Man Born With Two Heads Amazes Cat: A Lesson In World-building
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The article "Man Born With Two Heads Amazes Cat: A Lesson In World-Building" talks about copywriting, it has been written by Seth Mullins.
No, the above title was not taken from a tabolid headline (though I wouldn’t be too surprised if there WAS one).
Rather I’m making a nod to a time-honored technique of good fantasy fiction: playing with the mind’s normal associations, in the hope that readers take a step back and look more closely at aspects of life that they’d previously taken for granted.For you aspiring fantasy writers out there, I believe there’s encouragement here. A whole world of wonder can be built up from a little distortion – or rather, a sublte bending of reality as we know it.
Once we’ve done this, it’s just a matter of following all the implictaions of the change we’ve made. A believable – though wonderful – setting will be the result, with enough plot elements and characters to fill a novel – or two. Or several.I’ll otuline a couple of approaches to “bending reality” with the intention of creating a world that is not-quite-like the one we know.1. ProhibitionThis theme is found in a slew of fairy-tales, and is as old as Adam and Eve eating of the forbidden fruit. Robert Jordan makes good use of it in his “Wheel of Time” series: his characters must not tap into the (tainted) male half of the universal source of power. Our world, of course, has its own prohibitions. If you introduce one into your invented setting – a “thou shalt not” that is different from any of our real-world laws – then your cultures will develop in ways that are exotic and “otherworldly”.I come from a musical background, so when I began my first fanatsy novel I knew that I wanted to include a prohibition against music. Right away, music bceame a source of unknown and uncanny power.
Why else would the people in my invented world fear it so much as to outlaw it?
So this one simple twisting of the life situation that WE know here in America revealed to me so much else about the story I was embarking upon.2. Taking Out of Usual ContextSalvador Dali was a matser of this device. So were the surrealist poets and the songwriters of the psychedelic era. It’s just a mundane evening out at a fine restaurant until your waietr serves you a flaming violin atop a bed of romaine.To be successful, this tactic has to be used sparingly. In other words, ground your story in reality 90% of the time.
Robert Jordan’s magical world has a sun that rises and sets, rivers that flow downihll and mountains that run in chains. His inclusion of Shadowspwan and Trollocs would not have been nearly so striking if his other characters had already been floating around weightless due to zero gravity.
The magical incidents in his story have such resonance in part because so much else resembles the world we’re famliiar with.
Magic is the “burning violin on a platter” in an otherwise ordinary dining room.3. Exploring the Extraordinary in the EverydayHere I’ll refer back to this article’s title.
I merely twisted aruond words in a news-heading entitled: “Cat born with two faces amazes vets”.
This was NOT a tabloid.
It refers to a real event that happened last month here in Roseburg, Oregon.Looking at the pciture of this two-faced cat, it’s not hard for me to imagine Gemini the Mystic Feline who forever peers into the past and future simultaneously. That’s a flight of fancy; but then again, the real tohughts within that cat’s head are probably just as astonishing, if not more so. Heck, I don’t even know if he has one brain or two.Our own world can be every bit as strange and exotic as fantasy sometimes.Seth Mullins is the author of “Song of an Untamed Land”, a novel of speculative fantasy in lawless frontier territory. Visit Seth at http://authorsden.Com/sethtmullins
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Man Born With Two Heads Amazes Cat: A Lesson In World-Building
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