This post is about a really narrow part of world building, but I think it’s something that GRRM utilizes very well. To begin, when I say “ignorance” I don’t mean it in the pejorative sense; I just mean characters who don’t know things. And I’m talking about a specific sort of knowledge they lack, which…
Month: June 2019
What Maximalism is Doing in ASOIAF
In his memoir On Writing, Stephen King recalls advice he got form his editor during his first professional writing job as a highschooler covering sports news for a local paper: “When you’re writing a story, you’re telling yourself a story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that…
The Principle of Antagonism in ASOIAF
In Story, Robert McKee presents what he calls the Principle of Antagonism: A protagonist and the story can only be as intellectually fascinating and emotionally compelling as the forces of antagonism make them. This isn’t about the protagonist having a compelling antagonist, but rather about the depth of antagonism against the protagonist’s central values. If…
How Interiority Builds Empathetic Readers
A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone. Back in 2013, psychologists at The New School in New York City conducted an experiment to see how reading different types of literature affect the reader’s ability to empathize with others. To clarify, empathy is the ability to identify and understand the thoughts or feelings…
How Littlefinger’s Ending Got Story Basics Wrong
I know plenty has been written about the botched ending to Littlefinger’s story, because a lot went wrong in it. But, I want to break down the mechanical elements of the story, because there’s more to it than simply smart characters acting stupid, cliche sister-vs-sister conflict, and the worst criminal defense strategy in the history…
Where the Season 2 Story Structure Went Wrong
I just finished Season 2 today, and while I think it was overall pretty decent, it certainly didn’t live up to the quality of Season 1. I suspect a lot of this is from what I’ll call Season One Depletion. Basically, you have writers who’ve had ideas percolating in their heads for years, then they…
How to Put a Great Big World onto a Little Page
One of the things that makes really well done fantasy and scifi so enthralling is the bigness of the world building. Not every story needs to do this — Arrival doesn’t and it’s one of my favorite scifi movies; many of the best Star Trek episodes have nothing to do with exploring the galaxy. They’re…
The Unique Three-Dimensionality of Johnny Lawrence
(Full disclosure, I haven’t seen Season 2 yet. Waiting to get over my Game of Thrones hangover before diving in.) Borrowing from Michael Byers’s Faking Shapely Fiction, a three-dimensional character needs to possess three characteristics: unaligned traits, spectrum traits, and self-reflection. Unaligned traits are those which can go together, but we don’t expect them to….
World Building — The Mundane
One of the things that hooked readers (and show watchers) so quickly with the series is the richness of the world GRRM created. World building is also one of those incredibly challenging things that is daunting even for otherwise talented writers. I started this post intending to go into about five different elements of world…
Using Contradictions To Seed Clues
The Song of Ice and Fire series is full of all sorts of mysteries and plots and misdirection, and the first we get is the death of Jon Arryn — was he murdered, and if so, by whom, and most importantly, for what reason? These are the questions that motivate Ned and set the wheels…