I am currently reading Jared Diamond’s “Collapse“, subtitled “How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive“.

If you write fantasy or science fiction and want to build worlds, this is another book I recommend.

Collapse talks about the impact of climate change, environment, friendly/hostile neighbours and how society responds to these first four problems.  The way it responds then determines whether that society survives or fails.

The world we created in Shared Memories was devastated by a war 40 years previously.  In that war the people in our story lost their ability to produce energy, lost immediate access to major food supplies, and lost most of their healers. 

The population crashed.

When we wrote it I wanted the population to drop by 80%.  Calder convinced me it would be more like 50%.  I eventually came around to her way of thinking, but after reading Collapse I’m starting to think that an 80% drop in 40 years is still possible.

We’ll stick at 50% though, because to drop 80% the world would need to be a closed system, with no outside contact at all.

Our world—Roland’s world—did have external vistors and contact with others, albeit slowly.

The great thing about books like Collapse is that they show you how other factors, not just politics, influence a society, and make it survive or fail.  As writers we often focus on the politics and omit the rest.

Here are some of the other factors we should be considering.

Novelists often look to history and geography to help with their writing, but they shouldn’t forget science, even if they’re not writing science fiction.

Some ideas stand the test of time, others come and go out of fashion, or are superseded by other ideas.

The idea of electrons in an atom orbiting in discrete paths around the nucleus like planets around a sun, for example, is now considered obsolete, replaced by the wave structure of matter.

Other ideas do stand the test of time. The Tragedy of the Commons, for example, is still as valid as when Garret Hardin proposed it back in 1968. Likewise, in her book On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross came up with a model of the five stages of people go through to cope with death or terminal illness.

The stages are:

Denial - The “This can’t be real” stage.: “This is not happening to me. There must be a mistake.”

Anger - The “Why me?” stage.: “How dare you do this to me?!” (either referring to God, the deceased, or oneself)

Bargaining - The “If I do this, you’ll do that” stage.: “Just let me live to see my son graduate.”

Depression - The “Defeated” stage.: “I can’t bear to face going through this, putting my family through this.”

Acceptance - The “This is going to happen” stage.: “I’m ready, I don’t want to struggle anymore.”

Definition of Kübler-Ross model in Wikipedia

The model is as valid today as it was back in 1969 when Kubler-Ross proposed it.

I have to say that everyone I know, myself included, who has gone through a grieving process, goes through these five stages. No exceptions.

People move through the stages differently. One person may spend months grieving, another years. The stages also overlap. There is no, “I have stopped denying it, now I’m angry,” moment. It’s more a gradual realisation that you have moved from being alternately disbelieving/angry to angry/bargaining.

So how can we use this in our writing?

Any character who loses someone they love will go through this grieving process. Even your story characters.

Obviously, you don’t want to do grief-by-numbers scenes in your novel, but character-wise, you know some things will happen.

• There will be a period of disbelief.
• At some stage the character is going to feel angry that their beloved has died.
• They should eventually come to accept it.

What you put into the story is up to you, but if your bereaved character doesn’t respond to the death in a manner the readers expect, then the readers will lose empathy for the character.

You don’t have to be predictable.

Let’s take the following (admittedly cliched) scenario.

Your heroine is the queen of a small country at war. Her husband, whom she loves very much, is mortally wounded in battle. She sits by him as he dies and they tell each other how much they love the other. The king asks her to finish the war. She vows to do so, for his sake.

The rest of the book covers her struggle to win the war.

If she doesn’t spend part of the book missing her beloved. If she doesn’t even get angry with him for going off and leaving it all for her to do, then I won’t think much of her as a protagonist.

“But,” you might say, “She hides her grief by concentrating on fighting, so she doesn’t have to think about it.”

For a whole book?

No way. That grief will spill over occasionally, and where she is in the grieving process at the time dictates how she will react.

All of us have read fiction that changed our life in some way, whether it just be that we read them at a particularly impressive age, or whether the theme resonated with us. But what about the non-fiction, the ideas and articles you may have come across that have a profound influence on what you write and how you write it. 

What writing and other ideas influence your own?

Our own influences range, but they include:

• Diana Wynne Jones’ Tough Guide to Fantasyland—technically this is fiction, but we treat it as a non-fiction. The don’t do’s for writing fantasy.
• The Tragedy of the Commons—we apply this in world building and character building
• The stages of grief—there are five distinct stages in the grieving process. We use this for character building.
• The idea that a population will crash when the food runs out—comes from basic science experiments; we apply this for world building
• Lynne Truss’ Eats, Shoots and Leaves really makes you aware of the power of the comma.

There are dozens more.

The Tragedy of the Commons

The Tragedy of the Commons was written back in 1968 by Garrett Hardin. If you don’t want to read the whole article, it’s summarised in Wikipedia,

The article itself is about population control, and basically it says that

… there is no foreseeable technical solution to increasing both human populations and their standard of living on a finite planet.
Wikipedia, Tragedy of the Commons

The idea is:

(Hardin uses) a hypothetical example of a pasture shared by local herders. The herders … wish to maximise their yield, and so will increase their herd size whenever possible. (Adding extra) animal(s) has both a positive and negative component:
Positive : the herder receives all of the proceeds from each additional animal
Negative : the pasture is slightly degraded by each additional animal
Crucially, the division of these components is unequal: the individual herder gains all of the advantage, but the disadvantage is shared between all herders using the pasture. Consequently, for an individual herder weighing up these utilities, the rational course of action is to add an extra animal. And another, and another. However, since all herders reach the same conclusion, overgrazing and degradation of the pasture is its long-term fate.
Wikipedia, Tragedy of the Commons

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