heroines and swoon-worthy heroes break all the rules in this enchanting anthology of the fairy tales you thought you knew.

Once Upon A Forbidden Desire features 20 enticing fairy tale retellings by a diverse selection of fantasy romance authors. From sweet true love’s kisses to sizzling passion, from the streets of Seattle to enchanted forests, and from poor scullery maids to a winged Prince Charming ...

If you enjoy spellbinding romance, enthralling new worlds, and stories with a taste of the forbidden, these happily ever afters will leave you spellbound. Give in to the temptation and grab your copy of Once Upon a Forbidden Desire now.

With a foreword by Grace Draven and Jeffe Kennedy, this limited edition anthology celebrates the variety of the fantasy romance genre. It contains stories ranging from sweet to steamy and is recommended for an adult audience.

BUY IT NOW: Amazon

Top 5 Worldbuilding Tips

 

Worldbuilding has the power to captivate a reader. To transport them from their everyday life to somewhere surprising and unique. It’s why I love reading and writing fantasy, because the worlds are rich, enticing, and dramatic, intriguing, brutal, and romantic. And for me, when it comes to worldbuilding, it’s both the big picture and the little details that count. 

Here are five worldbuilding tips I’ve picked up along the way:

1. Take inspiration from everywhere, everything, and everyone. Absolutely, read in your genre, that’s a given, but also watch and listen to media outside your usual sphere of influence. Podcasts, documentaries, history programs, mythology, fairy tales, the news … be a sponge, and seek out things that will force you to see the world from a different perspective. Check out science YouTube (or in my case, find someone else who has, and pick their brain!), watch people you do and don’t know, and notice what drives them and how they interact. Anything can spark an idea to enrich your world, from quantum computing, to crypto currencies, to the social hierarchies of indigenous tribes in the Amazon. Walk, watch films, look out the window on car journeys, listen to music, and don’t forget to write things down!
2. In Lean Management, there’s a concept call The Five Whys, and it works well for worldbuilding too. The basic method is to ask why five times, and within five whys, you’ve probably got to the root cause of why something is the way it is. Why does your world trade in the way it does? Why do they use certain materials? Why are the roads paved with gold? If you don't know why (at least roughly speaking), you might have holes in your world, or it might even be blocking you. You don't need to have EVERYTHING mapped out, but you do need to know the bones of how things work and play together: politics, infrastructure, magic, religion, education, employment, the economy, healthcare … you get the drift.
3. I had an amazing sociology teacher who told my class that the quest for power, wealth, and status drives a huge amount of human behavior (along with reproduction, of course). Think about how people get each of these things in your world. Is there something unique about how power, wealth, or status is derived? Who has these things now, and how do they pass from one person to another? Understanding that will help with character motivations too (especially for the bad guys).
4. Pay attention to the details, and remember consistency is key. Keep a wiki or spreadsheet to help you keep track (or a big piece of paper with all the important information. If low tech works best for you, it works best for you). Draw diagrams and maps, and experiment with what helps you most, along with what best sparks your creativity. To make sure the details work across your world, ask yourself questions from the perspective of all. You might be writing about the nobles, but does it make sense for a peasant, or a merchant, or a teacher, or a medic? Or better yet, have someone else ask you. Conversations often flush out holes.
5. Be playful, explore, be curious, and be open to “failure”. Worldbuilding should be fun, and nobody can limit your imagination. If you find yourself down a rabbit hole that doesn’t pan out, so what? You probably had a wild time exploring in your mind. Not every idea has to yield fruit, but push yourself to go further, think bigger, and be bolder, knowing that some ideas will “fail”. That’s fine. It’s part of the process. And a failure might spark an even better idea. But keep going, for a lush, alluring world will be your reward.

HR Moore writes escapist fantasy with dangerous politics and swoon-worthy romance. She’s known for pacy writing, plot twists, and heroines who take no prisoners. HR also started FaRoFeb (Fantasy Romance February), a community for readers and authors to elevate and celebrate the fantasy romance genre. 

You can connect with HR Moore (and get a free story) here: https://linktr.ee/hrmoore

Everything Happens for a Reason

World Building Tips

1. Be anti-monolith: One of the great disservices modern science fiction has done is convince some of us that worlds out there in the greater galaxy are monoliths. An ice world. A desert world. A water world. Reality is demonstrably different - and not simply because Earth has wild variation in climactic zones. Each of the worlds in the solar system demonstrate the same thing. Sure. Mars is red and dusty everywhere. But there's ice at the poles. The equator is warm. Relatively speaking. Even Mercury has wild temperature swings, from 800 degrees on the day side to -290 degrees on the night side. Of course, we can't talk about ecosystems per se, not on Mercury, but we could on Mars. If, someday, humans colonized Mars and began planting crops and trees and otherwise terraforming the Red Planet, there would be climactic zones. Plants would have to adapt or be engineered for different conditions. It's the long way of saying that while we can speak of Europa being a monolith (an ice and water moon) it's likely that most worlds are a combination of many climate types with unique and disparate ecosystems based on an evolutionary history distinct from Earth's.

2. Cultures develop in concert with the evolution of a species: Human culture developed concurrently as humans developed. As an example, caring for the dead is used as a hallmark of culture and is usually attributed to the Neanderthal about 130 thousand years ago. Recently, the discovery of Homo naledi in South Africa pushed the evidence for deliberate burial back to about 225 thousand years ago. The point being that sentient creatures being organizing into societies far earlier than most of us imagine. If a culture in your world does a particular thing, it's likely they've doing the thing far longer than you or your main characters think. It's a great point of conflict if an outsider comes in trying to change some long-held cultural activity. It's an even stronger conflict for someone within the culture to challenge long-standing tradition.

3. Culture often develops in the direction of evolution: This specifically means that when a culture adopts a practice, it is because the practice confers either sexual advantage or survival advantage. Bonus if it's both. If someone within my made up culture takes up regular bathing, they're might gain reproductive advantage because they don't smell or because keeping clean prevents infection giving them more chances to reproduce over time. Another long way of saying that in world building, everything needs to happen for a reason.

Even though the book has been out for several years, I will always recommend Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies-ebook/dp/B06X1CT33R) . It is the how-to book on world building because it breaks down the how earth societies and cultures developed. Why some cultures seemed to conquer the world, while other cultures sank into oblivion or where wiped out. It a very handy book in helping prompt world builders to consider how illness, domesticating animals, and developing agriculture changed the shape of humans and of human culture and at what price.

Maybe that's the final piece of world building advice: Everything has a price tag. Magic. Culture. Disrupting culture. Art. Religion. You get to decide what the price tag if for each of those. Even if you're creating your own world from scratch, the laws of physics still apply. The law of conservation of energy suggests that for every expenditure of energy for something like magic, there's an equal and opposite reaction somewhere else. You get to decide what and where.

World Building...Don'ts

Oh man, my fellow SFF Seveners have had some excellent posts sharing their Top 5 World-Building Tips. How do I add to that??

#1: Should I craft a brand new language, a-la-Tolkien? It could be a spin off of dwarvish with a little Orc thrown in and I could put together an entire dictionary with phonetics…Wait….

#2: Maybe I’ll start with a Venn diagram of all the different types of magic in my book’s world. Similarities, differences, strengths, weaknesses, uses, taboos—which leads to a spreadsheet of who uses what and where and how along with character specific phrases and quirks that occur when they use magic. Maybe there should be colors involved, or at least a color coordinated spreadsheet, that will help when I compare my magic system to some of the classics out there…but…

#3: The classics all have history! I need to world-build with extensive history!! My characters will be able to trace their ancestry back hundreds of years. Classics always hide a spy or assassin in the ancestry, someone way-back-when that changed the tide of a monarchy—in that case I need all the details on how that monarchy was built and run, foils and successes, heroes and villains…

#4: Villain names, as well as the heroes, should have meaning that is reflected in the plot line of the story. Which means research time! There are oodles of Pinterest boards to get you in the perfect villain mood. And you like that one blue cape that has a slight silver sheen to it? Well, it’s your lucky day because there’s a shop in California that makes them and, what, there’s this Insta account that has gorgeous pictures of costumes in jaw dropping places…

#5: MAPS! How will the characters know where to go if there’s no map! There will be a current time map which connects to all the maps of the adjoining countries and all of those maps will have ancient maps because what hero doesn’t stumble upon a near-disintegrating map and have to make a calculated guess as to their current time translation….

Yeah….let’s just say Jeffe had it right when she said your book is the tip of an iceberg, not the entire iceberg. If you put the time and effort into writing the entire iceberg on paper(screen) you’ll log countless hours…and then you’ll still have to write the story. 

Don’t get bogged down, my friends! Happy Writing!

Jeffe's Top Five Worldbuilding Tips

SHADOW WIZARD coming September 29, 2022! Preorder now!!

     

This week at the SFF Seven, we're sharing our top five worldbuilding tips. Since I just returned from WorldCon in Chicago, where I gave a workshop on worldbuilding from a character-driven perspective, I'm going to cheat ever so slightly and pull from that.

1. All stories require worldbuilding

Even a story set in our contemporary world, written as realistically as possible, still requires worldbuilding because it's impossible to to replicate the complexity of our world. You will always be picking and choosing relevant details. Choose wisely. (And see Tip #5.)

2. Don't allow worldbuilding to be displacement activity for writing the actual story

Worldbuilding is fun! Writing is hard. It's easy to spend tons of time on research and worldbuilding and kid yourself that it's writing. It's not. Don't become the person with megabytes of maps and details and no actual text.

3. The world is yours to shape however you like - build it to challenge your characters

Story is about characters facing conflict. The world they live in creates external conflict for them and informs their internal conflict. Since you get to play deity here, build the world with challenging your characters in mind.

4. RPGs - role-playing games can distort your worldbuilding sense.

Many creatives learn worldbuilding from gaming, which can be a great exercise, but - as dedicated gamers have pointed out (I am not one) - game worlds often don't make any internal sense. Use caution in emulating that model.

5. Use the iceberg model

While you should know - or discover - all about your world, most of that detail should be like the iceberg beneath the surface. Only the tip of all that knowledge should show up in the story. If you've done the work and your world is internally consistent, that tip of the iceberg will be representative of the rest.

Lead Me Into Your World, But Don't Drown Me In It

 

This week we're sharing our Top 5 World-Building Tips. Firstly, ditto what Charissa suggested in Sunday's post. Secondly, since I love you, dear readers, I'll add some other tips that I've learned through rejection and correction, aka, the hard way (eyes stories that will never see the light of day...for good reasons).

1. Lead Me Slowly into The Dream: When introducing your world, particularly in fantasy and sci-fi, give the reader something real-world-relatable before rolling out your special crazy. It can be as simple as the scent of fresh bread on a breeze or the clatter of wheels on cobblestones or a pebble in a shoe. It's super tempting to dump all the "how your world is not the real world" right at the beginning because of your excitement to show the reader how amazingly different everything is. Resist. Think of the introduction like greeting a wary puppy. Show them something familiar, then, when they're comfortable, encourage them to follow you. Along the way, toss in an element of Other here and there, feeding them small bits until they're immersed. This is how you avoid info dumping your setting and overwhelming the reader. Once you have the reader's trust, they'll walk around your world with wonder.

2. For All The Suns in the Sky and Moons in the Sea: When creating your environment--as in climate, terrain, etc.-- consider the macro impacts of what you're making. Two moons in your world? How does that affect the tides? Does night last longer than day? How does that affect farming and food supply? What about light sources? Does it rain a lot or are most days clear skies? How does that affect water supply? Rivers? Seas? Transportation? Food supply? Is it windy in your world? Gentle breezes? Gales? How does that affect temperature? Circulation of fresh air? Is illness common because of stagnation? How has fashion adapted to accommodate frequent gusts? How are weapons modified so they don't blow off course?

3. The Consequences of History Live On: Whether the Great War™ was long ago or still unfolding, how does that show up in architecture? In the ways people get from Point A to Point B? In the sourcing of supplies as ordinary as underwear or as rare as magic stones? What measures of defense are so integrated into everyday life that no one questions them? Does all dinnerware come with toxin-detection coating since the groundwater was poisoned by The Enemy? What lingering scarcity remains a problem for national prosperity? Did The Enemy salt the ground? Blacken the sky? Cast a curse that no fire can exist, anywhere, ever, no matter how small? How does your world compensate for their man (or monster) made disadvantages? The consequences of your world's history should be reflected in more than the persecution of race(s) or magic(s). 

4. What Is Joy? We all know it's the small things, the minor acts that provide contentment. Too often, we the authors are so busy building conflict that we forget to demonstrate our characters experiencing joy. Happiness comes from more than interactions with other sentient characters, it also comes in private moments with nature or through connecting to The Greater Consciousness. How do people of your world experience joy? What are the minor acts? What are the great moments? What joy is personal and what is communal? What is performative and what is soul-nurturing? To balance angst, there must be joy.

5. For All The Secrets I Hold: If you're an analytical person like me, odds are you know far too many details of your world that...don't need to be mentioned in the book. Akin to character backstories that we know and readers never will, there is such a thing as TMI in world-building. Unless plumbing is plot-important, most readers don't care to know about the sewage systems. Same for the communication network of trees if your story is in space or ultra-urban. Ditto the complete pantheon when only one or two deities are involved.  

Top 5 Worldbuilding Tips

Worldbuilding! What's in a world? A LOT. Ultimately, you can read posts like this all day, but many ideas might not come to you until you sit down and start writing. Still, there are plenty of things to think about beforehand, especially if you require a solid foundation before you start writing a story. Here are a few things that rumble around my brain when it comes to creating worlds.

1. Think about your magic system. This one is hard for me, because I don't know all the bits and pieces of my world until I write the book. Then I go back with knowledge in-hand and revise. But you still need a general idea of the rules of your magic system, its limits and costs, and its availability across your world. Just remember that too much planning on this part can possibly create boundaries that come at an expense to the story. So a little freedom might help.
2. Language: And I don't mean spoken language, although that's a given. In my novel, The Witch Collector, the ancient language is Elikesh. It's spoken completely different from the common tongue. It's also how the witches in my story create magick, and my heroine, who was born with the inability to speak, uses a hang language to communicate AND build her magick. So yes, language in that sense is critical to grasp. But also your story language. Consistency and uniqueness. Words that make your story YOURS and not like everything else. I have a background in history, so I pull from that knowledge for setting and word choice. I wanted my books to feel familiar and yet foreign at the same time. Word choice is so important. I can't stress it enough. Pay attention to those types of details when you read other books. They're what make a world come to life. Don't call it a glass bottle if it can be a cruet. That type of thing.
3. History and Lore: Every culture has a history and their own lore. Consider what your world's history and lore and legends might be. A fun exercise is to sit down and put yourself in your main character's shoes and point blank ask them what their world was like 100 years ago, 500, 1000. And just free write. It's an amazing experiment. Your brain will likely give you a great background to begin with.
4. Religion, Society, and Politics: Who worships who? Who doesn't worship at all? What is society like at large? How do people trade, source food, clothes, etc? What are the world's politics? Who rules? How do they rule? This list can be long, and again, I advise letting your creativity guide you after you have a fairly solid understanding of how the world works.
5. Consider diversity. Writing a diverse world can be a little intimidating, because if you're like me, you don't want to do any harm. You want the world in your stories to look like the one you live in, but more so, like the world you WISHED you lived in. We CAN create worlds with cultural, sexual, and gender diversity, we just need to do it well. In my fiction, I write characters of all stripes, and I wanted to have a world where being something other than cishet isn't taboo or sinful or any other negative labels that get painted on members of the LGBTQ+ community in our everyday life. Instead, they live, love, and fight like everyone else, and everyone else thinks nothing of who they kiss or don't kiss at night. Being LGBTQ+ is part of the norm instead of the exception, and it's respected. I also color my world. And again, I don't make being white the default. If you only ever describe the skin tone of people of color, then you're actively saying that white is the default and needs no clarification. So be careful, do your research, and use sensitivity readers, but please consider diversity.

Good luck and have FUN! 

~ Charissa