The Care
and Feeding
of Fantasy Creatures
By
Stephen Bresnehan
Ó2002,
Stephen
Bresnehan
Knowing your
world is a critical part of creating your novel. World building, no matter how
you do it, will provide the information necessary for your dramatic needs. With
fantasy creatures, there is a certain dual quality to the information you need
to invent - first and foremost are the creatures themselves, and then comes how
your fictional societies view these creatures. As a starter, it is worth
revisiting a few articles that have appeared in prior issues of Vision.
In Vision
Issue 1, “Building a Better Beast” by Sarah Jane Elliott explores
the possibilities of how creatures can be invented, or re-invented, to suit your
story's dramatic needs and internal consistency. You can devise animal behaviour,
fundamental physiologies and ecologies, even a spot of evolution if the world
building calls for it. Follow “Building a Better Beast” and your creatures,
whatever they may be, will avoid the cardboard flatness of poorly planned
beasts. Don't forget, you control the absolute essence of your world, and the
physiologies and ecologies can be as bizarre and exotic as you want so long as
they are internally consistent. Most modern fantasy seems to overlay a thin film
of magic over an essentially mundane Western European medieval world. Don't feel
you have to conform to this.
Vision
Issue 2 contains “Man in Beast's
Clothing,” by Sarah Jane Elliott
which discusses the fun and games to be had with anthropomorphisations - talking
animals, intelligent animal characters, and the pitfalls of ”overhumanising.”
Any fantasy creature that fills a dramatic role in your work will be so much
more fun if it has a certain essence that is not exactly human. A certain
quality of dragon-ness or evil-reptilian-homunculus-wizard-ness will carry
dramatic weight and verisimilitude and drag your audience further into the tale.
It is up to you to define exactly how this unique essence is expressed, and so
long as it all has what you think is the right flavour, then you can't be far
from the mark. It is also likely to help you determine, or polish, the fantasy
creature character's drives and philosophies, which can't be a bad thing.
“Horses
for Writers,” by Mary K. Wilson
in Vision
Issue 7, deals with what is perhaps an artefact of our very urban world -- how
easy it is for creatures whose role is to support or facilitate the story to be
treated as machines, or nearly so. In reality, a horse isn't just a horse: it is
a retired racehorce with a suspect gait, or a riding hack that shies at falling
leaves, or an otherwise placid Clydesdale who knows how to put his hooves just
so to step on your toes every time. Basically, they each has his own
personality. Extrapolating on this, horses are not the only animals to regularly
fall afoul of an over-glib treatment in modern fantasy; they all do. Discussing
the minutiae of, for instance, beasts of burden in a novel is not likely to
thrill the readers, but a quick description of the sight, sound, and smell of
the bullock pens will make an immediate impression that an ox-drawn log wagon
isn't quite the same thing as a Peterbilt truck. Animals are biological entities
and, think what you may, all animals have personalities. Talk to anyone who
lives or works around animals, and if they're honest or sufficiently perceptive,
they'll tell you how animals can bond with some people and dislike others -- and
(this is the important bit) they will tell you how the animals express it. This
can add some amazing touches of realism to the non-character animals inhabiting
your story.
So where to
from here? You've got your world built up with just enough background ecology
and history to put the creatures you want where you want them. Your fantasy
character creatures are well-realised and your support creatures, fantastic or
otherwise, are real creatures as much as they are plot devices. (Just think --
you now have plot devices you have to clean up after!) The next thing is
matching the understanding of the fantasy creatures to the society concerned.
The author
should know all the essential information on the creature for the purposes of
the story, but the characters themselves might have a very different
understanding based on the information available to them, and this will be a
product of their society. Folk knowledge, proto-sciences, philosophy, guild
teachings, and so on can form the backbone of their knowledge. Non-literate
communities will have systems like oral tradition and apprenticing for passing
on this knowledge. Literate but non-technological societies may rely on the same
sort of information but in written form. Either way, just as you'll find with
the people around you, your characters will have imperfect and often simply
wrong ideas about their world and the creatures in it.
The accuracy
of such information can vary from individual to individual, class to class, and
society to society. If a character's vocation is to be a unicorn ostler or
dragon wormer, then this is (in theory) what they'll know best. If it isn't,
this in itself might be a nice little plot twist! The unicorn ostler will
understand much of the day-to-day life of the unicorn, and an old ostler will
have a lot of experience to draw upon. They'll understand temperaments, breeding
habits, and illnesses particular to the unicorn. They'll know the personalities
of their animals, and of unicorns in general in their part of the world. Their
understanding of unicorn-ness is likely to differ from that of any other
character. Even the unicorn ostler's supervisor, or the overlord funding the
unicorn enterprise (or whatever) will have a different understanding and, like
as not, the two perspectives won't match up because the characters’ exposure
to unicorn life is different. An overlord doesn't need to know what an ostler
knows -- that’s the ostler's job, which is why he's there.
The same
will be the case with non-domesticated fantasy creatures, except nobody may have
truly definitive knowledge of what the creature is or does. You, as author, will
know (you built the creature after all), but the characters can't know the
creature so thoroughly unless you've specifically thought of a way for such
comprehensive expertise to be consistent with the rest of your world.
Determining
how the fantasy creatures fit into the societies will determine how your
characters react to them individually and socially. The breadth of possible
reactions is considerable and the ones you decide to apply to any particular
character are constrained by only two things. First, the reaction has to fit the
dramatic purpose necessary to further your story, and second, it must be
reasonable for that character to have that response. Unusual reactions should be
flagged ahead of time, or at the least explained soon afterwards so it doesn't
jar the reader out of the story.
Knowing how
your characters perceive the fantasy creatures in your world will provide you
with one more tool to beat your story into shape and hopefully see you with a
novel that is individual, well-rounded, and conveys a feeling of completeness
that a reader will want to revisit.
The
author of this article has written a grand total of no novels or short
stories, and isn't likely to for a while yet. He is, on the other hand, having
an enormous amount of fun with world-building, plotting, character invention,
and all those thousands of fascinating things a writer does when they're not
writing.
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