Sure you can have elves and dragons, time travel and aliens. Myth and alternative technology are part of world-building in fantasy and sci-fi. But the real alternative worlds are inside people’s heads. To take the reader emotionally into a fictional world, the writer must show us how the main characters understand this world. Every world in fiction is a mentality – a way of understanding, a means of making judgements, a catalogue of right and wrong. To build a world, we must build our characters.

Consider, for example, an old jalopy. To one character this might just be a heap of rust, a shameful sign of poverty. To another character, the same car might be a challenge, a promise of something to be restored, a long summer full of happy activity. Different characters invest the same landscape and the same object with a multiplicity of significances.

I’m interested in how people create meaning in their world and negotiate shared meanings with others. And I was stuck at a fulcrum chapter in the book I’m writing, The Tears of Boabdil in how I was to achieve that with my main character. The novel is a braided narrative (thanks, Paula, for reminding me of that term). It combines a gritty police tale of an agent infiltrating a jihadist group, a forbidden love, and the magical power of narrative. In this chapter, the undercover police agent meets his handler. I needed to find a way of showing that the character inhabits a world not quite like our own, and I was struggling to express his rules.

The answer came from an unexpected source – a book I’ve been reading on the meaning of Palaeolithic art by Jean Clottes (What is Palaeolithic Art). Whether Clottes, a world expert on the cave paintings of southwest France, is right or wrong in his interpretation I don’t know, and I don’t really care. His schema was captivating, and perfect for my character.

• Connectedness and fluidity. Everywhere and everywhen are one. Things and events can metamorphose into each other. Signs are important.
• We tend to see individuals as members of general categories (cats, women, vehicles). But my main character responds to the particularity of things, so that a sleeping cat is a different thing from a stalking cat. He will later on experience the multiple aspects of his quarry – jihadi, respected teacher, doting father – as different entities
• The world is permeable to the effects of supernatural forces and these forces can be appealed to for their blessing
• The identity of a person or thing is the story we tell about it. Images have an affinity with the thing they portray and can change reality.

And there, I had the framework of my world. If we allow ourselves to be open to the permeability of things, the answer is out there. Now it’s a somewhat scary craft challenge to see if I can match up to Tolkien’s description of the goal of world-building as creating immersion or enchantment.

We aspiring authors are constantly advised to develop an author platform. In fact some publishers make it a requirement. So what is an author platform, and how do you make one?

A platform is a means for you to reach out to a target audience. In part, it’s the main thing about you as a writer – your published work. In part, it’s your profile on social media – whatever form of it appeals to you, blogging, tweeting, Facebook. Goodreads. I blogged about this in my tenth post, and I decided to take a re-look at what had worked for me on this blog.

When I wrote that first post, the blog had been going a month. It had received 90 views from 30 visitors, and had garnered three followers. Now, a year later, I’ve just passed 1,600 reads, with 588 unique visitors. As you can see, it’s a slow process, and, though slow and steady, the progress is not stratospheric. So it’s a good idea to get started and have your platform in place and growing before you’ve published your first book.

From May 2105 to February 2016, the blog chugged on, bumping along the bottom. On average, every month it attracted around 53 views from 23 visitors. Around three new people followed me every month. Then it all changed in March 2016. Average monthly views went up around seven-fold to 383. Each post is now read by 58 people, instead of the previous nine. Visitor numbers rose over four-fold to 119 a month. And follows more than doubled to eight a month. What was the secret? I joined a network, Friday Fictioneers, built around a challenge to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt every week.

The boost came from two elements: firstly, I was posting stories; and secondly I was connected to a network of around 150 people who write for the challenge every week. So I was buying into an established readership. It’s not magic. Some of the new visitors are reading other blog posts as well as the stories. Views of non-story posts almost doubled from an average of 53 a month to 98. While it does promote my visibility, it certainly doesn’t allow me to post stupid messages like “follow me” or “read my book”.  Though the links are there on my site, only nine new people have clicked through to my publications.

I can’t suggest what will work for you. It will be different for every writer. But the general message is probably

• However you start your platform, take it slow and give it time
• Link up with existing networks

Some simple tips can make your prose more vivid. This week it was my turn to lead an exercise in my writing group on the elements of description.  This what I said:

We use descriptive writing to describe a person, place or thing so that a picture is formed in the reader’s mind. This connects to the difference between showing and telling. When a writer tells something s/he merely communicates what happens. When s/he shows, the reader is drawn into the scene.

There are four main things to remember for good descriptive writing.

Use vivid sensory details

• Use precise language. Avoid general nouns, adjectives and verbs. Use specific words and strong verbs to build the picture. For example, “he scrambled up the scree” is more powerful than “he ran up the hill”.
• Make use of images, similes and metaphors.
• Use all the five senses – sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste. Practice just observing quietly.

 

Less may be more. When describing a landscape, you’re trying to portray it comprehensively and precisely but not necessarily exhaustively.

• Think about what’s important. A telling phrase to encapsulate a scene or a character can be better than a paragraph. For example. For example, this description of a distressed soldier in a story I wrote: “As he spoke, he drank, like he was firing and reloading a rifle, technically, methodically.”
• Hemingway, famous for sparse descriptions of his characters, held that “action is character” and that “dialogue is also action and a projection of character”.

 

 It’s not just exteriors. Link to feelings too.

• You’re not simply describing a landscape within which your characters move. Allow the physical and emotional worlds interact. Description is more powerful when you show the gears turning inside those psyches.
• Leslie Jamison advises “If you’re describing a chair, let your mind play with all the different things that chair could mean to various characters. Whose feelings were hurt in that chair? Who was betrayed in that chair? Who broke into his estranged father’s property to chop down the tree whose wood was used to build that chair?”

 

It’s not only about the words. Think, like a poet, about rhythm. The sound and rhythm of the words can capture a description.

• For example, look at how the rhythm captures the soul of these two ships in John Masefield’s poem, Cargoes:

“Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,

Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine.”

And

“Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,

Butting through the Channel in the mad March days.”

 

 

Exercise

This exercise is a technique for observing quietly.

Sit quietly for 5 minutes. Try to clear your mind. Don’t judge, just observe. DON’T WRITE DURING THE OBSERVATION PERIOD. Then write down, for each of the senses, the things you saw, heard, felt, smelled and tasted.

When you’ve done that, take another five minutes and try to come up with some great words or short phrases than would summon up a few of those things.