This series focuses on stories that are both well-written and do something that I find interesting from a technical perspective. This week, let’s look in the mirror.
I’d like to take a moment to discuss an important skill for novel writers: letting a world grow organically. This is hard to find the space for in a short story, but it’s vital in the larger world of a novel if that world is to feel like it has depth.
For instance, imagine a novel written about a planet with five moons. That’s the seed. How does it grow? Five moons…that’s a lot of eclipses. Tides? Ouch. Even thinking about that planet’s tide level prediction tables makes my head hurt. Lunar deities? Enough for a basketball team. Buildings? We’d need information about the gravitational attraction between the satellites and the planet, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest earthquake-proofing the heck out of anything larger than a storage shed.
All of this may seem like a lot of work, but that’s what turns five moons from window dressing into a real component of your world. And if you want to see this done well, I recommend “Bloody Therapy” by Suzan Palumbo and published in Diabolical Plots. She starts with the urban legend of Bloody Mary and asks a question that never would have occurred to me (it didn’t occur to her, either…its origin is explained in the author’s section below the story), then follows the answers into a story that alternates between amusing and heart-wrenching. I don’t want to go into any more detail for fear of spoiling it, but I assure you it’s worth a read.