This day started off on a bad note. The alarm went off, I hit the
snooze, then said to myself, 'In ten more minutes I have to get up
and get ready for work. That stinks.' It took me a long while to
fall asleep last night, so I was already in bad shape. During those
ten minutes, I lay there trying to build up the will to keep
existing. Then I said, 'Hang on. I saw Skyfall with Claudia
yesterday, and we saw it on Saturday.' Then I accused my alarm clock
of being the male child of a female dog.
Part of the fun of writing is you're always exploring new ideas,
places, and people. The downside of that is unless you already know
everything, you need to do research to address your ignorance.
Earlier today, I needed a name for a skin condition that would be a
likely suspect for something in Roja, and browsing around, I thought
of something I heard in the new Mortal Kombat trailer. (I'm a huge
fan of the original movie, even though I only played the game a few
times and got my backside handed to me) So I looked up Harlequin
Ichthyosis.
I have learned so much over the years from writers who put little
tidbits in their stories that were about something I had never heard
of before. I need you to hear me say this next part in a grumpy old
man voice, because it won't have the same impact if you don't. Back
when I first started writing, if you needed to know something, you
went to the library, and you hoped it wasn't something so exotic that
the librarians wouldn't know what you were talking about. Today, we
have Google, yet people on the whole don't seem to know much more
than they did those few decades ago. I looked that skin condition
up, and I got one of those shocks where my head is screaming, 'What
the hell? How can something that disturbing exist and we don't
regularly hear about it?' Babies get born with that condition, and
life sucks from that point on. Usually, not for long.
Part of the way we deal with the world, is to build a picture of it
in our heads. Let's say I have a brain saw, and I pull out your gray
stuff and pop it into a scanner. A lot of the info that I read is
going to be interconnected into an overall picture not of this world,
but how you think this world is. Each brain world is going to be
different. If you're a physicist, your world is made of atoms and
quarks and semi-real strings, as opposed to a stockbroker, whose
world only breaks down beyond physical matter when you think about it
really hard, but that has this dynamic, chaotic system of how money
works. If you believe in psychic powers, then some people show up
too late to board planes doomed to crash in your world because on
some level, they know what's going to happen. If you believe we went
to the moon, then your world has a moon with leftover pieces of
spacecraft on it. If not, it has governments that lie about those
spacecraft.
This world building comes in handy for those of us who build new
worlds all the time and then try to sell them. All we have to do is
make worlds that you want to read about. Simple, right? I can hear
Hollywood knocking on my door right now. Oh wait, that's my
supervisor, wanting to know why I'm not at work. People are funny
when it comes to what we like to experience, and what we want to
know.
Does your world have babies that are born with skin that comes in
plates, with weak gaps between them? Do those babies usually die of
infection, or suffocate because that skin is too tight over their
chest to let them breathe? Does your world only include women and
men, and not people who are born with characteristics of both, or
neither? Human beings are funny things, and the parts that make us
up, physical, mental, and spiritual, fit together in all kinds of
patterns. Is it possible for us to understand all those patterns?
Maybe, maybe not. But we're aware of a hell of a lot more patterns
today than we were yesterday.
Still mixing the patterns around. Still writing.
No comments:
Post a Comment