How Do You Tell an Interlinked Story?

 

by Mary Anne Mohanraj

 

mjm

This is only partly a blog post about Wild Cards; it’s as much about

Ellen Kushner’s Tremontaine, which is the OTHER shared world series I

write for.  The experiences of writing for both were so different, I

thought it might be interesting to compare and contrast.

 

Tremontaine is part of Serial Box, a new project to bring serialized

fiction to life, modeled on the tv episode format.  A group of writers

hang out together in a writers’ room, and together they come up with

characters, setting, and a pretty tight plot, that works its way over

thirteen ‘episodes,’ each a long story, but the whole making something

kind of halfway between a novel and a tv series.  For Tremontaine, we

already had the setting, since the series is jumping off a set of

books by Ellen Kushner, set in Riverside and its environs, a land of

swordfights, gay repartee, and political maneuverings.

 

When I first joined Tremontaine, in its second season, I actually flew

out to New York to do a long weekend intensive workshop with the other

writers – then we wrote our parts separately, but with lots of online

collaboration (through Slack).  There was much reading of each others’

drafts, much commenting, much rewriting to make things mesh together.

It’s not a process that allows for a lot of ego, because you need to

be constantly willing to amend your ideas (and even your favorite

characters) to make things work for the rest of the group.

tremon1

Wild Cards, by contrast, is more individualized.  Certainly the

original concept was tightly woven, and while I wasn’t involved in the

first dozen books, my impression is that there was plenty of

collaboration.  There still is – we use each others’ characters

constantly (and are encouraged to do so by our esteemed editor), and

in some of the more mosaic novels, intersecting plots are tightly

intertwined.  Others have a main throughline story, what we call the

‘interstitial,’ and then a sequence of individual tales that intersect

with the main interstitial story.

 

That takes quite a bit of editorial work too, but there’s a very

different feel to how the project goes; the main responsibility for

making sure all the parts sync up lies with the writer of the

interstitial, and of course with George R.R. Martin, who is carefully

editing all of our individual pieces, and then making sure they work

with the rest of the book.  George is the one who holds the entire

universe in his head, and makes sure that new characters we come up

with don’t simply duplicate powers seen a few books ago.  He (along

with assistant editor Melinda Snodgrass) also pushes us to simply make our

stories better – to go deeper, avoid the easy answers.  Sometimes I

can be a little too kind to my characters; I want to give them happy

endings.  George and Melinda – well, they don’t have that weakness.

 

I wouldn’t say either method is better – but they feel very different,

and I think they end up creating different kinds of worlds.  There are

many other ways you could build a shared world – one traditional

epistolary form involves simply exchanging letters to a friend in

character, discovering the characters, the world, and the story as you

  1. You can plan everything out in advance, you can make things up as

you go along.  If the world gets big enough, I do recommend keeping a

series bible, where you keep track of all the details of names and

places and other significant matters, because eventually, it’ll

probably get too big for anyone to hold it all in their head at once.

At Wild Cards, we do a lot of consulting with each other to check

details – “Hey, in 1957, what exactly was happening in Sri Lanka in

the Wild Cards world?”  Like that.

 

A shared world isn’t, I think, for anyone who is too protective of

their own characters, their own words.  The joy of it is in part from

seeing what other writers can do with what you created.  Occasionally

you’ll want to exert a little authorial control, “No, Natya would

NEVER speak that way.  She likes women too, remember?”  But mostly, I

think shared worlds work best if you let your characters roam a little

bit, take on slightly new shapes and forms. People evolve over time,

after all – so should characters, and stories.  I’m looking forward to

seeing where Wild Cards takes my characters next.

###