Writing near to home with SF and Fantasy

[Dom]

One little observation I've had with myself is that it's much easier for me to write urban fantasy and not-too-distantly-set sci-fi then it is to write fantasy or distant-future sci-fi.

I've sort of narrowed the reason down to this: it takes less brainpower.  When you write urban fantasy and not-too-distant SF, you have to put proportionately less brainpower into the setting then you do for stories where the entire world is different from ours on some basic fundemental levels.  This frees up brainpower so you can work on everything else.

For example, in urban fantasy and near-future SF, you generally just have to look out the window to get some of your setting.  You don't have to think about how roads are made of cement or whatever, and how they might work with the sidewalks and bridges and everything...they're just there, and you know the reader will know they're just there, you just have to mention them with a single word or phrase or sentence.  But in a fantasy world, you do have to think about this...maybe your fantasy characters don't have ground-based roads.  Maybe they teleport everywhere.  Or fly.  Or swim.  Or something.  So the result is, just to write your character going down to the corner store in a fantasy or distantly-set SF means you need to use more brainpower per word on the paper to do an equivilant scene where the world is much more like ours.

Or at least, this is how it goes for me.  I have one over-reaching world, and three characters in it who occupy widely different niches in the world.  At the hardest-to-write spectrum, I have a character who is royalty in a pure epic/high fantasy setting.  She's hard to write because her world is so far removed from my own I have to think and process everything before writing it.  It's not natural.  In the middle I have a character who is from our world, but has links into the first character's world.  When he's in our-world settings, he's easy to write.  But it's harder when he's in fantasy-world settings, because I have to play him against this alien world, so sometimes this world-processing thinking comes into effect.  On the easy side of the spectrum I have a character who is nearly entirely in our world...he writes like warm butter cuts.  It just flows out.

Have any of you noticed this problem with yourselves?  Or maybe not "problem" per se, but issue?

[Tersa]

You're not alone, I'm the same way.  If I try to write a whole freaking new world my writing has a tendency to be very choppy and the dialogue, normally the easiest part for me, sounds forced.  It's like you said, it takes more brain power, more forethought and planning, and I'm just at the stage in my writing I don't want to have to plan the ancestry of this character, where they live, where they're from, what their social status is, before I get to what the character IS and what the story is going to do because of them.  I just want to sit down, snap into that state of mind, and write until I'm done. 

However, that said, it's not exactly easy as pie to write urban fantasy either, even though it's probably just more general writing stuff that is hard instead of genre specific stuff.  For example, I don't have to really set up a whole different place for my character Jake to live, but because he is my main character and I'm telling the story through his eyes, I still have to sit back and try to get into a whole different headspace than what I'm normally in.  And it's not just that he's in a different stage of his life than I am (he's in his mid twenties or so, I'm a bit younger, still in the student stage of my life, while he's transitioning to the teaching portion of his life) but men just talk differently than women do.  They use different adjectives, different nouns, they use shorter sentences with fewer add ons.  In my experience, they say what they mean, then shut up.  I'm a girl, a tomboy, but still a girl, and I have to literally read back through my writing and go, "Arrggg, that sentence has two X chromosomes!!! *Growls at the second X* Y, Damn you, turn into a Y!  *Shuffles some nouns and verbs around*" 

So yeah, writing close to home is easier in some ways, but you have to focus much more on detail and I think that because the world is more familiar, readers are going to be less forgiving of inconsistancies and mistakes.  Without a whole new world to be awed by, it's easier to pick up characters acting weird and the sentences just aren't flowing and meshing the way they should.

[Antimatter Girl]

And it's not just that he's in a different stage of his life than I am (he's in his mid twenties or so, I'm a bit younger, still in the student stage of my life, while he's transitioning to the teaching portion of his life) but men just talk differently than women do.  They use different adjectives, different nouns, they use shorter sentences with fewer add ons.  In my experience, they say what they mean, then shut up.  I'm a girl, a tomboy, but still a girl, and I have to literally read back through my writing and go, "Arrggg, that sentence has two X chromosomes!!! *Growls at the second X* Y, Damn you, turn into a Y!  *Shuffles some nouns and verbs around*" 

You should read Cicero. His sentences are like concentric circles ::nod::

[Richelle Mead]

Yup.  I know exactly what you mean.  But you know what else?  Mainstream fiction is *too* close to home for me.  It's like urban fantasy is perfect because I don't have to develop all the details of a pure fantasy/scifi world, yet I can also bend rules of the "real world."  It's the perfect medium (pun intended).

[trboturtle]

Well, on the one hand, writing 'close to home,' means there's no need to explain how things operate, construct a culture, explain how engines work and the like. On the other hand, it's harder to fudge the 'real world' then in a fantasy world or on another world.

It's easier to accept things the farther removed they are from our time and place.

Craig

[novium]

it may be harder to write, but it can also be harder to read.

[Athanasia]

I can see the point. Definitely. On the other hand, we are lucky to come at a time when sci fi has had decades of books published and read. Unless one wants to depict totally outlandish people in totally outlandish settings (some great writers became cult writers for doing it), one can easily rely on the tools of the genre.

Just for the sake of it I will throw in an argument. Is it really easier to drag your reader into your world if the settings are contemporary and ordinary? Won't you need to work that much more to have them suspend their disbelief and transcend this ordinary place into one of wonder - than if you deliberately set your story 5 centuries hence on a planet of the Alliance?

<<Feel free to kill me - it's easy, nobody wears a personal armour to run their errands, at least not on the central planets. They'll just grow another clone (hopefully I remembered to pay my insurance) and infuse it with my latest memory backup (all hail to Kanri technology, although it's more of a religion to them). Technically, the Alliance laws won't even consider it like murder... more like damaged property. As for me, what can possibly go wrong. >>*L*

I'd say any writer can afford short cuts now because so much has been written. What would bug me would be to create a whole "outlandish" background just for one story, even novel-sized

My two cents,

Athanasia