How long does it really take to write a novel?

Depends on how much time you're willing to put in.

That's the short (facetious) answer, but it's honestly pretty arbitrary. Depending on the genre, content, and author, two books of the same word count may take a drastically different amount of time to write. To exemplify this, I want to draw your attention to sheer anarchy that being an author entails:

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is one of my top three favourite novels. It was published in 1960, when Lee was 34 years old. It was her first novel. In 1961, it received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 1962, it was adapted into a film. Lee died in 2016; it remained the only novel she ever published. (That is, unless you count Go Set a Watchman in 2015, but that whole situation was a mess and it was essentially the cutting room floor of To Kill a Mockingbird.)

Joseph Heller began writing Catch-22 in 1953, and it was first published eight years later, in 1961. He was certainly not a slow writer, however: he would often have figured out the basic plot and characters within one hour of coming up with the novel. If you've ever read Catch-22, you'll know there are a lot of characters.

So many of the greatest works of literature come from authors who only wrote a handful of works over their lifespans, and only began to publish them in their midlife or beyond. On the other hand, some authors function almost indistinguishably from factories, such as Stephen King, who currently has 65 published novels, generally releasing one to three novels every year. Some poets have written so many untitled poems that they are known only by a number, and these numbers can rise into the thousands. John Bradburne, the most prolific poet in the English language, wrote twice as many lines (169,925) as Shakespeare (87,668) and achieved not even half the notability. He also wrote most of those 6,000 poems over a period of 11 years, whereas Shakespeare was active for approximately 30 years. Some of Shakespeare's works were outrageously and unnecessarily lengthy, such as Venus and Adonis, which is openly acknowledged in many literary circles as being desperately in need of an editor. It is 1,194 lines long. For scale, that is just over 1/10th of the length of The Odyssey (12,109 lines). The Odyssey is between ~130,000 and ~160,000 words long, depending on the translation, and can take from nine to over 15 hours to read front-to-back, depending on various factors.

Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange was written in about three weeks as a cash grab. The first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was also written in three weeks. Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol took six weeks to write, though that's to be expected from Dickens, who was paid a farthing for every word he wrote and was thus highly prolific. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was written in two and a half days, which is not remotely surprising. Starkly opposed is The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which took J.R.R Tolkien about 17 years to write, and me 23 years to read past the first page. Ezra Pound's The Cantos took 57 years, and was still unfinished when he died.

Therefore, the long answer is sometime between 60 hours and 57 years.

If you are relatively normal, like me, you're going to fall somewhere in between those two figures. In fact, you very likely will fall somewhere in between six months and three years per novel. I would even wager that the accuracy can be further pinpointed, by taking my very helpful quiz, which is about as accurate as astrology (make of that what you will):

All jokes aside, it's not an easy question to answer. There's some kind of inverse correlation between how long you've already spent on the book, and how long it's going to take to finish. If a book has been worked on for more than five years, it's often because the person working on it falls into a group of writers who are more likely to work on a book for at least ten years. Or so it's said.

Thus, I cannot tell you how long it's actually going to take you. I can only show you how long it's taken me, thanks to the version history feature of Google Docs, and old hard drives.

How long it took to write my first novel, Maximalism:

The timeline is undoubtedly messy for this one. I remember the exact moment the idea spawned, which was after a university lecture on Greek and Roman literature, sometime in early 2020. However, the characters had existed since 2018, of course in a very elementary sense:

These terribly embarrassing drawings from six years ago are a necessary evil in outlining how Maximalism came to be. Yōkō is no longer a (weirdly tender) white guy called Hank, for one thing, nor do either of them have horrendously oversized and deformed noses. During their inception, I intended to write them as high school teachers. Then it sort of just spiraled out of control.

At some point in 2020 I redrew Yōkō closer to my vision, albeit like he was about to appear on an episode of Botched. I am not sure what possessed me to draw his chin like it's used to teach the Pythagorean theorem.

Over time, the composition of his body changed, particularly as I began to write him with spastic diplegia, but also because his utter lack of interest in taking care of himself would not lend to anything close to fitness (AKA, he does not look like what's on the left. At all).

This was also the point wherein I began to work on the first version of Maximalism, originally titled The Maximalist. All of these files are now located on an external hard drive, which were thankfully not encrypted by me during my "I need to encrypt all my files" phase which has caused me nothing but fury over the past five years.

Maximalism took approximately eight rewrites, from early 2020 to late 2023, to be finished.

The oldest completed version I can find is version 3, which clocks in at 153 pages, with a word count of 43,063. I believe the two versions prior to that were closer to short stories. The following files are within the folder for version 3, complete with the content of certain files. These files are almost entirely irrelevant to the completed work, and kind of showcase the sort of redundant neuroticism I had at one point about planning every fine detail.

Version 4 marked an enormous overhaul of the plot, and was completed approximately eight months after version 3. It's 241 pages long, with a word count of 60,797.

Version 5, completed three months after version 4, is 157 pages long, with a word count of 69,416 (I reduced the line spacing).

Version 6 was completed a month after version 5. It is 183 pages long, at 78,274 words. It was the first version to have been beta read, which was by a university professor of mine. She picked it apart brilliantly, and left me with so much new information to work with. It was also not the final version, despite my clear yearning that it would be.

In this folder, versions 7 and 8 are both contained, as well as the file with the comments from my professor (FINAL[84]).

I received the feedback in early 2022, about eight months after finishing the sixth version, and spent the following five months reworking the novel to its seventh version. Version 7 is 208 pages and 94,268 words long.

Version 8 entailed a very brutal editing pass. It dropped to 178 pages, at 78,770 words.

It was completed four months after version 7, a few days out from the new year.

This was the last version I moved to my external hard drive, and the rest remains on Google Drive in the version history. I will call this the final version, being version 9, which is officially 79,300 words and 184 pages long. This version marked the addition of the copyright page, the works cited list, and a few other formatting bits.

I want to make something very clear when we look at the version history: there was a period of almost a year, between December 2022 and October 2023, where I did not touch this novel.

The reason for this is simple: at this point, I absolutely hated my novel. I had re-read those same ~80,000 words well over a hundred times, and experienced a sort of cyclothymia in regard to it. I jumped frequently between perceiving it as a masterpiece, then thinking of it as nothing short of an embarrassment and a complete waste of time. This information shouldn't be sad or worrying, because to me, it was actually fantastic. It forced me into a state of utter neutrality; my own neurosis had pushed me beyond a point of no return, where my ego had no choice but to completely disintegrate. I won't say I became objective, not by a long shot, but I certainly stopped freaking out over whether the book was good or not. Instead, I started to ask myself questions: did I accomplish what I set out to do? Did I write something which I found funny, significant, meaningful, interesting, and satisfactory? When I hit the point where I could answer yes to myself, that's when I decided the book was ready.

Of course, there are still things about that book which don't meet my own standards. There's a lot I'd still change, and I am planning on doing just that sometime in the middle of this year, as one final revision. But I now have an awareness that how I feel about my work will always be superimposed, and I need to know when to stop.

Novels get easier to write as you write them.

Crazy!

There's a novel I'm writing that I don't talk about much, called Late Night. It's intended on being a single novel, with the story divided into two parts. The first part is complete, and is 72,500 words long, at 168 pages. The second half will ideally be about the same length, meaning the finished book will be ~150,000 words long. The majority of the novel was written within a single week in 2021, and I have never edited it, and probably won't once it's done.

The novel was started on July 9th, 2020. That day, I wrote the first seven pages, and proceeded to not write another word until December 21st, 2020. I then worked on it for nine straight hours, then 11 straight hours the following day, with a similar pattern every day until about the end of January. Between December 21 and December 28, I wrote 58 pages. Between December 28th 2020 and January 28th 2021, the page count had jumped to 182, with most of the activity being between the 5th and 12th of January, where I wrote over 100 pages. I proceeded to barely touch it for two years. At some point in that period I decreased the line spacing, meaning it dropped back down to about 140 pages while remaining the same word count, before I picked it back up in January 2023 and wrote around another 28 pages.

My other novel, Beekeeper, had a similar hiatus. It was stuck at around 7,000 words for several years, though I tragically do not have the version history to back that up because the current file is a copy of a copy. I was never at a point where I felt ready to write it, until approximately November of last year, where I attempted NaNoWriMo. I got a lot done, but didn't hit the word count I'd hoped for, falling short by about 20,000 words. I am currently in the process of fighting for my life to have this novel completed by early March, because I am intending on submitting it to a competition.

Beekeeper is more or less the inspiration for my choice in topic this week. It is currently sitting at 40,000 words, and I am hoping to double that in a little under two months. I am completely capable of doing this, and it's not even as strenuous as it appears, being about 750 words a day. I generally write between 750–2,500 words a day, sometimes reaching beyond 3,000 on my best days. Regardless, it still remains a daunting ask of myself, and I'm not going to force myself to hit 80k if the story doesn't actually call for it.

The reason why I don't believe Late Night or Beekeeper are going to require numerous versions and revisions is twofold. Unlike Maximalism, neither of these novels are particularly dense in research. Beekeeper is still somewhat research-demanding, but nowhere near the extent of Maximalism. Late Night requires essentially no research at all, as it is probably the only work where I'll ever follow the advice "write what you know." It is also likely to get me in profound amounts of legal trouble for defamation, which is why I've set it aside for so long until I figure out how to circumvent that.

The other reason is simply experience. Maximalism wasn't the first novel I ever attempted, but it was certainly the first novel I ever completed. There's around fifteen other abandoned novels that came before it, with god-awful titles such as Let's Kill God, Hometown, Untitled document, comedy book.docx, An Open Letter to the Universe, The Eastern Pack, Nature Takes All, Realm Master, Cor Avem, Snuffed Out, In The Valley, and my personal favourite: fuck this.PDF.

Yes, most of those are from when I was about 14.

If you took my quiz, and happened to select graphic novel as the project you're working on, chances are your result was that it would take you five or more years. I'm of course being very tongue-in-cheek about this, but it is also very much true that graphic novels take an extremely long time compared to novels (of course, depending on what you're doing.) That's why I'm not going to talk about String Theory here, because the timeline for that whole thing is invariably like a perpetual trainwreck. Also, I talk about String Theory in like, every other post.

Thanks for tuning in this week! I know that having the opportunity to look under the hood of the novels I was reading like this, especially when I was a younger writer, would've been wicked helpful. I hope it was helpful for you! Please bear in mind that this is not a representation of what writing a novel 'should' look like, and if your process differs, I assure you this is not me trying to change that in any way. (Novel-writing probably shouldn't look like this, truth be told.) It's rather that I think it's important to give writers the ability to look at someone else's process, which we don't often get to see. I like to think of it as the equivalent to a visual artist showing how they sketch out and draft their works.

Note that I may skip a few blog posts over the next two months in order to focus on Beekeeper, but I'll do my best to post at least once a fortnight!

Modelling a fictional suburb with Cities: Skylines!

Hello everyone! Though I said I'd be talking about dialogue this week, I've decided to postpone that in favour of keeping up the momentum of worldbuilding. I've made far more strides this week in planning my setting than I'd expected, and I'm ridiculously pleased with that. I had been dreading having to flesh the world out for so long, but I had no idea how easy it was going to be through using Cities: Skylines.

You may or may not have read last week's blog before I made an addendum, which was this rough layout of my fictional suburb, Glensyde:

By referencing this drawing, I created a new map (right-hand image) in Cities: Skylines which is pretty accurate to what I had in mind (I also changed the map to one with a slightly different river than my earlier map). Note that all the district names are auto-generated and are not final, and some of the streets aren't finished because I hadn't unlocked parts of the map when I was making them.

Creating an immersive setting via mods and assets:

Cities: Skylines sets you up with a fairly neutral architectural style. We're talking mid-century suburbia, modern high-rises, and your average billboard-heavy shopping districts. It works fine as a template, and I was initially happy to base my backgrounds off of what the game offered me. Then, I found the work of some very talented modders within the Steam Workshop, particularly users Macwelshman and rik4000 who create assets to overhaul the game's base style into one much more familiar to the UK. The town now feels far more authentic to its setting with this simple change.

How to add custom architectural styles in Cities: Skylines

Look up the sort of assets you want in the Steam Workshop, subscribe to the assets, and they should immediately download into the game. On the main menu (you can't do this in-game), go into options, and create a new style in the 'styles' menu. Then, go into the 'assets' menu, and add every individual asset to your new style. Go in-game, open the districts menu and click on a district. This opens a window, where the option to change the default style to your new style will be at the bottom of it. Do this to every district whose style you want changed, then (if the game is paused) unpause the game and wait for the new styles to be built.

Note that if you're not playing with cheats on (i.e. infinite money), you should do this one district at a time and not all at once, as the houses will all deconstruct themselves basically immediately. If you do it all at once, like I did, you will end up with a very low population and lots of people upset that the power's not working, which would've been a disaster if I was playing without cheats enabled. In terms of being a mayor, I am like, the George W. Bush of mayors. I accidentally demolished so many people's houses just trying to build a fence between them.

My current mod list for Cities: Skylines

Harmony 2.2.2-0 (Mod Dependency)

First Person Camera: Updated

Prop & Tree Anarchy

Find It! 2

Move It

Procedural Objects

The First Person Camera mod allows me to walk around the city. This is huge for what my overall intentions are with using this game. I am able to get shots at any angle I want with no issues. I can walk around and figure out which routes my characters will take to school.

Considering that this game is not designed to be played in first-person, the level of detail is pretty mind-blowing.

Through Cities: Skylines I'm able to mimic the problems with the town and simulate what impact these problems will have on the community. The high crime rate created a ton of abandoned houses, which is exactly what I'm going for. Glensyde is arbitrarily divided into a working-class South and a lower-middle-class North, which makes for a fairly mild but nonetheless impactful class divide. The North has far better infrastructure and a lot more to do, whereas the South is a sparser residential area which is heavily industrialized due to the presence of natural gas and oil. It's also where the majority of landfills are, along with the incineration and oil-burning power plants.

Here's a gallery of shots of the town I really like, particularly with how much I've been able to play with lighting. The run-down house with the green light in the backyard is Johnny's.

Assets I've used include the flag of Scotland, football goal posts and fields, and some really lovely brick walls which for some reason the base game does not offer. I was also able to add the vandalism I spoke about in my last post with a pack of graffiti assets, though keep in mind I am only using these decals as a general reference for where I want graffiti to go, but I'll be designing my own graffiti.

The main purpose of this entire process is to keep my backgrounds and settings consistent from one drawing to the next. I can change anything I want at will — whatever I need for the scenes, I can edit it into the map so I can keep it in scale with the rest of the setting. That's another thing, too: having people and cars moving around the map makes it so much easier for me to get a sense of scale (something I am not great at).

This process has been a lot of fun and has really taken a lot of pressure off of me in regards to devising the setting. I would highly recommend giving something like this a go if you've been stumped on how to flesh out your own fictional world/setting. I could even see this being useful for fantasy settings, so long as you found the right assets for it (check out this pack)!

This was a bit of a shorter post, but I'm sure it's welcome after last week. I'm very pleased with what I've been able to do and I really hope more people consider this method!

Finally, for those interested, here's a brief walk-through:

Building Immersive Fictional Worlds (Tips for Culture, Architecture, and Scenery)

Years ago, I sent a sitcom pilot to an executive producer in America after he'd generously offered to critique it. He informed me that my script, although high in situational comedy and sharp dialogue, did not take advantage of its setting in any meaningful way. Set in a destitute theme park, the employees often met in neutral spaces, such as the park restaurant or the Ringmaster's office. The producer asked me, "is there any reason this scene could not have taken place on a Merry-Go-Round or Ferris Wheel, rather than in an office?", which sparked the exact moment I came to understand what setting really is.

I have a habit of neglecting setting within my fiction. It's always been an afterthought, ticking an obligatory box, rather than something I felt I could play with. I now understand that setting is not just the wider context, necessary for encompassing a story: it is the story.

Treat this article as an overview of the varying components of building a fictional setting. I'll be going over some problems I've found and how I've solved them. Take whatever ideas of mine you like and run with them!

Building cities and communities — from concept to rendering

Depending on your project, there will be different assets it demands from you. If your project is in a visual art medium, such as a graphic novel, you have a unique array of challenges regarding setting — if the setting is entirely a fantasy world, you have to design it from scratch. If the setting is in, or based on, a real location, you have less of a workload when it comes to devising it, but potentially more responsibility in its depiction.

I've had to invent a fair few fictional entities, such as a high school, an oil & gas company, an auto-repair shop, high-rise flats, and residential suburban properties, not only to make the world feel 'lived in', but to ensure I'm not infringing on anybody's intellectual rights and/or privacy.

Initially, I believed the best approach would be to depict String Theory's setting, Glasgow, as it truly is. This was a good general approach, but it began to fall apart when I needed to find business, schools, and houses for my characters. You can see how this becomes a pretty big problem; I'm not going to choose a real person's house in a real neighborhood to draw a thousand times at every angle imaginable... especially not without their permission.

Another problem is that existing city layouts likely don't conform to what your plot needs them to be. When real people live in the places you're depicting, they're going to know whether point A and point B are a 2 minute walk or a 2 hour walk from one-another, and it will be very frustrating if you're way off.

My ultimate decision has been to set my story in a fictional suburb of Glasgow. When it comes to designing a setting for a graphic novel, there are several approaches you could take:

Real-world depiction

Using real-world photographs of a real location, such as with Google Street View. Though the most straightforward, this method poses issues with privacy and practicality. If you want to place your characters in a vivid scene, you need to be able to rotate that scene on any axis at will. You'll want to be changing the shot constantly, and with it, you need a ton of different angles that you just won't get from something such as Street View. You could certainly go out into the world and take reference images, but depending on what you're photographing you may also run into privacy concerns.

Some examples of using Google Maps and Street View. Side note: I have never seen a stranger building (left image) in my life.

Imagined depiction

Arbitrary:

Using your visual memory to devise settings without being particularly concerned over where each setting is in relation to one-another. This works just fine for certain projects, particularly those which are more casual in nature (like weekly webcomics!). You don't need to overdo anything that really doesn't serve the means of your work. However, when I employed this method my first go around, I could never shake the feeling that I was cheating myself on quality. It just felt unfinished, as though I didn't even care, when I was really just struggling with compartmentalizing the workload.

Setting examples from the original comic (2019). I avoided drawing settings so much that these are some of the only depictions in the first 100 pages.

Detailed:

Using your imagination to plan an entire world from scratch, thinking out every detail and ensuring consistency. In fantasy genres, this method works brilliantly and is generally the go-to. Think of Tolkien's Middle Earth, or The Elder Scrolls' Tamriel. In most genres outside of fantasy, not so much.

Combination depiction

Using elements of both reality and fiction depict a setting. A lot of graphic novels do this: think Batman's Gotham, Superman's Metropolis, Archie's Riverdale, etc. They're based on/in real-world locations yet are distinctly fictional.

Here's a rough idea of my fictional suburb's layout. It's based on an empty gap between a few existing suburbs south-west of Glasgow. The blue dots with my character's names represent where their houses are in relation to Glensyde.

The method I personally find most enticing involves digitally modelling the cityscape in order to generate any reference image I desire. I was initially considering using Blender to do this, which would take a long time (even with assets) but would allow me complete freedom in rotating the city on whatever axis I wished, getting camera angles you couldn't dream of, until I realized that there are actual city builder games to remove the high workload (and replace it with... uh, "fun.") Long story short, I bought the game Cities: Skylines for fourteen dollars to plan the fictional city's layout and give myself a great reference for the overall city.

I thought I would have it completed in time to get this post out today, but this game has a relatively steep learning curve. I think it will end up as an advantage to me, however. I've chosen a map with quite a similar river running through it to the one in Glensyde:

This is nowhere close to the layout. I'm still desperately trying to work out traffic problems (and figure out how to play the game.)

Ultimately, the best method comes down to what feels most balanced. You don't need to overdo your workload on something that doesn't require as much immersion, but in my case, depicting the journeys between locations has been such a problem that devising a layout has become essential.

Culture and backstory at an individual scale: claiming character's voices in a silent medium

Something very, very strange that I experience, and I know some other writers do too, is hearing the voices of my characters in my mind. They have developed accents, specific intonations, even particular vocal tics which I vividly hear. I often will veto certain tics when writing their dialogue, as it's important to strike a balance between endearing and distracting. Other times, I just let it happen, such as with Walt in my novel Maximalism, who hums a great deal more than he speaks (as I modelled his speaking patterns, as well as his body language, off of Jeff Goldblum's.)

There's something a lot of artists do with their characters, called a "voice claim". It's what it says on the tin — claiming the voice of a real person as being highly similar, or even identical, to your fictional character's. This helps people better visualize both the personality and backstory of your character, as there is plenty of richness to be had in putting a voice to a face.

It'd be easy to state my characters all have Glaswegian accents and have that be the end of it, but there is so much variation not only in the wider regional accents of Scotland, but even within Glasgow itself, that it doesn't really do much to say that. Not only this, but a great deal of the characters aren't even from Glasgow originally. If you were wondering why this seems to matter, considering you never hear their voices, this may clarify how I actually work backwards from their accents to discern a lot of their backstory.

I could say Harlene is Scouse because she's from Liverpool, but her accent's actually closer to Manc. Harvey may be from the Midlands (Nottingham) yet there's a bit of cockney in his voice, too; he's never lived in the South, but he's always been around working class people.

That's what's really fascinating to me about the accents of the UK and Ireland, that even with such regional variation, there is still further variation depending on which particular city or town someone is from, what they do for work, who they spend the most time around, and so on.

Charlie is Irish. However, I never knew where in Ireland he was from, because his voice has never quite matched with the Irish accents I'm used to. To me, Charlie speaks softly and with little intonation, which many Irish counties’ accents don’t quite reflect. Due to this, I've had trouble pinpointing his hometown.

His voice kind of sounds like how unsalted caramel tastes: the sweetness is there, but subtle, the texture is thick, smooth, almost cold in your mouth, and there's an uncanny/unplaceable bitterness that is often construed as richness. (Caramel is burnt sugar, which I find very fitting for Charlie's character.)

I digress. Irish accents have specific regional variations, ranging from musical to nasal to rugged to rich, but none were quite like Charlie's — until I heard the accents of County Donegal. Footballer Séamus Coleman is from this county, and has the most similar voice to Charlie's that I've heard so far.

Learning about County Donegal was a fascinating tangent; I found this video, "Is Donegal Ireland's Forgotten County?" to be absolutely enchanting. I would highly recommend watching the whole thing through, particularly the words of the gentleman at the end. This is what I mean about using accents to work backwards. With the way the citizens talk about how everyone looks out for each other (and the craic!), I began to perceive a new dimension to Charlie: homesickness.

Johnny and Side's accents were much easier to define. Johnny’s accent is based on an Onsind song. A rough-around-the-edges punk singer with a high emotional intelligence was always how I envisioned him. I found that claiming Craig Ferguson as his speaking voice melds well, as Ferguson has a rugged masculine energy while simultaneously having a kind, playful spirit, and a sincere emotional depth.

Side, on the other hand, has a voice much like Limmy's. This fits very well, not only due to a shared humour, but also that Limmy’s at times near-whispered hoarseness is well-matched to Side. I also find that Limmy, like Craig Ferguson, is a quick-witted and mischievous person with a scarcely hidden sincerity — also much like Side.

In the earlier version of the comic, you actually did hear their voices; I originally wrote Johnny and Side's accents phonetically. I later made the hard decision to remove these spellings. You can’t really phonetically depict a Scottish accent without writing Scots, and I’m not someone who is going to depict an actual spoken language that I cannot speak. I began to fear that my usage would not be accurate or constructive, thus with a heavy heart I replaced the majority of Scots words, i.e. didnae, een, oan, wean/wain, wis, naw, yer, tae, etc. with their English equivalents.

An example of the phonetic spellings I used. Though I always referenced a glossary, I had trouble keeping up with the consistency and accuracy. There were many mistakes.

If you've ever heard of the subreddit r/ScottishPeopleTwitter, you'll know that it exists mainly for humorous purposes. A lot of Scots tweets are just genuinely funny (Scottish humor is seriously unmatched), but when it hits the point where people are reading these tweets out loud entirely incorrectly, or even pretending to be Scottish to get their tweets more attention (and completely butchering Scots in the process), it becomes clear that not everyone is laughing with people who speak Scots. I don't ever want to be construed as one of those people.

Another example is the Scots Language Wikipedia controversy:

I think this person has possibly done more damage to the Scots language than anyone else in history. They engaged in cultural vandalism on a hitherto unprecedented scale. [...] Potentially tens of millions of people now think that Scots is a horribly mangled rendering of English rather than being a language or dialect of its own.

— Reddit user u/Ultach on r/Scotland, August 2020.

Navigating respectful and accurate portrayals of a culture outside your own can be very difficult. It's equally as disrespectful to incorrectly portray a culture as it is to outright wipe the culture from your story, but the happy middle ground is often far broader than it seems. It does tend to come down to asking, "how much is too much, how little is too little?" Some people tend to act like it's far more of a tightrope than it really is, and I think it's because people tend to overcategorize.

I was once at a cafe, talking to an American. They peered at me and asked:

"Where are you from?"

I answered the name of my hometown.

"That's in America, right?"

I laughed and told them, no, it's a twenty minute drive from here.

"When did you move here from America?" I told them I've always been a New Zealander.

They were dumbfounded — they swore I was from New England!

(I wasn't even wearing any Red Sox merch at the time.)

Over the years I have been asked by people whether I'm Australian, British, Canadian, South African, and even German. Other New Zealanders have even mistaken my accent as American or British, and if you tried to get me to pick out the difference between a New Zealand and Australian accent, I would likely have trouble. I don't even notice people's American accents until they tell me they're American!

The point I want to get across is that all of this stuff is super messy in real life: it doesn't have to (and probably shouldn't) fall into neat categories in fiction, no matter how convenient people want it to be. I do have a New Zealand accent, but that doesn't mean it's particularly definable as such, because I also have my own voice and a range of things which influence it (such as all the American television I grew up watching). This idea applies to far more than accents, mind you. People are, in general, a product of many influences, and there is no one category any person fits into perfectly.

My ultimate advice on writing culture into your world is to do the absolute best you can in the way which feels best for the story. If you feel like you can't do something justice, or it's not your place to write on it, you shouldn't feel like you're doing something wrong by choosing not to include it. I was using Scots entirely in good faith, and removing it was also an act of good faith. It's a kill your darlings situation — sometimes, when you put a lot of work and research into something, you ultimately come to realize that the best thing to do is fight the sunk cost fallacy and make the choice to omit it.

However, don't let that frighten you away from challenging yourself to learn something new, and to make bold decisions in your storytelling. Be fascinated, be modest, and be willing to make big changes when you have to. I think that's what can really makes us better writers.

Detailing a world with symbolism and design — from commercialism to vandalism

I touched on my last post about designing a coat of arms. Since several of my characters are in their final year of high school, I need to portray them in their school uniform fairly often. You don't really see many school uniforms without a highly detailed CoA embroidered on their shirts, sweaters, ties, blazers, scarves, gym kits, etc., which meant I definitely need to have one ready to copy and paste bloody everywhere.

I know very little about heraldry, and initially felt very over my head regarding designing the school's logo. I looked into a lot of the motifs within English and Scottish heraldry in particular, and utilized those to decide what would appear in my CoA.

Draft of the Glensyde Coat of Arms.

It features a double-border, which is apparently quite specific to Scottish CoAs. A saltire (an x-shaped cross, as seen on the flag of Scotland) is referred to as an 'honorable ordinary charge' and divides the escutcheon (shield) into four quadrants (fields). The symbols in each field are referred to as mobile charges. In the north field is a thistle (Scotland's national flower and emblem), in the south is a unicorn (Scotland's national animal), in the east are four horizontal stripes, and in the west is a cross crosslet fitchy (a combination of a cross and a sword). The latin slogan, "ex nihilo, nihil fit" means "nothing comes from nothing." A school may use this slogan to motivate academic effort, and it's also a nice nod to the law of conservation of mass, which is why I chose it. The crown atop has some little oak leaves decorating it, as does the entire shield, with a sort of oak wreath acting as its supporter.

In terms of imagery, it's not the most original thing in the world, but it doesn't have to be. I don't need to think about being original when the school itself probably wouldn't care to be all that original, and would rather want to place emphasis on popular Scottish motifs. It's also just a device to create a sense of depth in the universe and is not a standalone feature of the world to be vigorously analyzed by critics of heraldry. Remember: detail is important, but so is practicality. I researched and designed the CoA in about three hours. That's as much time as a detail like that really needs.

Creating commercial logos:

When trying to come up with a logo for a fictional oil and gas company, I looked at real world oil and gas logos, and realized how awful they all really are (other than Chevron's). Just looking at them gives me acid reflux (again, other than Chevron's). It's mainly the colours which offend me, but I also find there's some sort of disingenuous quality to them, like they're stuck in the mid-2000s and are long past caring.

This information is a brilliant launching pad for coming up with an authentic design. However, how inside the box do I I need to be thinking? Vintage logos are far more visually appealing, and there are trends in graphic design as of late based on circling back on vintage colour palettes and lettering. Though, these trends tend to be on a far smaller scale than an oil and gas company, which is probably only just entering its Corporate Memphis era.

What would the company's founder choose to do? What would Ulysses Coleman want the logo of his own self-made and fairly small-scale company to be?

I keep thinking of the Coca-Cola logo. They've kept nearly the exact same font since 1887 (for 136 years!) while continually simplifying it to keep it relevant to the modern trends of graphic design. I don't really ever drink coke because I hate it, and I'm not exactly a fan of major corporations, but I will admit that their logo is kind of perfect. Ulysses is no marketing genius, he'd certainly be more prone to copying the oil giants than carving his own path with something entirely new, but nothing reflects stubbornness quite like keeping a logo for 136 years because you believe in it.

I would highly recommend using Canva templates to create a ton of concepts. I would personally not use anything I made with a template as the final result, however, but here are a few concepts made through Canva:

The left one is too vintage-looking. The other two are close to what I have in mind, but the one with the knight (center) is too sleek. The one on the right is likely what I will base the final design on. It's perfectly bland and modern, a little bit ugly, yet still more visually appealing than most oil and gas logos, and has that Coca-Cola energy I'm looking for.

Vandalising your setting:

Finally, I want to talk about filling in the 'background story' of your setting. No matter where your story is set, you'll very likely have vandalism. (Considering the aesthetic of String Theory is very much influenced by rebellion, I'll be placing a lot of emphasis on graffiti here. Your mileage may vary!)

Graffiti is a great way to do this in a visual medium. You can go almost anywhere on the planet and find that people have painted words on a wall. If you pay attention to local vandalism, you'll notice a huge amount of both subtle and overt aspects of graffiti culture. You'll see the same tags showing up over and over, you'll notice rivalries and turf wars, you'll see that some artists almost never finish their work without being interrupted, while others seem to throw up new murals in the riskiest places imaginable. You'll notice that nobody ever spray paints cars — if they do, someone may well paint the word "TOY" over it.

Like it or not, vandalism is in every place that people live. It's a constant of the human condition that people love writing their name on stuff — the ancient Greeks and Romans vandalized the Egyptian tombs. If you want to depict a universe that feels really lived-in, graffiti artists and vandals will live there too, and you're gonna have your regulars.

Coming up with an assortment of unique tags is not an easy ask. Considering how a lot of people either change tags to shake suspicion, or only tag a few times before they stop, it's not going to make much sense to only have the same ten names come up in a big city (a suburb is way more believable for that, one guy in my town writes his tag approximately every two square meters on any surface he can find; I've even found it carved in wet cement. Twice.)

A few things to think about are: popular spots (skate parks, abandoned buildings, and alleyways), walls that are patchy from graffiti repeatedly being painted over (often in industrial areas), power poles and lamp posts where people will put stickers, quick tags and flyers, freight train carriages and bridges which attract murals/throw ups, tags scratched into glass/plastic such as bus stops and shop front windows, funny vandalism (on billboards, road signs), political graffiti, and so on.

Me practicing various forms of graffiti. I am not a graffiti artist, so these are not very good, but a lot of graffiti isn't very good anyway. It gets the idea across.

Next time you're in a city, take a look around at what graffiti you can see. It gives a better impression of how it's dispersed than I can really put into words, as well as the subtleties of how the culture operates (being considerate, for example.) There are also graffiti artists who post footage of their tagging, which shows what the process actually looks like, particularly how quick it is. In the beginning of this video by Resk12, you can see how a paint marker is used on small areas, how it takes five seconds (or even less) to write a tag, and how throwing up bubble letters only took him about three minutes.

Concluding remarks

This article certainly covered a lot more information than I expected; beyond anything it's just been me thinking out loud about some ways I'm trying to build more depth into my world's setting. Thinking about all the things that go on beyond the lives of your characters helps shape the world around them, and gives them a far more immersive environment to play in, as well as an environment which actively influences who they are.

That's it for this week, happy 2024 everyone! Next week will probably be on how I'm writing dialogue and composing scenes based around character motivations, but we'll see!