Modifying the Standard

Classic image of Hell: fire and brimstone.
Classic image of a dragon: great, bloody, flying, fire-breathing lizard.
Classic image of high elves: noble, slender, beautiful, ancient humanoids.
Classic portrayal of magic: muttering magic words and *bam* magic.

I could go on. These are all wonderful—especially as fallbacks, little minor things to fill in at the spur of the moment, since they require no real explanation—but boring. If something classic is going to figure into your work, change it up a little. I once read an interview with Masashi Kishimoto (the writer and artist for Naruto) on how he came up with the world. He just said (I'm paraphrasing) that most of what he came up with was him just trying to break the norm. Ninja? Put him in an orange track suit. Magic? Screw magic words, they're just going to make pretty symbols with their hands.

Guess what? It worked! Huge, multi-national franchise from a blonde, orange ninja that makes shadow puppets (I love Naruto, don't get me wrong on that point. The world-building is breathtaking, to say the least.)!

So, why not have some fun and change it up? It's one of my favorite exercises. Take a basic idea like dragons and see where you can go. Sure, fire-breathing is awesome, but take a look at Douglas Niles' drackans from the Watershed Trilogy. They breathe a fog that knocks out their prey...until they taste darkblood. Then it turns into a scorching blast of steam. They have a carapace over their wings that breaks open after puberty. They have a color war between brown and green. I love them.

Dwarves don't always have to dig tunnels and have excess body hair. Who says there can't be comely, dwarves? Who says elves have to be gorgeous, or shoot arrows? Why can't an elf, just once, shoot a sub-machine gun, or be a heroin addict?

The best wizard I've seen wasn't just kooky and wise—he was just insane, rambling, and had no bloody idea what he was talking about.

We all know the normal things, but they've been done to death, revived, and killed again at this point. Yes, you are going to get crap from people for messing with the 'official' lore. Stephenie Meyer did, and she has one of the best vampire mythos I've read. But, you can also root into the foundation much better with something different—I bring you to Meyer again. In today's age, vampires sparkle and are very, very pretty.

So, take a chance and have some fun. Screw the norm, just do what you want to do—if you prefer that your dragons live underwater and knit sweaters for the fish, make it work.

Now go, frolic with your imagination,
Voss

Lamentation of Swans, Fluther of Jellyfish

Yes, a fluther of jellyfish. It's the proper terminology for a group of jellyfish. Trust me. It's an example of the sort of useless knowledge you're bound to pick up along the way. Your characters are no different, but there's a beginning author syndrome dealing with those tidbits—characters always seem to have just the right knowledge for the situation. They've either been to the right city, no matter how obscure, studied the right tribe, no matter how long extinct, or happen to be everything short of a doctor of whichever out-there subject you happen to pull out of your rear end.

That works about, maybe, once. Things aren't easy in real life. Unless your character is under some kind of luck spell or blessed to have an eternal good life, it takes more effort than that to get things taken care of. You can't just have them knowing everything, or have an expert waiting off-stage to explain the entire thing. There's no conflict that way. Somehow or another, they need to earn the information. Sure, there can be flashes of trivial, otherwise useless knowledge, but not a whole slew of it.

Those flashes also provide a unique opportunity for continuity. If you introduce a piece of information early on, and then have it come up later in your plot as being actually useful, it creates resonance. Even if your reader doesn't explicitly, consciously remember the information, hearing it again jogs the memory, and they go 'Hey, there's that thing! You brought it back around! Whose a good author? Whose a good author? You're a good author! Yes you are, yes you are!'

What? That's what authors really want. Honest to goodness.

I suppose this could be more informative, couldn't it? That's kind of why I write fiction, though—I can make it all up. Here, let me try again.

Okay, I think I've got a little more in me. That little trivial knowledge can also be used really well to bring people together. I kind of don't want to admit the number of times I got together with my friends and just talked trivia, or played Jeopardy or Trivial Pursuit. It brings people closer to see what menial crap we all know. That's why games like that exist—they're fun and, unless the players are insanely competitive, lighthearted. That's how my first ex and I met, actually—historical trivia.

Okay. I'm officially spent. Not the best night's sleep, I have yet to get coffee, and 'Burlesque' is on—I think it's a good show of focus on my part I wrote this at all.

Considering how much it would take to buy a lamentation of swans,
Voss

Kids

“I don't know what's wrong with these kids today!”

Sorry. Broadway moment. I'm talking about using kids as tools in our writing. Okay, that sounds really bad, but that's what it really is. Little kids are great tools to provide dialogue, get your more mature characters thinking, and provide more internal conflict. Plus kids provide the cute factor for the reader, and they make your characters care about someone that can't take care of him/herself. And putting kids in dangerous, potentially lethal situations, while a pretty cheap emotional ploy, works.

But I'm not here to talk about putting kids in dangerous situations. Well, maybe a little—I'm not above manipulative writing on occasion. When I started thinking about this post, I was thinking more about that old(ish) show, 'Kids Say the Darndest Things.' It didn't happen very often, of course, but on occasion the kids on that show would say something very apt, or something that would just make an adult stop. It's because kids are innocent, and don't really know those unspoken societal laws we old fogies have ingrained in us. When confronted with that childlike honesty, how your characters respond is a quick and cheap way to show us a serious part of their personality.

They can also increase conflict in a very serious manner, especially when you have a romance or action-based plot. Think about it. If your romantic interest has a kid and your main character is reluctant about children, you have instantaneous conflict, and a chance to soften the main character's personality through the course of the plot. In action-based books, unless your main character is a heartless asshole, when you somehow or another put the kid in danger, your characters are going to have to go out of their way to keep the young one safe from the marauding demons or what have you.

Now, when you do put kids in dangerous situations, don't waste that reader reaction, either. One of the easiest things to do is make your reader hate someone or something for trying to harm the little kid. As soon as, say, your evil sorcerer tries to sacrifice a child (or, better yet, a schoolhouse full of children) to the Nameless Dark One for ultimate power or something, your reader is going to call him an asshole and want revenge.

So yes, when it comes to literature, children are really good multitask tools. Simple as that.

Voss

Jell-O and the Pudding Pops

Come on, you know you know that guy—it's the Cos. Bill Cosby is one of the most often imitated celebrities of our modern era, because he has very recognizable aspects to his speech. Whether or not that's a real part of his speech, a part of his stage speech patterns, or simply something attributed to him through his characters in 'The Cosby Show' doesn't matter—it's completely and instantly known that certain things are imitations of Bill Cosby.

The same thing has to be true if you're going to use character imitation to great effect. This links directly to having totally different, unique speech patterns and pet phrases for each character. If you're going to have characters imitate one another, there has to be something to latch onto.

I remember distinctly one moment in fourth grade (I remember a lot of moments from fourth grade, actually, but one that's applicable.) when we were reading 'The Wanderer.' It was about these people on an old boat or something like that, and it was told through their journal entries. Now, as they grew closer, they started to imitate each other. There was one character that had a habit of repeating things three times (i.e. Bored bored bored.). Late in the book, another character (Looking back, I'm pretty sure they had some kind of budding romance I didn't pick up on as a fourth grader.) starts to do the same thing.

As people get to know others, they pick up on conversational idiosyncrasies—I do it all the time. It makes your characters that much more real, that they are affected by the people around them. Of course, imitation can also be used as mockery—we all know that. But, to do it properly, you still need that uniqueness of speech pattern. Mockery isn't nearly as easy to pull of as books as it is in speech, so you need to really lean heavily on those speech patterns and such.

As far as I'm concerned, imitation and the techniques that go along with it are quite useful, particularly in romantic situations (where two people sort of start to blend personalities) or with younger people, who have a greater tendency to make fun (it's a cliché, but we all know it's still sort of true. We were all teenagers. Remember how it was.).

Now I'm going to go get the pudding...it works better if you can actually hear my voice, I promise...
Voss

Issues in YA and Middle Grade Fiction

God, that title is so boring, don't you think? Lacks pizazz, really.

Any who, like the title said, this is about issues unique to a YA (and middle grade) target audience. Most of them are really obvious, but adults can sometimes lose a bit of that connection to the hardships of those years, only looking back on the good times. But I'll tell you this much—there were hard times throughout those years for everyone. I'll be trying to only put up issues that cross genres, but no promises about that.

~Dating: Doesn't that make you cringe? Just hearing that word rockets me back to memories of awkward set-ups, hallway liaisons, and cheating weasels without the cojones to break up with you in person...not fun. In most YA and some upper middle grade books, dating, attraction, et cetera all play a role as at least a minor plot, often the major plot. But, to make it believable, you should have floundering characters, flakes, bad blind dates, and meddling friends—and pain. Lots of pain, little bit of pain, but love hurts. There's a whole song about it, actually.

~Drugs/Alcohol: You know what? Even in a generally peaceful, sort of semi-utopian fantasy/sci-fi world, there are still going to be people who think life sucks, and there are still going to be kids and teens who think they should drink and shoot up. That leads to sharing, which leads to a certain level of moral dilemma. At least once for most of us, the opportunity arose to drink/smoke/what have you—it doesn't matter if it's weed or sensa-sticks, vodka or cryowhiskey—it sort of happens, sorry to say.

~Sex: I've posted about this before, but it does stand repeating. Teens are hormonal creatures in their sexual prime and, if they're anything like I was in middle and high school, extremely slutty. The decision to have sex or not have it, who to have it with, even where to have it are important at that age—and there's pressure pushing them both ways, most of the time. Peers are trying to make them have sex, but other authority figures are likely telling them to stay away—we've all been there, right? It's a real issue for that age group.

~Bullying: I'd like to see more of this addressed in YA and middle grade fiction, since someone needs to bring it to public attention. Bullying is pretty severe—it leads kids to drop out, causes depression, leads to suicide, and breeds further bullying—but everyone tries to push it under the rug. When it does get shown, it's always something like 'Carrie' or whatever his name was from 'Degrassi.' They are real issues and based on real events, but they always make the bullied party look like the bad guy. In fact, one of the best examples of bullying where the bullies are actually portrayed in a negative light is in 'George Lopez', when the whole school turns against Carmen and forces her to drop out or be tormented for four more years—sitcoms do it better than books, for some reason.

There are obviously more that may or may not cross all genres—grades, parental issues, suicide, ascending the throne—but those, I think, are the big four.

Reminiscing,
Voss

Haughtiness VS Confidence

I just finished reading the special edition of Piers' Anthony's 'But What of Earth?', a book that flopped on first release. He went ahead and, after regaining full rights in a legal settlement, schlepped it over to Tor books in an unedited format, with a section in the rear for his comments on the editorial staff's original notes.

Now, if you're Piers Anthony, you can do something crazy like that and not get yelled at. Well, I'm going to yell a little anyway. He was spot on about most of the issues he had with their edits—they were either pointless removals, stupid changes, or they created more work than was really necessary—and I'm not going to talk about any places where I disagreed.

My beef is with the way he wrote up those comments. He had this sort of high-and-mighty author air about him, as though he was Piers Anthony and he could do no wrong. Often, he questioned the purpose of editors, of why he should even be edited for anything but spelling and grammar. That's what got under my skin. I don't see how any author can feel that self-important and arrogant. We have flaws, we make mistakes. I admit that he got a really bad set of copy-editors and, aside from screwing him on a lot of edits, they violated key parts of his publishing contract, but to call into question the validity and usefulness of outside editing?

It's one of things I really want to avoid. I definitely want Piers Anthony's level of recognition, but my goal, and it's a goal I'd like to see from other authors, as well, is to not get that arrogance. He also has a good point—author's kind of need to be a bit arrogant, or at least confident. It's our only real defense against publishers—we have to stand up for our work, when push comes to shove, even if it does mean losing a contract. However, I've noticed that a lot of the 'old boys' of sci-fi and fantasy have the same damn complex about themselves. They feel that they are the infallible lords of the speculative fiction genre, all hail, all praise.

Sure, if Piers Anthony, Orson Scott Card, or Asimov's ghost wanted to give me advice, I'd take it—they obviously know what they're doing—but I don't agree with anyone in any business that feels they are the top. It takes one nudge to knock down the Jenga tower. Besides, being properly humble around editors and publishers is good for your business, wouldn't you say?

Now, of course, I'm sure some people are going to be very unhappy with me because of this post, particularly those that really like Piers Anthony. I'm not saying he's a bad writer, but no one is so good they can't benefit from an editor—just not the editors assigned to that book.

Preparing for the flame war,
Voss

Genuine Emotion

Your readers will be able to tell if your characters are giving off real feelings, or just going through the motions. If you can't make the audience believe that Jimmy is heartbroken over the death of his parakeet, you need to rework that section. You need to not only have already given them reason to feel bad for Jimmy, as well as the parakeet, but you then have to be unafraid to really rip Jimmy apart when it happens and show his true colors, because when you're really and truly heartbroken or enraged about something, there's no hiding anything—no way in Hell.

How does it work, though? Think back through your life—we've all felt strong emotions. It's kind of the writer's bread and butter—if you haven't had some kind of meltdown at some point in your past, you're kind of just a fledgling writer. I am joking of course...a little. It's much easier to write if you've already been cut and sliced to bits and had your emotions laid out on the table at least once, multiple times being preferable. It really sucks, but that's the way these things work.

So you take that real emotion you've felt—not seen but actually felt—and you dive into it. You hurt yourself again or, if it's intense joy, you bring that feeling over yourself all over again. As soon as you start feeling with your character, that's when the reader will start feeling for your character.

If you've done this, you'll probably see a flaw right about now—how the hell are you supposed to write in this state? You can't even see, for Christ's sake! You have to either dial it back enough that you can type, but still keep the memory of that emotion fresh in your brain, or you have to hand-write/touch type your scene while your in the midst of that pain. It's the most effective way to make it all properly poignant.

Of course, you should also avoid saying the actual emotion in the scene. Jimmy's sad—don't tell us, because then we know what's coming. You have to show us without using sad, upset, depressed, or any other words like that. Talk about the cold in his limbs, the parakeet's silence, the churning of his lunch, the hot tears shredding down his face—but never say that Jimmy was sad unless you're writing a children's book...and I'd avoid it then, too, if at all possible.

But, more important than any of this (hopefully practical) advice is this: read it. If you feel the right way, you're at least headed in the right direction and, while you're not as impartial as the average reader, that outpouring of emotion from you will get you somewhere. Cross my heart and hope to die.

Now emote, my lovelies!
Voss

Fremde Sprachen (Foreign Languages)

“Ich bin ein Berliner!”

One of the most famous examples of a language blunder in history. Even if you don't speak German, you probably know that it means “I am a jelly doughnut.” What the poor man meant to say was “Ich bin Berliner.” (I am a Berliner.)

I've seen this kind of thing a lot—people sort of abusing their use of other languages. I'm here to say be careful. It's one thing if it's a fantasy language or an alien language that nobody actually speaks, but if you put in an Earth-based language that even one person can understand, you can just about count on someone that understands the language is going to find it and, if there's a mistake, they won't hesitate to point it out. I do it with German—often.

And it's not all about mistakes. You can use the language perfectly, but it doesn't matter if it's not actually set on Earth. I have a little secret to let you in on about 'The Dark Crystal'. When she calls to Fizzgig, it's not some made-up Gelfling language. It's Serb for (My translation might be slightly off, but it's the right sentiment) “Good dog, good dog.” Basically what happened, so far as I can tell, is they found the person on staff that spoke the most obscure language and had them translate it. The problem is that, while most people won't understand, there are people who do, and they can't resist telling.

I'm not trying to scare people off from using other languages, but you need to check up on it (This is in an Earth setting. I strongly recommend avoiding Earth languages in a non-Earth setting.). The best thing you can do is use a language that you speak fluently, with proper conversational grammar. However, sometimes your character just has to speak Slovak. It's an understandable desire. What you need to do then is get someone that does speak the language you're using and get them to look over your translation or, better yet, give them the English and let them do the translation for you.

If you're just using simple phrases or words (Hello, goodbye, good night, yes, no) an online translator will likely work, but anything more complex than that and it's best to get some outside help. Not only will you get that grammar and wording correct, but there are things in different cultures that simply don't translate properly. Look at German. “Alte Schachtel” literally means “old box”, but if you say it to a German woman, she's going to be pissed. It's the equivalent of calling someone an old hag in English. In Japanese, they have a word that means nothing (Sadly, my memory fails me as to what it is.) that's simply said before a meal—that's its one purpose, and it does absolutely nothing else. Those are the little quirks of language you can't just throw together with an internet translator or a bilingual dictionary.

That's all I have to say on the matter—it's a matter of protecting yourself from rabid readers. Wait. One more thing (And I've sadly seen this in a manuscript before.): for the love of all that is holy, don't sound out foreign words! Find the real spelling!

Wiedersehen,
Voss

Electronic Blowout

There are times when I swear by my laptop, desktop, and word processing programs to get my writing done. In fact, I used to entirely insist on using electronics to write, but then my laptop crashed. At home, I could still write on my desktop (Since it was NaNoWriMo, I needed that speed quite desperately, too.) but I was pen and paper when I left the house. I have to tell you, it's different. For so long, that's why I so preferred to write on my electronics—typing, I could get my ideas out almost as fast as they came to me.

However, that forced stint back to handwritten fiction kind of opened my eyes again, and hearing a fellow writer praise hand-writing really got me back to thinking on the differences.

Any more, if I feel like my prose is a bit lackluster, kind of just going through the motions to get from A to B, I unplug, go grab pen an paper, and throw my scene together. Why? Because, on paper, words are much more permanent, at least to our minds. You have to put more time into each word, which means more thought, which means that you're forced to sort of slow down and smell the literary roses. It makes prose more vibrant, more intelligent, and simply feel different.

Plus it's much more portable. Sure, you can take a laptop around anywhere, but they run low on power, take time to get going, and draw a whole lot of attention, whereas a notepad and a pen only need to be changed when you run out of ink and/or paper, only needs to be opened to work, and can be done subtly enough that you don't have hundreds of eyes staring at you in the supermarket.

Plus, look at pen and paper—it has an excellent track record, don't you think? Everything written by William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, and Edgar Allen Poe was pen (or quill) and paper. I'd like to think they're all pretty well known, fairly successful authors. Following in the footsteps of such greats can also make you feel kind of like you're on the right track, as though it's a parallel to fame, like following the Lewis and Clark trail.

Of course, if I'm going for that writerly feel, there's one thing above either the computer or the pen and paper option: the typewriter. That, of course, is another story to be told another time.

Pioneer writing, anyone?
Voss

Dialogue, Ye Many-Headed Viper

What sells better, gets more recognition nowadays, books or movies? That's right, movies. Now, I do often prefer a good book, but the appeal of cinema is pretty simple to see. It's all action and dialogue, none of that pesky back story to get in the way of anything else. Personally, I like the back story, but this is about mass appeal, after all—I think I've made that abundantly clear through the course of this blog.

Some writers are afraid of dialogue, since it's not a tool we're often trained in, but dialogue is probably the most important tool we have at our disposal in fiction. Look at it this way—in real life, you most likely can't read people's thoughts, so you only have their dialogue to judge them on. Why should your characters be any different? Especially with such an unclear image of your characters as we have in a book, what they say is of utmost importance.

One would think that we would be good at writing dialogue. I mean, we all speak, after all, so we know how it sounds, right? Not necessarily. People fluent in a language use passive listening rather than active listening, meaning that we enact a sub-conscious mechanism to gather information when we listen to people. Combine that lack of knowledge with the human tendency to, uh, stutter and, um, like, kind of, fumble with words when, uh, we speak, and you have a nightmarish cocktail.

Again, there's always a solution. The most fun is one of my favorite things to pull out of my writer's group—write a scene first without any dialogue, just action and explanation, and then write the exact same scene with just dialogue, and try to make each one viable and believable. At that point, it's closer to writing a script, in which we draw on our osmotic knowledge of scriptwriting gained from watching plays, movies, and operas (Or am I the only opera fan here?).

You can also try your hand with some public speaking lessons. In fact, go to your library and look along with the writing section for books on public speaking. Go ahead. I'll still be here when you get back. I don't think your characters should be constantly giving speeches—trust me, that's really the last thing I want to read. The important thing in those books is the way they dissect human speech. To teach you how to speak the 'right way' in front of a crowd, they have to show you how the average person speaks in a normal situation. Admittedly, it doesn't work for a more historical speech pattern, but I'd bet that, somewhere, you can find a resource for those too.

The other thing that no one ever wants to explain to writers is the differences in character dialogue. We all hear it—your characters should sound different from one another—but no one ever bothers to give us the tools for that. Well, I'm no linguist, but there are certain things you pick up on. Think about the way the different people in your life talk. We all have little idiosyncrasies (personally, I always use 'correct' instead of 'right,' use 'any who' instead of 'anyhow,' and often end long, drawn-out stories and explanations with 'et cetera, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.') that people take notice of. Some people use choppy sentences, others use long, languid sentences. Multilingual people will sometimes slip between languages. There are colloquial sayings, foreign speech patterns, and all sorts of countless other things that make people's speech more interesting. Go ahead and use those things to mark your characters as unique—but keep them to one character. If every character uses high honorifics when addressing people, it becomes a part of the culture, not a quirk of the individual.

If all else fails, though, go to the old standby (What? You knew I'd mention it at some point, didn't you?) and read your dialogue out loud. If you're really lucky and really nice to your writer's network, you might get people to read your other characters' parts. If you can't, then it's advisable that you at least don't read it in public. I mean, talking to yourself is one thing, but holding conversations with yourself in different voices can garner you a few weird looks.

Peace for now, loves,
Voss

Bathtub Novel

The bathtub novel is the number one atrocity in literature. Okay, so it's mostly a biproduct of great literary fiction, but it does show up in SF/F and, I'm sorry, but it doesn't matter—bathtub novels are bad.

What's a bathtub novel? It's a novel in which the character does NOTHING. They sit in the bathtub, lay in bed, hang in stasis, or wait for the evil sorcerer to come and kill them in the dungeon, but they don't actually DO anything. That's not to say an intellectually based work has no place, but if we're looking at mainstream, commercial fiction (which is sort of where I live, if you haven't yet figured that out), someone has to do something at some point. I think Kurt Vonnegut said it best:

“Make characters want something right away―even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.”

No matter what your book is about, something happens. Real people do things, eventually. It's inevitable. Even if your character has been chained to a wall and can't escape, he or she is going to struggle and kick and talk and whine and cry and bitch and piss and moan and, assuming they're not starving him to death, eat.

Yes, I'm being preachy here―so sue me―but this point is supported by Vonnegut, and last time I checked he wasn't exactly a total failure. It's not to say characters always have to move around and be active, but they can't be inactive the entire book, or you don't really have a plot. Of course, there are exceptions depending on how the plot is displayed to the reader. Look at Wells' “The Time Machine”. Technically, not a whole hell of a lot happens, but the story is told within the story, and hence something happens in the important part, although it's really only Victorian men sitting around smoking and chattering amongst themselves.

Plus, who knows what's going to come of that midnight trip to the supermarket for pizza? Maybe that's the jumping off point for your story and you'll have to (sit down for this) delete those twenty-thousand words of motionless, introspective, literary brilliance and start with “He wanted pizza.”

Actually, that's a good idea...don't use that line...I call dibs...

Off to write a story about a guy who really wants that damn frozen pizza at midnight,
Voss

Art and Culture

How do we define one people from another? Is it by appearance? Then what about the USA, or South Africa, or any other cosmopolitan nation? All right, then it must be by language? What about Switzerland, where they speak German, French, and Italian, or China, where dialects can differ so much that you may not be able to understand someone using a foreign dialect of the language?

It's by the art and culture that we are defined, and that's how it should be in writing, too. Go ahead and pull out your map, with all of those precisely designated countries you hand-rendered, the rivers you tracked down from the mountains, and the carefully drawn microtrees to designate a forested area. Now, what is it that makes one little glob different from the one next to it? If you say anything but art and culture, you're not necessarily wrong, but that should be in there, right up at the top of the list.

Now, I can't rightly separate art from culture, as they both shift and change with one another. Be it your country's food, drink, dance, theater, government, architecture, religion, literature, or whatever else, they should have a unique world view. Do you have to know all of that? Yes. Even if you only really deal with one character form that country? Yes. A country's art and culture will affect its people in such a way that it becomes inextricable from their being. Don't believe me?

Try to imagine how our country would be different without the Beatles, or Dr. Seuss, or the Rolling Stones, or Bob Dylan. It seems weird, but think about every ripple that never would have formed. You really can't, and that's the key thing. Its easy enough to track their influences on culture from the onset, but if you try and remove them, its a totally unpredictable mass of nothingness.

That's how your cultures need to be portrayed, or they probably won't come off as the most clear image that they could. Now, I'm not saying I'm perfectly amazing at this, since I'm not, but the first step to fixing an issue is seeing it, and every writer out there should be behind me on that point, yes?

What, however, influences your art and culture. While it's true that sometimes things are just flashes of inspiration from the gods, particularly on the artistic side of the equation, for realism's sake, one should trace them back to something greater that the people can't really control. Like, if you live in a tundra without heating or other modern conveniences, are you really going to have a face studded with piercings? No, because your whole damn face would freeze, turn black, and shrivel into a frostbitten husk. All right, that might be an exaggeration, but it would be highly uncomfortable and you know it. Look at a desert culture—your first instinct is to have them wearing light, skimpy clothing to escape the searing heat, but when you look at actual desert cultures through history, they wear more clothing than anyone else, because they have something more pressing to worry about than heat—sunburn. Heat may be uncomfortable, but sunburns can be lethal.

Also, why are they divided here? Why isn't this just one giant country like China or Russia? Is it an old religious dispute, governmental disarray, a river, a road? What force is so powerful to keep two countries apart, and is it a point of contention?

Where did their culture come from? Is it wholly original or did they, like many countries on Earth, borrow, assimilate, and steal various important parts of their culture? Are they the Chinese, originating the written characters, or are they Japan, taking the Chinese characters and changing their meanings?

There's so much more I could go into on this subject—hell, books could be written about this subject, if someone had the time—but I'll leave it at that. It's enough to get us thinking, right?

Voss