Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Creating Worlds - Jeanette O'Hagan


By Jeanette O'Hagan


For me one of the joys of reading —and writing— is being transported to another place and time. Maybe to encounter ancient or not so ancient societies and cultures (Medieval, Egyptian or Incan). It might be to a strange dystopian future or across the universe in a FTL spaceship. Or it might be the streets of New York or Sydney, the vast Australian Outback or the green hills of England. Books have whisked me away to all these places – and fired my imagination.


Creating Nardva


I changed schools in the middle of grade one, the first of many such shifts. The playground became a lonely place until I discovered the school library. My imagination was already fired up as each night my parents read from the pages of Narnia. Enriched by story-worlds, I began creating my own and this world grew and grew and grew. The result was Nardva – a planet in many ways like our own, but with two moons, strange cultures, shape-shifters, special magical gifts and epic and every-day challenges.

As a teen, I moved from recording my world-building (maps, languages, genealogies, customs, art, images) to writing down the stories. Most of my fiction, from the underground adventure of Heart of the Mountain, to courtly the intrigue of Akrad’s Children to my futuristic cyborg story in Project Chameleon (Quantum Soul anthology), happens within this fictional world.



Worlds with Depth


Even the most fantastical world draws inspiration from our world. As writers, we walk in the steps of our own Maker who spoke the cosmos into being. I find this thought both inspiring and very, very humbling.

Setting is important. Stories without sense of place result in ‘white space’ and ‘talking heads’ — boring, paper-thin worlds and characters. Just as we are shaped by our environment, our ‘where’ and ‘when’, so too are our characters and so are their motivations and the challenges they face. For me, the best stories have a sense of history, the sense that the world stretches to the horizon, the sense that if you peeked behind you’d find more than two-dimensional set pieces of plyboard and badly applied paint. A fictional world should be complex, dynamic and interactive. History, geography, ecology, economics, cultures all interact, yet are rarely monolithic, and are always changing. A fictional fantasy world, even more than the real world, needs to be consistent and coherent, with believable conflicts and power struggles.


Engaging Worlds


On the other hand, as my editor reminds me, I need be careful not to clutter my story-telling with too much detail, too much back-story, too much description, too much history and legend. I’ve spun and woven my world into existence over many decades and, as a result, my Nardvan stories are interconnected and occur in different time periods, geographical locales and among different Nardvan peoples. Writing whole scenes of tangential backstory or lengthy description of customs and architecture is a temptation that must be resisted.

We live in an age where readers become inpatient with huge slabs of description or information dumps. Our fictional worlds can be woven in through telling details in the narrative, fused with the point of view of our character, through their thoughts and reactions, through their interaction with the world, and through their speech. We need to make descriptive detail work for us.



Here Ruhanna (from Ruhanna’s Flight, in Glimpses of Light anthology), waits for her father to arrive at her island home.


From the little kitchen came tantalising smells fit for the palace in Silantis. Mariam had surpassed herself with Baba’s favourite dishes—turtle and seaweed soup, baked fish, baby tomatoes and sea-sage, oysters and rock crays with a creamy dill sauce, stuffed quails and fresh wave-berries with yarma cheese to finish off. Everything was ready by late morning. Ruhanna sank down on a cushion in the reception room, stroking the carved albatross on Baba’s box, and waited.

In contrast, the twins Retza and Delvina (from the novellas Heart of the Mountain and Blood Crystal) live deep under the mountain, their diet and perception of the world is very different from Ruhanna’s or indeed, Zadeki, a young shapeshifer whose people live in the forests.

Though Delvina’s stomach grumbled with hunger at the savoury fragrance, her fingers hovered over each bowl offered to her. Some looked like cooked leaves or roots, others held rolled up balls of white stuff sprinkled with seeds. Only when she saw the snails in a green tinted broth and a bowl of fried mushrooms, did the tension release in her shoulders. At last, something she understood in this strange land.

Whereas, Dana (features in Space Junk, Mixed Blessings: Genre-lly speaking, and Rendezvous at Alexgaia, Futurevision anthology) lives in Nardva’s space-age.

Dana snatched a food packet and shoved it into the rehydrator, keying in the sequence. Red lights flashed as the mechanism whined. She gave it a brisk shake. A sharp hiccough, it hummed, green lights winking on.

A close point of view and telling details help conjure world setting even in a few words.

I firmly believe that desire to create reflects the image of our Maker and Saviour. Writing immersive fictional worlds with stories of hope can fire the imaginations of our readers and open their minds to His grace.




Jeanette O’Hagan first started spinning tales in the world of Nardva at the age of nine. She enjoys writing secondary world fantasy, science fiction, poetry, blogging and editing. Her Nardvan stories span continents, time and cultures.

Recent publications include her debut Novel Akrad’s Children and novellas Heart of the Mountain and Blood Crystal. She also has over a dozen stories and poems published in different anthologies such as Glimpses of Light, Futurevision, and Quantum Soul.

Jeanette has practised medicine, studied communication, history, theology and a Master of Arts (Writing). She loves reading, painting, travel, catching up for coffee with friends, pondering the meaning of life and communicating God’s great love. She lives in Brisbane with her husband and children.

Find her at her Facebook PageGoodreads, Twitter, Amazon or on her website Jeanette O'Hagan Writes.

22 comments:

  1. Hi Jeanette, Thanks for visiting with us and sharing your tips on world building. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for the opportunity, Narelle. Glad to share.

      Delete
  2. I agree! The world around the story is so important and always so much fun to be whisked somewhere outside our 'normal' world. Thank you for sharing!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jeanette, you would know Nardva almost as well as your own soul, it's been with you almost your whole life. It's characters alive on another plane, just beyond the everyday self. That in itself is beautiful thing. I wish you every continued success with Akrad's Children.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Deidre. So true, it's familiar - and yet so many places and characters still to explore and meet :)

      Delete
  4. Hi Jeanette. I loved your blog. It is so interesting as well as instructive. Best wishes with your writing. Hazel

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Hazel. Thrilled you found both interesting and instructive :)

      Delete
  5. As someone who also gets transported with every book, I really appreciate this post. Thanks for sharing!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. One of the great joys of reading. Thanks for your comment, Leila :)

      Delete
  6. Love this! Such an inspiration to keep writing and weaving worlds :)

    ReplyDelete
  7. I've learned so much about world building form you, Jenny! Thanks for your generosity in sharing your journey and wisdom with other writers around you.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Cate. Happy to share & love tells stories. Looking forward to reading Boy in a Hoodie :)

      Delete
  8. Sometimes I think all the world building goes to waste. Maybe you could write a 'fiction-non-fiction' book on the world of Nardva. That would be an interesting read.
    Thank you for sharing, Jenny.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Kirsten, that's a great idea. I do manage to slip a lot of it in, a little bit here, a little bit there lol.

      Delete
  9. Thank you for the tips! There have been a few fantasy worlds that have really gripped me - Tamora Pierce's Tortall, the Six Dutchies in Robin Hobbs' series and the land in Hilari Bell's Shield, Sword and Crown series.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's great, Emily. Some worlds really resonate - though it can be different ones for different people.

      Delete
  10. You do some great world building, Jenny. You have a vast and realised world, which gives a real sense of weight to your stories.

    ReplyDelete
  11. "I firmly believe that desire to create reflects the image of our Maker and Saviour"

    I love that! It's true, whether we choose to create through the everyday activities like cooking or crafts, or something like writing.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. True :) We cannot help reflect our Creator, even when we don't acknowledge him. All the better when we do.

      Delete