Creating Alternative Worlds

The question came up in my critique group last night about building alternative realities, other worlds. Specifically, Orah spoke to the fact that she wants the world she’s creating in her “fairy tale” to parallel in some way the time frame we’re actually living in, so that her characters can interact with the “real” world, albeit from a distance. That’s why they have things like safety pins in their possession. We also heard a fantasy piece from Gay, set amongst ocean characters. Gay's piece seems to have accomplished that bleed-through between the “real” and the “fantasy” world Oral is asking about. Both pieces are targeted at the YA market.

So. I thought about it, and here’s a place to begin. My instinct is that it’s absolutely essential to establish the architecture of your world from the get-go. It doesn’t have to come all at once, by any means, but from the very first line you have to be focused on establishing your reader in time and space. If you're creating an alternative world, we need to see it. And if the “real world” also exists—with its safety pins and sleeping bags, then we need to be alerted to that right away too. So we can say, “Ah, here is a sister world, not completely separate from our own.”

It’s actually, a question of Point of View. POV, point of view. The big question of modern fiction. Rule of thumb: write from one POV, and one only. Lots of industry people won’t have it any other way. POV, however, is a very far-reaching and often controversial issue.

First of all, there’s the “person”  your writing in: first (I), second (you) or third (he/she). I’m going to slide over that, it’s not where my interest is focused at the moment. I’m going to talk about POV from another angle and say to you, the writer, that what I’m speaking of encompasses all three "persons." I’m going to talk about the sight (and insight) the “person” brings. I hope Gay and Orah don’t mind, but I’m going to use their work as examples, because it’s through the similarities and the differences in their writing that I can most easily make my point.

Gay has a talking jellyfish named Jeli for one of her main characters. It has washed up on the shore near Fort Bragg, California where it is rescued by a "Hu" named Memé Gay. Memé Gay helps Jeli into a tide pool and then learns from Jeli of the misfortune that has befallen her and her ocean friends. Clearly Memé Gay will become involved trying to help.

Orah’s main characters is Adi, an older woman who has magical healing powers that she's mostly stopped using. She sets out on a quest to recover her powers and meets Bart, a young boy whose parents have been abducted by a giant. The two set off together to search for Bart's parents in hopes of rescuing them. They are making their way through a forested terrain.

From the very first, there’s one marked difference: Fort Bragg, California. Fort Bragg is part of the "Hu" world, and it's also in the "real" world. Gay immediately establishes an overlap between Jeli's reality and the reality of her readers. Using geography is just one way to do it, but it's effective.

Before I go on, let me make it absolutely clear that there is no “better” or “worse” here, there’s only what one wants to accomplish as a storyteller. If you want a completely self-contained world that has no relationship to the “real” world of your reader, then you have no reason to create the connection. It’s only when you want the connection that you need to think about it. Orah told me that she wants to create connection, and asked how to establish that kind of understanding for the reader. That's what this diary is about.

The reason I’m calling it a POV issue, is because it is. POV means what we can see through the eyes of the storytelling character. Here’s the basics: If I’m telling a story through Louise Farrenc’s eyes (which I am), then when she looks out she sees Paris in 1830, I have to establish that for the reader. I have to bring the reader to Louise's Paris. I also have to account for what she feels inside and thinks—what it's like for her living in Paris in 1830. That’s her POV: everything she’s experiencing being alive. She sees other people, has attitudes and observations about them, but she can’t crawl inside of them and is never certain how they see and feel. She relies on her experience of them and perhaps some sort of sixth sense of simpatico. But even then, she’s got to validate her understanding of others. Right? She experiences everything through herself and if it's her POV, then we readers do too.

So. If Orah’s character Adi lives in a world that parallels the “real” world of 2010, then that’s what we readers have to see—how Adi sees/experiences both of these worlds. Orah doesn’t have to make a big issue out of it. She doesn’t have to point to it and say, “wow!” It simply has to be there in the same way that Paris in 1830 has to be there for Louise. Adi’s world has to include (and she undoubtedly takes it for granted) the world we call “real.” 

That’s what Gay is doing with Jelli and all of Jeli’s friends. They see the Hu world. But, (and this is important) as indicated by the fact that it’s a "Hu" world, not a human world, we see it through Jeli’s eyes, not our own. Got it? POV. We see the world through Jeli's eyes. We're not looking in, we're looking out. In Jeli’s understanding of reality Memé Gay is a Hu. In our understanding of reality Memé Gay is a human. Just that small slight of hand pushes us as readers into Jeli's perspective, into her POV.

There are many more issues here to discuss. The most important probably is about the “rules” for staying in a POV or moving into another, and how to do that successfully. It’s a topic that requires another blog entry, so I won’t go there now. Suffice to say moving the POV requires thought and skill. You have to take your reader with you. I think the best way to accomplish that is through a patterning, where the reader understands a structure that signals the change. Again, a subject for a much longer discussion, and I'll write about it at another time.

What interests me here, is the fact that the writer can get inside a POV that includes alternative "reality"… this is true whether we’re writing “fantasy” or not. In my story, Louise sees a ghost. From her POV, she sees “more” than many of the people around her. She sees the “real” world, everyone “shares," and she sees this "other" world where dead people exist and can communicate. I'm not so interested in asserting that "reality" is (exists) the way Louise experiences it; I want to say "this is the world Louise experiences." When we're inside her POV, what I have to account for, to create, is her experience of "reality." Ghosts visit her. From her viewpoint it’s “real”… I don’t need to make a big deal out of, I just need to focus on how she interacts with it and adjusts. She’s aware it’s not that way for everyone, and consequently has an attitude about it. It frightens her. That’s part of her reality too.

The point is, Point of View creates reality on the page, and if the reality is a fantasy world, the best way into it is through a character who knows that world. Let them be your guide. Create it through their eyes, and if they see our world too, then we’ll see it with them. If only a few of your characters see “our” world, then find a way, early-on to introduce us to one of the characters who sees into our world, even if it’s just a glance. That way we won't be caught off guard when it comes up in more detail. There needs to be reason why it is that way; the most successful, I think, would be a storyline in which the interplay between the worlds has purpose and value.

Cross-posted on the StoryStalker