Utopia and Dystopia

Utopias and dystopias have been a staple of speculative fiction for a long time. They both are based very much of current society and explore what might happen in the future if society continues on its current path. This can lead both to a utopia as in the original series of “Star Trek” or to a dystopia as in “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”.

 

To start the post off, let me define both ‘Utopia’ and ‘Dystopia,’ so we’re all on the same page here and know what we’re talking about. Both words refer to an image of a future society, the utopia being a positive vision of the future and the dystopia being a negative vision of it. The novel “Utopia” by Thomas More, of course, gave the name to the positive view of the future. ‘Dystopia’ was coined as its opposite later.

It is important to remember that both utopias and dystopias are focused on the society they’re set in, not on technology or something else. The society is not a backdrop, it takes an important place in the plot. In many utopias and dystopias, the society is the plot - or at least a part of the society, such as the government or the corporations, is.

This, together with our general social development in the last couple of decades, might explain why dystopias are more interesting to authors. It’s hard to get a conflict out of a positive future where everyone is happy and scarcity is a thing of the past, where people do not have to struggle and can just pass their days as they like. In a dystopia where the government makes teenagers fight in an arena or fertile women are forced to serve the upper echelons to birth their children, because most women can’t give birth any longer, it’s much easier to find a conflict. Therefore, this blog post is also focused more on the dystopia than on the utopia.

 

Dystopias focus on problems of our current society and blow them up all the way to eleven. If people mistrust the government (as they have for a long time now), the government will turn out to be as corrupt and tyrannical as they come. If people mistrust corporations (as well they should), corporations will turn out to exploit everyone and everything for money without the slightest hesitation. If people mistrust the system of education (which may also be a good idea sometimes), then the school system will turn out to be corrupt, making sure the corporations and the government get the kind of obeisant slave they want, once the children are grown.

Dystopian futures have a problem baked into the very clay they’re made out of. It might not always be visible at first glance - not all dystopias start out with obvious stuff like making people from every district fight to the death in the arena for the entertainment of the masses or zombies swarming across the wasteland that was once NYC. Yet, it’s always there. Sometimes, a dystopia masks as a utopia - but then the life is too good, there has to be something wrong with it.

Quite often, the dystopia seems alright at first, at least to a person who has grown up in it and doesn’t know about anything else. Life might not be wonderful, but it’s manageable. Humans are adaptable and so a person who has never seen anything else will simply adapt to their reality. Then something happens which makes them wonder. Perhaps the hard laws hit someone they love. Perhaps they are suddenly forced to take part in something everyone fears. Perhaps they are refused something they’ve always wanted for reasons they don’t understand. They start to ask questions and they start to doubt the answers those ‘above’ are prepared to give. Sooner or later, the dirty secret is discovered. Soylent Green is made of people. The Planet of the Apes is earth.

Alternately, people know they live in a bad time. There’s a war going on. There’s scarcity. There’s zombies walking around everywhere. There’s dragons overhead. Times are bad, but what can you do? That is, until someone thinks they know what to do and they take the dangerous journey and they might win or lose in the end - because in a dystopia, a ‘happily ever after’ is not guaranteed.

 

The way we view a dystopia can change over time. “1984” rings differently to us in a time after the date of the novel and full of technological devices which are far more efficient at keeping track of us than Big Brother ever was. In terms of privacy, Big Brother may be a step up by now. “The Handmaid’s Tale” generates a more vicious impact in a society where it seems more possible even than at the time of the writing of the story that a woman may lose control over her reproductive organs - just look at Texas. Sometimes, even a utopia of the past might sound like a dystopia in the present, depending on the changes society has made.

 

Dystopias, as mentioned above, do not have a guaranty for a good ending. The ending might be ambiguous, leaving us hanging after the confrontation is done. Is everything going well? Are things getting better? The ending might be good, there’s no rule preventing that. The evil government has fallen and everyone is free now. The ending might also be bad, though.

Dystopias are one of the few types of stories where a bad ending is accepted. Remember, it is a full society which is bad, not just one person or a few people who might be overcome by the hero and their friends. One person fighting back against a system is nothing. The system can and will win. Two people, ten people, fifty people - in a modern society with millions of people, that is not a problem, either.

Only if there is one thing or person that can be attacked to change everything, one supreme leader, one master of the ceremonies, one person who holds all the threads in their hands, another person can put an end to things. In other cases, if that person can’t spark a massive revolution, nothing will change and they will most likely die or be removed in another way. As history has taught us, even revolutions don’t guarantee a better future.

 

Utopias and dystopias are very interesting ‘what if’ experiments with society. It is easier to write a dystopia, because you’ll find more ways to create a conflict in it, but for lighter stories, a utopia might also be an interesting setting. There are many different aspects of society which you might boost, depending on what kind of story you want to tell. Have fun with utopias and dystopias and remember - a ‘happily ever after’ is not guaranteed if you’re in a dystopia.

Grimoires and How to Use Them

Today’s blog post is about an object which you might find very useful in a story: the grimoire. A grimoire is a hand-written book created by a magic user and filled with all spells, hexes, charms, enchantments, potions, and other magical knowledge they have. Such a book can be an interesting object for a story and in different ways, too.

 

The grimoire has a real-world equivalent in the commonplace book. These books were kept by scholars (and at certain times also other people) and filled with all the information the owner considered important, such as passages from different textbooks or results of their own research or experiments. For a time, it was expected of students at various colleges and universities, such as Cambridge or Oxford, to keep a commonplace book for their studies.

At that time, printing was a difficult process and had to be done with woodcuts, meaning that every page had to be cut into a wooden board and then printed - runs were limited by how often the board could be used before the printed page was no longer legible. It was only with the invention of the moveable lead printing letters that books began to get cheaper and larger runs were possible. Different ways of binding the books then made it even cheaper to make and sell them. Before all of that, the individual book was too expensive for every student to have one, so they needed to write down information somewhere else and blank books were a good deal more affordable.

Some people did write grimoires as well - even if there’s no real magical knowledge in there, they often also include recipes which do work. Alchemists certainly kept books for their own research and for their recipes as well.

 

In a world in which magic exists, however, such a grimoire would be far more interesting than in ours. Grimoires can take quite a few different jobs in a story, depending on what you want to write and how you use them.

Magic could, for instance, influence the books and make them dangerous. So many different spells, hexes, etc. in close quarters can create a lot of problems. Your main character’s job might be to deal with grimoires which have grown dangerous, perhaps even sentient. It could be a one-time job, because their own grimoire or that of their mentor has gone wild, or it could be their regular job, keeping order in a large library full of grimoires or being the go-to person when one’s grimoire begins to act strangely. They might even be on the government’s or the magician’s guild’s payroll.

A grimoire could be a MacGuffin in the story. Once upon a time, a powerful magic user wrote a grimoire full of powerful spells unknown to everyone else. As every grimoire is unique, there’s no reason why this shouldn’t be the case. The villain is after the grimoire to use it to enslave the world and the main character (or characters) have to make sure they don’t get it. A grimoire is no better or worse a MacGuffin than that microfilm or SD card or other regular object.

In a magical school, every student could have to write their own grimoire and your main character could either be very into it, trying to find spells and suchlike which are not in the normal curriculum or they could be very lazy and try to make someone else write their grimoire for them.

 

Even a use of grimoires in modern times, in an Urban Fantasy setting, is quite possible, it needs less of an explanation than, for instance, the fact that people don’t notice dragons and sprites all around them. Harry Dresden from the Dresden Files actually keeps a stack of notebooks with magical information - whether he calls them that or not, those are grimoires.

Grimoires cannot be printed, because they need specific paper and ink, none of which can be used with a printing press. This is a functional thing and, until someone (perhaps your main character?) invents a press which can deal with the paper and ink, everyone has to write their grimoire themselves.

Magic is forbidden knowledge and thus books about it cannot be regularly printed and sold. Whoever finds a mentor to teach them about magic has to make their own book about it - a grimoire.

Magical skill is vastly different from person to person, so a standard textbook will not suffice. Everyone who uses magic has to keep their own book with the spells they can actually use.

While standard spells, potions, etc. are gathered in textbooks, a lot of magic users also experiment with magic and thus develop new things. Those are written down in a notebook and this notebook, no matter what it looks like, is a grimoire.

Modern grimoires are no longer books filled with hand-written notes - they’re an app on the mage’s smartphones filled with all the spells, hexes, potions, and other magical information the mage has.

Your main character might be pulled into the magical world after buying an old book during a yard sale which turns out to be a grimoire. They use a spell as a joke and it works - because they’re secretly magic, too, but have never been told.

 

Grimoires can also be presented in different ways.

They may take pride of place on a lectern in the middle of a magic user’s vast library. They could be hidden in the tomb of a powerful witch or wizard and require a lot of daring-do to extract from there.

Perhaps they’re just a stack of harmless-looking, cheap notebooks, because that’s the only thing your fledgling mage can afford. Perhaps they’re huge, ancient-looking tomes with yellowish parchment pages and an odd black ink in them.

The students of your magical school might spend a lot of time lugging their books around and discuss what spells and recipes they’ve gotten in theirs, exchanging information between classes. Some teachers might be very strict about what part of their classes they allow to be written down.

 

Instead of having a boring printed spell book, try giving your magic user a grimoire which is self-made and filled with all the information which that magic user has already gathered about their craft. Make it a MacGuffin, a regular tool, a dangerous artefact - get creative with the principle. Make good use of the grimoire and make grimoires great again!

More Scrivener Impressions

At the end of September, I finished my first book which was written in Scrivener. Before that, I had already edited one book in the program, so I have experienced both of the things which I need to do in Scrivener by now.

To be fair, I didn’t fully write and edit the books - I did the content edit of “Ignition Rites” before I switched to Scrivener and I also wrote four chapters (of twenty-seven) of “The Haunting of Winterthorne Hall” in Word before I switched over. Yet, I certainly did the majority of the work for each of them in Scrivener.

I can now judge better how useful Scrivener is for me and whether the switch from Word was a good idea.

 

For someone like me, who writes a lot of series, Scrivener projects are a marvellous thing. The project format with a multitude of files which will be compiled in the end is practical all by itself, but it is even more useful when you are writing a series.

Unlike Word, Scrivener has been developed with authors in mind. Authors need something different than Larry from Sales who needs to write short letters and the occasional report and business proposal (which is what Word is great for, mind). Scrivener projects hold a lot of different files - the actual manuscript with the text you want to eventually publish, the plotting of your story or even non-fiction book, and all of your notes, research, character or location sheets, and so on. There is a lot of background information which will never be in a story, but is absolutely necessary for the author to have available.

When I was still working with Word, I needed extra files and extra programs to keep track of all the background information - first in OneNote, then in Campfire Pro. When Campfire Pro again corrupted one of my files and made it hard for me to preserve my notes, I gave Scrivener a second look, devoting more time to it. With Scrivener, I have all in one place - and that goes twice for series. Because, you see, the project is easy to navigate even with a lot (and I mean A Lot) of text in it.

Every scene/chapter/novel has its own files and folders. I can keep all the manuscripts of a series in the same project, each of them has its own folder, and if I want to compile one for use in another program (as a .doc or .pdf or .epub file, for instance), I put it in the ‘Manuscript’ folder and do so. While I write a new part of the series, I put the files in the ‘Manuscript’ folder, too, for a few useful functions, but once the release is done, I just shift the new part to its regular folder away from ‘Manuscript.’

In my Word files, I had a hard time navigating between all that data, but the ‘binder’ window on the left-handed side of the Scrivener window makes it a breeze - not to mention I can also put bookmarks on parts of the binder I need often, such as the character sheets or my notes or my research. Like this, I don’t even have to leave Scrivener when I need to look up something in a prior story of the series, because all of the text is in the Scrivener project. In addition, this will make it easier for me to create the collections of two or three books of a series for sale as I plan to.

 

I’ve always tracked my words per day to see how far I’ve gotten and how much is left to do. Before Scrivener, I did that on paper - writing down the next target to reach once or twice a day. Now, it is much easier. Scrivener allows me to set targets which I can then follow up in the program: words per day, words per manuscript, words per file or folder. I am not using the word target per day, but I am using a target for the manuscript (estimated from the number of chapters and the type of book) and I’m giving my chapter folders a target, so I see how much more space I have in this chapter for all scenes together. It’s easier than having to calculate all the words from all the scenes in the chapter I have written. In the same space where I can see the project target, I can also see how much I’ve written in that project that day - only in the manuscript, so changes made to notes or other background material don’t count. For me, that makes keeping up with my word count much, much easier.

 

The scenes, too, were an eye-opener! I’ve never really looked at writing from the level of scene-by-scene, although I have written that way, of course. Being a linear writer, I have never had that much of a problem with finding where I needed to continue - always at the end of the written text. Yet, being able to find every scene and to give every scene a title which tells me what it is about has helped me a lot more than I would have expected.

First of all, I can plot in the manuscript that way - I have all my scenes listed as a file of their own and each file has a synopsis with all I intend to write in this one. Yet, it has also proven very good for editing. While content editing has to be done from the beginning to the end of the story, copy editing profits from not being done in a linear fashion. With “Ignition Rites”, I did the copy edits from the end to the beginning, which helped me with staying on the word level instead of looking out for the story. Like this, it was much easier.

It is also much easier to change the order of the scenes in this program. Each is its own file and I can move them back and forth in the narrative whatever way I want. Not that I often need to do that after plotting, but having the possibility to do so is still good - and it’s useful for the plotting process, being able to exchange scenes, so they fit better into the narrative.

 

I also enjoy using the editor much more than I enjoy using Word. I’ve set a sepia theme which is very easy on the eyes as I write. The editor shows me the number of words per scene at every point, so I know how far along I am and if I should better get to the end of it. To the left, I have the binder for quick checks, to the right I can have the inspector with the synopsis, the bookmarks, or a couple of other things. I can split the editor into up to four windows for referencing different files at the same time (and through the bookmarks can add a fifth window there). This, of course, goes well with having all information in one place.

I especially love the typewriter mode in which the last line of the text (or the one I’m currently working on) always stays in the middle of the window, which means I can keep my head in a comfortable position and write much longer without any troubles.

 

Automatic saving and backups are the final thing I really love about the program. When I stop writing for a certain amount of time (standard are two seconds, I’ve set it to one), the program saves automatically. I do not have to worry about when I’ve last saved (which I tend to forget when I’m really into writing), the program does it for me.

Every time I close a project and have made changes there, Scrivener also creates a .zip backup file for me and keeps the last few of them (settings include three, five, ten, and twenty-five). Like this, should a file be corrupted, I have a backup to work with.

 

As you might already have guessed from this, I love Scrivener and I will not return to Word plus several other programs. I had a good time writing “The Haunting of Winterthorne Hall” (out next year in August) and I had a better time than usually editing “Ignition Rites”, too. If you are a writer who goes for long texts, fiction or non-fiction, you should give Scrivener a look. It might or might not work for you, but it’s certainly worth your consideration.

Not Like the Other Girls

The girl who is ‘not like the other girls’ is a staple in writing, especially in young adult fiction and fiction for teenagers. Unfortunately, there’s a deeply misogynistic root to this trope and that is why you should be careful when using it.

 

In real life, every girl is ‘not like the other girls,’ simply because teenage girls, believe it or not, are not clones of each other. Our teens are when we realize what sets us apart from the others. Perhaps we have an interest our classmates don’t seem to share. Perhaps we feel we’re more adult than them already. Perhaps we just are different in the way we dress or the way we want to look. Setting yourself apart from others and finding your own identity is what being a teenager is about, after all. In addition to the bodily changes from child to adult, adolescence is also where we mentally grow up into a full-fledged individual.

 

Yet, this is not what the ‘not like the other girls’ trope is all about. The girl who is ‘not like the other girls’ is usually defined by having male-coded interests, traits, and skills, not simply by having a different kind of femininity than most of her female classmates. Being ‘not like the other girls’ is what justifies this girl being the main character.

You will not find the opposite, the boy who is ‘not like the other boys’ and gets the main role because of that. A boy who is perfectly like the other boys is a fine character for a story, a girl who is like the other girls is not.

The big problem is that, as mentioned above, the girl who is ‘not like the other girls’ is set apart from them through having male-coded traits and skills. She might be interested in technology or cars, she might be into sports, she might be a tomboy and dress like a boy. In essence, she become an honorary boy by those skills, interests, or traits. She’s often the only girl in the group of main characters, the one who seems to do her best to be more boyish than the boys.

 

All of this is based on the misogynistic idea that male interests, traits, and skills are worth more than female ones. A girl who can sew and cook is worth less than a girl who can repair cars and climb a tree. A ‘real’ girl can be the damsel, but not the hero. Every girl who is ‘not like the other girls’ plays into that view of the world. Her role as the hero of the story is justified by her not being a girl, but a boy with boobs, essentially. She is not valued for bringing female skills to the table, as she could be in a group of main characters, but by playing along with the boys and adding to their male skill set.

This doesn’t mean that girls can’t like male-coded things. We’re humans, not robots, we’re not programmed to only like ‘appropriate’ skills and interests or only have ‘appropriate’ traits. Most girls will have some ‘male’ skill, interest, or trait, even if it’s not pronounced and they might not talk about it. For a long time, for instance, girls would not speak about their love of comic books, even if they were as interested in them as a lot of boys were. By now, they do, but often receive a harsh backlash by the ‘fanboys’ who think they must be fake for pretending to like a male subject such as superheroes.

This gate-keeping is what makes women stay silent about their male-coded interests, traits, or skills. They are derided for them in real life, so they don’t speak about them. They only see the girl who likes the same things in the media, the girl who is ‘not like the other girls.’ That is what makes women love these characters who can openly display their male-coded side without getting attacked for it. They are the ones who can save the day with their skill to repair cars or with their knowledge about superhero comics.

 

What to do instead? Write characters who are not defined by being girls or boys. Write characters, not gender stereotypes. Some find it easier to do that by writing a male character (as ‘male,’ together with ‘white’ and ‘straight,’ are the standard) and then simply turning him female at the end of the creation process. There are a few changes to make then, but those are mostly based on biology (such as women have less physical strength, but even that is relative).

Ask yourself what your female character, especially if they happen to be a teenage girl, should be like. What interests would they have? What traits would define them? What skills would they have learned and how much would they like them? Play up female-coded traits, interests, and skills as useful. Show how they can save the day, too. Bad-ass female characters are cool, but they are not necessarily defined by repairing cars, climbing trees, and knowing all about comic books. Let the ‘tomboy’ girl and the ‘girly’ girl bond over their love of comic books or computer games. Let the ‘girly’ girl unpack her computer knowledge and hack the servers of Evil Corp™ while the boys in the team try their best to get into the building with brute force. Let the ‘tomboy’ girl win the monster’s trust by bandaging their injury and preparing them a meal.

 

The ‘not like the other girls’ trope is an easy shortcut to creating a female character which will be accepted as a protagonist for a story. At first, it even looks like it’s empowering. All these girls have fun with male-coded traits, skills, or interests, after all. They evaluate the ‘guilty pleasures’ of the female audience and make the character more relatable for the male audience. That is not what they should be there for, though. They should represent girls and women on screen or in books. It’s not wrong to have male-coded traits, skills, or interests, but there’s also nothing wrong with having female-coded ones. Let the girls win the day with their female-coded side for a change and show that those skills, traits, and interests can be valuable as well.