How can you research stuff that never happened?

[athelind]

As most of you know, I dabble in RPG design, mostly as a sounding board for normanrafferty. Some of you may also know that I am (like three out of four people in the fandom) working on a "fantasy epic" of my own. Thus, many of my conversations revolve around the Theory and Practice of World Creation.

Last night, the conversation took a startlingly familiar turn. I opined, as I often have over the decades, that "The best fantasy is written by people who do research, who don't just shrug and say, 'well, it's a fantasy, I can just make stuff up.' Too much fantasy these days is written by peole who think that reading Tolkien counts as 'research'."

The response: "Why does fantasy have to be based on research into what happened? Isn't true fantasy stuff that is Completely Made Up From Scratch? The only difference between basing your game on research of ancient myths and Tolkien is that their books are older."

(I haven't attributed the source because a) I don't want the person in question to feel like I'm "picking on them" in a public forum, and b) the sentiment is so often expressed.)

The obvious comparison is SF, of course. I've read a lot of science fiction, and it's not hard to tell the difference between the stuff written by people who know something about science and are willing to do some research on a topic before writing a novel around it, and the people who just read a lot of Star Trek and Star Wars novels and copied what they did.

However, a better comparison is comic book art.

I've read a lot of superhero comics. The medium has a lot of stylization, a lot of visual shorthand.

The most adept comic book artists have a deep-seated understanding of human anatomy. Their stylizations are based on that knowledge. Jack Kirby was famous for his impossible, dramatic poses -- but the man knew how the human body worked, and how to exaggerate it for effect.

When a comic book artist learned exclusively from reading comics, it shows. He applies the stylizations and conventions without really understanding the underlying structures. He uses the shorthand without grasping what it stands for. His exaggerations become more exaggerated, until his figures are so defomred and distorted that they bear only a painful resemblance to the human form. On the surface, the art may look slick and cool and cutting-edge, but on closer examination, it just doesn't hold together.

There's also... well, as an environmental scientist, I think of it as a "bottleneck effect". When you rely on second- and third- and fourth-hand sources for inspiration, you lose nuances and concepts and ideas with every successive iteration. Writers and gamers often proclaim that doing research just trammels on their Unfettered Creativity -- but so much of their output just winds up looking the same.

You want "Unfettered Creativity"? Our ancestors spent generations coming up with all manner of, well, wacked-out shit. I guarantee you that twenty minutes in the library skimming the Motif-Index of Folk Literature* will give you more useful, inventive, exotic ideas than reading the complete works of Robert Jordan, R.A. Salvatore, and Margaret Weis put together.

It will certainly get your farther than reading the Dungeon Master's Guide or the Eberron sourcebook.

I should also say, by all of this, I am not advocating that All Fantasy Must Look Like Old Fairy Tales. To the contrary, I'm protesting the sameness of the bulk of the genre. Doing research, immersing yourself in folklore and history, serves two purposes: not only will it give you a richer, deeper reserve of concepts from which to draw -- it also will help you break away from the endless litany of cliches and do something genuinely different and innovative.

---

*True Confession Time: I discovered the MIFL through a "Recommended Reading" article in Dragon Magazine, c. 1978-80.

Comments

[trpeal.livejournal.com]

One minor regret I have with Fight Cast Or Evade is that I didn't give world creation much thought to begin with, setting it in a very generic "fantasy world" that is almost straight out of the World of Greyhawk. Now, when I want to focus on bits of the culture and such I have to shoehorn it in to what I've already haphazardly written, rather than having everything be part of a consistent whole.

On the other hand, I'm dealing in parody, so maybe that's not so important. But the characters don't know they're living in a parody, and I'm sure they'd like things to make sense.

Plus, I love a carefully detailed and original world. Too bad I didn't think of that before I started.

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

Well, yes ... but it's not exactly a revolutionary idea, is it? :) Most of the best fantasy and SF writers I've met pretty much say that the best way to write good fantasy and SF is to be interested in other stuff!

-The Gneech

[rikoshi.livejournal.com]

I guess that's what I thought was cool about Ironclaw and how much they didn't tell about the Autarchs. It was very much a, "Cool, now I get to make stuff up!" set of revelations, but they weren't completely without guidance because I at least knew how the world turned out by the time the campaign setting came along, so I was able to shape some things that way.

[paka.livejournal.com]

Research and whacked out shit.

For the longest time, there was this helmet design that kept cropping up in late Imperial Roman art, sort of a nasaled helm with cheekpieces and elaborate inlays, pasteboard jewels or something. Totally bloody ridiculous until someone dug it up. Then you have all this other bizarre stuff - the Battersea shield, the Pazyryk tattoos and horse furniture, deer stones, the Sutton Hoo helmet, the Oseberg cart - really freakin' fantastical!

The world is full of bizarre crap that our ancestors came up with; for instance, because sitting out winters in pre-industrial Scandinavia is pretty damn boring unless you start making up weird stories and carving designs in everything nearby.

[mythos-amante.livejournal.com]

There's also... well, as an environmental scientist, I think of it as a "bottleneck effect". When you rely on second- and third- and fourth-hand sources for inspiration, you lose nuances and concepts and ideas with every successive iteration....-- it also will help you break away from the endless litany of cliches and do something genuinely different and innovative.
"

And THAT, my friend, is exactly how I feel about furry art! XD Thank you!

[rikoshi.livejournal.com]

To be fair, though, there's still a lot of furry art that's being put out that is still fresh and interesting and beautiful. I'm not saying that the problem you mention doesn't exist, but it's not at 100% across the entire spectrum.

[mythos-amante.livejournal.com]

True, but nothing is ever 100%! ;D

Some artists have backgrounds in art history and the stories and the symbolism that societies have been based on for hundreds and even thousands of years.
Others, (MANY in this particular fandom, 'cause face it, we're kind of a "young" fandom now and a lot of people are more interested in computers, comic books, and sci-fi/fant books than they are in musty old mythology/history books) "make it up as they go along," mainly from rehashing sci-fi/fant novels and bad furry fiction, never knowing that there are deeper stories that they can learn and absorb and give a new spin on with their OWN voice; that will make their art more fascinating and their minds more open to seeing connections to the stories of other peoples, AND to their own people. We're not talking to other furry-fans, we're talking to their cultural and genetic ancestors. Knowing THOSE stories would make their own lives richer and more complex by seeng and aknowledging more connections with other beings who DO have more in common with them than they might like to think. And knowing more cultural stories would make their art resonate on a very innate, subconscious level with more people, mostly in a way that has little to do with bulges in pants.

But, I suppose part of the charm of much furry art is that it exists in its own little micro universe where anything can happen and different "races" can interact on equal grounds. But that also means that the art avoids interconnectedness with everyday society as a whole, as many of us fans do, due to ostracization in our youth, or whatnot. I just get frustrated because there is a LOT more to gain from people learning other peoples' deep-rooted symbology and using it to make bridges; more people can come in or go out freely; rather than everyone staying on an island that gets fresh blood every so often but outside of that incestuously interbreeds into retardation and ineffectiveness.

[rikoshi.livejournal.com]

Your point about bad furry fiction is a big problem that I face, being a writer. It's something of a foregone conclusion that furry fiction is bound to suck and isn't worth looking into, and so I'm faced with the near-constant reality that hardly anyone is ever going to read what I write (I mean, I still write it anyway, but...).

Then again, I suppose a lot of that also has to do with the fact that it's a lot easier to look at pictures of animal-people than it is to read novels about them. :)

[mythos-amante.livejournal.com]

YESH! And art is SO pretty! You might face the idea that it might be difficult for anyone outside of the fandom to interact mentally with furry-fic based characters. Being kind of a fence-walker myself, I think the main turn-off I have with furry fiction is that there ARE all these animal people of different races strolling around together. It makes a sort of sense in the Chanur and Kzinti series, but again, that's Sci-Fi, and they're aliens, right? So Them being animalk people is okay, as long as there are humans around to interact with them through. The only place anthros seem to have a space for reader-connectivity without encountering a LACK of Suspension of Disbelief in the audience is in fables, stories told in terms of "we understand that this is a race on a DIFFERENT plane of existence" or "these are familiar creatures and this is their hidden life," and things made "for kids" (AND the fandom, of course, where we're sort of used to it.) (books that work from my POV are Tailchaser's Song, the Firebringer series, and Redwall.) Otherwise the adult, non-anthro-oriented mind balks at a half-page description of some lion-man's rippling thews and how his eyes glisten golden in the African sunlight while some mongoose slave boi polishes his toenails for him. It would make sense if he was some embodiement of some human god, or if all the animals suddenly became sentient and walked upright, but not if humans never existed. There's just not enough there to have a human-resonating reader get into it, in my opinion. There's just got to be some way to get readers to go from here to there.

Sorry, this was going to be a short response, but I see your dilemma and had to brainstorm.

[mythos-amante.livejournal.com]

This is fun, by the by! You guys rock! *cheers*

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Ooh, furry art. An even better comparison than comic art.

[halfelf.livejournal.com]

As the individual who was the source of the statement I made before, I still stand by what I said. What you are saying is, in effect, that people cannot be as creative as they used to be. Everything must be built on the past, which lends it greater inherent believability. It becomes more transparent when you talk about Sci-Fi, since the concept of that has been around a much shorter time than Fantasy.

I have to disagree. There are plenty of fiction writers out there who have interesting, unique fiction. There's also plenty out there who build on past fantasy concepts, or twist them into new ways. Diskworld, for instance, is fantasy, and borrows a lot from fables. Does that make it inherently better than, say, the Death Gate Cycle, which for the most part is entirely unique?

In three hundred years will people say that basing books on Robbert Jordan lend versimillitude to their stories? Where's the line?

I definitely agree that Folk Literature has a wealth of information to draw from. One of the worlds I was working on in my spare time drew more from that than from today's D&D. But people can still make things from scratch, and these ideas and dreams are no less valid than the ones built on Grimm's Fairy Tales.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

...if you don't know what's been done before, how do you know what you're doing is new?

[halfelf.livejournal.com]

Does it matter? This is sort of like a tree falling in the forest argument. Also, down that road lies the statement that everything has already been done before. I'm not sure I'm willing to believe that.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

It's not that "everything has been done before".

It's that "those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it."

Usually in Summer School.

[halfelf.livejournal.com]

Well, keep in mind, I never advocated ignoring it completely... I'm just trying to say that it's possible that you can make up something completely new that's also very interesting. :)

[athelind.livejournal.com]

And I like that, and encourage that, and love discovering stuff like that!

I just think -- as Termy notes, down below -- that if you Know What's Gone Before, you're better equipped to come up with something new!

[terminotaur.livejournal.com]

I think the need for research is important, not just for the aquisition of knowledge in creating your setting, but in the mental gymnastics it forces you to make. as you go through the process of grappling with these issues the chance of discovering an inventive twist increase.

In another sense spending the mental effort to research various aspects of a world forces a level of "A lead to B, which caused C" and so on. Cause and effect of different aspects of the setting. There is a greater interconnect of aspects of the setting.

Any setting should strive for a level of plausibility. It makes even an unreal location or situation more real I think because it gives the reader something to latch on to. There is a logic that follows (of if not, it will follow as the story progresses).

Of course I'm also shivvering at home with the flu right now and operating on 3 hours sleep so everything I said makes perfect sense to ME. :)

[hafoc.livejournal.com]

Hrmm.. I don't think I ever researched for Flanker. But of course the whole writing experience for that one has been just spooky. Putting in hints, in the early chapters, about how it all comes out, when I didn't even know it CAME out.

[collie13.livejournal.com]

Frankly, doing research has taught me that real life is far, far more peculiar, weird, and interesting than most fantasy. ;)