When Reality Influences the Imaginary
Posté : ven. avr. 02, 2010 10:55 am
Building a World: When Reality Influences the Imaginary est un article de Glenda Larke à lire en anglais.
Voici le début :
"When I was very young, growing up in Australia, I decided there were two things I wanted to do in life: travel and write books. What I didn’t realize until many years later was how much the traveling would impact my writing.
You may ask: “Why? You write fantasy! You make stuff up. You aren’t writing about the places you’ve been.”
That’s true, but to make an imaginary world believable is not as easy as it sounds. I’ve been lucky because I’ve lived for years in many places far from where I was born. In a way, I collected worlds. That dusty Australian farm where I lived till I was eleven, a suburban house in the tropics where I was (and still am) part of an extended Asian Muslim family, a Viennese house on a road where Beethoven once lived, a flat-roofed villa in Tunisia with marble floors often gritty with the dust of the Sahara, a small apartment in Borneo with a view over the South China Sea, monkeys on the balcony and ants living in the walls.
Each time I moved, I had to learn more than just a new spoken language; I had to learn the cultural language. What was polite in one society was rude in another, what made one culture vibrant was denigrated by another. (Do you know how hard it is for an Australian to understand that walking across a lawn in Vienna is an appalling breech of public behavior?) All this is an excellent way to understand how to build the culture of a fantasy world, and then how to slip that culture into the story without the dreaded infodump."
Voici le début :
"When I was very young, growing up in Australia, I decided there were two things I wanted to do in life: travel and write books. What I didn’t realize until many years later was how much the traveling would impact my writing.
You may ask: “Why? You write fantasy! You make stuff up. You aren’t writing about the places you’ve been.”
That’s true, but to make an imaginary world believable is not as easy as it sounds. I’ve been lucky because I’ve lived for years in many places far from where I was born. In a way, I collected worlds. That dusty Australian farm where I lived till I was eleven, a suburban house in the tropics where I was (and still am) part of an extended Asian Muslim family, a Viennese house on a road where Beethoven once lived, a flat-roofed villa in Tunisia with marble floors often gritty with the dust of the Sahara, a small apartment in Borneo with a view over the South China Sea, monkeys on the balcony and ants living in the walls.
Each time I moved, I had to learn more than just a new spoken language; I had to learn the cultural language. What was polite in one society was rude in another, what made one culture vibrant was denigrated by another. (Do you know how hard it is for an Australian to understand that walking across a lawn in Vienna is an appalling breech of public behavior?) All this is an excellent way to understand how to build the culture of a fantasy world, and then how to slip that culture into the story without the dreaded infodump."