Ask the Bard #8: Un-chatted Territory: Maps, Messages, and More
In this week's world-building advice column, I talk maps, the importance of 'the message', and why I don't use chat.
Holy cats, where in the world did you all come from?!
The last time I looked at my subscribers, there were only 71 of you, and now there are 77?! And four of you just today?! To all of you — each and every one of you — I say THANK YOU for being here, for reading my words, and for making this weird little collective of creative kindreds the radiant community that it is!
To those of you who are new this week, WELCOME!
Now buckle-up, Buttercup, shit’s about to get weird.
Ask the Bard
Q: How important is map building in world building? FYI I hate map building.
A: ‘Fraid it's gonna be an ol’ fashioned “good news, bad news" situation.
Bad news first: It’s absolutely critical that you have a visual understanding of your world, if only so that you remember that it’s the Eastern Union and the Western Empire, and not the other way around.
Haly, I’m talking to you. (It’s me. I’m Haly.)
Good news: No one else ever has to see it. So go ahead and make it on the back of an envelope, or on the inside of a dust jacket from a book you don’t like. Draw it in crayons, or do it in MS Paint. You don’t have to make a good map. Or one that’s pretty. You just need to make one that YOU can understand.
For anyone who missed it, I released a set of five Haunted Forest maps earlier this week as a web-only post. These were made with Inkarnate Pro, my map-making software of choice. It has a robust set of free options — enough to satisfy most basic fantasy uses — and a varied and ever-growing set of different aesthetics for Pro members. Plus, the Pro subscription is reasonably priced at $5/month or $25/year.
Welcome, Autumn! Thank You, Readers!
·One of my favorite tools as both a writer and a DM is Inkarnate. It gives me a way to visualize a scene and check my spacing. This keeps me bound to wat’s possible versus what sounds cool until you try to visualize it and can’t because it doesn’t make sense.
Q: Another question, how important is “The Message” to a story. Can a story exist without one?
A: Let’s walk with Alice to go ask the caterpillar.
Look, I don’t speak for the entire writing community by any means, I’m just a passionate writer with an imagination that won’t quit and a penchant for reading shampoo bottles and the back of food packaging (IYKYK)1. But I feel pretty confident when I say… I doubt I’m the only one who has idle dreams of scholars arguing over “the meaning” of my work centuries after I’m dead.
Here’s the thing, though… If they do this, it will happen independent from whether or not I instill meaning into my work. Because of this, I don’t recommend focusing on having some sort of “message.”
Why?
Well, “Victorian moralizing” has become a catch-all phrase for an entire genre of books — in and outside of the Victorian era — where “the message” is delivered in such a heavy-handed way, a reader can’t help but walk away with a concussion from being bashed about the head with “the message!” Example: C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books.2
Are there examples of where it’s been done well? Sure! Lots of them! The best ones buried the message so deep and left it so open to interpretation that scholars are still arguing over it to this day. See: the Marquis de Sade, George Orwell, and L. Frank Baum.
Yanno what? Let’s take a look at that last one, because the allegory in The Wizard of Oz is obvious, well-documented, and completely over most peoples’ heads. It’s also one of my favorites. I find all of Oz and the incredibly intricate world-building so very fascinating.
(Congratulations on reading this far. I warned you: shit’s going to get weird.)
In brief terms: The Tin Man represents the heartlessness of corporate industry, the Scarecrow represents the naive farmers, the Cowardly Lion represents ineffective government. Dorothy, of course, is “the people.” If you’ve only seen the movie and never read the book, then I encourage you to correct that oversight because it is an absolute masterclass in how to do a message well. Lacking that, there are many scholarly articles and papers dissecting The Wizard of Oz as economic allegory.
All that being said, your work will have a message, whether you set out to give it one or not. That is why I say don’t focus on it. Because focusing on it will only make it come out like a cannonball.
This is why voice in writing is so critical. Your voice is what conveys the subtle message. The word choices, the turns of phrase, the style. All of that is a reflection of your cultural attitudes and experiences!
Q: I’ve been thinking about the cultural attitudes of my primary society. Can you give some more examples?
A: Literally what I’m here for.
Alright, further illustrations of cultural attitudes. Well, look at the houses from The Seven Books That Shan’t Be Named, by That Hateful Bitch. Each one has its own set of archetypal attributes that it values: courage, resourcefulness, loyalty, intelligence.
Another excellent example would be the different factions in Veronica Roth’s Divergent trilogy. Abnegation, Dauntelss, Erudite… Each are named for the very attribute that they associate with their cultural identity. The Dauntless value risk-taking, toughness, and a carefree attitude. Very different from Abnegation’s values of piety and self-sacrifice.
More? Got you covered.
How about the different districts in The Hunger Games books, by Suzanne Collins. Or, if you’re tired of books and movies, let’s look at the different vampire clans in White Wolf Publishing’s Vampire: the Masquerade role-playing game? The anarchist Bruja, the incestuous Giovanni, and the crack-pot mad Malkavians are just three of more than a dozen different and distinct clans, each with its own cultural stereotypes, archetypes, and rebels.
And, yes, you can also have negative cultural values. Control might be valued by the king, expressed as culture through oppression and indoctrination, and with a counterculture of rebellion forming amongst not only the peasants, but also the nobles. Conformity might be valued by a church’s congregation that then tries to enforce it on people who don’t belong to their faith.
Let me know what you decide!
Q: I went to post my question on the chat thread, but you don't have chat active now! What's up with that?!
A: TL;DR: This is the result of Substack's lockout.
So, many of you remember last Thursday when I got improperly flagged and suspended for 24ish hours. Well, the permanent consequence of that is that ALL CHAT THREADS I STARTED WERE SUMMARILY ERASED. Not DMs, and not my replies to other threads.
The problem with this is, they didn't just rob me of those conversations and resources (photos, links, answers to questions, fun chats, etc.), THEY ROBBED MY ENTIRE COMMUNITY of those resources.
Now. Was this the right thing for Substack to do? Probably. Had I actually been scamming people, then yes. Yes, that would have been proper, hundy-p, no argue. Safety is paramount.
But in the case of a false flag, would it have made more sense to suspend them, and not remove them until later? Maybe. But that's not my call. It might be a bug, even, we all know how great the Android app is.
Regardless, this is where we are now: I trust Substack's T&S team to resolve issues. I do NOT trust that this won't happen again. Therefore, I will never again run a chat through Substack.
I do, however, have a Discord server. Which affords not only more reliability, but also more features. So please, join me there and help grow this weird little collective of creative kindreds!
Rhapsody by Moonlight Discord Server
Q: …Stream?
A: Sorry, friends, I didn’t have it in me this afternoon to feed the corporate greed machine that is Twitch, and Live on Substack hasn’t rolled out to me, yet.
We’ll try again next Wednesday. In the meantime, did you know I host live hangouts in Discord? It’s all the fun of hanging out at my house to watch cool shit and chat, without the hassle of travel or, yanno, pants.
Keep an eye out for events in the server!
Here's that Discord link, again.
Coming This Week:
Thursday: Final check-in on School of Cat for World Anvil’s Institutions of Learning challenge.
Friday: Fiction Friday will see a new installment of The Graveside Letters of Jolene Williams. (Link will take you to the index for this serial prequel to my WIP, Cornfields of Avalon.)
Saturday: Quick Six: Cultural Touchstones
Sunday: New Week, New Theme!
Monday: Manic Monday: The Theme in Action
Tuesday: Twisted Tuesday: Subverting the Theme
Wednesday: World-building Wednesday and a new edition of Ask the Bard! Don’t forget to join me LIVE on Discord around 4:30 pm Eastern (1:30 Pacific, 9:30 UK).
Welcome new kindreds! Longtime pillar of the community,
likes to ask me on a regular basis, “where did you learn all this?!” And I always give the truth: I read EVERYTHING. From scientific papers on groundbreaking physics to the back of shampoo bottles and cereal boxes.Sure, it’s easy to focus on world-building when you’ve stolen the plot straight from The Big Book of Hebrew Fairy Tales. It is the perfect illustration of heavy-handed messaging.
To my great relief, I have a basic map in my head and to my (even greater) relief, I don't have a message for the current WIP and don't need one. So, Substack live isn't just out there for anyone to use?