The Thigh Bone Is Connected To The…
Many words lurk below, you have been warned…
Once again it has been far too long since I have posted here. Other worlds than Saavd have claims on my time as well. Nor is the “real world” the only competitor! I find myself with multiple stories vying for full attention. Character notes and story outlines span across superhero, speculative, cyberpunk, action and fantasy fiction settings. Saavd is the richest of these worlds and also the oldest. Saavd has more background material, more coherence, than my other endeavors. Saavd has seen many starts and stops throughout the years since it first sprang to life, but it has never faded far from my thoughts nor my pen. Yes, pen. I still use pens and paper to flesh out most of my ideas before transferring them to electronic format. Three-ring binders of notes take up more than one bookshelf in my library!
While this long evolution has delivered a fruitful field for exploration and speculation, it also contains minefields of discontinuity. The characters have grown and changed in my mind as both of us have grown and obtained wider experiences. As I attempt to pull Saavd and its occupants into an interwoven tapestry, I find myself constantly having to change the characters’ personal histories and adjusting Saavd history to match.
To me, the basic building blocks are the characters. More so than plot or conflict or situation, the characters focus the story rambling through my head. A single character being the centerpiece of the story was typical for what I wrote for many years. Other characters in the story were ancillary, not really fully defined. The larger stage that their stories were played on was vague and even contradictory in some cases. This didn’t bother me until I decided to attempt writing more than one major character at a time into a story. I cannot simply collect all the characters and stories and paste them together. Even the small collection of “teasing tales” from Saavd now has to fit into a consistent whole that is larger than just the immediate lives of the characters.
Which brings me directly to the point of this ramble. This blog was intended to be a container for thoughts and experiences on the writing of stories. Saavd was not intended to be the background for a single story, a background that would fade away. Saavd is meant to be a setting for many stories, not all of them mine even. I didn’t have, and still don’t have, full-fleshed and complete tales of the denizens of Saavd. I was given an opportunity and a vehicle to put forward the stories of Saavd even though not everything was fully realized and I took that welcome chance. However, I now find myself in the position of needing to make adjustments to what I have already put forward in order to build and maintain the continuity of the world and its characters. As my tales expand and intertwine I’m faced with the question of rewriting material that has already been “published” or leaving the inconsistencies in place and possibly creating situations that can’t be resolved.
This certainly isn’t a new or unique problem. Serial characters and storylines from comic books to popular literature have many “adjustments” made from the first incarnation to the latest. Hard-copy publishing doesn’t really allow an author to go back and change the earlier stories however. The author must either account for the inconsistencies in later tales, or simply ignore them. The Internet, on the other hand, is a completely different matter. It certainly will, if it hasn’t already, rival or replace the current hard-copy publishing environment. On websites, a writer easily can go back and tweak previous story details, characters and timelines to match with current or planned stories. What effect does that have on readers however, when what they remember can be retroactively modified?
Good stories allow characters to grow and change while remaining true to themselves, but does the writer have a responsibility to account for inconsistencies and resolve them? Is it fair to readers to have minor and major changes made to the story continuity? Someone in the comic-book world (I have no idea who) coined the phrase “retconned” for retroactive continuity changes, normally to explain a fairly complete shift in the direction of a character. I don’t believe it was meant as a compliment. A beloved character can literally change overnight. In the hard-copy world at least the reader can go back to earlier stories and enjoy the character they liked. Where does this leave the Internet reader however? Earlier stories can be changed just as easily as later ones and a once-beloved character may never be the same again.
I believe readers are touched by and relate to characters more than story details. Many people who have never read A. Conan Doyle or Robert E. Howard have a mental picture of characters like Sherlock Holmes or Conan and have ideas on how those characters would react to situations, even though they could not tell you details on any story involving those characters. So, what’s the answer? I have no idea, yet. Hopefully there is one, but the Internet evolved under an entirely different set of rules and stimuli than print and the rules there are rewritten by the participants on a regular basis. Perhaps, like software, stories should be versioned and change documents provided to the readers, but keeping up with all the details would seem to promise nightmares and mountains of hair pulled out.
So here I offer heart-felt thanks to the people that have visited and enjoyed the Saavd website so far. You may find changes in what you read months ago, but if you do, believe that it was done to make Saavd a more consistent, believable (as much as fantasy can be) and enjoyable place to spend your time.