Writer as Philosopher

I'll be the first to admit, this one feels a bit pretentious. 

I'm not claiming to be a philosopher, nor that my apprentice-level philosophizing has any merit. But I do think that one of the important roles of a novel is to explore ideas and new perspectives. I usually don't have the complete idea for a book until I have a question that I'm mulling over, either one that I'm still asking myself or one I think I've found an answer for and want to propose to others. 

Following are a few core questions/ideas drove my philosophizing in The Engineer's Craft: 

The men of the tents vs. the men of the fields.

Like with most ideas I write about, this one came to me serendipitously as I was listening to a random YouTube essay on my way to school. The presenter was discussing a concept in ancient Israel, where the men of the tribes were sometimes classified as either "men of the tents" or "men of the fields." Meaning, the men who primarily used their minds for work in the tents (planning, organizing, traveling, teaching, guiding, etc.) and the men who primarily used their bodies for physical labor in the fields (planting, harvesting, building, fighting, etc.). I've always considered myself a "man of the tents"; sports never came naturally to me, and I've always preferred mental exercises to anything physical. As I wrote Bartus, I wanted him to share that identity with me--I wanted him to be a man of the tents, who feels out of place in a world that prioritized the men of the fields. 

There was only one problem; Bartus wasn't entirely a man of the tents. 

And the more I wrote about it, the more I realized I wasn't entirely a man of the tents either. As with most dichotomies, when we really begin to explore them we realize that they aren't black and white; every muscle man has a mind he uses to navigate the world, and every bookworm has a body that he uses to move through the world. Both can be developed, no matter a person's personal propensities. 

Learning this helped me give nuance to a discussion that takes place in The Engineer's Craft; when Bartus airs his grievances about not fitting in with the rest of the sailors because he's an engineer, Mauv tells him about the tents/fields idea and asks him which is more important. Rather than maintaining the binary, the following conversation explores that neither is more important than the other, as neither could survive without the other. The men of the tents know when and what and where to plant, but the men of the fields do the actual labor and provide food for the tribe. 

Later in the book, I explored Bartus discovering this dual identity--the final act of the story requires him to use both his mind (to find a way out of the excavation site) and his body (to fight his way out of a dangerous situation). He finds that he has the man of the fields within him, when he needs to use it. I really enjoyed exploring this idea--I feel like it changed not just the way I view society, but myself as well. 

What would it be like to be a Christian believer during the Crusades?

This was the very first seed of what became The Engineer's Craft. I'd decided a few years prior that I wanted to include religion in my books, since it plays such a major and defining role in my own life. My first book in this series, The Alchemist's Lot, was an attempt to portray religious life positively in fantasy (so often, "religion" in fantasy or science fiction is portrayed as a cult, or imminently toxic). I wanted a character who could explore the positive aspects and benefits that religion provides for someone. In The Engineer's Craft, I wanted to recognize that there are negative aspects to organized religion--that people have been hurt by it, even if I haven't. But I also wanted to explore how or why a person might keep their faith even when they are hurt by religion. As I pondered this, the question in my mind became: "what would it feel like to be a true Christian during the Crusades, to have had spiritual experiences where you couldn't deny God's existence or Christ's divinity, but then to see the church that operated in their name go an commit unspeakable acts of violence?" 

It's a difficult question, but also one that's easier to address given the historical distance. 

Add onto that the veneer of fantasy, and it becomes approachable for both reader and writer to consider. Bartus became the hypothetical believer--someone who has had unspecified experiences where he has felt an equivalent to "God's love" in the world of the Republic. He is unwilling (or perhaps better stated, uninterested) in giving up his beliefs. He has what I call a "simple faith," the gift of believing despite difficult circumstances. I'd always planned for the Luminarium to be a somewhat nefarious force in the Republic of Metirno (an embodiment of the toxic aspects of any and all religions), and so they became the Crusaders in the worst sort of way, their deeds witnessed by Bartus to force him to confront that simple faith and come up with a rationale to believe or not believe. 

How would a naturalist or atheist perceive magic in a magical world? 

In conjunction with the previous question, I wanted to pay homage and explore how a person might exist in a world with divinely-attributed magic and still be an atheist or naturalist. I've never been a fan of the Ricky Gervais argument for atheism of "I just believe in one less god than you"; I think that rather than listening to the various personal accounts of people who have had spiritual experiences, it shuts out any concepts of what people might call "God" and pokes fun at them. Though, to be fair, Ricky is a comedian and poking fun is in the job description. Either way, I wanted to write Mauv as a thoughtful naturalist, one who isn't seeking to discredit Bartus' religion or any other religion, but rather show how they all work together as a whole, and how by working together patterns might emerge that show how they are part of the natural world rather than sentient forces to be called "God." Rather than Mauv saying "I believe in one less god than you," I wanted to explore the idea of "I believe in many more gods than you, but I just don't call them gods," which I think is a much more holistic approach that can take in more evidence than the Ricky Gervais approach. In this sense, Mauv is who I would be if I were a naturalistic atheist. It was a lot of fun exploring this world view and pitting it against Bartus' simple faith, and helped me to deepen and mature my own understanding of perspectives that differ from my own. 

The return home and ordinary morality.

Why was I so focused on this idea of returning home after a long time away, its weight and its impact on our lives? Probably because it's something I think about a lot in my own life. When I first decided to switch my undergrad major from Physiology and Developmental Biology to English, I knew that it would be a difficult road. I recognized that there was a good chance I would end up working to make ends meet for most of my life, and I had to be okay with that. Consequently, I felt a looming threat of being that 30-something-year-old living with his parents, relying on them for all his socialization, not progressing in life. I determined not become that man, to never let myself live at home past the age of 25, and to do all I could to become self-sufficient while also chasing that passion inside of me that prompted me to be a writer. 

But the idea of home still plagued me. I think frequently about how different modern life is to how humans have lived for thousands of years. In the past (and in other modern cultures) it wasn't weird to live with family your whole life. Even if you weren't in the same house, you might inherit the land or live in the same village or a nearby village. "Moving" as we think of it just wasn't an option for the majority of people--picking up everything you own and going somewhere else is a lot harder with U-Haul. With this, I began to think about how we grow up and move on with life while still valuing home life. I wanted to write a character who, like me for many years, didn't see value in that home life; a boy who could only see the trap, how it prevented him from moving on. I wanted that character to go on a journey where he begins to see the value in it, and where he eventually returns. The return was crucial to me, in part because so much of modern fantasy has forgotten that step of the Hero's Journey. Instead, we've rejected the home and have our characters move out into the wider world which is often depicted as being inherently better because it provides more freedom, more options. I wanted to explore how the home could be more than the world. 

And that's how Bartus came to be--an embodiment of my exploration of home. 

Along the way, the idea of "returning home" transformed and took on new meanings. One of these was the idea of a societal return to "ordinary morality." I've borrowed this term from a podcast episode I listened to from Brett McKay. Basically, ordinary morality is the idea that it's okay and even good to live an ordinary life. It exists in contrast to "extraordinary morality," which is the morality we get taught at graduation ceremonies where the speaker says that we can go on to do great things (find a cure for cancer, fly to the moon, write the next best American novel, etc.) Our society is extremely focused on extraordinary morality right now--we've rejected the image of quiet contented family life. But just as there is value in living near/with family, there is value in achieving the ordinary.