The chamber maid brings tea - Pehr Hillestrom 1775

Before our modern era of democratic equality, before school children growing up were routinely taught that “we are all equal”, quite a different calculus of social standing prevailed.¹ There was a time when class and status created strict boundaries in a person’s life, as is still the case in parts of the world today.  The strictures imposed by these forgotten frameworks had a far greater impact on historical lives than most contemporary writers are aware of.

Game designers who are ignorant of these limitations may unintentionally create worlds that mirror modern times and social equalities. Authors who give only passing attention to class and status in their fictional settings short-change the layers of interaction that can have a vital impact on characters and events. But when writers have a better understanding of these social factors, a great deal of dramatic tension and challenges for characters can be introduced to the setting, and in a way that makes cultural sense.

I don’t want to wax academic on the subject, but do want to examine some of the historical issues around class and status, and suggest some sensible ways to play up these factors in fictional settings.²

Class and Status

Class (socioeconomic standing) and status (prestige associated with one’s position, or the lack thereof) have colored human societies throughout history. For most of that history, distinctive classes with various levels of social standing were recognized to exist, with differences between them often enforced by law.  In day-to-day life people might not have paid a lot of conscious attention to class and status, but a person’s “place” in society was much more sharply defined than ours (generally) are today in the modern western world.  If someone tried to step outside their expected place, there was much harsher backlash than a person would normally experience today. This served to reinforce the expectation that everyone had a given station in society and would pretty much stick to it for most of their lives.

Today, class is associated almost exclusively with a person’s socioeconomic standing, and in our “land of opportunity” we have an underlying expectation that an enterprising individual can change that status if they work at it. It has not always been so.  In past times the implications of class went far beyond socioeconomics.  Each person was born into a social niche which itself conveyed a certain status, and this place in society determined pretty much everything about that person’s life.

French courtier exchanging finery for more sober clothes following the Edict of 1633, by Abraham Bosse

Education, employment opportunities, marital connections, voice (or lack thereof) in politics, even down to details such as what clothing one could wear and what adornments were forbidden: all these factors and more became dictated not only by custom and common usage but also by codification in law, such as the sumptuary laws that dictated permissible attire depending upon one’s class.

It was much more difficult in the past to change class and status than it is today. Marriage, inheritance, success in trade (hence gaining wealth), and elevation to a notable position were perhaps the most commonplace ways of doing so, but beyond those methods the opportunities for changing social standing were fewer than in modern times. Many who hoped to alter their standing had to defy convention and possibly even the law in order to step outside the station society had fixed for them.

When we fail to reflect these layers of nuance in our representations of the past, we risk producing generic, essentially democratic, “everyone has equal rights”-hued interactions that bear a vague resemblance to present times. Another common pitfall lies in choosing just one or two factors from the past to stand as tokens for a class-based society:  nobility are unsympathetic to the plight of the common man (unless they are our heroes); our always-literate adventurers do not stem from the lowest classes of society; we call one group lords and another group ladies and they always bow or curtsey and are very mannered.

While this shorthand representation of class factors succeeds in signalling “class plays an important role here”, this tokenism both misrepresents the reality, and gives a shallow and skewed impression of the real dynamics that existed in a more class-conscious era.

For writers who want more verisimilitude in historical settings, or who want to play with a multi-layered and rich set of social dynamics, here are some things to consider about class and status. (For convenience I may use these terms interchangeably. In doing so I am referring to the combination of both which was more restrictive historically than in modern times.)

“Learn your place in this town. Or soon enough you won’t be in it.”

Regina Mills (the Evil Queen) to Emma Swan in “Once Upon a Time”

“Know Your Place”

Throughout most of western history, most people had a sense of “place”. This awareness corresponded in part to geographical location, but even more so to where  they fit in society: in family, clan, village, in the larger community and realm of obedience to authority.

Estates of the Realm - Jacob Meydenbach, 1488. "You pray humbly, you protect, and you work."

In the Middle Ages this was exemplified with “the estates of the realm”:  a representation of the presumably heavenly ordained classes that a man could occupy during his lifetime.  An example can be seen in this Renaissance-era (1488) woodcut by Jacob Meydenbach, which shows Christ on a rainbow blessing the three estates. Those groups are clerics, nobles, and peasants. The Latin captions say to the respective groups, “You pray humbly; you protect; you work.”

Governments were structured along these lines. Throughout Europe. evolving parliaments were arranged in ways to reflect the divisions of the lords spiritual, temporal, and commoners.  Laws – or how they were administered – reflected these divisions, with multi-tiered justice systems often meting out different punishments and penalties depending upon one’s station of birth. Not everyone was considered “equal before the law” – that was a much later invention. For a long time it was considered important to support and reinforce the divinely determined differences in station of birth, and this was reflected in law and custom.

This notion of “knowing your place” lasted for centuries in Europe and the colonized Americas, and, it could be argued, continues to exist (in a diluted manner) today. For generations people were made aware that they had obligations to meet that coincided with their station in life – and even more pointedly, that to imagine themselves filling another’s place was an unacceptable flight of fancy. While a nobleman might choose (or be compelled, if a younger son) to dedicate his life to the church, it was only a minority who became churchmen, and it was highly unlikely for that process to happen in reverse (for someone to leave the church and live as lay nobility again). As to commoners and peasants, their lot in life was set: while an orphan taken in or the son of a well-off tradesman might gain entry to the clergy, by and large people born “to the land” would remain “on the land” for the rest of their lives.

In later times as economies diversified and cities grew, more opportunity opened up and economic mobility began to erode this restrictive estate structure. The habit of thinking of people as born into a place, though, continued for centuries.  The last hurrah of this outlook in broad society probably came with the outbreak of World War I in 1914.  The Great War caused social upheaval and adjustments in many regards, but domestic service provides a case in point. About 13% of women in England were in domestic service in the 19th century, and service work was the single largest employment sector for women on the eve of World War I.  To aspire to a lifetime of service to one family was an honorable goal, and completely in keeping with having a sense of place and knowing one’s place; as a result, commoners from a lower-born class routinely took service with the higher-born. It seemed like a time-tested and nearly inevitable arrangement for a large chunk of the work force.

However, the needs of war opened up clerical employment and demanded women fill industrial jobs by the tens of thousands, to take the place of men who went to the battle front. This forever changed the nature of women’s work, and also dealt a fatal blow to the centuries-long definition of appropriate endeavors for men and women born into a certain class.  The servant culture of the western world never recovered from this tectonic shift. The nobility and well-to-do had to adjust accordingly, and this all gave a huge impetus to the long slide into egalitarian relationships that dominated the 20th century. We have notable portrayals of this era and this groundswell of change in some entertainment media, most notably in the groundbreaking TV series Upstairs Downstairs, over the course of which the family and servants underwent great changes with the outbreak of WWI, and in the more recent production Downton Abbey.

Upstairs Downstairs

In part 1 of the documentary Maid in Britain (embedded below), you can see an installment of a great program about class and status and domestic service in the U.K.. It’s a very insightful production (the other installments are online at YouTube). Although focused strictly on domestic service, it delves into a microcosm that is a good example of the class consciousness and status I’ve discussed here.

In part two of this post, I look at some guidelines for class-conscious behavior, their origins, and how to use them in fictional settings.

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1 “We are all equal” may not be the reality, but it is certainly an ideal today, and is commonly presented as such in school and cultural indoctrination in most ostensibly democratic nations.

2 Class and status have their outworkings in every society in the world throughout history. For purposes of this post I am focusing my remarks on America and western Europe over the last 1000 years, since this geography and time span plays a dominant role in our fiction.

Related Posts

How to Use Class in Historical Settings, Part 2 (online on Wednesday 2/8)

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: How to Use Class in Historical Settings, Part 1
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Mark Twain (pen name of Samuel Clemens)

“Kill your babies” is sage advice followed by any writer who needs to edit and polish their manuscript. It refers not only to ruthlessly cutting excess verbiage, but also to pruning subplots and even characters as needed to strengthen the story.

Mark Twain exercised this practice quite literally. One of his classics, Pudd’nhead Wilson, started life as a short story called Those Extraordinary Twins, inspired by a famous pair of conjoined twins. As he wrote, it grew in the telling and soon turned into a tangled book-length tale instead. Secondary characters like Wilson became dominant, and the story about the twins was stalled. To fix this, he  drowned characters in a well to get them off the stage, and ended by teasing apart two separate stories that had muddled into one.

I’ve been thinking lately about revising a particular book draft, and realized I will probably have to kill far more of my babies in the process than I had at first anticipated. Mark Twain’s account of his experience in this regard is entertaining and instructional, and so warrants a little closer examination.

The Tocci Brothers

The conjoined twins who inspired Twain’s original story are an interesting historical byway in their own right and well worth a novelist’s attention. The author was not alone in his fascination with them. Giacomo and Giovanni Tocci captivated the attention of the masses in Europe and

The Masters Tocci by James G. Mundie www.missioncreep.com

America in the last two decades of the 19th century. The Italian brothers were joined at the sixth rib, being two separate individuals from that point up, but sharing one torso, one set of genitalia, and one pair of legs. They could balance in place with the aid of a wheeled device, but muscular atrophy and a clubfoot prevented normal walking. One brother loved to drink beer and the other preferred only mineral water; they were were artistically talented and spoke several foreign languages. They were the subjects of intense interest and repeated medical examinations throughout their touring and performing lives; at the height of their popularity they were making as much as $1000 a week (~$25,000 in today’s money). They retired in 1897 at age 20 and bought a walled villa in Venice that afforded great privacy. They made headlines again when they married two separate sisters; the Italian press, knowing of their shared genitalia, were scandalized and considered the women ‘vulgar’. It is no surprise that the Toccis lived in seclusion for the rest of their lives, until they passed away at age 63.¹

The Deadly Well

Twain’s original story in Those Extraordinary Twins featured conjoined twins very similar to the Toccis, presenting them with farcical challenges and a problematic love affair. But minor characters soon took over the main storyline and pushed the twins offstage. He wrestled with the draft novel until he realized that, like the twins, he had two stories that had grown intertwined, one serious and one a farce. Editing required radical surgery to separate one from the other, prompting him to drown characters in a well to clear the stage of extraneous actors.

His description of this is classic Mark Twain, both a cautionary note and a hilarious commentary on the writer’s process, and so I quote at length here:

When the book was finished and I came to look around to see what had become of the team I had originally started out with…I found them stranded, idle, forgotten, and permanently useless. It was awkward all around; but more particularly in the case of Rowena, because there was a love-match on…I didn’t know what to do with her…I finally saw plainly that there was really no way but one–I must simply give her the grand bounce. It grieved me to do it…

Still it had to be done. So, at the top of Chapter XVII, I put in a “Calendar” remark concerning July Fourth, and began the chapter with this statistic:

“Rowena went out in the back yard after supper to see the fireworks and fell down the well and got drowned.”

It seemed abrupt, but I thought maybe the reader wouldn’t notice it, because I changed the subject right away to something else. Anyway it loosened up Rowena from where she was stuck and got her out of the way, and that was the main thing. It seemed a prompt good way of weeding out people that had got stalled, and a plenty good enough way for those others; so I hunted up the two boys and said “they went out back one night to stone the cat and fell down the well and got drowned.” Next I searched around and found old Aunt Patsy Cooper and Aunt Betsy Hale where they were aground, and said “they went out back one night to visit the sick and fell down the well and got drowned.” I was going to drown some of the others, but I gave up the idea, partly because I believed that if I kept that up it would arouse attention, and perhaps sympathy with those people, and partly because it was not a large well and would not hold any more anyway.

Whether this manner of “killing his babies” was something he literally did in a draft of the book or was simply a Twainish metaphor remains unclear, but the end result was the same: when he had cleared out the unnecessary characters and separated farce from drama, he was left with the soon-to-be-classic Pudd’nhead Wilson. Later he finished Those Extraordinary Twins as a lighter story that concentrated on the twins as initially envisioned. Both tales benefited from the necessary triage he’d done.

Mark Twain’s account of his drowning spree is given in the introduction to Those Extraordinary Twins. I admit I found this manner of jettisoning unwanted characters to be highly amusing – but the greater trick that he accomplished was to see the difference between the light story and the serious one, and to disentangle the threads (including characters) of stories that were more appropriately separate tales. Truth be told, I am also a little gratified that a storytelling master like Sam Clemens could finish a novel and still be unhappy with it and yet struggle to put his finger on exactly what was wrong with the plot. If Clemens writing as Mark Twain had this much difficulty revising a completed novel, then us lesser mortals need not be pulling our hair out when we grapple with similar issues.

Here’s hoping I can simply drown a few bothersome folk, and that will fix my problems. I have the well ready. Now who to drop in it…?

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1 If you are interested in reading more about the Tocci Brothers, they are the subject of many specialized sites around the web. I recommend two that have a respectful and considered treatment not only of these twins but of many other differently abled persons who were public figures in the past. One is The Human Marvels: Presenting Peculiar People, where the proprietor J. Tithonus Pednaud takes a decidedly 19th century stylistic approach to presenting his information that feels quite appropriate to the subject matter. Another is artist James Mundie’s intriguing collected studies of “freaks of nature” called Prodigies.  Inspired by the individuals and their life stories, his site features striking hand-drawn portraiture along with a thoughtful recounting of the pertinent details of their deformities and history. He also includes references to books with more information on the persons covered. The illustration of the Tocci Brothers that appears on this page is reused with kind permission from Mr. Mundie and originally appeared here. I especially recommend his site for an artist’s sensitive take on this unusual subject matter.

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Book Editing: Killing Characters With Mark Twain’s Deadly Well
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The Backwards World: Woman swings scepter while man spins thread - Israhel van Meckenenem 15th c

I know an indie game designer who is working on an rpg with a surprisingly radical premise: that women are the dominant force in a fantasy society.¹ It is not that I personally found this so surprising, or even so radical; rather, I describe it this way because the very concept quickly became a lightning rod for criticism. A certain proportion of men reading about the game designer’s project simply could not get past the underlying premise of power-reversal in the fantasy setting.

The sharpness of that reaction, and indeed the vitriol in many of the remarks made, is what truly surprised me. But then again, it shouldn’t have. This designer unwittingly touched one of the third rails in game design – and for that matter, an unspoken rule in the construction of fictional settings in general, be it rpgs, books, or film. Namely, he blundered into the forbidden territory of power balance between the genders.

This designer proposed altering the power balance and some of the gendered expectations of behavior into the inverse of contemporary culture, where traditionally men hold most or all of the power. In his setting, it would be women in the power-dominant position. This concept, it turns out, was profoundly disturbing to a small but not insignificant percentage of men reading about this game. The negative reactions were varied, and when expressed, were often more harsh than not. There was curt dismissal (”I’d never play a game like that” – a declaration made on the basis of the premise alone, without knowing any other details about the game). There were rabid rapid flights of fancy down some ‘inevitable’ slippery slope to abuse of power (“Men are being forced against their will to be subservient and women will take advantage of having them in that position”; “Women would have to abuse men because men would never stay in that position willingly”). And the most red herring of dismissive attacks of all, ad hominem questioning of personal motivations and sexuality (”There’s something wrong with you if that you want to play a game like that. It could only be for personal fetishistic reasons.”)²

I thought the designer’s premise was an interesting thought experiment. As a sociologist and student of cultural anthropology, I consider gender roles largely socially constructed. The concept of challenging them, of altering power dynamics at this basic human social level, raises interesting questions and carries many intriguing possibilities. Not the least of which would be this question: what would it be like to live in (or play, in the gaming sense) in what is essentially a comprehensively matriarchal society? That is the beauty of casting this in a game-able form: it simply hasn’t been done before in the gaming genre, and is very rarely touched upon in fiction.

Yet there was a strong and argumentative outcry against this fascinating notion (“OMG, that would be terrible! Men would be treated like second-class citizens based on their gender! It would suck, and you’re a freak for even thinking it up!”) – a reaction from a small but vocal minority that went well beyond a simple “I don’t like your game concept.” From a sociological perspective, the backlash spoke to threatened identities – or the perception of threat – embedded in how people thought of themselves, and how they projected they would feel (comfortable, or not) in a game setting that challenged basic identity frameworks such as power privilege associated with gender.³

I am glad to note that the designer handled the criticisms with grace and poise. Encouraged by others who, like myself, are intrigued by the concept, he seems to be carrying on with development of that game setting. So in this case in point, perhaps a creative effort was not doomed to a stillbirth by outraged reactions before it even got off the ground.

The underlying issue, though, does not go away just because this one project is proceeding.

If some men think it would be abhorrent to live as second-class citizens in a world where the opposite gender holds all the power – well, I can only say, “welcome to the world most women live in.” By ‘most women’ I mean women all around the world. Certainly power is more equitably distributed in a place like America, relatively speaking, than it is someplace like Afghanistan. (See the movie Afghan Star for an eye-opening dose of restrictive gender roles and life-threatening backlash when they are transgressed.) And yet it was predominantly American men having the largest conniption fits about altered gender norms and the power-reversal concept in a game.

Do not misunderstand me, here: I am not saying, “Put the shoe on the other foot and see how you like it.” I am saying that in a game world, at least, we can do what we cannot do in the real world: turn these paradigms on their head, and see how they might play out if differently imagined. I think it is a great opportunity to play with and examine these all-but-invisible pieces of social encoding by challenging them in a fictional environment. For surely it is not new news that gender roles are deeply ingrained in us. Most people are relatively unaware of how gender messaging and assumptions color their thoughts on virtually every aspect of social life and personal identity. We are like fish in water, unaware of the water because it is the very air we breath. Yet threaten that environment, and the outcry sounds like an armoring-up, a stance reflexively taken to protect the core self.

As indeed, on some level, it is.

I guess I’m writing this commentary because I want to encourage people to be aware, to be mindful of the gender roles they have ascribed themselves and those around them, and how this translates into their creative works. If it feels “wrong” that women as a class run everything in a fantasy setting, the mindful person will ask him or herself why that is so. In the process of self-examination we garner more personal insights than we ever do by simply declaring that scenario anathema, and flailing at the one who dared to envision such a transgression.

The designer I mention in this post may not have been squelched by those negative reactions, but this is the kind of invisible social conformity pressure that helps keep other artists and writers in check.⁴  We don’t play much with the broad social implications of gender assumptions in most of our fiction and games, and certain approaches to this delicate terrain can obviously evoke strong backlash. Critics may not intend to “keep someone in line” with mainstream gender-think, but that is, in the end, very often the result of that process.

To anyone who thinks of creating gender-transgressive content, I can only encourage you to plug your ears to the (un)spoken mainstream expectations, and create the vision that drives you, however quirky it may be. If it is disturbing to some, then they’re obviously not the market for that work, but there are plenty of others who will be. As to the “disturbance” factor, I think the best art is the kind that unsettles and makes the person contemplating it feel moved, even if “moved” sometimes equals “downright uncomfortable.” Many of us never question our assumptions until we’re challenged in just such a manner. So go on. Challenge.

The ones who are disturbed by your work are the ones who need to be.

_____

1 rpg=”role-playing game”, in case you don’t follow the field and its shorthand.

2 These are not literal quotes from the exchanges referred to. I am summarizing and paraphrasing, rendered in a narrative form. To the best of my recollection this is the gist of what I read.

3 The text and assumptions about gender roles and power dynamics that are packed into these protests are so incredibly dense I will leave it to a women’s studies, sociology, or anthropology grad student to tease them out and offer a fuller critique on the issue. Such a level of analytical discourse is beyond what I’m prepared to get into right now for a humble blog post.

4 I’m not naming the designer because I want to keep the focus here on the underlying issue, not personal details in an internet exchange. Although, if he would like to identify himself and his project, I think it would be great to give his intriguing work more exposure, and from that viewpoint I encourage him to consider commenting on this post, since the aforementioned kerfluffle now lies somewhat distant in time.

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Gender Roles and Women in Power: An Uncomfortable Fiction
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Liberty leading the people - Delcroix

Let’s say you have a realm, empire, dynasty, or kingdom – some kind of large-ish conglomerated polity in your story world or rpg setting.

And let’s say you want to mix things up a bit and introduce change. Maybe you want to create tumult, because civil unrest yields much fertile ground for drama and adventure. Maybe you want plot threads to yank at significant characters and their changing fortunes, and so need fortunes to, like, change in a radical manner. Maybe you just want to irk challenge established characters and introduce obstacles into their governance or power base, or take things to their extreme conclusion and turn the powers that be on their heads.

How do we go about doing this?

There are many ways to skin those cats, but in this five-part series I’ll focus on just one subset. I’m calling it “how to overthrow a kingdom,” but you might just as well call it, “how to introduce compelling, believable change in how a governance system works.” So let’s take to the barricades (like in Lés Miserables) and leap in, shall we?

Armed Conflict

Or, in the words from the movie Dragonheart (1996),

Young Einon: The peasants are revolting.
Brok: They’ve always been revolting, Prince. But now they’re rebelling.

Armed conflict is a very common approach to creating drama in fiction and games, and for that reason I mention it here as one of the ways to overthrow a kingdom. War, rebellion, and armed civil unrest are certainly some of the most frequently used angles in fictional worlds. However, unless it is extremely well motivated and set up, I wouldn’t recommend using this as the default mode of forcing change in high places (although it so often is).

War, revolution, people rising up against the established order: it’s an obvious way of making change happen, and if I may venture the observation, perhaps more “obvious” to an American audience than to many others. Our country was born from revolutionary warfare, and even today the rhetoric of uprising has a place in our political discourse. Considering our history through the 20th century and into the 21st, it could be argued that that “war as resolution or way to effect change” is central to our national psyche.¹

That doesn’t mean, though, that armed conflict is always the best tool to use to force change and create dramatic tension in game or story. In fact, I think it is both an obvious – and often contrived – ploy, and from a narrative perspective, perhaps too easy to use strife in this manner. Too often we see these trite things play out: Need regime change? Have an armed incursion. Need raiders in the countryside? Have a civil war. Need the prince and heir running for his life? Have a palace coup.

Used properly, these tactics can be effective and have their place, but because they are popular and obvious, writers and game designers often look no further than this simplistic framework: “Need to overthrow a dynasty? Have a revolt.” The formula is straightforward, but it overlooks the single biggest argument against it: it doesn’t happen all that often that change at the top is actually caused by armed revolt.

It is true that when revolt or war does effect change, the event is dramatic and leaves a lasting impact on our imaginations and collective memories. From rebelling lords forcing King John to sign the Magna Carta, to East Germany being reshaped by the Soviet Union, to Moammar Kaddafi being driven from dictatorship by popular rebellion bolstered by outside interests – when one group takes to arms and forces their will upon the ruling power, it is always memorable.

Battle of Hastings, 1066 - the Bayeux Tapestry

Certainly wars stand out in our minds for that reason: think of the myriad small principalities and kinglets having at each other hither and yon during the Dark and Middle Ages, a common template for role-playing game design and related fantasy fiction. But simply because something is memorable does not mean it is the prevailing dynamic. Even in the contentious Middle Ages, many kingdoms fell or changed due to other, non-war-related reasons. As polities and governance systems became more complex, neighbor bashing neighbor had a lot less to do with change than other system-impacting events did.

Historically and across many cultures, these other kinds of factors more frequently cause lasting governance change and drive dynasties from power. “Want to overthrow a kingdom? Have a war” may not be the most effective way to achieve the goal, or even the most realistic. Its one advantage is that this is a tactic a disgruntled population (or fraction thereof) can take into their own hands and put into effect (and so, I would argue, particularly noteworthy and memorable to democratic imaginations). Other causes of regime change are very often out of the control of individuals – but can be all the more powerful for that reason.

Still, if you must resort to warfare or armed rebellion to overthrow a kingdom, here are three things to keep in mind when you weave this into your story or game setting:

1. Motivation

Conflict does not happen out of the blue. The clash has to be strongly motivated. What is driving individuals to risk their own deaths, or those of their loved ones? What personal or institutional forces are driving the push to war? Someone has made the decision to wage war, and others have gone along with that decision. Why?

2. Resources

Armed conflict takes money and supplies: weapons, armor, often transportation, and always food. Whether you write about insurgents supported by friendly locals or an invading Mongol horde, ask yourself where they are going to get their supplies from. The availability of such things have a direct impact on the success of the conflict, and quite often on civilians in the area as well. How does this impact your story and your world?

3. Capabilities

Armed conflict plays out on a landscape – literally, a geographical terrain – and on the “landscape” of what is technologically (or magically) possible. If we decide to conquer those people across the sea, how are we going to deal with crossing the ocean? We have both geography (ocean) and technology (ships) to contend with there, but it needs to be considered and addressed in some manner in the narrative. If magic is commonplace in a kingdom under attack, how do they incorporate it into their defenses of cities and armies? What are the constraints and the opportunities afforded by the landscapes in which the conflict will unfold? All meanings of ‘landscape’ intended here.

Bayeux Tapestry detail - ships crossing sea

Those are perhaps the very basic starting points for creating a believable armed conflict that will be deeply enough rooted in the narrative or game setting to have legs and be sustainable for dramatic purposes. (If you have thoughts on other strategic elements needed to motivate armed conflict in fiction, please share your thoughts in the comments below!) That said, I would encourage writers and game designers to think of other – possibly more likely – ways to force change in a realm.

To that end, the next post in this series looks at one of the most pervasive, potentially earth-shaking, and yet little-used devices for toppling kingdoms: the economy.

Part Two of “Five Ways to Overthrow a Kingdom” will appear around December 19. You can get the RSS feed in your newsreader by clicking the button in the page title banner, or receive posts directly in your email by subscribing (see left side-bar for the form).

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1. Not to say we don’t have a pacifist mindset in this country as well; my point is simply that a nation that does not have the capacity or willingness to go to war, does not go to war. The fact that we wage war and incursions (and relatively readily, at that) speaks as much to our history and historical mindset, from Revolution through ‘rugged individualism’ and more, as it does to contemporary military or political necessities.

Related Posts:

TED Talks and the Patterns of War

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Five Ways to Overthrow a Kingdom in Fictional Settings – Part 1
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"Pish-posh!"

I’m writing an alternate history/paranormal novel that takes place in a version of Victorian England (Queen Victoria’s Transmogrifier, which I’ve written about here).  I routinely give things a once-over to make sure my language is consistent with the era I’m depicting: no anachronisms, no modern slang, and appropriate use of mid-19th century phrasing when it adds flavor and makes sense to the reader.

Recently I was working on a short story that will be appearing in the forthcoming anthology, Demon Lovers: Succubi.¹ The story is related to characters and events in Transmogrifier , and in the course of this writing I found myself using some turns of phrase I had to double-check. When did they come in vogue? Would it be right to have people saying them in their time/place?

One case in point is the term “pish posh”, a dismissive utterance somewhere between “don’t be silly” and “oh, come on!”.  To my surprise, etymology for the term “pish” shows the word as an exclamation of contempt has been in use since the 1590s. Who knew? And yes, it was in vogue in the 19th century, as reflected in novels and some letters and journals of the period.

Anyway, this got me thinking about use of old expressions in writing, and so, here’re some thoughts on the when/how/where/why of it.

When to Use Outdated Speech

Obviously, speaking in an “old fashioned” way can have (at least) one of two impacts. First, it can make someone sound old-fashioned – i.e., identified with an earlier era -  if you have them do it when no one else talks that way. This is a tactic to use if you want to make your character sound dated. You don’t have to think 19th century or earlier literature here for that to happen, either. The older man who answers the challenge, “Yo, why you up in my grill?” with “No sweat. It’s groovy, man,” sounds like an old hippy, or at least someone who came of age during the 1960s.

The other time and place to use period slang is when it is era-appropriate and everyone talks that way. In that situation, though, a writer has to deal with a different challenge:  we generally want to convey the flavor and feel of the period, without having the language feel stilted. We want the story to flow in a way that is comfortable and understandable for a modern reader, but remind them in subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) ways, that they are a fly on the wall in a place and time that is not “here, now”.

Certainly there is artistry to accomplishing this, and in the end you have to rely on your feeling for language (or develop a feeling for language) that lets you strike the right nuanced tone to carry these things off. But even if you’re tone-deaf about vernacular and what slang comes from what period, there are still solutions to hand. Here are some resources I’ve found that can help you transport readers back in time without jarring the believability of your characters and setting.

Resources

If you’re writing a period piece or want to talk old-fashioned on purpose, know your old-fashioned language. I think one of the best ways to do this is to read books from the era in question. I am lucky in that I grew up reading a lot of novels written in the 19th century and things even earlier, so the cadences and usage of that era are almost second nature to me. Often I will write something down and then go, “Wait, where’d that come from? I better look that up in case I’m making it up.” Turns out I’m probably regurgitating something from Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe) or Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island), and so on. Good! The language my people are using, at least in the incidental expressions and phrasing, is hitting the right tone.  You don’t need this to be second nature in order to use the right phrasing, though.  There are great resources online that I frequently turn to, and you might find them useful too. Here’s a sampling:

The Online Etymology Dictionary

One of my favorite resources for the etymology of uncommon phrases is the most excellent Online Etymology Dictionary, which you can browse for endless hours (if you’re of that bent) right here.  While good dictionaries have interesting etymology (word origin) notes, this online resource is more chatty and has some interesting backstories tucked in here and there about the phrases in question, going beyond the simple ‘word root/first use’ info in regular dictionaries. Great resource, highly recommended. In fact, let me give that a Lizard Lair stomp of approval!

Online Etymology Dictionary

The Word Detective

For an even more back-story filled and often humorous romp through the underbrush of language evolution, check out The Word Detective. This bloggish reference site is the online version of a newspaper column produced for ages (well, online since 1995, anyway) by Evan Morris. Great stuff here, less dictionary-esque than the previous listing, and an eclectic grab-bag of vocabulary byways.

Evan Morris’ work gets stomps of approval as well, but it’s the same as the one above (5 Stomps=This Rocks!). In fact, all my recommendations here are 5-stomps worth of word fun.  If it’s just 4 stomps of “good stuff,” it’s not on this short list.

Speaking of vocabulary byways, I also recommend…

The Oxford English Dictionary Online

The O.E.D. is the sine qua non of dictionaries, and many obsessive wordsmiths would give their next smartphone for an unabridged version of this venerable reference work. Other dictionaries pale in comparison. Actual access to the grist of the OED online costs moolah, but you don’t need to be a paying subscriber to get one of the next-best things: their Access to English page. This content gives you various subsets of historical and word-evolution info. I find their “Word Stories” section to be one of the most consistently useful. I think they have a newsletter link somewhere there; I seem to get periodic (quarterly?) mailings from them, but right now cannot spot where I signed up for such a thing. Their Word of the Day is also entertaining, and you can sign up to get that emailed to you as well (right hand column on the home page).   5 Stomps for this one as well.

So there you go, hopefully a little helpful grist either for your writing mill, or for your language enjoyment neurons.  Happy dated slang to us all. May we use it well!

Do you have suggestions for etymology and slang resources that help with language from other eras? Please share in the comments below!

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1. Demon Lovers: Succubi is an anthology appearing December 2011 from my imprint, Storybones Publishing. More will be announced about that book shortly. You can find the book website at http://www.demonlovers.info.

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: When to Use Old Language and Slang in Your Stories
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You can see the Maps of Koristan page here. This is more than just maps: it also contains a narrative about the role-playing game genesis of this area, anecdotes about how some of my stories and books in this region came to be, and how my writing about one spot on this map got Marion Zimmer Bradley to lecture me about submission lengths. (See the page for more on that particular encounter.)

On a related note, in the future I plan to release some of these (and other) maps and regional information as sourcebooks. These docs will be of use in role-playing games or also just as fun reading for fans of my works or people interested in world building. Some will be free, and some I will charge for. If you want inside scoop about the development of this and related content projects, and possibly a chance to be a beta reader, please join my email list where you will get updates about this and other writerly things I’m doing.

Related Page:  Maps of Koristan

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Maps For My Fantasy World & Novels
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Actually, there’s a bit more to it than that.  See, I’m starting work on a book of folklore called Sa’adani Tales, a collection of folk tales from the Sa’adani Empire. This pastiche of origin stories, myth, fairy tales and more will give readers a unique feel for the culture and common sensibilities in the Empire and its birth-world, Àstareth. (If you’ve read my blog for a while, you may have noticed I have an ongoing fascination with folklore.  See Related Posts below for some discussions in this vein.)

Not incidentally, both Empire and Àstareth are rpg settings too (sf and fantasy, respectively), and the stories I’ve written previously actually came out of rpg encounters and gaming needs. You can read more about that in this post, which talks about the larger Sa’adani Tales book project. You’ll be hearing more about this from me in the coming weeks and month, I’m sure.

ANYway (as PeeWee used to say), I was going through my short stories lately and noticed a particular one that is not just folklore but also a ghost story. Since Halloween’s right around the corner, I thought this would be a  great time to share this with you. The story of Li-Wan’s Revenge also appears in Dragonsword, so if you’ve read my free fantasy novel, you may recognize it – but I guarantee the illustrations will be new to you. It’s worth downloading the story just to see Emily Vitori’s handiwork in illustrating the tale¹.  (Hey, I think all folklore should be illustrated. It makes the story come so much more alive – especially when we’re talking about alien or foreign cultures.) If you have a black and white screen on your ereader, you might like to take a look at the color .pdf to get the full effect. Thanks for your great work with this story, Em!

If you’ve never met Li-Wan before, all the better. I hope you enjoy this ghost story and the little taste it gives you of the Sa’adani Tales book. Let me know what you think about it in the comments below. Thanks, and Happy Halloween!

Download Links for Li-Wan’s Revenge

Formats

.pdf

.mobi

.epub

.pdb

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1. Emily illustrated the pictures of people in the story. The peony flower is a detail from the 1861 work “Peony Branch” by Chosui Yabu.

Related Posts

Sa’adani Tales: Folklore in Short Stories

 The Fae: Fairy Folk, or the Sidhe By Any Other Name

Fairy Tales, Symbols, and Readers’ Expectations

The Disneyfication of Children’s Media

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Li-Wan’s Revenge: A Ghost Story
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Imperial Rus (sigil) of the Sa'adani Empire

OK, I owe my blog and you my readers a lot of posts! I plead the fact that my book Splintegrate ate my brain at the end of September, and I’ve been digging out from under the tsunami of Everything Else that stacked up while I was off in science-fiction land.

One of the things that developed while I was sojourning in the Empire was this:  I began to realize that over the years I’ve written a fair amount of folklore for that setting – and me not usually a short story writer, either.  As you may know if you’ve read other parts of my blog, the Sa’adani Empire is not just a fictional setting for my novels: it is also a role-playing game setting, and over the years I’ve documented bits of lore from it to share with my rpg players. Sometimes just “a bit” did not suffice to establish details or the flavor of things, and so every now and then I’d write out a full-blown tale.  Origin stories, cautionary tales, myths, legends, ghost stories – things like that.

Sa’adani space is also connected to my fantasy setting, for the Empire had its roots in the civilization of Qua-lun on old Àstareth (the world on which The Truthsayer’s Apprentice and Kar Kalim take place). For folklore purposes, this means that some stories from the homeworld – and sometimes once-current events – have become memorialized over time and passed down through generations as legend and folktales from the Old World.

Collectively I have the beginnings of a book of Sa’adani folklore here, and so the Sa’adani Tales project was born.

But this is just the beginnings of a book.  I see how it needs to come together, and what I need to do to produce a finished work. Soon I’ll be announcing this as a crowdfunding project, because I need assistance to help turn this into a reality. I’d like to write the rest of the book over the coming 6 months and publish it in Spring 2012. Actually, the writing could go faster, but I want this to be illustrated, too. I always loved reading folklore that was illustrated, and since these stories are about strange people and events in a galaxy far far away, I think these stories deserve to be illustrated as well.

I’m not going to get into all my project details right now (I’m still in the planning stages), but if you want to hear more about Sa’adani Tales and the crowdfunding drive, I hope you’ll subscribe to my newsletter to catch the updates about all this. (Form’s in the left-hand column on this page.)

Meanwhile, to give you a taste of the sort of thing that will be in Sa’adani Tales, I invite you to check out Li-Wan’s Revenge. It’s a ghost story, and since Halloween is fast approaching, I thought this would be a great time to share this with you.  It’s available for free. You can download the story in whatever flavor suits you by following the links in this post.

 Related Posts

Li-Wan’s Revenge: A Ghost Story

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Sa’adani Tales: Folklore in Short Stories
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This lack of professional publishing engagement with your work meant something.  It often meant your work had only niche appeal, thus not justifying a publisher’s expense of bringing something to market. But more often, it meant your work actually sucked. You had not yet mastered your craft;  you wrote something no agent would touch and no publisher would buy. Sure, spend your money on vanity publishing: when you see how difficult it can be to market a work, and are unable to sell the many copies you thought would fly off the shelf – well, that’s when reality sets in, and you will look longingly at established publishing houses, and wish your work would be taken up by one of them.

Enter the Ebook

Now – quite suddenly, relatively speaking – all those barriers to getting one’s work out there are gone. Vanished, as if they’d never existed. There’s been a lot of discussion about how the publishing model has flipped around – not just from a business viewpoint but from the actual get-it-in-print viewpoint. It used to be that a lot was written, and specialists picked what they thought was marketable. This is what would see print. The new model is, everything plus the kitchen sink gets into print and is readily accessible everywhere (electronically): and out of this morass, the good stuff will (presumably) float to the top. This is also known as the “publish then curate” model, as opposed to its predecessor, “curate then publish.”

Tons of Garbage

The first and most immediate effect of this new model is the fact that it pushes tons of garbage onto the market. When the price of entry is a word processor, minimal (and I do mean minimal) ability to string words together on a page, a free ebook conversion program and free distribution services: well, if you envision it, and take time to write it, then you can have it in print, for any value of “it”.

Where does this leave the good stuff? If the good work can’t find enough of a readership to elevate it from the muck at least by word of mouth, then it leaves that good stuff buried in the muck, lost in the noise of the absolute glut of cheap or free poorly written material that is flooding the market.

This is frustrating to anyone trying to get their stuff read. It is not only frustrating but I think a real tragedy when this is the fate of truly good writing that can’t get the hearing it needs. But most fiction ebooks do not even fall into that “good writing” category: they sink even further to the bottom of the heap, the really bad writing buried under reams of merely mediocre writing, because there is simply so much STUFF coming out now in ebook form, and the sad fact is, most “authors” in this market are not producing any work that warrants that job description. They are writing at a 7th grade level with stilted craft abilities, and their work is being avidly consumed by an audience with 7th grade reading skills.

This is all well and good if you aspire to write dross for ill-educated masses who aren’t especially particular about the execution of what they read. If, though, you want to write intelligent, insightful, entertaining things that intelligent, insightful readers can really appreciate and be entertained by, you have to up your game and write at a whole different level. This will not only elevate you out of the junk heap of ebook mediocrity, it will connect you with an audience that is the right audience for what you are trying to convey.

This brings me to my tip list of the three things to avoid like the plague if you want to successfully publish an ebook (in a way that distinguishes you from the dross, that is, and makes your work stand out for its merits).

1. Don’t Write Crap

Even the suckiest book will find some poor benighted soul who thinks it rocks. That one ignorant fool does not a market make. If you are writing, you have to be able to, well, WRITE. This means technical skills like good grammar and spelling. It means proofreading skills like getting rid of redundancies and using the right turn of phrase instead of some bastardized thing that misses the mark. And most importantly, it means (if you’re writing fiction) that you need to learn how to tell stories effectively. This means learning your craft. For every significantly flawed work you rush to market, you will lose readership: all those intelligent well-read readers who are potentially repeat book-buyers will trickle away and be almost impossible to win back, because they will have read your work and decided, “Hey. This is crap.”

2. Don’t Publish the First Book You Finish (or the Second, or the Third)

At the risk of being redundant, I’ll say it again: Learn your craft. Practice. Write. Join critique groups and get critiqued. Don’t think because you start here and end there you have told an effective story. Learn what an effective story is. Read voraciously, and listen to intelligent input about your writing. This does not mean asking for fen feedback from your favorite yaoi writing forum. It means finding constructive, detailed technical criticism and constructive input, ideally from other published authors. If not, then find a writing group populated by English Majors (Masters are even better). The kind of detailed critique skills they learn about writing in school is one of the only real-world uses that degree background will ever see. Work it for all it’s worth. And write a million words. Seriously. If you haven’t done that yet, you’re still learning the ropes. What you write at the end of that journey will be vastly different than what you started out with. There are relevant discussion comments in this thread here and more easily found if you google around on “a million words.”

If it takes potentially years to master any major skill, why do we think writing would be any different? People who say, “Well I decided to start writing last year, and now I have three books out at Smashwords” – well, ok, good for you for completing multiple projects. But what’s the quality like? If you’re not a natural genius with the written word, I’m betting you have some craft honing yet to do. Probably years worth of it. And you know what? That’s ok, because it’s par for the course – but be aware of that need, if you want to have quality work on the market.

NOTE:  I know the above two points are similar, however: the first is about quality on the page, the second is about the author’s learning process. I think these are two areas primarily responsible for all the drek posing as readable fiction right now, and so deserve being highlighted in this manner.

3. Don’t Sit Back and Let Your Book (Try to) Sell Itself

This last point is not about craft, but about the issue I mentioned earlier: that in this (still accelerating!) ebook revolution we are in, there is a growing glut of books on the market. Just releasing it at Lulu, Smashwords, Booklocker or Amazon is not by itself sufficient to guarantee sales. You need to take additional steps to draw attention to your work. This is a really necessary thing to do, just as much (or more so!) as in the days of hard-copy vanity publishing, when someone with a 1000-print run had boxes in their living room, relatives saying “No more, thanks!”, and yearning to sell the rest of their inventory so they could get their living room back.

The actual sales tactics have changed, in this day of the interwebz and social media connections, but the problem essentially remains the same: how can you draw people’s eyeballs to your work, so they even realize it is there, much less want to pick it up and read it?

A discussion on marketing is waaay beyond the scope of this post, but this point is in this list because if your book is like 99.99% of those out there, you cannot simply leave it to chance that your book will “catch on” somewhere, or magically stand out in a publisher’s listing compared to all the other hundreds of books in their catalog. Give some thought to this challenge, and understand that when you choose to publish an ebook, you are also making a commitment to market your work – if, that is, you want to stand out from the trash heap and create a market for your work.

That’s it for now – some quick thoughts on big problems I see in today’s fiction ebook marketplace. Good luck to everyone aspiring to write, and LEARN YOUR CRAFT. You don’t just owe it to your readers: you owe it to yourself, to tell the best story you can.

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Here’s a little disclaimer: this is a not-so-disguised rant as well as cautionary “points to watch out for” commentary. I’ve been a professional editor and publisher since I was 24, so I’ve been at this for a while. My experience spans old-style print media from journalism to journals, including newspaper and magazine layout with galley proofs and a handy exacto knife for trimming layout edges, to web content, book editing, and *.mobi conversions for Kindle ebooks today. Still mastering that last, but my point is simply: I’ve seen a lot of styles of media production and distribution, and the content they purvey. Edited a lot of it, and written a lot of it as well. It is from that viewpoint that I share these observations, as well as from my deep dismay at the shear mass of unreadable garbage on the ebook market today. Don’t ask me to review your ebook unless you have zero doubts about the quality of your writing, because if it is not up to professional standards that is the first and (if you’re lucky) the last thing I will note about it in my review.

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Three Problems to Avoid If You Publish a Fiction Ebook
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In the process of beefing up my media section here I decided to start pulling this stuff together and putting it in one place. As I get things sorted out, reviews and whatnot will be in the Media section here (see Media in the menu bar). I’ll also run blog posts that link to the more full-length item in the permanent Media section. All of this is reachable under Media | Reviews, or by searching the site for “reviews”.

In the course of doing this I’m reminded of all those various ratings systems out there: stars, rotten tomatoes, inflatable ducks, whathaveyou. And I thought, well, if it’s a review from the Lizard Lair, we need our own special imprimatur on this content. And so, without further ado, I introduce to you the Dinosaur Stomp of Approval rating system.

Details in the graphic below. I trust it is self-explanatory. Wanted to post the whole thing here so you know what the heck the stylized dino-stomp signs mean when you see them.

And appropriately stomped reviews will start appearing soon as well.  You can spy  stomped (and unstomped) reviews here.

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Lizard Lair Media Ratings: the Dinosaur Stomp of Approval
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