The Use of Physics to Help Develop Characters and Explain the World
I do a lot of planning before I start writing in earnest. At the core of that plan are two simple things: a character and a situation.
Not just any character and situation will do. Each must be ideally suited to the other. It must be the one situation the character would find most daunting and the one character who would be most out of place in that situation.
In my first book, Dellia, I wanted to send an ordinary person to a fantastical world. Since I had already decided on the situation, the concept for Jon came with relative ease. He had to be a physicist obsessed with explaining his world, and the world to which he was sent had to be impossible for him to explain.
Even though I do a lot of planning, I tend to set that plan aside and not think about it when actually writing. Instead, I simply put the characters in the scene and let their personalities, values, and beliefs drive their moment-to-moment dialogue and actions. If what I get back doesn’t exactly match my plan, then I revise my plan. It is through Jon’s moment-to-moment interactions with the world that his many observations on the physics of the world came to be.
Upon entering the world, almost at once, Jon encounters a dragon. He wondered why nothing as large as an elephant, or even a pig, could fly. So I researched the subject, and sure enough, it turns out there are practical limits to the weight that flesh and blood wings can support. Up to that point, the idea that Jon would find the physics of the world troubling was just a theoretical concept. It existed only in my head. It could only become real to the reader if it manifested in Jon’s thoughts and actions in the story. So it became crucial for Jon to know that something as massive as a dragon could never fly and to speculate whether its wings were vestigial or perhaps made of some other material that could support the weight.
Not long after, he notices the rock floor of the cave entrance has been worn smooth by use and wonders what it would take to result in that much wear. So I researched again and found you can predict the wearing down of rock over time using the Archard Equation. Throughout the book, whenever Jon encounters something that defies well-known physical laws, he notices and considers it. So he comments on instant travel, viewing the past, sensing emotions. It became a theme for him, and he even developed theories about how the world works. All of which flowed naturally from him as he interacted with the world.
In the next book, Aylun, Jon continues his observations on the nature of the world. He considers how creating lightning out of thin air defies the laws of conservation of energy, how viewing someone over a distance without the aid of technology would be impossible, and even delves into the nature of matter. Megan, who is almost as well-schooled as Jon, notices physical laws being violated but is far less hung up on it. However, the nature of prophecy and the rules governing it catch her attention, and she questions Aylun endlessly about it.
Check out David Scidmore’s Aylun here:
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As the theme became more established and spread to Megan, I began to consider the larger implications. You see, Jon’s musings on the many ways the story world violates well-established physical laws may be amusing to some, but to have the best chance of capturing the interest of all readers, they must have a bearing on the outcome of events. If not, they become irrelevant material that might as well be edited out.
So I began to develop theories as to what would explain everything happening in the story world while also explaining why nothing of the sort happens on Earth. I have a few ideas, but like many things in the story, I won’t really know until it comes time to set them down on the page. The thing is, I need to plan so I know where the story is going and to assure myself that the path events take is inevitable.
However, I also fear the plan becoming a straitjacket. I don’t want to cast every idea in stone before it has a chance to evolve into something better. This is where I am at with Jon and his obsession with explaining the world. Of course, I have thoughts about where it will lead in the future, but I want to leave the subject open for as long as I can so those ideas can grow and evolve and perhaps become even more integrated into the plot.
This is perhaps why storytelling appeals to me so much. It satisfies the part of me that wants to plan and construct something intricate and fascinating, but it also allows me to indulge the artistic side that wants to touch people’s emotions, and it engages the spontaneous and creative part of me that wants to just see where things will go.