David Smallman

Building the Second Age of Man

At the moment, I'm doing considerably more world-building than novel-writing.

I'm mapping out an extensive future history spanning more than a century, looking at how world events might unfold and how geopolitics, wars and conflicts, financial instability, resources, technology and changes within society could influence one another.

A lot of it may never appear explicitly in a finished book. In fact, readers might never know most of it exists.

I'll know it exists.

That's important to me. If something happens in this fictional future, I want there to be a reason it happened. I want the events surrounding it to make sense and the history behind the story to feel coherent, even when much of that history remains somewhere in my notes.

Perhaps that's the engineer in me.

I write technical and engineering papers as part of my work, where detail matters. Processes, procedures and requirements have to connect properly, and gaps have a habit of becoming problems later. I'm discovering that I've naturally started approaching world-building in much the same way.

Whether that's how you're supposed to write fiction, I have absolutely no idea.

But it's how I'm doing it.

Bringing People Into the World

Creating a hundred years of geopolitical history might be complicated, but I've discovered something potentially even harder:

What do you call everybody?

It turns out that picking a character's name can be surprisingly difficult.

These aren't just names I need to put on a page. If I'm going to create these people, I want to do them justice. I want to understand who they are, what shaped them and how they fit into the world around them.

Most importantly, if somebody eventually reads what I write, I'd like these characters to feel like people rather than pieces I've moved around to make the larger story work.

That's a very different sort of challenge from the technical writing I'm accustomed to.

Then again, perhaps learning how to do that is the point.

Baby Steps

This is all still unfamiliar territory for me.

Gail and Eli are developing very different kinds of stories, so although we're all doing this together through Smallman Publishing, I can't necessarily look at what they're writing and use the same approach for my own ideas.

Science fiction, particularly at the scale I'm imagining it, presents its own challenges.

For now, I'm taking baby steps in a world that still feels rather unknown to me as a beginner "author".

I've spent most of my professional life writing things that need to be technically correct, detailed and unambiguous. Fiction asks something rather different of me. I need to learn how to take all that research, structure and detail and turn it into something another person might actually want to sit down and read.

I don't know whether I'll succeed.

I don't know exactly what the Second Age of Man will eventually become.

And I don't particularly mind.

I'm going to endeavour to enjoy finding out.