You Can't Change History Without Changing Your Language (A Modern Fantasy Pitfall)

Most modern fantasy stories that you come across use the hidden world trope. From Vampire: The Masquerade to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, the fantastical world was always here, but it was kept secret from your prying eyes. This allows us to show the audience a world they know, and then to bring them past the veil and into the realm of the supernatural. Part of the reason we see this trope so often is that it's what readers really expect to see... but another reason is that modern fantasy without a hidden world requires so much retooling and redesigning that it can get exhausting.

And in some cases, it no longer resembles the world we know at all. This goes all the way down to the language we use, and the pop culture references that can be made in our stories without snapping the reader out of the narrative.

And things can get conspiracy-board complicated with this.

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When You Alter History, Everything Changes

We're all familiar with the idea of the Butterfly Effect. Often used as a science fiction premise, it's when someone goes back in time, changes one thing, and then they come back to their present only to find that seemingly tiny action has resulted in massive, unanticipated changes in the present.

This is something you have to do when you remove the secret world trope from a modern fantasy story. It's also why so many stories that you see have a major supernatural event set relatively close to the present. Whether it's the revelation of the supernatural world in Trueblood, or the world-shaping alterations that occur in Shadowrun, most of the world's history played out the same way it did in our history books, with a divergent point happening somewhere in the modern era (typically in the 1980s or 1990s, though sometimes later).

But when you go back further than that, you have to change more. And you don't just have to change major world events (such as the necessity for adding necromancy to the Geneva convention if there were Nazi sorcerers raising corpses in the trenches to continue the fighting), but you also need to change the language people do and don't use.

For fantastic examples of this, check out Lindsay Ellis's video Bright: The Apotheosis of Lazy Worldbuilding.

While there are a lot of points made in that video (and you should go watch it) the one I want to hit on is a point that a lot of writers often overlook; if you change history, then you change the culture. You alter the course of events, and that should lead language to develop in different ways, or for particular touchstones to operate differently.

One of the smallest, but most deeply-rooted, examples is when Will Smith's cop character tells his neighbor, "Just crip walk your ass back over to the barbecue."

This statement, especially said by a cop, is a direct reference to the Crips, an infamous street gang. However, for this statement to make sense in-universe that means you needed to have the trans-Atlantic slave trade, leading to the Civil War in America, leading to the exodus of freed slaves from the harsh conditions of the south, leading to the building tide of social concerns that created the Black Panthers, you need the Black Panthers to be destroyed by government actions, and for the Crips to be created to fill that power vacuum. And you need all of that to happen in a world where, apparently, 2,000 years ago the 9 armies of all the various races (elves, humans, and other fantasy creatures) came together to defeat some unspecific Dark Lord.

That's stretching it, to say the least.

Now, that's not the only example we can take from Bright, whose world has fantasy creatures and magic going back even more than the 2,000 years mentioned (unless that was when all fantasy arrived on Earth's doorstep, though the film doesn't say, so we can't assume that). There's the moment Smith says, "Fairy lives don't matter today," which implies the existence of the Black Lives Matter movement, and all the historical precedent that goes into that, including the existence of all of our real-world human racism, which seems weird in a world with half a dozen other fantasy creatures added into the mix for millennia. There's also a moment where Smith yells at an orc, "So take your Shrek-looking ass back to Fiona!" This, of course, implies that somehow Grimm's fairy tales were still written in this world, that the Disney company exists, and that the specific events that led to the creation of Dreamworks still happened, and that they made Shrek in this setting, and that it still became a massive, box office hit.

Which is asking a lot from your audience in terms of believability.

You Can Do It... But Think It Through

I don't want anyone reading through all of that and thinking that it's just not worth the effort of writing modern fantasy without a masquerade, or a relatively recent divergence point. Or that's it's not even worth writing modern fantasy at all, if you have to police every reference your characters make, song they quote, or turn of phrase they use. All of that, though, is part of doing your due diligence when it comes to keeping your setting internally consistent, and minimizing the amount of times your audience asks you questions that your story isn't going to answer.

You're the one who decides your own workload.

With all of that said, though, if it sounds like too much effort to alter the real world with an older divergence point, then it might be worth taking the dramatic step of building your own modern fantasy setting; one that isn't on Earth at all. Especially because this can let you make echoing references, where you have something that is in-context of the setting you've made, but which feels like a reflection of a similar piece of media, turn of phrase, etc., from our real world. For example, replacing the phrase, "Don't take any wooden nickels," with, "Don't take any brass tacks," could refer, in-world, to a name for a coin that's no longer in distribution (a brass tack) from a country your nation was once at war with, and so their currency wasn't accepted (or was considered a sign that you're a sympathizer for their cause) long enough that this became part of the lexicon. Alternatively, if the coins are outdated and no longer in circulation, they might be only used by criminal elements, making them a crime to hold, even if they're valuable in a certain part of society. This would also allow the phrase, "Let's get down to brass tacks," to also be co-opted, as you're discussing a serious, sensitive matter that is not to leave this room.

Just as an example.

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The Challenges of Writing Modern Fantasy Without a Masquerade

If you've read most modern fantasy, you're familiar with the Masquerade. It is, in short, the idea that the vampires, werewolves, fey creatures, witches, wizards, etc., move among the masses without being seen by the general population. Whether it's by magic, by constantly staying in the shadows, by manipulating media to make their very existence seem ludicrous, or just the idea that a majority of people will not believe what their own eyes tell them, the Masquerade is a common theme in a lot of modern fantasy because it serves two, important purposes.

The first is that it allows the author to keep our world, and its history, intact. If the supernatural community was kept behind the curtain, then as far as we know our history happened more or less how we think, giving the writer carte blanche to make edits and changes as the story progresses. This immediately gives the audience a foot in the door, as they know the real world, and can add the fantastic elements to it as the story progresses. The second thing it does is that it creates the illusion that this fantastical world could exist right under our noses. All you need to do is walk down the right alley on the right night, and you could find yourself in this world, too.

Oh dear... just how did you wind up in a place like this?

However, there are writers and readers alike who've grown sick of the Masquerade. They want modern fantasy stories where the magic and the monsters walk out in full daylight, and where there's no secret about who and what they are. And while you most certainly can do that, it is by no means an easier task to accomplish. The Masquerade does a lot of unexpected heavy lifting for you, and removing it means that burden falls squarely on your shoulders.

Before we get into it this week, make sure you sign up for my weekly newsletter to stay on top of all my releases. Also, speaking of unusual modern fantasy stories, my second hard-boiled cat novel dropped, so if you enjoyed my Maine coon heavy Leo's adventures in Marked Territory, then you are going to have an absolute ball with Painted Cats!

You Will Need To Re-Write History

In The Gold Bug by Edgar Allan Poe a man drops a golden scarab through a skull nailed to the end of a tree branch. The difference between one eye socket and the other, once the characters take 30 or so paces out in a particular direction, is the difference between an empty hole in the ground, and finding a king's ransom in buried treasure.

That situation is sort of what you deal with when you do away with the Masquerade. Because it's going to change history, and the further back you go, the more changes will be made.

The difference a few inches can make.

As an example, say that supernatural creatures have only been in public for a short period of time. This is, more or less, the sort of setup we have in True Blood. For while vampires have been around forever, they finally stepped out of hiding (along with a lot of other creatures), and the world is still changing to reflect this impact. But all the time they were hiding behind the curtain? Well, that history remains intact.

But go further back with it, and see how that alters things.

For instance, what would happen in vampires came out of hiding in the 80s? Or if werewolves were public knowledge in the 60s? After decades of being part of the world, how does their presence alter things? Are certain types of movies just not allowed to be made due to public outcry, with schlocky trash considered vamp-sploitation? Have civil rights progressed for supernatural creatures? Can they serve in the military, or in public office? Has science been able to understand anything about these creatures? Can lycanthropy cure cancer? Is there a push to use more plastic and aluminum in public spaces so that fey creatures aren't hurt by touching iron? Are vampires limited in the places they can live due to the widespread nature of churches? Are there hate groups that focus on these creatures?

You could go back even further, too. What effects did these creatures have on world events like the Great Wars? Are they found across the world, or only in certain places, and how has that shaped culture there? Have laws needed to be changed for life sentences (or life appointments) for creatures that are functionally immortal? The earlier the Masquerade dropped, the more the presence of the supernatural will alter the course of how the world developed.

You're Generally Better Off Making Your Own World

My two cents on this issue is that if you don't want to do a massive amount of world building for an alternate historical timeline, but you still want a modern fantasy world where elves, orcs, shapeshifters, etc. are a part of the day-to-day world, then you should just make your own, unique setting. Because at the end of the day it's usually a lot easier than trying to ask how things would have been different of Rome had been ruled by elves, and the Germanic tribes had been united by orcs come down from the mountains, and how that changed the events of the past few thousand years on Earth.

On the one hand, this is not a small undertaking. You need to dope out finance systems, technology, political relationships, cultures, and a thousand other things just to make the world feel like a real, lived-in place. At the same time, though, you're free to make those things regardless of what Earth's actual timeline was like, and without trying to mold our real world history, nations, etc. to fit what you're trying to do with your fantasy. It gives you total freedom to get as weird and wild as you want to!

Yeah, Smith and Wizards just dropped this beauty. You wanna talk trash now?

Unless your story needs our real world to act as the foundation for some reason (either to provide that extra escapism of the fantasy within reality, or to try to make a statement on how history might have gone differently with one or two fantastical alterations to the timeline), you shouldn't feel tied to using the world we all know and live in. Because unless it's required that you have New York, or Chicago, or Tokyo as a touch stone for some reason, don't tie yourself into knots to make them part of your setting.

Instead, take us to new places we've never seen before. Places where elven private eyes carry spell-slinging side arms, where werewolf orcs act as muscle for the mob, and where gnomish scientists try to crack the code of creation using a combination of ancient spells and a large hadron collider. Because that's going to be way more interesting, refreshing, and unique than another Shadowrun homage where in the year 20XX the event happened, and now there's ogres, trolls, elves, etc. in the real world because we want them here now.

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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my cat noir novel Marked Territory, its sequel Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

Does Your Masquerade Pass Muster? (Thoughts For Modern Fantasy Stories)

How many times have you read a modern fantasy story where an entire supernatural world is kept completely in the shadows? Whether it's vampires in their ivory towers making secret deals with politicians, cabals of wizards waging war on werewolves, or eldritch beings whose stirrings send ripples through space and time, the general population doesn't know about these things. And most folks, if you tried to tell them, would look at you as if you were a crazy person.

Cynthia, James isn't a vampire. If he tried to bite your neck without consent, file a sexual harassment complaint with HR.

This approach does you two, major favors as a writer. The first is that it means you don't have to re-write any major world events or locations in important, noticeable ways. This means all you're doing is adding the underground stuff, and putting in secret, hidden places that only the denizens of the Night World know about. The second is that it gives your story an extra added thrill, because if this secret world is only known by a few people, then it could potentially be real.

That's a powerful shot, and it's one reason this kind of story is so popular. However, there is one thing that can make or break your story on pure suspension of disbelief... the strength of your masquerade.

How Does No One Know?

This is not a rhetorical question. If you are asking your readers to believe that an entire secret society of dark wonders walks among us, then you have to explain how no one has noticed them. And as the world marches ever onward into the age of satellite surveillance, smartphones, and instant video, this becomes more and more important.

There are a few things you can do to make your masquerade feel more believable, though, and to get your audience focused on your story rather than on the premise you're asking them to swallow to get to your story.

Right, right, no one knows it's the plague because of his mask. Anyway, back to the duke and his party...

#1: The Veil

The first (and in my experience most common) way to have a masquerade is to have a metaphorical or literal curtain of invisibility around the secret world, typically thought of as the Veil. For example, in the Vampire: The Masquerade setting the vampire community has a huge, proactive network meant to keep their existence secret. They own the cops, they own the judges, they own the newspapers, and if there is information they don't want released then it simply will not circulate. Not only that, but it is extremely difficult to collect evidence of a vampire, and what evidence there is looks more akin to shaky Bigfoot-capture footage than proof of nosferatu. So between the money, the power, and the community rules against breaking the secret, they hide themselves in the shadows. There are literally hundreds of these bloodsucking undead monsters all around the world, but their existence is covered up by lackeys, and the efforts of those looking to hide information, camouflage evidence as false, and to make vampires into a popular fiction that couldn't possibly exist.

Some setups go even further, though. In Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, for example, being a part of the secret world means that regular people simply stop registering your presence. You can maybe get their attention long enough to ask a question, but as soon as they look away they'll forget they ever even saw you. You exist as a member of the secret world, now, and by virtue of that membership are apart from the world of the mundane in a real, complete sense.

For those wondering, the second option is harder to do in a unique way, but is strangely easier to swallow since you can just say, "Because magic, that's why."

#2: Isolation

The second thing you can do (particularly if you want to avoid the above approach), is to make the supernatural elements of your secret world rare, and far away from prying eyes. I call this the horror movie approach, since it seems like immortal hockey-masked murderers, ghostly child predators, angry spirits, and demonic possessions would get a lot of attention... but because they're isolated, rare, or unusual, they just don't. Even in horror movies where there are secret societies, church divisions, or multiple generations of victims, it seems like no one in the general population ever lends credence to these stories.

Because it's easier to hide something when it's rare.

If you think about it, this is the key to a lot of cryptid beliefs. Even if you comb every inch of Loch Ness, or beat every push in the pine barrens, it's a lot more believable that one (or maybe a handful) of creatures could evade being discovered in such a big area. Hell, we're still finding isolated tribes of people in the rainforest, and we've been exploring that area for centuries!

One of the best examples of this in my opinion was the Clive Barker novella Cabal. In it a man is driven to hunt down the legends of a city of monsters beneath a necropolis in the middle of nowhere in Canada. A place called Midian. Beneath that necropolis we find the tribes of the moon, who are the monsters from all of our folklore. Hunted nearly to extinction, Midian is one of their last refuges. And we believe it, because their sheer isolation, combined with their relatively small numbers, means that they very well could have escaped notice for decades... or centuries.

This isn't limited to middle-of-nowhere settings like the Slaughter family's house in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. You can have isolation in urban environments as a subject of blight, or even as a result of money. Monsters could live behind the walls of the old, venerable mansion just as easily as in the concrete gutters of half-abandoned slums. The key is that no one goes there, so how would they know?

#3: The Cthulhu Effect

Those who know the truth are deemed to be mad, and it is only by calling clarity insanity that the world can keep its eyes closed to the threat of the Old Ones.

Or, put another way, convincing someone of the impossible takes a lot of doing. Especially because people do not like to be proven wrong. Even if you can show them facts that proves their beliefs about the world are incorrect, humans have the unique ability to look you dead in the face and say that those are lies, what I know is true.

There is evidence of this all around you. How many people believe the world is flat, even though you have photos from outer space proving the contrary? How many people refuse to consider that the world is billions of years old, insisting that a holy book written in the bronze age is more accurate than carbon dating? How many people totally believe that if you cut taxes on the rich that the money will trickle down to the poor, despite decades of research that state that simply is not what happens?

Now imagine telling a populace who is more than ready to disbelieve easily-proven facts like this that vampires are real. Or that fairies live in the woods. Or that no, really, you can totally do magic? Even if you have video of yourself casting a ritual and summoning a hellhound, the first 50 comments on the video are going to be FAKE! with a helping of, "what editor did you use for this? It's really smooth."

People are stupid, pigheaded, and don't typically react with open-minded clarity when events transpire that could make them re-think their whole worldview. And you can use that to explain how an entire werewolf pack goes undetected when they masquerade as homeless people, or how the popularity of stage magic was engineered to specifically cover up occult practices in a phenomenal act of sleight-of-hand. People don't want to believe that these things are real, and while some of them might, those who see the truth are more likely to be thought of as delusional, dangerous, or both, rather than as witnesses to the world's radical truths.

You Still Have To Explain All This, Though

While you can use all sorts of combinations of the above explanations, the important thing is for you to illustrate how your masquerade functions. If your protagonist gets definitive proof of a werewolf attack, show how the camera doesn't want to be recorded what it's being pointed at. The video is choppy, problematic, and seems to malfunction. Even though it's clear to one character, you should show how others regard it as faked, or how they think this belief in werewolves is a manifestation of the trauma the believer experienced.

And so on, and so forth.

It helps if you have a Professor Van Helsing character to help explain things to the newly exposed, but it's also important to remember that Van Helsing was sort of thought of as a quack with odd, old-world ideas until he managed to convince several thoroughly modern men that the woman they'd been courting had, indeed, become a vampire. And to do that he had to prove to them she was attacking children, and chase her back into her crypt.

Despite their belief, and their slaying of multiple vampires, in the world of Dracula the living dead didn't suddenly get unmasked to the public. They were known to our protagonists who remembered themselves in their ignorance. Who knew that they never would have believed it either, and who understood that it takes extreme circumstances to make someone step over the threshold to the other side of the Masquerade.

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing entry. Hopefully you found it engaging, and it got some ideas going for you! If you'd like to see more of my work, check out my Vocal archive. To get updates on all my releases, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. Lastly, if you'd like to help support me, you could Buy Me A Ko-Fi, or head to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page to become a regular patron. Either way, there's some free books in it for you as a thank you!