Exchange of Realities

A little over a year ago, I talked about heroes/adventurers and their day jobs; not everyone can support themselves by adventuring, and not everyone wants to. The problem with these sorts of jobs is that many people just don’t find them interesting; they might take time away from a game group, seem “too much like real life” (yes, I’ve had complaints about this), or just be hard to come up with decent events for. But if you don’t do something with them, they may as well not be there, right?

The answer, then, is to come up with just enough detail to make it a worthy background. Here are some things you might need.

What exactly is the job? If you can’t summarize it, it’s hard to get it across, whether it’s being a doctor, teaching, serving as the translator for the God of Prophecy (irregular hours, but the pay’s good). Which leads to three simple questions: what does the character do, when does he do it, and who does he do it for? (In some cases, “How does he do it?” may also be applicable.

What are the people around him like? Just about any workplace is going to have at least one standout personality. Usually, it’s the boss, since everyone pretty much has to know who the boss is; likewise, it might be a similar-ranked coworker, or someone responsible for the character’s training—basically, someone whose name, position or personality sticks out. Once that’s established, occasional references to that person doing that-person-ish things can give a feel without actually requiring being there.

Are there any interesting tasks it involves, that fit with the job but are outside its norm and thus notable for the character? Try slipping in references to those while summing up downtime. Take my library job. There’s not much point talking about standard situations, since libraries are pretty universal. But on the other hand, if your first time meeting the commanding general is when she walks in unannounced one Saturday morning when you’re the most senior employee on duty, and you’re having to figure out how you’re supposed to act and how you tell her she’s got a book overdue, it’s something you’re not likely to forget. An offhand summary of a situation like that can say a lot about the job without having to spend time on it.

Then there are the situations that happen at work but aren’t necessarily work-related—or at least, not related to the character’s work. They don’t say as much about the job specifically, but they say something about what can happen there, a little something about the world, and a bit about the people, particularly in how they react to it. “The boss locked his keys in his car and wigged out about it, and now we’re all stressed” or “One of the patrons told me a story about nearly being recruited by the CIA, and I had most of a blog post on it by the time I left” is one thing; seeing a coworker who was missing and possibly confirmed dead at lunch the next morning and everyone acting normal about this is something else entirely.

So what is it like working for these people or in this position? You don’t need to write or play out half the workday just to get it across.

Just because humanity depends on its sight doesn’t mean writers have to—and what better way to learn than to listen? Here’s what I tend to hear on an average day on the job.

It doesn’t just look like a regular library here; much of the time, it sounds like a regular library. The checkins and the checkouts have the same heartbeat-like beep-thump, beep-thump, beep-thump as any other. While it may be hard to hear the sound of book pages turning, newspaper pages are a lot noisier. The fans whir or occasionally click; the computers give that overheated background hiss for short periods before fading away as if realizing nobody’s listening. And outside, there are the crows, the gulls, the occasional small chirpy bird (I know we have starlings, there was a hummingbird indoors at one point not too long after my arrival), the cars passing through the parking lot or (less audible) zooming down the street a stone’s throw and a forbidding fence away. Every so often we get an airplane—loud and low-flying, as we’re pretty much right under the city airport’s standard takeoff trajectory. If someone’s on the telephone, or sometimes even answering a patron question, they’ll often stop, wait, and then explain “sorry, airplane” before finishing the explanation or asking the other person to please repeat that last sentence.

Somewhere in the distance, there’s the sound of one or more formations marching, and the incessant “Left right…” chant in which no two people outside the formations themselves can actually agree on what that third syllable is, save that it starts with L and doesn’t quite sound like “left”. Contrary to some outsiders’ assumptions (my immediate supervisor was actually telling me about a friend who sang a couple verses when he found out where she was working), you don’t actually hear the fast-paced, call and response cadence made famous by the movies and once parroted by children at San Diego Zoo day camps that often when you’re in this library. Never is it in accompaniment to the slow, even marching that most daytime formations seem to favor. At times, early in the morning or late in the evening, there’ll be an exception; the sound of running feet, and something vaguely garbled but in the tune that every drill instructor, no matter how tone deaf, can probably sing in their sleep, and even civvies can recognize. Sometimes, there might even be understandable words, but that’s likelier from the DI than from the mass of recruits, going as they are for volume. On graduation days, in the afternoon, there’s snare and cymbal as the band marches by, but I’ve never seen them use the brass instruments in the parking lot. I wonder if it’s to avoid trombone-related injuries? I can see the general’s flag, when applicable, but I never hear it flapping; if the wind’s strong enough to do that, it’s strong enough to drown out the noise.

And then there’s the daily music. I’ve never been there when the flag was brought down, but rare is the day when I’m not in earshot, if not already on the base, when they play the recording for Colors. On the other side of the wall, it sounds like one musician playing, but when you’re on the parade ground, the speakers everywhere lead to an echo effect, as if the music was being provided by a class of trumpeters who couldn’t agree on whether to start on Three or wait until Go. A few minutes after it, you’ll hear the last phrase/introduction to the Star Spangled Banner. And every so often, for reasons I still have yet to make sense of, there’s a recording of a march-tune I don’t recognize, one that sounds like Liberty Bell, sounds like you could get a pretty snappy walk to it, sounds like carousel calliope, all at the same time.

 Walking down the arcade along the parade deck, mostly you just hear footsteps. There are usually words when a Marine walks past someone else; accompanied by a salute when it’s an officer, just a “Good day, sir/ma’am” when greeting a civvie.

Listen. What do you hear? What does it tell you?

Orientations. Most of us have probably been through at least one, for work, or school, or something else. They’re pretty much a fact of dealing with large organizations, after all. Bunch of people leading you around the system telling you things that were already in the manual, except that every now and then there’s something useful slipped into all the whats and wherefores, or something happens that makes it interesting.

Photo by Michal Zacharzewski

Writers avoid them, gamers more so. Can you blame them? Most orientations are an infodump of epic proportions. Granted, it’s justified to have the announcer going on and on, but it’s also dead boring. On the other hand, there are useful things that can be learned, and sometimes there’s something else going on. Meeting someone, perhaps. Making discoveries. Coming to realizations about the job and what it means (and not always negative ones, either). In fact, one could say that those are the only good reason to run an orientation. The audience is likely to remember standard operating procedure through trial and error, after all.

So how does one execute a scene couched in an orientation?

First off, figure out what the parts that are actually going to matter are, and how many of them actually connect to the orientation itself. Is it an unusually surprising bit of information? Meeting someone? The oddity of being on one of these things when you’ve been in the place you’re getting oriented to for several months and actually work for one of the stops on the tour? (I know that one from personal experience.) These, needless to say, deserve to be given detail, so figure out what that detail looks like.

Then summarize as much as you can of the rest. It’s particularly easy in writing, when you can actually show the character’s eyes glazing over by going from the first few sentences of actual quote and word by word to a summary. Specific motivational pitches, bits of paperwork, whatever, give way to “and then a movie about [subject], and then a short speech about [subject], and the brochures piled up on the desk like leaves in fall.” The best part about the summarizing is that, when you introduce the thing that matters and start describing it with specifics rather than generalities, whether it’s a quote or a character or an incident or what, it’s going to stand out. Harder in a game? Well, yeah, here you’re having to balance out the length of exposition as well as everything else, since the players probably can’t just skim. Pre-write the unimportant parts.

Of course, on the summarized parts, you’re going to want to make every sentence count. If it doesn’t contribute to the context, if it’s just there to be part of the orientation, try to pare it down. Every sentence has to pull its weight, since the more sentences you have, the more likely you are to glaze people’s eyes rather than getting your point across.

Yes, there are very few things inherently more difficult to write well than a standard orientation. But if you can make it work, people will remember it.

I actually thought of this one because of work, when the librarian ran out of toothpaste and I happened to have a tube—and of course, the question came up, “Why do you have a tube of toothpaste?”

I’ve already talked about characterizing people by their possessions, and there are plenty of character insight surveys that include some variant on “What have you got in your pockets?” And those alone are pretty effective. But there’s a step farther we can go, and that’s asking why they’re there.

After all, carrying capacity is (at least theoretically) a finite resource, and filling it too much tends to slow people down. As a result, particularly in realistic sorts of worlds, why people are carrying what they’re carrying matters. It makes sense for someone on a journey to be carrying a week’s rations, and a weapon, and one doesn’t expect a professional adventurer to be without his (hopefully collapsible) ten-foot pole, whether it began life as part of a ladder or not. A character prone to research might carry writing material and writing implements, possibly even a well-protected journal. But when you’ve got someone who’s packing long, thin jewelers’ tools, several changes of clothing including the livery of the guard of a nearby noble house, a few pieces of chalk, various pale blue crystals in various shapes (some of which are set in pendants or other jewelry, some of which aren’t), one ornamental dagger and a two-compartment hollow statue in what appears to be the right pocket of a trench coat, even knowing that he’s enchanted his pockets to go to a small pouch in hammerspace isn’t going to keep you from wondering why he carries the stuff around.

This sort of game is particularly fun when talking about people who carry around things that only make sense when you consider planning for contingencies, or when trying to figure out where something that came in handy for a purpose for which it was clearly not packed came from. The toothpaste above was pretty logical; it was the same bag I’d weekended in Oregon in the previous month, and I’d never bothered removing my travel-kit. I imagine I got slightly odder looks back in high school during the demonstration on platonic solids when I realized the teacher wasn’t having much luck drawing his octahedron and started pulling dice out of my Big Bag. (“May I? Good. Regular pyramid. Cube. Octahedron. Dodecahedron. Icosahedron. Help any?”), and I’m not sure I ever gave an adequate explanation of why the contents of my belt pouch at one point included various writing implements, keys (half not even useful), wallet, a pouch of miniature dice more than two thirds of which were d10s, small amounts of candy, a few chips of obsidian, a lump of turquoise, a cubical crystal bead with two faces scratched up, one pennywhistle, a few cap erasers with the tops worn through, various random pieces of paper, several broken rebab strings, a set of chopsticks, one of those round Altoid tins and/or a vertical five-day pill dispenser full of seed beads, and an unopened set of disposable earplugs—and that’s not even counting the gold-colored talisman of an Asian-looking ship (I think it might’ve been a junk) hanging from one of the straps by a loop of red embroidery floss. (I dare anyone who hasn’t met me to guess the reasons behind or uses of all of these.)

So ask not just what their pockets hold, but why such things are in their pockets.

When I was first hired on, I’m not sure what I was imagining a military base library to be, but I didn’t expect the interesting range of similarities and differences to public libraries that mine had. And between the fact that not everyone who reads this is going to have seen a military library, and the emphasis on library form being determined by library function that I put in my last post, I may as well show you what my Marine library looks like from a patron’s POV.

At first glimpse, you might mistake it for a small public library. There’s the circulation desk, up front, with its two reference computers; the internet room a ways to the right, the copier and the fax machine to the left; the single drop box is an internal wall slot rather than an external bin. Nonfiction fills the first room (weighted, of course, towards military history, which covers about half the normal shelves, as well as the ‘professional collection’ wall), DVDs the room behind it, and fiction and the juvenile and YA sections are in smaller rooms off to the side, all clearly labeled though not all labels visible from the door. In the main room, as well, there’s a magazine rack and a newspaper rack, three tables—one with at least one puzzle, probably more, one with a patron on a laptop, one with a pile of somebody’s gear—and a shelf each for travel and test prep. At any given time, you’ll likely see between two and four techs in the main room, one on Sundays; if you’re lucky, you might even see one of our two librarian/admins. And of course, there are brochures advertising programs, posted rules for the internet (and a corresponding sign-in sheet), and potted plants on top of every other bookshelf.

Then you notice the decorations. There’s a reproduction of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima painting just inside the door, similar paraphernalia at various places throughout the wall, a paired national and service branch miniature flag set on the end of one shelf, a bust of the anthropomorphic Marine bulldog mascot on the other. The bulletin boards are full of events on the base targeted primarily to Marines and secondarily to their families, except the one in the back half-covered with postings for jobs at Miramar. And then on the far wall there’s the crest, right below the banner that says “Commandant’s Reading List” (bet you didn’t know that Marines had homework!) and right above the shelf dominated by the big binder labeled “Marine Reading List”. (But wait near the desk for a little while; it’s almost a given that someone wearing desert camouflage will come in, probably as part of a group, almost invariably with two chevrons or fewer on his collar, and ask if we have the list and if so where it is.)

Speaking of that desert camouflage, you may not see it too often off-base but here (at least in summer) you’re unlikely not to see it. Some days they’re just a few tan spots in an already empty library, but more often they’re in small knots, swarming the tech lab or the copier, walking in pairs up to the Commandant’s List shelf to choose the subject for their book report or bemoan the fact that all the copies of the Art of War are checked out again, crowding into the TV room for a movie with explosions and shouting, bunching up behind the last shelf of the fiction room for a board game (yes, we provide those too). If the copier’s swarmed with camouflage and the tables are full of overflow from the computer room, the printers both working at top speed, it’s probably Tuesday, and Recruiter School has probably begun a new session. If instead they’re in a tidy mob between the reference desk and the tables, sprinkled with people in civvie garb and listening to one person lecture them about DVDs, internet programs and a coffee machine while another unobtrusively weaves through them distributing flyers, it’s Welcome Aboard and probably the first time any of that group has been through these doors.

Of our fiction, adult General Fiction comprises the largest portion of the holdings, with mysteries a little way behind and Westerns, mostly read by the retirees who pop in almost as often as the men and women in uniform do, narrowly edging out “Science Fiction” for third place. Then again, the audiobook collection is as large as the science fiction section. Children’s books get a room to themselves (along with children’s DVDs, seventy-five percent of which sport the strip of paper sticking out from under the back cover that signifies they’re checked out). Young adult (which seems to be entirely fiction and biographies) doesn’t; it’s four shelves around the outside of the TV room. It’s not clear if the Powers That Be understand what constitutes age ratings on a movie; instead, ‘Juvenile’ DVDs are all animated in some way, and the rest are all not.

Can you see how the patrons and the location have shaped the building?

Do you want a way of explaining where characters acquired or could acquire knowledge without having to worry about where they keep the books? A point of contact for academics, with each other or possibly even with everyone else? A way to make sure that knowledge in your setting, be it facts or stories or even potentially dangerous secrets, is not forgotten?

Image by ams9w3

You may need a library.

But before you fall into the standard model found in public libraries everywhere, think about the overall purpose and feel of your library, and how that would make it different.

First, consider the purpose—and please, be a bit more specific than “that place with books everyone can look at.” Where reproducing manuscripts is expensive, libraries are likelier to be a source of information than a source of books; materials are perused within the building itself, and borrowing might even require special circumstances and proof of trustworthiness. Some might be about finding information quickly and efficiently: in these cases as well, borrowing is likely to be limited, and the emphasis will be on making sure the materials are all well-organized in their places and that the staff know the organization system perfectly. Often, these sorts will be in a specialized field of study, like medicine. On the other hand, you have situations like today’s public libraries, in which the idea is to give people a source of books, fiction is as prevalent as (if not more so than) nonfiction, and a particular book might spend all but about a day or two of its first month in the collection checked out.

Now consider the library’s patrons, both what it’s likely to attract and how the people who come are going to shape the library’s holdings. Purpose will often create patronage: a specialist library draws specialists, logically enough, and a children’s library draws children. If it’s one of those libraries where the books have to be read on the premises, the average patron by necessity will have more time to spare than the average patron in a public library, who can sneak chapters of books between meetings or listen to an audio in a traffic jam on the way home. But the people in the area around the library have an effect as well. For instance, the Oakland Public Library system has a few branches that are the go-to spot for materials in different languages, since they’re in areas with high concentrations of people who speak those tongues. On the other hand, my Marine library (largest demographic enlisted personnel, then retirees, then dependents of the above two groups) not only has the expected slanting towards military history in the nonfiction section, but also features a shelf dedicated specifically to required reading for enlistees and a Western section larger than either its science fiction section or its young adult section.

Here’s a fun question: are the materials it holds necessarily books? Using something else can give a library an exotic feel and necessitate some long-reaching differences in how it’s built and how it’s organized. And even modern public libraries are as likely to have electronic materials as not.

What sorts of services does it offer besides the storage of information? A library can serve as a meeting place or a place to post events; it might host classes or hook mentors up with students. Most public libraries have copy machines and provisions for their patrons to get online. And what more can be done in a fantasy context?

Any of these factors can characterize a library, setting it apart from others of its kind and giving it its own personality. Give it a try!

It’s easy to not pay attention to the people in the world around you, to pigeonhole them into this group, that group, the other and not really pay it much mind. This lot does this. Those other people do that. PCs in RPGs (and their players, possibly more so) seem to be rather fond of this. So too, in my experience, do main characters of stories, and by extension probably their authors.

I got to thinking about trying to avoid this because of a pair of encounters with a patron at work today—one of those gregarious old ladies who are practically an embodiment of why Census listers find “A granny flat. With an actual granny in it” to be a prime source of delays. There I am, getting a couple BMPs checked out of the system, and she walks up with a book that’s been on the shelves since May, plunks it down in front of me and informs all of us that we must check it out. Given I was the only one of us who was going to have an operative library card by the time that thing was checked in, and since familiarity with the material is important, I followed her instructions.

Which brought me to the second encounter, when she was checking her own stuff out. I’d let her know that I had indeed checked out the book. Which, within a couple sentences, led to her telling me about having been nearly recruited by the CIA when she was younger, complete with having been called on a phone line her parents didn’t even know she had and told all sorts of things about herself as verification. Chalked the whole thing up to having ‘done some wild things’ at that age, and useful foreign language proficiencies. That I had not seen coming.

Knowing there are stories like that out there, attached to people you’d never expect to tell them, is a pretty powerful motivator for getting out there and listening. It’s easy, when needing to generate large casts of characters, to give them relatively cookie-cutter backgrounds, and if you do people can come to expect it. But when you take one of those cookie-cutter backgrounds and add something different to it, something unexpected, not only does that often get people’s attention, but they’re likely to take that and apply it to just about everyone else. Who knows who the next person with the Easter egg history is going to be?

While this technique is more useful with game groups, it doesn’t need to be limited to them. An author who knows herself to tend not to be too interested in her secondary characters may want to dig through them, see if they have any such stories to tell, possibly give them a few if they’re not coming up with any on their own. Whether it’s the author or the main character whose interest is piqued in that way, it’ll still probably draw authorial attention onto the minor characters, and in my experience minor characters the author wants to pay attention to are generally more interesting than those who are just there to fill a role in the plot.

You don’t need to do it for everyone in the cast, but a few character background surprises can do wonders for the secondary characters as a whole.

And now, for something a little different.

0800 hours on MCRD San Diego. I’m sitting in the food court with my mother, looking out the window at the roiling mass of families here for graduation. By now, the crowds are something I’m used to. They’ve turned on music in here, loud enough that I’m not sure I’d hear a bugle if it was being played right outside the window.

But that doesn’t keep me from noticing when, outside the window, Colors begins. If you’ve never been on a military base, it might not mean much to you, but Colors—the raising or lowering of the flag every day—is a big deal, big enough that if you’re outdoors and that bugle’s playing, you aren’t allowed to do anything but pay respects in the general direction of the flagpole until it stops. It was one of the first things they taught me when I hired on with the library.

The recruits knew. There was no way they wouldn’t. So in and among the crowd outside that window, anyone wearing a uniform was stock-still, standing at attention, all facing in the same direction. And yet there were all these people—their friends, their families, still talking or moving around or carrying on, not even holding still in deference to the fact that there was clearly something that these people had to do.

Now, I’ve never considered myself to be one of the uniformed crowd. When they showed me the video on why “civilian Marine” isn’t an oxymoron, I still had my doubts, since there’s a big difference between fixing weaponry and my shelving books. I still can’t keep my ranks straight beyond being able to tell low-range from middle range from officer, and all that takes is simple collar reading. And I operate under no illusion that I’d last a minute in training, let alone out in the field. Heck, even in dress most of the visitors seemed more associated with their recruit relatives than I—you had the small children in their “Mini-Marine” T-shirts and the proud parents and grandparents and what have you with theirs, and the main thing marking me as having anything to do with the services was just the government-issued ID on the lanyard about my neck. As far as I’m concerned, if there’s an ‘us’ and a ‘them’, my ‘us’ is definitely the civilian population.

Except that something in me speaking to sheer instinct seemed to disagree that morning. I looked out over the mass of families talking and carrying on, over at my mother on the other side of the table, rolled my eyes at this sign of what seemed to me to be mass obliviousness (didn’t anyone tell these people how seriously the Marines take Colors?) and muttered “Civilians.”

I’m sure there’s something in there to be learned. About the gray area in dichotomies, perhaps, or about how self-identification works. About things that seem obvious to people who already know them and can justify them easily (we’re used to standing still for the flag at sports events or graduation, aren’t we?), and how they might look to outsiders. About how much rituals and understanding them can create a feeling of in-group and out-group even when the usual in-group/out-group lines are drawn somewhere else.

But right now I think I just need to think about what this means for me.