I’ve created a world in which there are only three countries: the First World, the Second World and the Third World, which, as you read from my most recent draft, aligns closely with the way we consider the grouping of countries today. My challenge as a writer is to introduce a new world in a way that can be easily understood by my readers.
In my first (multiple) versions, I had invented a fiction East African country called Taifa (the Swahili word for “nation”). I was following the old adage, “write what you know”. Years ago, I had the opportunity to live for a few months in Tanzania so I thought I could use my first-hand experience of the land, people and culture to create my new world. As an example, I have Lyra and the David-like character (who was then called Duma) being attacked by a hippopotamus. Really.
When I changed up my idea of the “worlds” and chose to put my bad guy in the Second World, my descriptions no longer worked. Changing it in my head was so much easier said than done.
As is all writing.
Here’s my first attempt:
Annie and Lyra take an overnight flight to Stone Town. They arrive in the Second World city early Saturday morning. Lyra has been to the Second World once before, to the capital XXX, a modern metropolis, for one of her mom’s concerts, but she’s never been to Stone Town. It’s an exotic port on the eastern coast of the Med Sea, a bridge between the southern cultures of the First World and the desert lifestyle of many Second-Worlders.
Annie guides Lyra through a throng of touts outside the airport, young brown men with large smiles waving pamphlets of tours, hotels and restaurants.
“Pretty lady,” one persistent man calls out in a clipped English accent, fluttering his yellow brochure in their face.
“A beautiful room for beautiful women,” a young boy nudges the first man out of the way.
Annie laughs, shakes her head and expertly pulls Lyra through.
“Fly catchers,” she says. “Always with their mouths open.” The affection in her tone eases Lyra’s tension. She’s not used to such aggression, such cheerful chaos.
Problem #1: I had to locate Stone Town on our globe in my own head. I had already done that with Thorin Hill, a town on the the north-eastern Atlantic coast and again with Burke, the First World’s capital, which is on the most easterly point of North America. In this draft, I place it on a Mediterranean Sea-equivalent. The location wasn’t right, though. I want to have the climax of the book in a scene like that; not the characters’ starting point. As much as I didn’t want to stick with the details of reality, I also didn’t want to create an entirely new universe. I studied maps of the Mediterranean and the Middle East and I finally decided to place Stone Town on the Black Sea in Turkey, then have my characters travel south to the Mediterranean Sea.
Except I’ve never been to Turkey. I know nothing about the landscape or the people, except what I’ve read on the news, but I had no interest in researching for accurate details.
My solution? Make it up. I plan to use real landscapes and images taken from the Internet as my starting point, then create it how I want.
LESSON LEARNED: Make your world make sense in your own head first.
Problem #2: I was still trying to use examples from my “Taifa” drafts, but they reflect the African country my first-version Lyra goes to. Yet Stone Town in the Second World is very different from my fictional Taifa. It wasn’t until I stopped trying to “shoe-horn” in versions of my own experiences in Africa that I got a better handle on the Second World.
LESSON LEARNED: Don’t always write what you know. That’s why it’s called “fiction” 🙂
Ok, so I’ve eliminated “what I know” of a foreign, exotic, different land and I can make it all up.
How?
It took me a long time to figure this out. Description for me is a challenge. I know description has to include specific, unexpected detail and I know it has to include sensory detail (how things smell, sound, taste, feel and look like). I attempted multiple times to describe Stone Town, Lyra’s first introduction to the Second World. None of the descriptions survived.
My solution: I focused on the “feel” of the scene. What emotions did I want the readers to get from Stone Town? A scary, poverty-stricken place? An exotic, other-worldly place? Once I decided on “different, vibrant, exciting”, the scene started coming together. Here’s what I’m working with now:
Stone Town, across the Atlantic, is an exotic port on the southern edge of the Black Sea, the geographical divide between the First and Second World and the philosophical divide between secular progressive cultures and the traditional religious cultures. It sits on the border, a pawn between those who insist it should be a wall and those who argue it is a gateway. Yet the city itself seems ignorant—or at least indifferent—to its role in the religious wars. It is vibrant and lively, chaotic and hectic. Even in the early Saturday morning hours, as Annie and Lyra’s taxi makes its way from the airport through the cobblestoned streets, grizzled fishermen, their brown skin tough and leathery, haul their freshest catch from the sea up the steep hill to a sprawling outdoor market, fabric vendors lay their brightly-colored wares on tipsy tables outside their narrow shops and kids on rusted, sagging bikes bump over the uneven roads, ululating in a high trill at every divot in the pavement. The taxi snakes its way around the downtown core, a clutch of five or six heritage blocks whose centuries-old stone buildings give the town its name. The taxi driver, a stooped old man with a toothless grin, expertly maneuvers the car through streets and spaces impossibly too narrow for a vehicle and bursts out onto a wide boulevard that hugs the white sand beach and the deep indigo waters of the Black Sea. But along the boardwalk parallel to the road are armed patrols, soldiers dressed in riot gear, their machine guns aimed and at the ready.
Lyra startles at the sight, a harsh blot on the natural beauty of the landscape.
LESSON LEARNED: For every descriptive scene, focus on what you want your reader to feel, then choose your diction (word choice) to match. I used “vibrant” and “lively”–positive words for crowds–not “disorder” or “turmoil”, because I want my readers to come away with a sense of adventure instead of fear.
I may still tighten this scene up on my next draft, but for now, it’s good enough for me to move on.