Holly Lisle's Vision
Keep
Your Eyes Open
By
Valerie Serdy
©
2002, Valerie Serdy
Ideas
for our writing can come from anywhere and everywhere. This is an old
writing axiom, rather like "write what you know," and yet sometimes I
forget the value it has for me. I grew up reading fantasy novels and
internalized various conventions and clichés without realizing it. Only
after reading Diana Wynne Jones' A Tough Guide to Fantasyland did I realize
that, aside from automobile-like horses and black birds of ill omen, there are
rarely any animals in most fantasy novels. It took reading Water: A
Natural History by Alice Outwater to show me what to do about it.
My own novel is plagued by
a lack of animals: in the scenery, interacting with my characters, providing
work for people. I grew up in
suburbs and cities so my knowledge of "wild" animals was limited to
dogs, cats, and the occasional roadkill. As
I've moved progressively further from cities, I've noticed more animals and
birds in nature and slowly those creatures have made their way into my writing.
But an animal's appearance is still as rare in my writing as when I see
it in my yard. Construction,
hunting, pets, and people noises have led to wariness in all but the most
gregarious animals.
As a writer, I stick to the
old standby: write what you know. Judging
by the lack of animals in other fantasy novels, I suspect other writers are
doing the same thing. But it
doesn't always make sense to use our modern urban experiences with animals for
our fantasy novels, especially considering most fantasy novels are based on some
type of pre-industrial (or emerging industrial) medieval society.
This point hit home after I
read Water, in which Alice
Outwater discusses the history of America's waterways starting with Medieval
Europe's demand for furs. While at
first this history book seemed like an unlikely source for fantasy world
building, the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.
Today, there are over 280
million people in the United States, making it the third most populous country,
after China and India. Our cities
are close together, sprawling with suburbs that surround a city's center for
miles. The landscape is covered with roads, utility lines,
railroads. We have dug new channels
for rivers and filled in wetlands. Until
the 1970's, companies dumped their waste byproducts into any convenient river or
up out of their smokestacks. All of
this has caused animal habitats to disappear,(in replaced by houses, farms, progress. And with their habitats, the animals themselves are
disappearing: 5200 animal species worldwide are threatened with extinction.
Medieval cities, on the
other hand, were few and far apart. Many
were not all that populous. During
the Black Death, it is estimated that Paris, the most populous city north of the
Alps, had a population of 180,000 people; today it has more than two million.
People simply weren't numerous enough or technologically advanced enough
to damage animal habitat and thereby reduce animal populations and change animal
behavior as effectively and quickly as we have today.
When European fur trading
hit its peak during the 1300s, prized animals were so numerous that 380,000
animals could be caught, skinned, and delivered in two months.
And while particular species may have declined, this total number
remained relatively stable for a number of decades.
Our experiences today simply don't allow us to fathom how numerous
fur-bearing animals must have been to sustain the level of predation for that
long.
While we may not want to
use our experiences today to define our fantasy worlds, we can use various books
like Water to help us out. Water
describes how prevalent animals such as beaver, buffalo, and prairie dogs were
in North America before European colonization and westward expansion.
Outwater also points out that naturalists' journals, such as those of
Lewis and Clark, describe which animals were common in different habitats before
human predation. Some journals also
show common animal behaviors that may not be apparent at the zoo or available
from a quick field guide.
This information comes in
handy if my characters spend any time traveling cross-country.
The lands they pass through will be richer and more realistic in
landscape and scenery with the addition of herds of grazing animals and the
chitter of an angry squirrel. The
information becomes even more useful if I've made fur a large industry in my
world as it was for many medieval societies.
Water
pointed out how the cold climate of northern Europe and poor architecture
combined to create a thriving trade in furs to keep people warm.
If my characters also live in a cold environment, they will do whatever
it takes to stay warm: build better homes, make warmer clothes.
If my characters don't have open fields to graze sheep for wool, fur
becomes a realistic alternative. If
certain animals are hard to trap because of wiliness or rarity, they will be
more expensive, influencing fashion. Everyone
simply must have a beaver skin hat. And
if certain animals become unavailable due to excessive hunting, as Outwater
shows, my people will begin to expand and colonize other areas to meet their
needs, which creates instant conflict as my people clash with other peoples.
Reading Fantasyland,
a book that ruthlessly pokes fun of the fantasy genre, allowed me to recognize a
cliché that had slipped into my own writing.
Once my eyes were opened to this flaw, I was able to pull advice and
ideas from other books, such as Water, to help correct the problem.
Ideas do indeed come from the strangest sources.
The
Tough Guide to Fantasyland, by Diana Wynne Jones, Trafalgar Square;
ISBN: 0575062576
Water
: A Natural History, by Alice Outwater, Basic
Books; ISBN: 0465037801
Excerpts
of the Lewis and Clark journals can be found at the University of Virginia http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/JOURNALS/toc.html
and PBS http://www.pbs.org/lewisandclark/archive/idx_jou.html.
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