A random interaction on Twitter earlier this year began me thinking about how the elements and principles of design can be linked to writing. I’m trained in design, both for graphic art and landscape design, so the concepts were known to me. But I’d never thought about applying them to writing.

In this first analysis, I’m going to be considering them in the context of world-building, in preparation for a talk I’m giving in May, I’ll be doing a series of blog posts on this concept…and this is the first one. I won’t be talking about all the things that should be included in world-building – there are dozens (hundreds?) of resources for that, but rather  how the design concepts can be used to integrate world building into the narrative.

Today, I’ll look at how the element of line can be used. In visual art, line refers to linear marks, or edges where shapes or positive and negative space meet. There are two ways to consider this in world-building.

The equivalent of visual art’s linear marks in writing is movement: journey, regardless of the method. Journeys are prime places for showing us the world: what is the traveller experiencing? What are their senses telling them, and how are they reacting? (I wonder sometimes if this is why fantasy worlds and hero’s journey story arcs go together – there is so much scope for world-building!) If these reactions or impressions add to the character’s growth or reveals things about them – either directly to the reader or to another character – then the world-building slides seamlessly into the story.

In this snippet from Book 1 of my Empire’s Legacy trilogy, Empire’s Daughter, here is the protagonist Lena at the beginning of a physical journey:

The track widened, allowing Garth and me to ride abreast, behind Casyn. Looking back, I could no longer see even the smoke from Tirvan’s chimneys. Stop that, I told myself. Look around you. This is new. The plateau we rode on was rocky, heathland and bog, without trees. A raven croaked from a boulder.

We came to the road. I had expected a cobbled track, but the builders had made it wide enough for two wagons to pass. Paved with squared stone, it spoke of permanence and age. Casyn signalled a stop. We rode up beside him.

“North,” he said, pointing, “the road goes to Serra and Delle, and beyond it to Berge where it turns east again to run below the Emperor’s Wall on the northern border. South, it meets the sea near Karst, and then again turns east to Casilla. The closest inns are an easy day’s ride in either direction.”

A map nestled in my saddlebag, drawn by Casyn, showed the villages and inns on the road. If no one at the first southward inn had news of Maya, I would accompany Garth to Karst, riding northward again as spring approached. The northern road, Casyn had counselled, would be treacherous for a lone traveller in a matter of weeks.

“Is there an eastern road?” I asked. When Casyn had brought me the map, I had focused on the inns, knowing that I was most likely to find Maya—or at least hear word of her—at one of them.

We learn a number of facts about Lena’s land in this passage: a bit about its ecology and its comparative eco-region: ‘…heathland and bog, without trees. A raven croaked…’ Most readers will be able to picture this and relate it to a northern setting. But we also learn that it is new for Lena: a short ride from her village, and she’s never been there. It tells us about the insularity of her upbringing and the expectations of her village.

“I had expected a cobbled track, but the builders had made it wide enough for two wagons to pass. Paved with squared stone, it spoke of permanence and age.”  Here we learn that this country has a history, a past that is still to be revealed – but one that the character Casyn takes for granted, while Lena does not.

“North,” he said, pointing, “the road goes to Serra and Delle…. So we have map of Lena’s country laid out in words, grounding both her and the reader. Lena has this map, she’s seen it, but we also learn the geography isn’t her focus: she wants to find Maya, and she’s looked at the map only in relation to that goal.

World-building, using the linearity of the journey as the vehicle, has given the reader insight into the northern setting of this world, hinted at the age and technology of the culture, revealed a bit about the limits of Lena’s village’s worldview, and provided an brief overview of the settlement structure of the country – and shown us there is another country to its north. But because it is in the context of Lena’s experience, it blends into the narrative.

 The second way to consider the concept of line is the intersection of shape or space: edges. In writing, the equivalent is meetings: the edges of culture, personality, gender, religions, politics, language…. Again, showing how protagonists react to these edges combines the world-building with character development.

In this excerpt from much later in Empire’s Daughter, Lena has reached a crowded southern inn, another new experience for her:

Only women occupied the tables and benches. The men had a separate room. Here in the south, where villages and farms crowded closer together, and with regular traffic on the road between Casilla and the Emperor’s camp, custom kept men and women apart. Voices and bodies filled the room. I went to the serving bar to order ale and food. When it came, I paid, then made my way to an empty place at the far end of a table. My room-mates sat at the opposite end. They each raised a hand in greeting but made no effort to include me in the conversation. I ate my stew, listening.

I heard talk of crops and herds, of a good year for wine, of births and deaths. Women bet on a dice game at a table behind me, and someone played a stringed instrument of some kind in the far corner, quietly and without accompaniment. I thought of the map Casyn had drawn for me, trying to picture this inn. As far as I could remember, it sat at the hub of several roads, leading out to a semi-circle of villages—Ballin, Karst, two or three others. When I finished my food, I turned slightly to watch the dice game behind me. It seemed friendly, with much laughter and joking. One of the women looked up. “D’you want to join us?”

I shook my head. “I’ve never played. May I just watch?”

“Sure,” she answered. “But where are you from, that you’ve never thrown the dice?”

In this scene of meetings – a new space, with different rules, new people, a new game – there are lots of opportunities for world-building. What do we learn?

Only women occupied the tables and benches. The men had a separate room. Here in the south, where villages and farms crowded closer together, and with regular traffic on the road between Casilla and the Emperor’s camp, custom kept men and women apart.

Fairly self-explanatory, and in all honesty if I were writing this book again, I might leave out that last sentence and just let the first two show us the difference in cultural practices between the south of Lena’s country and the north. (Or reframe the last sentence as Lena’s direct thought).

I heard talk of crops and herds, of a good year for wine…While the reader is picturing Lena sitting alone, listening (which gives more insight into her character), they are also learning that this is an agricultural area; coupling that with villages and farms crowded closer together tells the reader that the south is a more fertile area, with better conditions for crops, and warmer, if wine can be produced.

As far as I could remember, it sat at the hub of several roads, leading out to a semi-circle of villages—Ballin, Karst, two or three others. Here, as Lena remembers, the reader is reminded of the geography and infrastructure of roads and villages; the sentence also reinforces the higher population of the south.

The dice game gives the reader insight into recreational pastimes (as does the instrument being played quietly in the background); the fact Lena does not know how to play again emphasizes the cultural differences between north and south. It’s also a jumping-off point for a conversation that will lead the narrative (and the journey) forward.

Lena’s experiences here are mostly that of hearing and sight. I could have included other sensory information – the taste of the food, the smells in the air, the temperature of the room – but I’d done that in other inn scenes, so while repetition (a principle of design, rather than an element) is important, so is variation within that repetition. More on that in another post!

 Elements of Design graphic By Mtpanchal – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74316457

Today’s post is by author Bjørn Larssen, author of the wonderful Storytellers, set in Iceland. I’m about half-way through the book, and I’ll be posting my review soon, but until then, here’s Bjørn with some background on the setting and genesis of the novel.

(Storytellers on Amazon.com:  https://amzn.to/2OgxUiW)

The Elves of Iceland

I started working on my first novel, Storytellers, on January 1st, 2017 – an easy date to remember. The novel was inspired by a dream I had. Writing down – rather than writing – the first draft took me two weeks. The second draft took two months, but I still had one problem. The setting was “a village”, which didn’t seem precise enough for historical fiction. What I described was a community both isolated and widespread, living largely from fishing, in a place where nature was not calming and pleasant, but actively trying to kill people.

At the same time, and in the previous few years, I’ve been obsessed with the singer Ásgeir, whose debut album Dýrð í dauðaþögn (Glory in the silence) was my album of the year… for two years in a row, since nothing better came out. The English version, In The Silence, featured lyrics so beautiful they almost hurt, translated by John Grant. As I was listening to In The Silence for the 150th time, it dawned on me that there was a country called Iceland, which was cold and produced both Björk and Ásgeir. So I decided to investigate it a bit.

The first two books I picked up were a novel by Halldór Laxness, Independent People, and an introduction to Iceland’s more recent history – Sigurður Gylfi Magnusson’s Wasteland With Words. Everything came into place. Iceland was not only a perfect setting for my novel, it felt as if the country was created especially so that I could write about it. It would take a while until I realised that the Old Gods worked the other way round, but at that point I started doing serious research. “A village in Iceland” still wasn’t enough of worldbuilding. I needed to know more. Whilst most Icelanders wrote diaries and memoirs, most of them were never translated to any language other than Icelandic. I realised I needed to go there – and talk to someone who would know much more than me.

We went for four days. I needed to spend a day in Árbærsjafn, the open air museum the name of which I couldn’t even spell at the time, much less pronounce. Other than that, we intended to see the touristic parts – Thingvellir (which my husband still calls “the Game of Thrones place”), Geysir, and other attractions by the Golden Circle. I met up with a wonderful historian, Helga Maureen, got answers to most of my questions, then we drove around until all of a sudden a wave of heavy depression fell upon me. My husband and my friend went to see the Öxararfoss waterfall, I stayed in the car. And then something unexpected happened. Twenty minutes later, when they returned, my depression was gone and I was in the perfect mood to continue driving around.

*

According to a survey conducted in 1998, 54% of Icelanders declared that they either believed in elves or at least did not want to deny their existence. The second option feels like a perfect definition of an elf: a creature whose existence can be neither denied, nor proven via scientific means.

In December 2013, the elves and Icelanders’ approach towards them made the front pages of worldwide newspapers. The local authorities decided that a new road needed to be built between the towns of Hafnarfjörður and Álftanes. The road would lead through the Garðahraun lava field – where a large rock or pillar of lava was a well-known church for the elves dwelling in the area. This was enough for the foreign journalists. “Iceland’s Hidden Elves Delay Road Projects,” declared the articles. At the time, this only caused me to raise my eyebrows politely before moving on to the interesting stuff (politics).

The truth was much less exciting, at least for the foreign journalists. A group called Hraunavinir (“Lava Friends”) protested against causing massive damage to one of the few completely untouched parts of the country. Their protests were ignored, and activists arrested. The protest against disturbing the elves’ settlement was simply one of the ideas they came up with, but surprisingly it proved to be the most difficult one for the authorities to ignore. Whilst no official statement was issued declaring the road impossible to build due to the elves’ presence, the authorities didn’t dare to simply announce elves didn’t exist. Gunnar Einarsson, the mayor of Álftanes has contacted Ragnheiður Jónsdóttir, a well-known psychic, to communicate with the elves. It was announced that the elf church was relocated, and the elves moved out. Work on the road commenced, and has been completed by now.

*

Snorri Sturluson, a scholar who wrote down most of the Sagas and myths as we know them today, came up with two possible origins for the elves. One of them was that they were the “unclean” children of Eve, hidden from God when he came to visit (those are not my words). God, who was not pleased with this turn of events, decreed that what is hidden from Him will be hidden from everyone else as well. This is where the phrase “hidden folk” came from. The other story was even better, as it suggested that Eve was such an – ahem – lively lady that neither Adam nor God could control her. After some deliberation, God created a second man for her, naming him Elf. Therefore humans are descendants of Adam and Eve, and elves – of Elf and Eve.

Obviously, none of those stories appear in the Bible. My personal theory is that Snorri had to come up with something to avoid danger. The thirteenth century was not a good time to announce the existence of mythical beings that had nothing to do with the Christian God. Yet the belief in elves was widespread in Nordic countries even before Iceland became inhabited in the 9th century. The heathen faith lists Nine Worlds, one of which is Álfheim (the home of the elves), and another – Svartálfheim (the home of the dark/black elves). Back when the Old Gods ruled the worlds, their subjects did not use the phrase “hidden people”, but regarded them as natural spirits, same as the many species of wights guarding homes, land, trees. They had no need to come up with explanations why the elves existed. They simply did, same as Odin, Freya, Thor, and everyone knew that.

*To quote Gunnar, the blacksmith from my novel, elves are beautiful, colourful, always happy, and they also don’t exist. The elf who haunts Gunnar doesn’t particularly care about his non-existence. He is, however, miffed by the idea that Gunnar might not find him beautiful, and the blacksmith quickly apologises. It’s not wise to argue with supernatural beings.

Storytellers was never intended to be the sort of book that featured supernatural beings, but the elf not only didn’t care for Gunnar’s feelings regarding his existence. He had no interest in my opinion regarding his presence in the book either. I briefly considered forcefully removing the elf, but at the end I didn’t dare. After all, who was I to deny his existence? I was rewarded with a show of the Northern lights and ran back to rewrite the chapter that was previously based on my YouTube viewings and photographs.

The elf church in the Garðahraun lava field was moved to accommodate the elves’ needs. The psychic, Ragnheiður (Icelanders address each other with the first names, rather than the paternal names) was able to discuss things with them and come up with a compromise. Where humans demanding to preserve the lava field failed, the elves ultimately won. And I got out of depression so rapidly that no doctor would be able to explain what happened.

Of course, I don’t believe in elves. That would be silly. I am not going to deny their existence, though. Just in case.

Bjørn Larssen

Legion of Mono captures the resolve of a people’s last military leader in the hours before what he knows will be a final battle. His grief at leaving his partner and their child; his pride in his family’s honour; his strong bonds with his fellow soldiers: all are skillfully expressed. The author has created, in twenty-five pages, a glimpse into a world that feels solid and complete, a remarkable achievement. The ending left me wanting more, of both the world and the story. Highly recommended.

A hard truth about being a writer is that we mine everything that happens in our lives, if not to recreate the actual event, then to use the emotions involved.

My brother died last week, too young at sixty-four, taken by an aggressive cancer diagnosed too late, a lack of symptoms until it had spread irrecoverably. I am devastated; even writing these words is hard.

There is a difficult balance to maintain, too: I am the bereaved sister, but I also must be the strong adult aunt, the practical sister-in-law, all at once. Not easy, and tiring, on top of the jet lag.

But. There is that detached observer in my brain, saying: remember this. Remember how you feel, every bit of it. Watch how your family members are reacting, remember it. Remember how the two days and 5000+ miles of travel felt, the exhaustion. Remember that peanut M&Ms and Tim Horton’s coffee made you cry, because that’s what we shared on birding trips. Remember the deep breaths you took before facing your sister-and-law and the nieces and nephew. Remember everything, because some day, you’ll use it. Not in its present form, but you’ll use it.

And part of me hates that. I can’t stop it, though; it’s who I am. I shape and define and explain my world with words, some of them – most, these days  –  fiction. Imagination can take a piece of writing only so far; it needs to be fed by honest emotion as well.

So I accept that detached observer in my mind, recording dispassionately what’s happening. Some day these feelings will make their way into a story. I have no idea when, or what story.  Maybe they’ll generate their own. It won’t be soon. But when they do, that story will be, in its way, a memorial for my brother, whom I loved, and love, and will miss forever.

In the third book of my Empire’s Legacy trilogy, my protagonist Lena is thinking about language:

“I tried to sort out the inchoate ideas forming in my mind. About language, and meaning, and if all concepts were universal, and could be translated. About the gap between intent and comprehension, between what was meant and what was understood, and the assumptions and shared experience encompassed—or not—in any exchange.’

While this is a theme in the Empire’s Legacy trilogy, and the sequel currently in progress, it’s also recently become of immediate personal interest to me. Exactly how to categorize the series for Amazon’s keywords and classifications is very far from simple, because of that gap between what is meant, and what is understood.

I’ve always called the series ‘historical fantasy’. But that has resulted in some vocal protest: it’s not fantasy, because there is no magic. But the world is not real, I would counter, so doesn’t that make it fantasy?  Not in everyone’s mind. I tried ‘alternative history’. Again, disagreement, because there is no historical event being mirrored, only an echo of the Roman Empire and its provinces. Speculative fiction? Perhaps, but a term misunderstood or not familiar to too many.

This is minor, of course: I’m marketing books, not trying to create a shared understanding of world-changing issues. But in Book III, Empire’s Exile, and more so in the work-in-progress, Empire’s Reckoning, that’s exactly what my characters are doing, trying to negotiate treaties that change the world. Which makes me think about Lena’s question, and its applicability to both my fictional world and our real one. How do you reach a shared understanding when simple words like ‘fantasy’ – or ‘equality’ or ‘citizen’ – mean such different things to different people? When a word like ‘immigrant’ conjures up positives in one mind and only negatives in another?

As writers we often strive for clarity (unless perhaps you are a poet, or James Joyce), but there will always be a gap between what is meant by the writer and what is understood by the reader. That is good, because it makes the world the reader enters theirs alone: shared by others, but always comprehended slightly differently. As long as we recognize that, and recognize too that another reader’s experience may different from yours. A starting place to discuss assumptions and shared experience, not a reason to end a conversation that might enlighten, illuminate and surprise.

As for the series?  How about ‘imaginative fiction’?

This is a reflection about coincidence, or synchronicity, or possibly about me seeing connections where there are none, except in my mind. It doesn’t matter, really.

I am, by training and education and part of my working life, a scientist; an applied geneticist, precisely, and that training and education spills over to my avocation as a birder and amateur field biologist. But by possibly a deeper inclination, a desire for a mythological interpretation of existence that goes beyond the seeming black-and-white of science, I find deeper truths in the worlds created by certain writers: JRR Tolkien first and foremost.

A friend of mine is groaning at this point…not elves, he is thinking, much as CS Lewis said at the meetings of the Inklings. Which brings me back to the coincidence, or synchronicity, I mentioned at the beginning. The Inklings, or more precisely their meeting place, are part of this: for many years, their famed Oxford writing group met at a pub called the Eagle and Child, better known as the Bird and Baby, in St Giles’ Street. Here CS Lewis and Tolkien and many others shared and discussed their writing, giving feedback on what are some of the most influential fantasy and science fiction novels of the twentieth century, the books that made me, first, want to be a writer, and then taught me how to write.

But about 75 miles away, and a few years later, at the pub named the Eagle (but once the Eagle and Child, too)  in Cambridge, Francis Crick and James Watson announced their discovery of the structure of DNA at lunchtime one day. This too, later, caught my imagination, in a different part of my brain: there is another magic in unravelling the secrets the double helix carries, deciphering the language written in the pairings of arginine and guanine, thiamine and cytosine.  Nor are the day to day processes of scientific research – the planning, the first attempts, the repetition and the fine-tuning, interspersed with moments of inspiration and realization – very different from those of writing.

There is a place – not a physical place, or not one in this world – where the helix of life and the helix of story intersect. The axle-tree of all the worlds, Guy Gavriel Kay called it: Spiral Castle, the still point around which the worlds spin, a mystical, sacred place from Welsh mythology, where resurrection is possible and life can be created, or recreated. As it can be, from DNA, or from story.

DNA writes our stories in one way; words write them in another. That both these crucibles of meaning in my life occurred in part at pubs that at one time shared the name of The Eagle and Child is only coincidence, but out of such connections we create meaning. Or perhaps, recognize it.