Writing

Steve’s Book Roundup 4/2/2022

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I write a lot and have quite a few books.  So now and then I post a roundup of them for interested parties!

The Way With Worlds Series

This is what I do a lot of – writing on worldbuilding!.  You can find all of my books at www.WayWithWorlds.com! 

The core books of the series will help you get going:

  • Way With Worlds Book 1 – Discusses my philosophy of worldbuilding and world creation essentials.
  • Way With Worlds Book 2 – Looks at common subjects of worldbuilding like conflicts in your setting, skills for being a good worldbuilder, and more!

When you need to focus on specifics of worldbuilding, I have an ever-growing series of deep dive minibooks.  Each provides fifty questions with additional exercises and ideas to help you focus on one subject important to you!

The current subjects are:

Fiction

Take a typical fantasy world – and then let it evolve into the information age.  Welcome to the solar system of Avenoth, where gods use email, demons were banished to a distant planet, and science and sorcery fling people across worlds . . .

  • A Bridge To The Quiet Planet – Two future teachers of Techno-Magical safety find trying to earn their credentials hunting odd artifacts backfires when they’re hired to put some back . . . on a planet where gods go to die!
  • A School of Many Futures – The crew is back, and finding having secrets and keeping them isn’t the same thing! Unfortunately they also find “very normal” is a cover for “anything but” . . .

Creativity

I’m the kind of person that studies how creativity works, and I’ve distilled my findings and advice into some helpful books!

  • The Power Of Creative Paths – Explores my theories of the Five Types of Creativity, how you can find yours, and how to expand your creative skills to use more Types of Creativity.
  • Agile Creativity – I take the Agile Manifesto, a guide to adaptable project development, and show how it can help creatives improve their work – and stay organized without being overwhelmed.
  • The Art of The Brainstorm Book – A quick guide to using a simple notebook to improve brainstorming, reduce the stress around having new ideas, and prioritize your latest inspirations.
  • Chance’s Muse – I take everything I learned at Seventh Sanctum and my love of random tables and charts and detail how randomness can produce inspiration!

Careers

Being a “Professional Geek” is what I do – I turned my interests into a career and have been doing my best to turn that into advice.  The following books are my ways of helping out!

  • Fan To Pro – My “flagship” book on using hobbies and interests in your career – and not always in ways you’d think!
  • Skill Portability – A quick guide to how to move skills from one job to another, or even from hobbies into your job.  Try out my “DARE” system and asses your abilities!
  • Resume Plus – A guide to jazzing up a resume, sometimes to extreme measures.
  • Epic Resume Go! – Make a resume a creative act so it’s both better and more enjoyable to make!
  • Quest For Employment – Where I distill down my job search experiences and ways to take the search further.
  • Cosplay, Costuming, and Careers – An interview-driven book about ways to leverage cosplay interests to help your career!
  • Fanart, Fanartists, and Careers – My second interview-driven book about ways to leverage fanart to help your career!
  • Convention Career Connection – A system for coming up with good career panels for conventions!

Culture

  • Her Eternal Moonlight – My co-author Bonnie and I analyze the impact Sailor Moon had on women’s lives when it first came to North America.  Based on a series of interviews, there’s a lot to analyze here, and surprisingly consistent themes . . .

My Sites

What to Marvel at

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

Marvel media (movies and TV) are something Serdar and I discuss a great deal because they influence modern culture and modern creators.  They’re unavoidable culturally, commercially, and in influence on the media being developed now.  Unfortunately, I think Marvel productions are leading people to the wrong conclusions.

Is this going to lead to me bashing the films?  No, because most Marvel media are good and many are great!

What would you find in a typical Marvel production?  Near-universally excellent casting, some of which cultivates or recognizes considerable talent.  Direction, productions, and effects deliver breathtaking action and heart-touching moments.  Scripts may not be award-winning, but they are clear, well-paced, and often surprise with genre analysis and interesting twists as Serdar notes.

If you want to be entertained and maybe get a bit more?  Marvel delivers.

The problem I have with Marvel is that it’s omnipresence has a warping effect.  Everyone is trying to do extended universes – which is nice in small doses but boring when everyone does it.  Once a rare subject to cover, superheroes are everywhere – and I like superhero stuff.  Marvel did well, but now everyone is doing Marvel, and there’s a sameness to it all – an unsustainable one in my opinion.

Success breeds imitation, and I’ve had enough imitation thanks.  To add to all of this, imitating what Marvel did – quite well – misses the major lessons of how Marvel made this work.

The secret of Marvel is valuing competence.

The lesson to take from Marvel is not to imitate what they make, it’s to look at how they consistently deliver solid, entertaining productions.  Analyze the effective and surprising casting.  Note how the films and shows pace themselves.  Examine the use of genres and genre-bending (especially as superhero stories are essentially meta-genres).  Learn from the media, not the overarching gigantic media machine.

Trying to imitate Marvel will only produce imitation without the foundation – and it probably won’t work unless you have money to throw at your efforts.  Instead, you can look to the foundation to find out how to build your own thing.

Besides, there’s only so much room for the same thing.

Steven Savage

Shock The Creator

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

There are two areas of practice where I say, “if something doesn’t shock you, you’re not doing it right.”  One is spiritual practice, and the other is worldbuilding.  Today, I’ll focus on the latter, if only to save you from me discussing psychology and minutae of Taoist breathing exercises.

Every author brings themselves to their worldbuilding because there’s no one else to bring.  Even if authors think they’re expanding on ideas created by someone else (such as the way Richard Florida influenced me), that’s not true.  Writing about someone else’s ideas means you’re writing about your idea of their idea.  The author (you) is inseparable from worldbuilding.

The problem with bringing ourselves into worldbuilding is we may quash our imaginations.  We come with our preconceptions about people, politics, history, and our inspirations.  When our creativity takes us “off script,” it’s too easy to force our way back onto the expected path.

I think we do this because when you worldbuild, you ask questions – I should know, I write worldbuilding books that are just questions.  The problem with asking questions is you’re going to get answers, and you won’t always like them.  Worldbuilding means thinking about big issues that can lead to uncomfortable conclusions about ourselves, our creations, and the real world.

I’d say when that happens, good because worldbuilding should shock you.  When thinking about politics, gods, science, or whatever your mind will go places.  You should be surprised by some of your conclusions because you’re thinking very big picture – in a way the biggest picture.  That shock is a sign you’ve challenged yourself, which might be good.

I’m not saying every disturbing thing that comes to mind is a good idea in your worldbuilding.  Not everything shocking is true, despite what many Internet Reply People think.  But those ideas came from inside of you while you work on a very intimate process – something is going on there you want to explore.  The fact it surprised you may well mean there was real inspiration there.

For myself, I can point right at my Avenoth novels, which are very political in their own way.  This post-post-apocalyptic fantasy series contains some of my politics and feelings about society.  It would take a lot to detail here, but suffice to say the core idea is “any survivable society is scaled, interconnected, and has people consciously keeping it running.”

But there was an unpleasant dark side that shocked me – and that I kept.  This society survived a massive world war that killed three-quarters of the population.  It is a society that also had “warrior lodges” and “monster hunters” that were designed to parody fantasy tropes.  Finally, the great devastating war ended with a massive, murderous military action committed by a loose alliance that was tired of fifty years of death.

This peaceful society came out of bloody history and built peace.  But it had to cope with violence.

Thus violence was recognized and ritualized.  Warrior Lodges became mixtures of mercenaries and sports teams (it’s easy to arrest someone when you’re on a trading card).  Some professions were trained and allowed to use violence and weapons if needed, such as the relic-hunting pair of Marigold and Scintilla.  Government agencies subsumed monster hunting orders, embodied by the warhorse character Briar.  It was a society that didn’t avoid violence so much as channel it.

I found this disturbing at first because my creation normalized violence.  Watching people beat each other up with fancy weapons to place bets?  Weird orders that recruited traumatized people into their ranks is considered normal?  Disturbing, yet these elements rang true, and I kept them – and probably learned more about myself and societies.

These elements were not just good worldbuilding, they added to the story.  Marigold and Scintilla were disgusted with the old orders because someone had tried to recruit them.  Students of the pair sported badges on their robes denoting their favorite Warrior Lodges.  Complex regulations about weapon use came to the fore so Scintilla and Briar could ignore them.

I was shocked.  My worldbuilding was better for it.

So next time you’re busy creating a new world, watch for those moments you surprise yourself unpleasantly.  A bolt from the blue may have struck you, and once you stop reeling, odds are you’ve found something worth keeping.

Steven Savage