12 Imaginary Places

Religion, legends, and literature alike are replete with various conceptions of ethereal or terrestrial paradises or places with romantic flair. Here are a dozen examples of ideal locales, including their names, their origins, and their definitions.

1. Arcadia (the Greek region of Arcadia): an idealized, unattainable pastoral state, bereft of civilization

2. Atlantis (allegorical legend recounted by Plato): an island with a complex, advanced civilization that was submerged in a cataclysmic disaster in preclassical times)

3. Camelot (European legends and folklore): the seat of the court of King Arthur, renowned for its splendor

4. Cockaigne (European medieval legend): a place of idleness and luxury

5. El Dorado or Eldorado (Spanish legend): the name given to a Native American chieftain and, by extension, to the prosperous city and surrounding empire he supposedly ruled; later, a metaphor for happiness or personal fulfillment

6. Erewhon (Samuel Butler’s satirical novel Erewhon): a seemingly utopian society with the same flaws as actual civilization

7. Faerie (European fairy tales and folktales): the magical realm of fairies and other legendary beings

8. Neverland or the Neverlands or Never Never Land (J. M. Barrie’s stage play Peter Pan and his novelization Peter and Wendy): an idyllic land serving as a metaphor for escapism and perpetual childhood

9. Shambhala (Buddhist tradition): a mythical hidden kingdom in Central Asia adopted as an ideal state by believers in mysticism

10. Shangri-La (James Hilton’s romantic novel Lost Horizon): an idealized paradise in a hidden valley in Asia

11. Utopia (Sir Thomas More’s allegorical novel Utopia): an island with a harmonious sociopolitical system; in uncapitalized form, any idealized society

12. Xanadu (Chinese history): a city in what is now Inner Mongolia, the historical summer palace of Kublai Khan, but also, inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan, an idealized place of luxurious splendor

November Is the Write Time

Writing is one of the loneliest pursuits (or professions), and as I know as well as anyone, enthusiasm for expressing oneself is tempered by the daunting challenge of actually doing it. For those of us for whom having written a novel is a more appealing prospect than, you know, actually writing it,National Novel Writing Monthprovides a quirky motivating nudge.

The annual event, which encourages writers to complete the first draft of a novel in thirty days with the knowledge that one can publicly celebrate one’s progress while embracing the morale-boosting benefit of knowing that one is part of a worldwide community of fellow scribes, is in its fourteenth year.

Last time around, more than a quarter million people participated from all over planet Earth. Only one out of seven hit the 50,000-word goal, but every one of them started — and as we all realize, the first step is the hardest. (More than a hundred NaNoWriMo participants have had the novels they worked on for the event published — again, not everyone, but enough to make it reasonable to imagine that someday you number among them.)

To help encourage participants, the NaNoWriMo website offers various features and tools, including Pep Talks, email messages from published authors ranging from Booker Prize winner Nick Hornby (whose books High Fidelity, About a Boy, and Fever Pitch have been adapted for film) to newcomer Melissa Mayer, whose young-adult novel Cinder started out as a NaNoWriMo draft.

You’ll also find NaNoWriMo badges you can download onto your website or blog, special offers for software products or self-publishing deals, and forums in which you can contact other participants in your area to give and receive advice and encouragement. (Forums include the Appellation Station, where participants can get help with naming people, places, and things — and books — and the Character Cafe, a resource for development of your dramatis personae.)

In addition, NaNoWriMo sponsors ancillary events, such as a fund-raising write-a-thon on site in San Francisco; Camp NaNoWriMo, an extension of the original event held during other months; and support materials for teachers and students involved in the event. And, as usual, the website lets you keep track of your word count and post excerpts of your work.

The beauty of this crazy conception is that the timed nature of the event encourages you to do what writers must do to succeed: Just write the damn thing already — no time to edit, no opportunity to agonize. Write a crappy first draft. (All first drafts, the site assures you in its inimitably perky-but-puckish style, are crappy.) Sign up, already. Operators are standing by.

Pathetic Fallacy

Is a pathetic fallacy really all that pathetic? Although some literary critics condemn the technique, the person who coined the phrase was attacking not its use but its overuse.

Pathetic fallacy is the association of feelings, sensations, or thoughts to inanimate objects, such as when a writer describes a cruel sea or a brooding cliff or an unyielding boulder. Nineteenth-century critic John Ruskin wasn’t being pejorative when he first described the concept; pathetic, in his usage — indeed, in its original sense — refers not to something pitiful, as the dominant modern connotation implies, but to something associated with feeling. (Pathos, the Greek word from which pathetic is derived, means “emotion, experience, or suffering.”)

Pathetic fallacy also applies to scientific and technical contexts. For example, the widely misquoted and misunderstood statement “Information wants to be free” imputes a motive to information. (The entire comment by technology writer Stewart Brand has been manifested variously, including this version: “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. . . . That tension will not go away.”)

However, as the noted philosopher-warrior Yoda sagely observed, “Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.” Strictly speaking, no inanimate object or phenomenon can attempt something; it can only accomplish or fail to accomplish it. But even scientific and technical writers often indulge in poetic license, describing how, for example, electricity tries to complete a circuit, as if the force were engaged in an endeavor prompted by a cognitive cue. That’s not too far removed from, for example, a novelist’s or a poet’s reference to icy fingers of gusting wind trying to penetrate a ramshackle cabin during a blizzard.

So, don’t hesitate to employ pathetic fallacy — ascribing emotion to phenomena (“Nature abhors a vacuum”) is a sensible analogy, and sensible and subtle literary use is likely to be effective and unobtrusive — but put your critical faculties on full alert to recognize when overreaching produces purple prose or poesy.

Writers Can Learn from Middlebrow Masters

After several years of intending to read through Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series of seafaring novels, I’ve finally embarked on that voyage, and I’m delighted to note that O’Brian proves that writers can draw lessons in technique from fiction that doesn’t necessarily make it onto too many Great Literature reading lists.

O’Brian wrote twenty novels featuring fictional early nineteenth-century Royal Navy officer Jack Aubrey and his friend, naval surgeon Stephen Maturin, over the course of several decades, leaving another one unfinished when he died in 1999. (It was later published in its incomplete form.) After completing the first installment, Master and Commander, I suspect that they’re all ripping good yarns but not (despite some comparisons to the works of Jane Austen and other literary giants) classics for the ages. Yet they’re instructive in how to write — and, in one respect, how not to write.

First, the bad news: O’Brian, facing the significant challenge of explaining the naval terminology, traditions, and hierarchy of the Napoleonic era to the many readers unfamiliar with such matters, solved it by having various characters explain nautical concepts to Maturin, a landlubber. Unfortunately, though this technique is reasonable in moderation, here it’s employed to extremes. At times, it’s no more subtle than the satirically excessive exposition in the Austin Powers movie series, with the character Basil Exposition laboriously providing background information to the protagonist (and the audience).

But the author’s successful avoidance of narrative exposition (that is, other than in dialogue) is related to his great strength: O’Brian rarely employs attribution; the reader usually knows who is talking. But even more remarkable, he rarely has to describe his masterfully well-developed characters. Aubrey and Maturin are an odd couple; the officer is a big and brash yet charismatic leader, while his friend is a quiet, studious surgeon/naturalist/philosopher. The author subtly signals the doctor’s initial unease with shipboard life (he gets in sailors’ way or hits his head on the low beams belowdecks) and his preoccupation with surgical procedures and natural phenomena by indirect reference. Among the best small moments are those in which Maturin tries to engage the practical and intelligent but unschooled Aubrey in intellectual discussion.

I did not take advantage of opportunities to work my way through the literary-classics canon during my own schooling, and I am at sea when it comes to lit crit. (If I were asked to analyze the subtext of a cornerstone of the literary tradition, I would probably blithely blink without comprehension much like Aubrey does when confronted with a Latin expression.) But I found myself very much impressed (without being very much distracted) by the mastery with which O’Brian conveys character without describing his characters.

I am certain that such lessons in narrative technique can be drawn from many novelists great and small (and in between), and you likely can relate your favorite epiphany of this type. This point only proves that wisdom and inspiration are to be found in unexpected places. Enjoy your pulp fiction, airport novels, beach books, light reading — in whatever form your leisure reading takes (including enjoying Great Literature) — but be receptive to such insights.