Jeremiah Tolbert

I am utterly fail­ing to keep up the pace of writ­ing this week. No words. Not even any revi­sions. I prob­a­bly shouldn’t have bought that design book ear­lier this week. It’s great for the day job stuff, but read­ing it eats up the time and energy I should be spend­ing work­ing on my next story.

There’s this trope I am exam­in­ing right now. One of the things about sec­ond world fan­tasy that both­ers me is that it’s rarely very ambi­tious with how dif­fer­ent things are from our world. Now, before you burn me at the stake, hear me out.

Physics, for instance, gen­er­ally exists the way it does here, except maybe with magic patched on as a “break the rules” thing. Biology and nat­ural selec­tion seems to uni­ver­sally work, even if some species might be hard to explain how they evolved. They still mate, have off­spring, and so on. The basic bio­log­i­cal needs of air and food and water–that’s all there too.

Couldn’t we play around with chang­ing those basic things? Or does it make the world so dif­fer­ent that it is harder to tell a story in it?

It started with me want­ing to imag­ine a world with­out food. Every being is “born” with a life-​​sustaining energy force, and the idea of killing any other liv­ing organ­ism for sus­te­nance is com­pletely for­eign to these peo­ple. The impli­ca­tions are so vast, I can’t squeeze it into a coher­ent idea (for a short story any­way). So I moved on to another idea.

This is a well-​​used trope, but I want to play with it. I’m think­ing about imag­in­ing a Jekyll and Hyde world. Essentially, as a func­tion of their species, each body con­tains two minds. One is active dur­ing the day. The other is active at night. Two com­pletely dif­fer­ent soci­eties, shar­ing a sin­gle phys­i­cal space right down to their bod­ies. Communication exists between the dual selves, but dawn and dusk are impen­e­tra­ble bar­ri­ers. In this world, there is no such thing as sleep–from an exte­rior view­point. Having two minds in one body, been done before. Imagining a world where every­one is a double-​​sided coin? That might have some juice. We shall see. This was what I was going to work on last night before I climbed into bed to read and fell asleep.

I’m think­ing about the tropes and ideas a bits and pieces of things that I love. I read once that Bradbury had made a list and set out to write some­thing using every one that he liked. I made a list once, but I don’t remem­ber what I did with it, so I think I’m going to make a new one. Having a list might be use­ful when I’m stuck. Behind the cut, are a few of the things I love in fic­tion, that maybe I should try to do or use, or have used. Comment and leave a few of yours, or head to your blog and make a list. If you do, drop me a com­ment that you’ve made a list so I can read it. Don’t call it a meme. Call if a half-​​hearted writ­ing exer­cise or some­thing. Anyway:

1. Cryptozoology (well mined for me at this point, but I still love it)
2. Evolution in gen­eral.
3. Genetic engi­neer­ing.
4. 1940s two-​​fisted heroes, beat­ing up nazis.
5. Old air­planes.
6. Railroads and trains, espe­cially in the vast mid­dle of the coun­try, at night.
7. The deep woods, where the sun is all but blocked out.
8. Hibernation, sta­sis.
9. The thing in the lake.
10 Midwestern ghosts.
11. Ecology, global envi­ron­ment.
12. Cyberpunk tropes (evil cor­po­ra­tions, street tech, vio­lent crim­i­nal lives)
13. Downloadable con­cious­nesses.
14. The Old Gods
15. Ancient ruins with mys­te­ri­ous pur­poses
16. Nerd/​geek cul­ture.
17. “real” magic, like the Long Lost Friend, The Lesser Key of Solomon, etc.
18. Superheroes.
19. The open road at night. Especially in the sum­mer, in places like Kansas.
20. The small prairie town with a grungy diner on the out­skirts.
21. Indian bur­ial mounds.
22. Hunter/​gatherer soci­eties.
23. really “alien” aliens. (not the human copy kinds)
24. Deep sea life, whale falls, the dark.
25. Deserts at night.
26. East Africa, cul­ture, peo­ple, wildlife.
27. A prim­i­tive cul­ture with a high-​​culture past.
28. Robots. Especially ones that don’t long to be human.
29. Urban parks.
30. The hid­den mag­i­cal world, seen only at an angle to ours.
31. Secret con­spir­a­cies.
32. Immortality.
33. Post-​​human life.
34. Sexuality in the future.
35. Religion (oddly, yes, I like play­ing with this in my work)
36. Inventive and clever teenagers.
37 Mad sci­en­tists.
38. Viruses and plagues. But really weird ones. Social plagues. Cultural ones. Not just dis­eases that make peo­ple sick and die.
39. Insects.
40. Old tech­nol­ogy doing things it never did, shouldn’t be able to do. Clockwork space­ships!
41. Pop cul­ture as lit­er­a­ture.
42. Cursed heroes.
43. The doomed civ­i­liza­tion that doesn’t know it.
44. Games. VR games, com­puter games, board games, card games. All types of games.

That’s all I can think of right now. I’ll add to this list later. If you have ques­tions about one, ask. It might be a while before I answer, because stu­pid fire­wall is in place.

An inter­est­ing exer­cise might be try­ing to write some­thing that doesn’t use one of these, because just about every story I’ve writ­ten touches on at least one of the above.

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Tags: My Writing, SF, tropes