On Nov 17, 2011, at 12:12 PM, jshkay wrote: > Most definitely my favorite books of yours have been the Tsuranuanni trilogy > with Mara of the Acoma. Reading through those books, the thing that caught > me most was the extremely vivid and complex society you created. What > process did you go through to create this society? Did you research a > similar society, and then layer that research on top of what you had revealed > in your Magician series? Did you brainstorm ideas for what you wanted to > have in this society, and then use the ideas that most appealed and apply > them? > > I'm not sure how detailed you want to get, or if you even want to go into > details at all. That being said, if you're willing, I would greatly enjoy > hearing an in depth response of how you created the Tsuranuanni society from > start to finish. > > Thanks, > Josh >
You write about "something." This is why I tell would-be writers to avoid being Lit majors in school; it teaches you how to evaluate other people's writing, not learn how to be a writer yourself. Study history, sociology, anthropology, anything, because that's where you learn what to write about. I wanted a non-traditional fantasy setting, something that didn't look vaguely 14th century Norther/Western Europe. George Martin did something similar with his horse people across the sea, which were an interesting mix of North American indigenous horse tribes (Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, etc.) and Mongols. I decided to go for a Japanese and Korean social structure, with a Chines political structure, and tossed in some Aztec and Zulu for good measure. The Dasati were the closest I've ever come to creating a culture out of whole cloth, and I had almost two years to puzzle them out and even then things kept changing on the fly. I had to change the backstory, because no society can long exist that murders their own young--witness the Spartans. And I had to change the mechanics of how the society existed with wholesale murder being the order of the day. That actually dovetailed nicely with what I was doing with the demons in their realm, too. Best, R,E,F, ---- www.crydee.com Never attribute to malice what can satisfactorily be explained away by stupidity.
